[DIYbio] Return of the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

I have updated the DIYbio FAQ, here's the link and the rest of this
email is more for people who have previously edited the FAQ.

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq

@Mac, I think you should add a link to a FAQ on the main diybio.org
site. This will help people find a biohacker resource almost
immediately. At the moment, the alternative work flow seems to be
"find the mailing list, and then type in a question". Beginner
questions are very important and useful, although I think that people
could also be served by a link to the FAQ.

Jonathan Cline has done an excellent job with upgrading the FAQ over
the past few years. We can only hope that he continues to put in such
regular effort. There has also been a trickle of other contributors to
the FAQ including: Jonathan Cline, myself, Mac Cowell, Fenn Lipkowitz,
Nathan McCorkle, Jason Kelly, Jason Bobe, Claes Gustafsson, Markus
Schmidt, Parijata Mackey, and Patrick McLaren. So, thank you everyone.
Having said all that, I should probably take most of the
responsibility for the initial awfulness of the FAQ. It was pretty
bad! And now it is much less bad.

(By the way, that list was constructed through this method:
git log --follow diybio/faq.mdwn | grep "^Author: " | sort | uniq
)

But I also think it has a long way to go. Many of the questions that
we see on the mailing list don't exactly match up with the questions
in the FAQ. I uploaded an archive of DIYbio emails from the past few
years (300 MB ish):

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/diybio.maildir.tar.gz

It would be an interesting computational project to analyze this text
corpus and extract actual questions. But it's not as easy as looking
for interrogatives, since many statements don't have the expected
punctuation, or sometimes there's a paragraph explaining the setup
before the question. And, on top of that, it is obscenely easy to
quickly make a question that will never be asked again by anyone ever
("Is it better to use nailclippers or a tree branch to mark 2cm
grooves in my gel while juggling?"). But many of the basic questions
are common questions. I don't presently have the patience to fight
with the nltk package at the moment so I just manually extracted some
questions from the emails on my own here:

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq/better-questions

So I am proposing that we use those questions for informing us as to
what to write on the FAQ in the future. Most of them are directly
pulled from emails on the mailing list. You will probably recognize
your own questions in there if you squint hard enough. Some of these
are pretty basic, but the current FAQ doesn't answer them. I am also
interested in alternative ideas for the FAQ.. e.g., maybe something
involving stackexchange, methodmint, protocols-online, or a web app,
or something that doesn't involve me writing countless pages of
unreadable crap.

Why don't the questions currently in the FAQ match up with the trend
of questions that we observe on the mailing list? One obvious answer
is that questions in the FAQ are less likely to be asked, therefore
only new questions would show up in the mailing list. Except that most
of the questions that we answer on the list are rehashes of the same
timeless questions since the beginning of DIYbio time. And another
exception is that newbies are unlikely to find a link to the FAQ
unless they know to go looking for it, since there's no link on the
diybio.org page, so they don't have their questions pre-answered for
them negating that aspect of that explanation. Instead the other
answer that I offer is that the questions might not genuinely match
up, so we should rethink what the questions are or populate the
document with better content. Hopefully the content I have contributed
in the past week is heading in this direction :-).

Another explanation for the rather small list of editors is possibly
OpenWetWare's user registration policies. Yes, I know, we talked about
this before:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/50U54BYu9Rw/uyOKjBD1xXkJ

But given the lack of editing of the FAQ, I suspect the wiki
registration barrier might be impeding edits to the FAQ over the past
few years. I suppose it could also be argued that Jonathan Cline and
myself are simply at the top of the power law distribution in terms of
editors, e.g. a small fraction of the total editors will do the
majority of the authoring or something, but I think the membership
system only reinforces that by not allowing anyone to edit
immediately. However, openwetware.org if anything gets high marks for
serving the iGEM community so well. I am not sure if we are that
community, and I want to experiment with other tools for collaborating
anyway. I suspect that nobody is going to be particularly upset about
me trying out the FAQ on an alternative system, except possibly
Jonathan who has put more effort into it than I have, although not
many other people because I can count on my fingers the number of
editors who did drive-by edits.

So diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq is a complete port of the openwetware.org
DIYbio FAQ to git. This means that you can pull the complete revision
history and edit files on your computer with this:

git clone git://diyhpl.us/diyhpluswiki.git

historical view and git things:
http://diyhpl.us/cgit/diyhpluswiki

creating a user account:
http://diyhpl.us/piny-commands/newuser/

or for those of you who prefer github:

git clone https://github.com/kanzure/diyhpluswiki.git
http://github.com/kanzure/diyhpluswiki

Note that users who register to edit can edit through the web
interface, through git on their own desktops (or their own public web
forks hosting ikiwiki), or they can poke around in the restricted
shell environment (ssh whateveryourname@diyhpl.us and have fun owning
my box). You could also hypothetically push a fork on github, and send
me pull requests or something crazy if you're into that.

I pulled in the full revision history from OpenWetWare, so there's
nothing lost in terms of historical record. Also, I have pulled in the
original revision history of the FAQ from my old/dead mediawiki
instance, so the history is now accurate. For fun you can do this to
see the history, farther back than openwetware has:

git log --follow diybio/faq.mdwn

OK that's it, let me know what you guys think. Feel free to mess
around with the other wiki content, some of it is sprawling. As
always, there is an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net ##hplusroadmap
which you can access through mibbit.com or irccloud.com, and you can
find open source hardware projects on /cgit here:

http://diyhpl.us/cgit

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.