The Fine Manual
Very good article that makes a lot of good points. This boils down to something my grandmother used to harp on: “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.”
In other words, if you can’t help the person, then just be quiet. If you really care about free software, let’s keep the rude and condescending comments to ourselves and provide some thoughtful and useful help.
I wish the RTFM jerk crowd would just stick to hard distributions and operating systems like BSD, Gentoo and Slackware, and not waste time with abusing newbies trying to get things like Fedora and Ubuntu to work.
Rudeness drives people away. On the other hand, asking questions about things that are in the manual is rude to the developers and other users. My response would probably be “I think that’s in the manual or the FAQ”. Anything more is not only rude but is taking too much of my time.
I think a nice technological solution would be to have some kind of intelligent agent that scans the question and finds things that are in the manual or FAQ and auto responds with the answer. This is hard in the general case but might not be very hard to do for a small subset of frequently asked questions. I suspect that a Bayesian classifier could probably be trained to do this sort of classification.
Comment by Marc — June 18, 2006 @ 2:27 pm