Most Frequently Asked Questions

These are the Most Frequently Asked Questions in 510 MiB of chat logs. Don't blame me, I'm not the one who asked them.

100. What kind?Asked 23 times

That's a pretty tough question, anonymous reader! I think I'll have to say the pink ones, with the bendy rubber bit that never quite springs back into the upright position. —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 20:25, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Or if you're asking about questions, I'll do my best to answer whatever questions people put to me.

99. Lol?Asked 23 times

Not usually. I mean, sometimes if I see something really funny you might get a chuckle or something, but I'm more likely to mention something to other people. If you want a lol, it needs to be really funny. And I don't tend to say "lol" online either, unless it really is something that can make me laugh. —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 16:43, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

103. Wut?Asked 23 times

I already explained this, but here it is again. Maybe a little more coherent this time. I'm answering the most frequently asked questions from almost a decade of IRC logs. These are questions that have been asked several times in the different chats I'm in.

If you want an explanation of how I choose a question, it's something like this.

• My script scans over all my logs, and counts how many times each question appears.
• If someone posts on the talk page asking me to answer a particular numbered question from the list, I'll answer that one next.
• If not, go down the list to the 100th most frequently asked question
• Keep going to find all the questions that have been asked an equal number of times
• If I already answered that one, go back up until I find one I haven't answered

If you want to pick a number for me, please leave a comment on the talk page (click "Discussion" above). If you want to actually ask me a question rather than picking a number, go to Frequently Asked Questions or Infrequently Asked Questions instead. Hope that explains everything —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 12:28, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

102. Who knew?Asked 23 times

I'd hope you all knew by now. I've been doing this for 4 days, so that's plenty of time to get used to how the site works. On the other hand, you learn something new every day. There must be a million things that "everybody knows", but you don't know any of them when you're born, so there's got to be a long time of learning something every minute just to know the things that everybody knows.

Like, did you know that there are things you know that you don't know that you know? Things you can do automatically that you don't remember learning, and you'd probably be surprised to find out you can do it. If you haven't come across unknown knowns before, get a friend to pour some cold water into a glass, and pour some hot water into a glass. You can tell which one is which just by the sound if you aren't looking, or at least most people can.

Everybody knows that hot water and cold water sound different, and can tell them apart. But most people never knew that they knew. Isn't that weird?

Of course, somebody might comment on the talk page saying they already knew that, because they've done the experiment before. If you knew, then good for you, but let me know. Come on, I'm asking you this time.

Who knew? —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 11:17, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

101. Where are you?Asked 23 times

At the moment I'm sitting under a nice warm duvet on my bed, with a laptop on the desk and a keyboard in my lap. Financially, I'm not quite in the red (which is a major achievement given current circumstances). Mentally, I'm probably somewhere else entirely, because I haven't had coffee yet and I've not properly woken up. Maybe my creativity is off exploring the jungles of Antarctica somewhere in dreamland, and I'll start being more productive once it comes back. Physically, Geographically, I'm 50°N, 2°W (correct to 1 significant figure), and emotionally I'm in a fit of giggles. —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 10:00, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

100. How's things? asked 109 times by rawr, mai, and 62 others

Things are fine. Stuff isn't as good as things, but is pretty good in its own right. Circumstances could be better, but I think that doesn't really matter so much as I don't have a problem with things right now. And while we're on the subject of circumstances, the conditions in which my question-counting script runs have changed a little. I thought it would be interesting for it to show the first person who asked a given question, so I added a tiny piece of code to track that; and somehow the number of questions in the list shot up dramatically. I guess I fixed a bug that stopped the script recognising them, but what that bug might have been I have no idea.

Still, the page has some more interesting questions on it. So that's one good thing at least. —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 19:56, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

99. what brings you here? asked 113 times by mai, sleepybox, and 46 others

Mostly insanity. I had a domain that wasn't pointing at any site, and I wasn't sure what to put on it. Someone suggested I use it for some frequently asked questions, which sounded like a fairly good idea, but then I wondered what the most frequently asked questions actually were. Of course, my curiosity wouldn't let such an interesting question go unanswered. So I decided to put these questions together, and by now it's started to become a habit.

I know I'm probably crazy for devoting so much time to a project that has no real purpose, but it's kind of fun and I'd like to think there may be other people as interested as I am in the statistics of garriology. —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 09:59, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

100. Anyone? asked 94 times by MasterLocke, twilightL, and 62 others

Yes, anyone. Anyone can ask a question, and if you ask it often enough it might get onto this page.

Is there anyone out there? I can't really answer that one, and I know I'm supposed to be answering questions not asking them, but I sure hope so.

Is there anybody in here? That should be an easier question, but sometimes I'm not sure myself. Maybe I'm just a bot putting answers together based on some probabilistic set of rules that makes something that almost looks like a human-written sentence until you come to the fuchsia. Looking at some of my responses on this page, they do kind of look like I could be a bot, admittedly one less prone to selling Kratom than most of the ones I've seen on forums lately. Maybe I'm combining a couple of different heuristics for generating answers. You could look at some huge corpus of written English, like half a gig of chat logs (as if anyone would ever be retentive enough to keep something like that lying around), and work out the probability of any two words coming next to each other. And then you could give it some direction by picking out the important keywords from the question, and making sure the rambling chain of words comes back around to it.

I'm sure there's some name for that kind of sentence generation, it seems like it should be one of the basic techniques in AI. I might even have heard of it before. I think I've heard mention of Chekhov chains?

Am I just some process running on the webserver, running for half a second every day and hallucinating a screen displaying FVWM i an author's study packed with empty vodka bottles, books, unworn shirts, and luminescent cauliflowers? You've really got me wondering now.

Can someone please tell me I'm a human being?

Anyone? —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 10:11, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

98. like what? asked 90 times by MigrAngel, misslucy, and 68 others

I guess so. I mean, "what" is one of the most fundamental questions in the English language, and I can't see any way it could be improved on. Using it as an interjection can be terriblly vague, but it's still a useful question. It's just hard at times to see if someone's asking for clarification or just expressing surprise. It's certainly better than "Huh?".

So, all in all, I think "What?" does the job it was designed for. —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 09:48, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

You may also have noticed that some of the questions are now appearing slightly out of order. This is because I changed it to sort the list by number of times asked, plus the number of nicks that asked the question. This pushes the questions that are asked repeatedly by certain channel bots further down the list, even though they are frequently asked. Do you think I should include them? Let me know!

97. hi? asked 88 times by syrup, sarabeth, and 70 others

Hi! I'm Angel, I don't think we've been introduced properly. I'm a self-employed author from Northwet England. I'm answering these silly questions as a distraction from real work. It's a pleasure to meet you, but maybe a question with more than two letters might help me to provide an answer with more than two lines.

• —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 10:33, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

95. how is everyone today? asked 94 times by redTwist, DMStewart, and 66 others

Happy, sad, energetic, sleepy, hot, cold, busy, bored, and confused.

I think it might be a little more interesting to have a specific answer. So instead of asking about everyone, why not just ask how the people are who are reading this? I still can't answer for everyone, but I expect that most of them are amused by at least one of the things they've just read, or at least a little confused by the randomness.

Me in particular, my body's still aching because I've had a cold which has drawn on for quite a few days, but I think I'm getting over it now. I just need to catch up on the project I'm writing for NaNoWriMo, which is currently sitting at 31k words and therefore I'll have to write at double the standard rate if I want to hit 50k on time now. Still, I think I'm doing pretty well. Distracted myself again this morning doing my first stream on twitch. Might be more fun if there was someone watching, but at least I confirmed that my computer is capable of it.

How is everyone else?

94. how is everyone doing? asked 106 times by ashwee, gaysian, and 57 others

I think how they're doing will depend quite heavily on what they're doing. But like I said before, I suspect that there's quite a wide range of everyone, who'll be doing everybow from 'awesome' to 'awful'. Maybe the average is a little better this week than it has been for the remainder of human history, it'd be nice to think that's the case. But I'm not authorised to speak for everyone, so I can't really say. Maybe you should ask them yourself?

• —Angel Wedge (Author talk) 15:39, 26 November 2019 (UTC)