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Extension Farm Bill Leaflets



Extension agricultural economists from across the United States have
prepared thirty-two leaflets related to the 1995 farm bill that will
be discussed, debated and deliberated during the next session of Congress.
These papers provide historical background, information on stakeholders,
key issues and much more concerning this far reaching legislation.

These leaflets are now available on the World Wide Web at the following URL:

     http://unlvm.unl.edu/farmbill.htm

A gopher version of these documents is available on the Institute
of Agriculture and Natural Resources - U. of Nebraska gopher at:

     gohper://ianrvm.unl.edu

Authors and editors of all documents are included in the preface and in each
leaflet.

These documents have been converted to html by the staff of ICCS at the Institute of Ag. and Natural Resources, University of Nebraska
in Lincoln.




Article 73344 of news.groups:
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From: eugene@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)
Subject: [l/m 2/9/94] FAQ on FAQs			n.g.FAQ
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Date: Tue, 1 Mar 1994 12:55:22 GMT
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This is a prototype.

	"FAQs: the bill boards of the Usenet."  --me

FAQs are the first generation of community memory.
They began with the efforts of Mark Horton, Spaf, Chuq, myself and others.
They are called "Frequently Asked Questions" files, but I prefer
"Frequently Answered Questions" as you will note the news.group
is called news.answers, not news.asked.

Not every person calls them FAQ.  "Periodic post" is another term, and some
posts (e.g., in news.announce.newusers) don't have special names or
designations.  You have to learn to wing it.

Design issues:

1) Keep them short.  200 lines or less is preferable.
	If you don't recognize the irony in this like Bill Thacker says:
		Farg them.

2) They will come in three basic types:
	a) netiquette: how to use the net
		always refer to news.announce.newusers
		why? for procedure for new group creation, etc.
	b) answers to informational queries.
	c) Misc.

3) Provide support for version control and killfiles.

4) Break the FAQ up.  Chain them.  Link them.

5) FAQs don't stop flame wars.  They don't limit free speech.
They should not limit speech.

6) Posting charters appears useful but is ultimately silly.  Your call.
You can't limit speech in an unmoderated group.  No enforcement, so I consider
this wasted bandwidth (bigger wastes exist).  If you want low noise,
minimum flaming, to avoid mass cross-posts by broadcasting novices, make
the group MODERATED, just like editing a Journal.  See comments on
appropriateness below.

7) If you can provide anonymous FTP, do so, but remember that not every one
has this luxury.  Mailer servers can also answer FAQ queries where FTP is
not available.   Some stuff can be archived at rtfm.mit.edu instead of trying
to archive and make available for FTP yourself.  rtfm already has
an FTP mail server set up.

8) You will have some interesting times maintaining them.
(my personal chuckle comes on certain wilderness intestinal dysfunctions).

9) Develop them by consensus, BUT retain editorial control subject to
things like flames and liability.

10) FAQs have other useful functions like pulsing connectivity information
like a light house.

11) Frequency.  Good question, few good answers.
The naive FAQ maintainer posts once a month.
Others post by hand.  Still others post weekly.
Monthly posts are frequently never seen (FNS), whereas weekly posts
will get criticism as being noise (typically by those who have not learned
the 'n key or about Killfiles.
The hand poster typically has not discovered crontab yet.
They must have presence to have an affect.  Issues involve maintenance and
effect.  A problem is that FAQs grow (as memory does).
If they are not posted, they are not frequent themselves.
The current method under test is the FAQ chain with sections posted once a day.
Others clump parts and post all at once, assuming that expiration is
minimized using news group fields (doesn't work, many systems need the disk
space).  Multiple FAQs with multiple maintainers exist.  Some FAQs are
posted biweekly or once a month and a shorter weekly outrigger or outlier gets
posted for those times the FAQ isn't posted.

12) An FAQ should have no or a minimal signature line, strictly for
purposes of bounced email.  Otherwise, cute things like ASCII graphics
don't have a real place (usually).

13) Organization or design:  Several styles are popular.
The most popular: QAQAQAQA ... down a file.  (e.g., news.announce.newusers).
The most work is: Q-summary, QAQAQA (many colorful variations).
I like the "Jeopardy" style: AAAAA... (look the questions are obvious, just
provide the answers (like references). [Optional: determine the question.])

1.1) Sizes: Several useful message sizes are worth knowing.  200 line is an
	empirically determined human suggestion.  UUCP has a default 100 KB
	size limit.  Many sites change this: we have one machine, for instance,
	with a 30 KB limit.  Other systems have other limits, and then there
	are people's file systems [approaching 99% fullness]...
	Other people keep FAQs to 1000 lines or less
	(do you know how many vt100-equivalent screenfuls 1000 lines is?).
	It is suggested that "GIF or ASCII graphics" be avoided.  Especially
	large files may require retransmission, and if problems happen,
	message thrashing occurs.
	Bottom line, try to keep FAQs small and manageable.

1.2) No every one has an editor which does automatic line-wrap.
	Limit line lengths to 72-75 characters.  Test the FAQ.

11.1) Header Expires: field:  Some news systems offer a feature to keep
certain articles around longer than most news system articles.  This is
optional, a system manager decides this.  Even in the best instances, it does
not appear that this field helps searchability or utility.  The idea being
that these articles will pull away from other expired articles does not
hold.  You are welcome to use them, but article length is more important.

Open issues: is the FAQ just a static file?  Or is it something
which is dynamic?

Some files like netiquette files are probably fairly static.
FAQs make poor books.  They should clearly be referenced.  Referencing is one
of the standard argument/flame techniques on the net.  FAQs aren't flame-proof.
Nor should they be.  This is what makes the use of FAQs an open issue.

FAQs are voluntary things.  Their evolution is based on the involvement
of the readership and the openess and time of the maintainer.
This is testable.

	"Computer people are lazy."
			--Kaz Ogawa

12) Why do people post "Where's the FAQ?" when it was recently posted?
Several reasons:
*)Because network connectivity is worse than most people think.  News is a low
priority service and articles (including FAQs) don't reach all sites or
stay at those sites.  These people are innocent.
*) Because people read articles sequentially and don't reach them in their
reading order.  They don't know how to view Subject headers or search for
specific topic /FAQ/ posts.  These people are innocent.
*) Because some FAQs aren't called FAQ.  Nor should they have to be.
*) People don't read.  These people aren't innocent.
	"You see what you want to see and read what you want to read."
			--Rock Man, "The Point"

Known testable reader habits:

The typical user merely reads sequentially through a post: one screen-full
at a time, doesn't jump around, doesn't search, until they get to the
end of a post and automatically page or skip to the next post.  If they need
to get to the bottom, say like the last question of an FAQ, they scroll
(page) down there.

They will learn to skip and page, but they will not learn to use
Killfiles or search (much less use regular expression search).
The above paragraph holds until they learn to skip the reminder of an article:
the so-called 'n' key for 'next' article or note.

Most people will lurk (read, but not post).

Most people will skip news.announce.newusers.

Most people invoke readers on topic specific groups rather than wade through
thousands of uninteresting newsgroups.

We need to face several facts.  CRTs are a poor way to read text.
They search easy (if you know how), but we ignore typos more and we scan more
than read.  Many people dump FAQs (and other posts to printers).
FAQs should offer references to things like hardcopy media (e.g., books)
rather than give unreadable dissertations.  It is difficult to follow a
logical argument on a computer in a strictly serial fashion.  Our reading
(mostly at work) will not allow it.

It takes work to maintain an FAQ.  It is advised that reader should NOT
archive copies.  FAQs change and FAQs should appear frequently enough that
new versions can appear to answer questions.  Readers always tend to want it
NOW.  Email to the maintainer or anonymous FTP are a far better way to get it
than daily posts of the FAQ (this will happen, mark my word, that's a joke).

Inevitability, you will have an FAQ, and some clueless newbie will post
an article which the FAQ answers but they haven't seen.  Don't worry.
Propagation is poorer than you think (maybe only 80% get through).
Short queries aren't a problem.  Every one can post to the clueless (by
email) and say, "See the FAQ" [the FAQ-version of RTFM].

If the goal is to stop flame wars, and you wish to ignore point 5,
the best thing to do is an FAQ SUMMARY of all arguments,
challenge people to add more rational points on each side.
Then every one can point and say, "Arguments?  See the FAQ.  Let's move
on to other things."  We lack network history/memory.  The FAQ is not
perfect, but some of this works.  Cash incentives are useful.
A new book by Johnson and Koop (ex-Surgeon General) is a good example of this.

Systems which use Killfiles typically only grab the first 24 characters
of a Subject: line.  Any additional use of Killfiles requires extensive
editing, and not all readers these days know how to text edit.

Indices and tables of contents are helpful, but not always useful.
Most readers do not know of their capability to skip large regions of text.
This is why shorter files are more important than indexed files.

Most of our users have no idea the diversity (or lack of) in news interfaces.
The FAQ must work on the least common denominator.

Guidelines for moderation: proposing, accounting, etc.

Sci and the sci-oriented comp groups should probably mostly be moderated.
Separate open-forum groups can be created (name.d, d for discussion).
Talk groups should almost never be moderated.  If free speech is an issue,
then you should make it a talk group.  Rec and other groups can consider
moderation.  As one more option, you can propose two groups:
	the primary one moderated,
	the secondary one for discussion.
You will notice quite a few groups with *.d endings (others do not:
e.g., rec.arts.movies.reviews & rec.arts.movies).  A bogus free speech
argument would ask to list good moderated groups (comp.risks: selections
published hardcopy in CACM, comp.compilers: 85% of the posts published in
book form, comp.research.japan: NSF funding for two years,
rec.humor.funny is also published in hardcopy, etc.).   They are out there,
and they are good.

A real problem is that few people comprehend the number of news groups.
We have people who don't know how to propose a news.group, but also
propose groups which already exist.  There appears to be no way around this.

Copyright.
Face it, FAQs should not be copyrighted.  Or they should be copyrighted with
the greatest of copy permissions possible.  It's a public document (right?),
and if you are going to post it, you have to assume it's going to get every
where you would not want it, so ignore it.  Murphy's law will hold.
Credit can be due to authors, but it's a community document.
If you want and expect strict copy control, then don't post it.

Students/classes and homework.
The Net can serve as a wonderful Danny Dunn Homework machine.
At this time, no guidelines exist to protect the student from getting
complete information from the Net.  The Net is seen as an information resource
where some of the foremost experts of various fields communicate.  That's
the ideal, in practice, it does not always work that way.  If you are a teacher
or prof, you need to explicitly state the guidelines for using the Net.
If you are a student, if there is any question about using outside expertise,
then ask your teacher.

Frankly, I seriously wonder about the intelligence of posters if they
have to be told to contribute to an FAQ.  This is implicit with free speech.
If an FAQ maintainer has to be forced to maintain text, that is another
matter.

Usenet Self-Moderation Project

=====

O.B.I.T.
Outer Band Individuated Teletracer

Grover: It *watches*, saps the very spirit.  And the worse thing of
all is *I* watch it.  I can't *not* look.  It's like a drug -- a horrible drug
You can't resist it.  It's an addiction.
...
Lomax: The machines are everywhere!  Oh, you'll find them all; you're a
zealous people.  And you'll make a great show out of smashing a few
of them, but for every one you destroy, hundreds of others will be built,
and they'll demoralize you, break your spirit, create such rifts and
tensions in your society that no one will be able to repair them!
You're a savage, despairing planet.  And when we come to live here, you 
friendless, demoralized flotsam will fall without even a single shot
being fired.  You're all of the same dark persuasion.  You demand, *insist*
on knowing every private thought and hunger in everyone -- your families,
your neighbors, *everyone* but *yourselves!*

===== tag line =====

Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 16:54:08 EDT
From: tdh@ksr.com (Dave Hudson)
Subject: Re: FAQ on FAQs

>Systems which use Killfiles typically only grab the first 24 characters
>of a Subject: line.  Any additional use of Killfiles requires extensive
>editing, and not all readers these days know how to text edit.

The easiest way to get a subject into a killfile is to let the
newsreader do it, while the kill is taking effect.  If dates,
"Frequently Asked Questions", "part M of N", or other crap are at the
beginning of the subject line, this will not get into the killfile in
a way that is convenient for edits.  Since the date is redundant, and
since if changes are important then they can be called out in a
"changes" edition or by use of changebars, dates ought not even be in
a FAQ's subject line.

So, if you're going to have a FAQ on FAQs, please recommend an
explicit format for subject lines, e.g.:
	"{Newsgroup,Interest} {Topic,} {(Changes),(# of #),}"

				David Hudson

From: kaminski@netcom.com (Peter Kaminski)
Subject: Re: [l/m 10/6/92] FAQ on FAQs n.g.FAQ

Nice document.

Some things I didn't see mentioned:

  The "Supersedes:" header, so that new posts can delete old ones out
  of the spool, especially for posts with "Expires:" headers.

  The use of "Followup-To: poster".  Sometimes the maintainer will want
  questions or comments to go directly to him/her.

  The structure used for the misc.kids FAQ suite: a periodically posted
  index to email addresses of maintainers/distributors of the actual FAQs,
  which are not posted.

Pete

From: mgfrank@avernus.com (Marc G. Frank)
To: eugene@amelia.nas.nasa.gov
Subject: Re: [l/m 10/6/92] FAQ on FAQs			n.g.FAQ

In article <1992Nov1.125511.25183@nas.nasa.gov> you write:
>This is a prototype.
>FAQs are the first generation of community memory.
>13) Organization or design:  Several styles are popular.
>The most popular: QAQAQAQA ... down a file.  (e.g., news.announce.newusers).
>The most work is: Q-summary, QAQAQA (many colorful variations).
>I like the "Jeopardy" style: AAAAA... (look the questions are obvious, just
>provide the answers (like references). [Optional: determine the question.])

I think you ought to recommend that FAQs be posted in digest format,
since most mail- and newsreaders have commands for skipping to the next
section of a digest.  IMHO, this increases the usefulness of any FAQ.

--
Marc G. Frank                                        Vote for Kibo:
mgfrank@avernus.com                    The only candidate who knows
                                                 how to cross-post.