Re: finally: new authors

[snip] > 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. Agreed, we need to spend our own time promoting ourselves and not force everyone to do the research. If there is any question (which will happen in most cases) then show the goods. Listing raw statistics won't do it, neither will relying on people to remember everything. > 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). Yes it lists a lot of people but most have been there forever, not many changes. And of course we have far fewer categories. One point I made earlier was the difference between extension authors and everyone else. The people who close bugs and generally work on the entire code base get little credit with some being mentioned as "Quality Assurance" members. Pretty broad category. I'd say these people do most of the work and certainly don't do it for credit. But anyway, back to phpdoc. What categories are on the table? AFAICT we have: a) Authors b) Editors c) Technical Editors d) Notes Maintainers e) Contributors f) Extension maintainers? g) Helpers? Contributors being, for example, Pollita who documented the entire streams reference and related goodness. Or maybe (f) will exist... A contributor is not someone who comments on a few threads and randomly fixes a typo here and there. IDK how to define what a helper is but advogato has it, see below. I like the idea of people leading the charge on an extension if that person actually knows the topic and will actively update and maintain it. For example, ncurses, domxml, pcntl, sockets, the list goes on. These extensions need people to document them and do require some specialized knowledge. We need a way to find knowledgable people to maintain and/or update extension documentation. So how about the ability to "lead" extension documentation? The one drawback of course is once an extension has a maintainer pershaps others won't want to touch it. We can combat that though, shouldn't be too much of a problem. The person who just asked to document ncurses is an example and would most likely enjoy this role. There was a similar situation with domxml awhile back. I'm still not comfortable with our proposed doc categories nor do I have a proposal nor do I even know what the proposal is. Anyone feel comfortable proposing specific categories and including detailed descriptions of each? :) Maybe in a new thread? :) > 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 :)]. :) How about we take a similar approach to advogato in that we also have a "Helper" category. This won't list everyone with a CVS account but will list even more people. That and the ability for people to maintain individual extensions... > 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). Agreed. [snip] Regards, Philip