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?
I don't think that future editing devalues someones work. But I think it can be undestood that we would like to give more credit to those who actually actively work on something.
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,
Do we? That would make me happy :)
-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.
Well, as you see, we are going to add 'many' people to the credits list either we go on the human route or the computer automated one. So there will be 'many' 'cool people' ;) [Many should be view relative to the current number of listed people]. This is just to prevent anybody from coming in and voting on guys without really being part of the group. What if we would start a voting about adding an extension on internals@ (or for a better exmaple, one year ago on php-dev@). Do you think that real PHP developers will cast the majority of the votes? I don't think so.
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.
Well, to be fair most of the time, notes editors are simply copying over the user note with slight editing. We should not expect them IMHO to rewrite the text just because of legality questions. We should put the notes into the legal system as 'free to be used by the docteam' IMHO.
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?
And do anybody read the list at the end of the film? Not in Hungary. The lights are turned on as that list starts, and people go out. Those lists are also cut in TV broadcasting and replaced with commercials. So do having a list of 400 contributors will be a real show of respect? I don't think so.
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.
Well, even if this does not seem to be a good metric, this seems to be much better to me, than any automation, and not because I won't get onto the list if an automated system is used, or because I can't get my mates to be on the list. But because I think to give real credit, and for the contributors to feel that they are respected, they should not be picked by a computer.
Just to provide an example, I receive "happy birthday" and "happy nameday" emails from the central computer of the univeristy every year [yes, I do!]. I feel much better when receiving a mail from any of my friends, though technically it is the same thing. But one mail reflects the feelings and care of someone, the other reflects some program's automated behaviour.
Under the proposed system their personal feelings can be manifested in a single negative vote, regardless of any argument....
As I said, if any negative vote comes in, 'community' decision is needed (~it need to be talked about, not just voted).
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.
Well, I suppose you have not seen some of my last commits to 'phpweb'. I have a newly installed linux system (upgraded yesterday), and I had the 'remove whitespace from the end of lines' option checked in by default in my IDE. Therefore I have committed some files with many chars changed, although I have done small real changes to the files.
We cannot just depend on changed character count, it should not be what leads the decision, but something that supports it.
Let me have another more closer example. In phpdoc we have a kind of 'wrapping policy', basically lines should not be long. What if I add 12 chars into some paragraph? I need to rewrap it to make it readable. That means some words will go to new lines, and depending on the length of the para, many chars will be changed (let's say 15 lines), just because I have added one or two words.
What if someone commits a translated file by error? What if someone else fixes the problem? That would mean hundreds of changed lines for both of the guys. These are real examples, these are happening every week here!
What if I commit one file with windows newlines? The one guy who will correct me, will have another hundred lines. What if I commit one file with tabs instead of spaces? The guy who corrects me will have several more chars (1 tab = 4 spaces!).
After a month or so, I'll get many-many lines just by correcting such mistakes, or adding two words into paragraphs. The automation will think that I am a cool guy, who added a great deal of content, or corrected many errors in the documentation, however this is not the case.
CVS gaming is much more transparent
Well, ok. But you are talking about using raw numbers. If you consider all the things above, and are convinced that using raw numbers won't show the quality of the work someone done, then you end up putting some guys looking behind the numbers. And then we get to the system I am proposing, decisionmaking by humans.
If you reread the examples above, you will notice that I am not saying that rude guys will get all the numbers. I say that anyone who volunteers can get better numbers just because the nature of his commit is destined to generate a big change count. Even if noone is going to get on committing things with large change counts before anyone else can, these factors will make the numbers untrustable.
than buying people at a conference beer all night long.
It seems our points of view are quite different. I think I can't be convinced with a beer. I don't like beer anyway ;) [By the way, I would like to buy a laptop, in case anyone is interested ;)] Let's say we will have 'as few as' 15-20 guys listed for the first run on the credits page. What if somenoe buys beer on a conference for three of them to convinve them that he should be listed on the credits page. Those three will propose the guy on the mailing list. Do you think that if the proposal is not reasonable, the other 12-17 listed members will watch happily this nomination, and let they guy get on the list [~devalueing their listing]? Or even if not all 12-17 guys are on the list and hear the nomination, there won't be anything against the nomination if it is not reasonable?
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.
Well, I have not thought about this possiblity, but as I said above, I am not approaching the problem from the 'bad guys will make everything bad' perspective, but from the 'good guys will inadvertantly do things to make the raw numbers irrational, as they have done before' persepective.
Goba