Re: finally: new authors

I'm going to do a bit of thread strafing, so as to not clog the list with multiple replies... if you can't follow who-said-what, focus on the responses. On Saturday, May 3, 2003, at 05:51 AM, Gabor Hojtsy wrote:

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    who are no longer active.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.

If someone added or edited 50% of the pages, but hasn't bothered later fixing typos, does that devalue their past work as compared to recent edits? Has the later work now surpassed their original work? What is a fair metric for determining this?

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.

I am struck that all manual contributors, for the most part, are professional coders, who have access to *all* of the data needed to determine the actual level of each human, individual, contribution, and yet.... rather than quantify using that code and data, are seeking other human-based processes. I have read Goba's and Andrew's objections on the matter, and they do strike me as examples of automation being bad when it is done *poorly*, rather than example of automation being bad simply in and of itself.

-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.

Contribution listing as a high-school popularity contest, with the "cool people" doing the voting??? This strikes me as a possible disincentive, politicizing a task. I'd like to give myself a permanent -3 votes for starters, if I could. :-) I don't particularly want to be popular, or well liked. I'm a coder, not a politician.

c) People who make the occasional commit and/or haven't

    been around very long.

That would be me, for now. :-) I have no stake in being listed, so I'm not trying to be.

| 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.... This is quite an interesting legal subject ;)

A long time ago, I wrote a bit about this. The notes editors can (and should) easily fold the *value* of a note without folding in the direct note, verbatim... the text author is then the note editor, even if the *idea* to add/change came from someone else..... back to the listing issue, though. On Saturday, May 3, 2003, at 07:19 AM, Andrew Lindeman wrote:

That's what I was thinking all along. Listing all the people who contribute to the documentation effort on the front page is not viable. As you said, I think all credits should be moved to a 'Credits' page, and that linked from the front page..

Might I propose a metaphor: In american movies, the biggest star people are before the movie, the rest of the people are afterwards. So, why not a "major credit" listing on the main credit page or front page, and "the tons of others" on another page? On Saturday, May 3, 2003, at 02:58 PM, Andrew Lindeman wrote (referring to automation):

I still think your argument is weak. Number of commits, especially in something like documentation, is _not_ at all a good representation of how much you've actually contributed.

I *strongly agree* this is an example of a poor metric, for the reasons mentioned previously.

If you convince _people_, rather than _computers_ that you deserve to be on the credits list, the list will be a whole lot more meaningful, as Goba mentioned.

I disagree that this is a good metric, and think it is a poor metric, as well. It provides direct incentive for people to be well liked first and foremost, rather than accurate, or frequently contributing.

I'm also confident that people here will not let personal feelings get in the way of something like this. If they do, they will not have a valid argument against you appearing on the list and they're opposition will be ignored.

Under the proposed system their personal feelings can be manifested in a single negative vote, regardless of any argument.... Something possibly worth discussing: CVS doesn't just track number of commits, it also tracks lines changed, what lines were changed, and *how much change was involved in a file*, with a little coaxing. Let's take a few examples: Author A: Changes one punctuation character a day. 365 commits per year. However, comparing the old lines versus new lines only shows 365 individual characters added/changed/removed per year. They are well liked by others. Author B: Changes a page once a month, rewriting whole sections. Only 12 commits per year. However, comparing old lines to new lines show 30,000 characters added/changed/removed per year. They are almost universally disliked, because they are constantly changing the work of others, and hold unpopular social and political views. Author C: Changes 5 pages every day. Some pages are one character, some are entirely new paragraphs/examples/etc. 1825 commits, 350,000 added/changed/removed characters per year. They are viewed with some suspicion by many others. Depending on the system used, A or B or C may be a 'top listed author". Here is what *I* would suggest: 1) Author listings are based on monthly added/changed character counts, and changed/updated monthly. 2) Major authors get their own listing, minor authors are separate. Can this system be "gamed"? Yes, but I think the gaming of character counts is a lot more obvious than the gaming of people. CVS gaming is much more transparent than buying people at a conference beer all night long. The worst case I can think of is that excessively verbose commits would be used, but those who trimmed such commits would get the credit for the trims. -Bop Ronald Chmara Ronin Professional Consulting LLC 520-326-6109 "To create a new standard it takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination. And the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard " --Bill Gates