Hmm, now this is one difficult topic :)
Hope we will succeed with the discussions before another year. First of all, to be officially correct, we need to come up with a proposed new authors listing structure (and probably a guideline for the method of adding new members in the future), which we will send out to the current listed authors to accept or disagree with. After having a policy on how to accept new authors and how to allow publication of the manual, there would be no need to ask every non-active author, and the whole thing will probably be easier and quicker with active members participating in the discussions.
There are a few groups that come to mind:
a) People who wrote the original manual in the late 90's and
who are no longer active. This is the entire current list, for both authors and editors.
Of course this group should remain listed there but whether we separate active and inactive members, not sure.
But, "edited by" should all be active, Egon and Stig are not active editors for years now. I believe they should be moved into the inactive original authors list or whatever it's called.
Also in the future some of these authors may come out of
'retirement', I can see Torben doing this :) So maybe there
should be no separation as it could end up being misleading.
Well, I think they should be kept on the frontpage, and moved only if the list becomes absurdly long. I would vote on the side of Alexander Aulbach's idea to list active members on the top, and inactive ones below them.
b) People who have been consistantly active for at least
a year or so. Who both edit the manual and implement
changes/additions as PHP progresses. Difficult to
define, see below.
Well, I think the method should go somehow like this:
- First the currently proposed new authors will be nominated
to be on the list.
- Then as we have active members on the authors list, I think
a voting based list extension system can be establised. Let's
say for someone to become a member of the offical PHP
Documentation Group (ie. listed on the frontpage of the
manual), he needs at least three positive votes from listed
authors, and no negative ones. There will probably be a few
active members on the authors list after the first step
mentioned above, so acception will be judged by current
active members [it will hopefully work smoothly].
c) People who make the occasional commit and/or haven't
been around very long.
This group should not be on the front page, maybe we can have a "helper appendix" or similar? Might not be worth
the trouble to maintain and worry about though. This
can be its own discussion.
Well, this is a group hard to define ;)) We should also think about the user notes, which are hosted by the side of the manual, and ocassionaly integrated to the manual text. The current statement about this on the about-notes page is:
| Periodically, the developers may go through the notes and
| incorporate the information in them into the documentation.
| This also means, that notes are always under the same
| license, as the manual itself.
While I have added the note on the license, I see now, that this cannot be true. As if a note is under the same license, then we need to mention the author of it, as one contributor to the manual. We have never done this, and probably won't do in the future. So the text needs to be changed to something that the user gives all rights regarding his note to the documentation team (to integrate it into the manual, etc).
This is quite an interesting legal subject ;)
d) Translators. Many times translators are listed on their
translations front page, do we have a policy on this?
Translators should be listed on the frontpage of the translated manual. I thought this is the rule, even that it is not written down.
e) Technical editors. Those who work on stylesheets, the
manual generation, xslt/dsssl, etc. Behind the scenes.
f) Editors. I don't think we have any of these except maybe
Gabor. Most of us monitor/edit each other. Then again,
I may not know what editor means. Is it someone who edits
current text or is it like an editor of a newspaper? I
assume the latter.
If you remember to what Egon did, he was perfectly fitting the editor's role. He monitored all commits, warned guys doing things not in line with the rules here, moved some small staff around, when needed, asked guys to revert bad changes, etc. Well, I think editors are those who are not authors of the content, but mainly work on presenting it in a better way with reorganizing stuff, fixing grammatical errors, fixing bugs, etc. So editors are those in my eyes who work on content, but rather perfeting the content, not adding it.
Well I'm sure we all have similar feelings Gabor so you don't be shy either ;) Okay I feel the same way and will only nominate one person, myself, as part of group (b) above.
That is a typical "Author" role. It's ok with me.
I myself would like to propose a new role 'Technical editor' or something like this, which would fit for me and Hartmut too (in case he agrees) and Jouni can also be moved there (in case he agrees of course). This role would be for those who work / worked mainly on the technical staff behind, and not primarily on the content, which as far as I see is the case for me, Hartmut and Jouni.
I try to avoid this group :) But as for you Goba, you also monitor
every commit and mention potential problems. So I guess you are
both an editor and technical editor?
Well, it is another question, what to do, if someone seems to belong to more then one group. I don't want to take side here, as this question is about me ;) So I awaiting more comments.
Goba