For other uses see FAQ (disambiguation). For frequently asked questions about Wikipedia see Wikipedia:FAQ This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers all supposed to be commonly asked in some context and pertaining to a particular topic. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual media its pronunciation varies; "fack" "fax" "facts" and "F.A.Q." are commonly heard. Depending on usage the term may refer specifically to a single frequently asked question or to an assembled list of many questions and their answers. Contents 1 Origins 2 Modern developments 3 References 4 External links Origins

While the name may be recent the FAQ format itself is quite old. For instance Matthew Hopkins wrote The Discovery of Witches in 1647 in FAQ format. He introduces it as "Certaine Queries answered" ... Many old catechisms are in a question-and-answer (Q&A) format. Summa Theologica written by Thomas Aquinas in the second half of the 13th century is a series of common questions about Christianity to which he wrote his reply to each.

The "FAQ" is an Internet textual tradition originating from a combination of mailing list laziness plus speculation and a separate technical and political need within NASA in the early 1980s. The first FAQ developed over several pre-Web years starting from 1982 when storage was expensive. On the SPACE mailing list the presumption was that new users would ftp archived past messages. In practice this never happened. Instead the dynamic on mailing lists was for users to speculate rather than use very basic original sources (contacting NASA which was not part of ARPA and had only one site on the ARPANET) to get simple answers. Repeating the "right" answers becomes tedious; it went against developing netiquette: "Thanks in advance I will summarize" and didn't. A series of different measures from regularly posted messages to netlib-like query email daemons were set up by loosely affiliated groups of computer system administrators. The acronym FAQ was developed in 1983 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list.1 (Miya notes that Mark Horton's "18 question" periodic post (PP) happened concurrent to the SPACE FAQ although it was not labelled with the word FAQ.) The format was then picked up on other mailing lists. Posting frequency changed to monthly and finally weekly and daily across a variety of mailing lists and newsgroups. The first person to post a weekly FAQ was Jef Poskanzer to the Usenet net.graphics/comp.graphics newsgroups. Eugene Miya experimented with the first daily FAQ. The first FAQ were initially attacked by some mailing list users for being repetitive.

On Usenet Mark Horton started a series of "Periodic Posts" (PP) which attempted to answer trivia terminology such as "What is 'foobar'" with appropriate answer. Periodic summary messages posted to Usenet newsgroups attempted to reduce the continual reposting of the same basic questions and associated wrong answers. On Usenet posting questions which are covered in a group's FAQ is often considered poor netiquette as it shows that the poster has not done the expected background reading before asking others to provide answers. Some groups may have multiple FAQ on related topics or even two or more competing FAQ explaining a topic from different points of view.

Another factor on early ARPANET mailing lists was netiquette wherein people asking questions typically "promised to 'summarize' received answers." Rarely were these summaries more than mere concatenations of received electronic replies with little to no quality checking.

The initialism "FAQ" possibly started as a contrived three-letter abbreviation with an auditory similarity to the word "facts" (i.e. a statement "check the FAQs" echoes "check the facts".)citation needed Modern developments

Originally the term FAQ referred to the Frequently Answered Question itself and the compilation of questions and answers was known as a FAQ list or some similar expression. Today FAQ is more frequently used to refer to the list and a text consisting of questions and their answers is often called an FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked (if asked at all). This is done to capitalize on the fact that the concept of a FAQ has become fairly familiar online documents of this kind are sometimes called FAAQs (Frequently Asked and Anticipated Questions)citation needed; Frequently Questioned Answers2; or more humorously IFAQs or IAQs (Infrequently Asked Questions)citation needed or even EAQs (Easily Answerable Questions).

In some cases informative documents not in the traditional FAQ style have also been called FAQ videogame FAQ in particular. A number of online repositories of videogame FAQ have emerged in recent years where most so-called FAQs have nothing in common with the meaning of the name but are often instead rather detailed descriptions of gameplay including tips secrets and beginning-to-end guidance. Rarely are videogame FAQ in a question-and-answer format although they may contain a short section of questions and answers in this format.

Over time the accumulated FAQ across all USENET news groups sparked the creation of the "*.answers" moderated newsgroups such as comp.answers misc.answers sci.answers etc. for crossposting and collecting FAQ across respective comp.* misc.* sci.* newsgroups. The term FAQ and the idea behind it has spread offline as well even to areas not related to the Net at all. Even bottles of bicycle chain lubricant have been marketed with accompanying leaflets titled as a FAQcitation needed. References Hersch Russ. FAQs about FAQs. 8 January 1998. eg. the C++ FQA Livinginternet.com External links Original USENET examples FAQ definition Jargon File Usenet FAQ Archives