I have updated the DIYbio 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. 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. 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 (with the exception of Nathan McCorkle's diybioforums.org version). For fun you can do this: git log --follow diybio/faq.mdwn There are about 350 commits on that document and 36 on educational, 43 equipment, 24 methods. 28 news, and 68 on projects. - Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507