Indeed note editing has not been much of a recognized
position, and along the years not many have been aware
of the php-notes list.
Yep, this is said for us, and we should treat manual editors 'fully qualified' documentation contributors in the future. I hope more guys will come in for notes editing this way too :)
The current system for note
editing (a mix of some of my old code and a lot of
nice enhancements by Jim) makes life easier for the
editors.
One thing that should be interesting, and has not been
implemented, would be to allow note editors to
register interest in a particular chapter/section and
then recieve only those notes. I wrote code to that
effect but I am not sure where it is right now after
'phpweb' as reorgnized.
phpweb is really not that much reorganized, it is developed step by step with new features. I don't know when you made that code, but the note handling part is nearly the same for a long time [except some spam protection].
To come back to the topic, it might be more
interesting to have:
1) The manual editors in the main page (TOC) of the
manual. Those will be the people that will be
contacted with stuff regarding the organization of the
manual, or licencing questions, etc.
Well, it seems now, that most of the guys who commented says, that we should not have such a list. We will have a similar list anyway on the top of the 'contributors page' or 'credits page' or anything we call it.
2) Perhaps list the last 4 or 5 people commiting
changes to a particular page, and list them as
authors. This might require some CVS wizardry included
in the manual building process.
Do you really think the last 4-5 people are to be considered authors? See what PHP does in phpcredits() for giving credit to extension authors. It is not automated either...
3) An appendix listing the people that have
contributed to the manual with some stats, and pages,
that way if someone wants to contact the writer to
suggest improvements or corrections, that page will
make it simpler.
As I said before, I don't think that stats count. They don't show the quality of contribution, only the quantity. And also if someone suggests improvements he better file a bug report, as it is the only way to keep track of it, to let the community help, to let others do the work, if the usual maintainer cannot do it, etc.
Goba