Editing FAQ (section)

==Origins==
While the name may be recent, the FAQ format itself is quite old. For example, [[Matthew Hopkins]] wrote ''The Discovery of Witches'' in 1648 as a list of questions and answers, introduced as "Certaine Queries answered ...".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hopkins |first1=Mathew |title=The Discovery of Witches: In Answer to severall QUERIES, LATELY Delivered to the Judges of Assize for the County of NORFOLK. And now published By MATTHEW HOPKINS, Witch-finder, FOR The Benefit of the whole KINGDOME. |date=1648 |page= 1|publisher=Angell in Ivie Lane |location=London  |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951000896825x&seq=11 |access-date=30 December 2023}}</ref> Many old [[catechism]]s 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 a series of replies.

===On the Internet===
The "FAQ" is an [[Internet]] textual tradition originating from the technical limitations of early mailing lists from [[NASA]] in the early 1980s. The first FAQ developed over several pre-Web years, starting from 1982 when storage was expensive. On [[ARPANET]]'s SPACE mailing list, the presumption was that new users would download archived past messages through [[File Transfer Protocol|FTP]]. In practice this rarely happened, and the users tended to post questions to the mailing list instead of searching its archives. Repeating the "right" answers became tedious, and went against developing [[netiquette]]. A series of different measures were set up by loosely affiliated groups of computer system administrators, from regularly posted messages to [[netlib]]-like query [[email]] [[daemon (computing)|daemons]]. The acronym ''FAQ'' was developed between 1982 and 1985 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list.<ref name="faqsaboutfaqs">Hersch, Russ. [http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/ FAQs about FAQs] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220123062535/http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/ |date=2022-01-23 }}. 8 January 1998. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/ {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220123062535/http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/ |date=2022-01-23 }}.</ref>
The format was then picked up on other mailing lists and [[Usenet]] [[newsgroup]]s.
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 [[newsgroup]]s.<ref>{{cite newsgroup |title=Frequently asked questions - weekly automated posting |author=[[Jef Poskanzer]] |date=Oct 31, 1989 |newsgroup=comp.graphics |message-id= |url=https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics/c/8eud8W8qUHk/m/M2jHKdSJlP4J |access-date=May 20, 2022}}</ref>
Eugene Miya experimented with the first daily FAQ.