One thing I would caution against is just pasting in a bunch of questions from an already existing collection of frequent questions. The Stack Exchange engine seems to work best when participants are asking questions they really are trying to answer.
In my experience many of the questions in traditional FAQ listings tend to seem very hypothetical (even when they are not). Please don't take this as some kind of blanket statement (I find such statements are rarely useful, and I'm not a Stack Exchange expert user) but rather an encouragement to focus on more individual and more interesting questions.
On the Stack Exchange blog there is a post from Robert Cartaino (the Stack Exchange community coordinator) where he comments on seeding a site with questions. Although the Ubuntu Stack Exchange is now in public beta, I think the comments there are still relevant. In particular, two comments stand out to me:
- "... if people feel that the author doesn’t really care about the answer, the whole exercise would likely be perceived as a waste of time."
- "... if you want to ask question just for the sake of asking questions, at least make them really good ones."
Jeff Atwood also wrote about early questions in a post about the launch of the original Stack Overflow private beta.
I will attempt to illustrate with a couple of the FAQ-style questions that are listed under the kernel tag. I think these questions are slightly awkward in the Stack Exchange environment because they really don't have a question body.
In any case, the two questions are about communicating with the kernel team and getting involved with the kernel. Here is how I imagine those questions as if an individual had asked them. I won't presume that my suggestion is particularly good - it still feels very 'invented' - but hopefully it communicates what I was trying to say.
How can I contact the Ubuntu kernel developers and help improve the kernel?
I'm interested in helping out with development of the Ubuntu kernel. Where should I go to find out what needs to done? And, how can I get in touch with the kernel developers?
