What should the FAQ contain?
The mathoverflow site has a great FAQ. What are some key points that the FAQ for this ask.sagemath.org site should make?
The mathoverflow site has a great FAQ. What are some key points that the FAQ for this ask.sagemath.org site should make?
direction for how to ask a good question, e.g. aim to post a question with code that can reproduce your problem, make it short.
What is the relation of asksage with http://sagemath.blogspot.com/ ? Eg. "Getting started with Cython" was very interesting, but the 'NEXT TIME' announced was never wroten. Of course everybody can understand that William Stein may be overbooked :-) but is it a deliberate strategy to abandon the blog in favor of asksage ?
The FAQ should say that this site is for questions about using the software, not about answering homework or other general mathematical questions.
Some places to get such help are:
Links to other places for getting help:
sage-support
sage-devel
A clear statement that this site is for the mathematics software Sage, not the accounting software by the same name.
Recently askbot has been updated to make it easy to link to Trac tickets with the syntax "ticket 1956" as well as autolinking url's like http://sagemath.org. Both of these would make useful additions to the FAQ. Further details are given here (at the askbot site)
Moreover, new users often overlook the code formatting button (little picture of 0's and 1's), so perhaps that should be a FAQ item too.
It should have VERY clear instructions about what people can and cannot do with various 'point levels', and exactly how many 'points' you get for various actions. For example, I just wanted to retag a bunch of questions as 'graphics' since that matches the Trac thing and would make them easy to find... but I can't.
There should also be explanations of every color thingie and what the "0 mins ago John Palmieri 36" means (last answer? last comment? what?). Essentially, every possible thing on the front page should be well-documented on the FAQ.
To be fair, I just checked out the actual askbot site... and it doesn't do that either!
(This is less on topic, but it is also weird that the number of votes and answers on the front page don't correspond to the actual number of votes and answers.)
Editing tips.
There isn't anything particularly helpful included near the "Your answer" text box (except, of course, the buttons :). If there's an easy way to link to other posts, or to particular pages of the sage documentation, that would be useful information.
What is this site for?
This probably deserves to be its own question, but some discussion has started in the comments here already. I'd like to add that I think/hope certain questions about sage development can be included here (and tagged with devel
)--this could be a good resource for those starting out with sage development. For example, the question about mercurial queues could, in its answers, help others get off to a smoother start.
Explaining good use of tags, in general, is a good idea. The FAQ could suggest / require that certain topics (like sage development) include tags. It might be helpful to use tags to separate the devel and support communities so it's easier to find relevant posts.
Links to good answers (per rating system) which have a high frequency of tag hits (from the search box) and a high frequency of fulltext-search hits, weighted. Also links to answers with high pagerank (from a google search with site:ask.sagemath.org).
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Asked: 2010-08-18 19:55:17 +0200
Seen: 3,909 times
Last updated: Nov 02 '16
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it might be useful to resurrect this question for a while
Question? Does the FAQ include any of these things? Doesn't seem to...
no, I don't know who would update it. Another approach would be to post these as separate question/answer pairs -- I think I'll try that with the syntax question