<p><strong>Frequently asked questions</strong>&nbsp;(<strong>FAQ</strong>) or&nbsp;<strong>Questions and Answers</strong>&nbsp;(<strong>Q&amp;A</strong>), are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. The format is commonly used on email mailing lists and other online forums, where certain common questions tend to recur.</p>

<p>&quot;FAQ&quot; is pronounced as either an&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initialism">initialism</a>&nbsp;(F-A-Q) or an&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym">acronym</a>. Since the acronym&nbsp;<em>FAQ</em>&nbsp;originated in textual media, its&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation">pronunciation</a>&nbsp;varies; &quot;F-A-Q&quot;,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ#cite_note-pron-1">[1]</a>&nbsp;is 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. Web page designers often label a single list of questions as an &quot;FAQ&quot;, such as on&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search">Google.com</a>,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ#cite_note-2">[2]</a>&nbsp;while using &quot;FAQs&quot; to denote multiple lists of questions such as on&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_the_Treasury">United States Treasury</a>&nbsp;sites.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ#cite_note-3">[3]</a></p>

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<p>The &quot;FAQ&quot; is an&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet">Internet</a>&nbsp;textual tradition originating from the technical limitations of early mailing lists from&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA">NASA</a>&nbsp;in the early 1980s. The first FAQ developed over several pre-Web years, starting from 1982 when storage was expensive. On&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET">ARPANET</a>&#39;s SPACE mailing list, the presumption was that new users would download archived past messages through&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol">FTP</a>. In practice this rarely happened, and the users tended to post questions to the mailing list instead of searching its archives. Repeating the &quot;right&quot; answers becomes tedious, and went against developing&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netiquette">netiquette</a>. A series of different measures were set up by loosely affiliated groups of computer system administrators, from regularly posted messages to&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlib">netlib</a>-like query&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email">email</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computer_software)">daemons</a>. The acronym&nbsp;<em>FAQ</em>&nbsp;was developed between 1982 and 1985 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ#cite_note-faqsaboutfaqs-4">[4]</a>&nbsp;The format was then picked up on other mailing lists and&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet">Usenet</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup">newsgroups</a>. 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&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Poskanzer">Jef Poskanzer</a>&nbsp;to the Usenet&nbsp;<a href="news:net.graphics">net.graphics</a>/<a href="news:comp.graphics">comp.graphics</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup">newsgroups</a>. Eugene Miya experimented with the first daily FAQ.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, on Usenet,&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Horton">Mark Horton</a>&nbsp;had started a series of &quot;Periodic Posts&quot; (PP) which attempted to answer trivial questions with appropriate answers.[<em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed">citation needed</a></em>]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&#39;s FAQ came to be considered poor netiquette, as it showed that the poster has not done the expected background reading before asking others to provide answers. Some groups may have multiple FAQs on related topics, or even two or more competing FAQs explaining a topic from different points of view.</p>

<p>Another factor on early ARPANET mailing lists was people asking questions promising to &#39;summarize&#39; received answers, then either neglecting to do this or else posting simple concatenations of received replies with little-to-no quality checking.</p>