However, the newbie and expert lists help alleviate this by recycling the knowlege passed down from developers and Mandrake itself. Sometimes, a little encouragement from a fellow user goes a long way too IMHO.

Ben Reser wrote:
On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 12:56:21PM +0100, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:
  
I'm personally skeptical about FAQ's and such documentation,
because so many people plain ignore documentation in favor of
asking questions (many different projects of mine show). You know
that I've even written the cooker-FAQ and maintained the mdk-rpm
howto, so I guess I can voice up :).
    

This is faulty logic.  You are assuming that because some people refuse
to read documentation that all people do.  That's just not reality.  The
Mandrake RPM Howto is an invaluable resource.  I use it on a regular
basis.  I direct people to it on a regular basis.  It would be far more
useful if it was kept current and included details on things like
mklibname etc...

Fact is the documentation does decrease questions.  But it will never
eliminate them entirely.  It would be much easier if when people asked
commonly asked questions we could direct them to concisely written
documents, rather than typing the answers out again over and over and
over again.

The amount of time spent producing the documentation would likely be
paid off in the savings of time of people responding to these questions
and in simply better quality output by those of us who do spend the time
reading them.

  

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