First my gut is against listing everyone and rather see
a short list. Listing everyone who has done anything
seems crazy to me, too much work, too much stress. I've
yet to see anyone propose a sane way to do this. Just
think of all the bug squashers and code committers over
at php-dev that lack credit. And how full of stale
users this list would be. Not having this list will
provide those wanting this credit to work even more
on the manual to get on the short list.
Well this is a somewhat valid point, but I am not sure this is enough.
But I'm guessing
most people don't care and occasionaly commit out of
thanks to PHP for existing. Or simply for other reasons like a coder using the manual finds a function that needs a clearer explanation or better example. I know this is the reason for my first commit, I kept on forgetting if the strip_tags() allowable_tags parameter used a comma for tag separation or not so I entered in an example for my own reference. After utilizing this documentation I was hooked :)
Well, if we are at history stuff, I was here first to commit our translations (which were firstly done in HTML, eek!). It was a great work to reverse engineer back to XML, and while I have done this, I needed to integrate the stuff into phpdoc, for which Hartmut and Jouni gave many valuable help. Jouni is also mentioned on the Hungarian translators list. He actually fixed some of my typos too, and helped to get me everything in place ;) Under this thing, I got to know to the build system, and then the website, and...
And here we are, almost two years later, so I
guess it's time I be mentioned somewhere. I didn't think I deserved a mention after a month though, or even after three, and still feel this way. Just another anonymous guy helping out on one of a million open source projects out there. How about we start small and see how it goes.
Going from no credits in three years to massive everyone
get credit now is too much change.
As my proposal first started (human based voting), I cannot imagine a very huge list to vote on members of it. I never intended to give hard numbers though. I thought I will be ready to base my decisions on things I remember of a person from, or I'll beleive what he says about him. This is however not doable, as I realized after some comments from others.
Let me cite two things here. The first is the PHP Credits listing (phpcredits(), also available at
http://www.php.net/credits.php). If you look on this list, well you see that there are many guys mentioned than just some core. The list is however absolutely human edited. The main credits list is here:
http://cvs.php.net/co.php/php4/ext/standard/credits.c
The lists of extension credits and sapi credits are 'autogenerated' from files edited by humans, so they are also indirectly edited by humans:
http://cvs.php.net/co.php/php4/ext/standard/credits_ext.h
http://cvs.php.net/co.php/php4/ext/standard/credits_sapi.h
As far as I see, we should employ a similar open list structure, but with categorized listing, so guys won't get lost in the names. IMHO if we start to nominate and vote future members, it will eventually turn out that there are not so many who think they would like to be there (also given that the list will be extensible in the future, anytime).
Another thing I would like to mention here which fits the scene I think is the ending event of the 2001 PHP Conference in Frankfurt. The organizers said that this would be the time to ask questions to the PHP Core Group [
http://www.phpconference.de/2001/qapanel_en.php ]. Actually Rasmus, Thies and Zeev were there as the core if I remember correctly. As the Q&A session started, Rasmus asked all the attendees with CVS accounts to come to the stage and sit there to represent the community nature and to answer questions of course ;) This is what it got:
[
http://photos.derickrethans.nl/album02/devs?full=1 ] I was proud to be there, and proud to be one of those who were asked to go to the stage. I was a usual attendee back then and it was a great deal of organizing from me to get there (staying in youth hostel, etc), but it was great. The best thing was that I felt being honored.
So what is the whole point of this is that as I said it does not take any money to us to list more people, and we organize the list clearly and cleanly (like phpcredits()) then it won't be a problem IMHO. We will not get 400 members listed, and we can also add some revison possibility, so listings can be removed (or better moved to the 'retired contributor' category as you call it). If we make it clear that inactive contributors will get [re]moved from the listing, then it will probably help activate them as much as not adding them there would. Well, if you write on your business card that you are a member of the PHP Documentation Team, then you would probably work for staying in that positions. [That said, I am not going to print such business cards :)].
It should be noted however, that there are some contributors who should not be ever removed from the credits list, just moved. These include Stig for example, who set up the whole stuff at the first place (AFAIK).
Here's something we all can do to get a credit. Create a
little phpdoc resume that shows what was done, this will
be on a personal website and not in phpdoc. As this resume
grows everyone will take notice. Spend your own time
promoting yourself and not force other humans or some
statistics engine to do it for you. Also use this to show
the documentation team what is up.
As I said, I think this is a good idea ;)
Now if someone creates a setup that shows statistics then
we can use that as a bonus but it certainly will never
be the baseline to any credits system.
Well, I like stats ;) But I don't think that stats can be used really effectively in this case. They would be nice as one factor to consider though :)
I would look
forward to creating a "How to make yourself look important through phpdoc statistics" white paper. ;)
Reserve your time for more important things, please ;)
Goba