Re: [clreq] Move editors to authors (#603)

Interestingly, and by coincidence, the Unicode Editorial Committee discussed this same topic wrt Unicode publications last week.  Their approach, which they are not planning to change, is to limit the list of 'editors' to the one or two persons who are actually caretakers of the document at the present time (ie. publishing and making current modifications).  They don't expect the list of editors to be more than a couple of people at any given time.

They prefer not to have a simple list that calls out authors because they say that it can be too difficult to define who should and who should not be in such a list.  They do, however, have carefully worded text in an Acknowledgements section that details who the contributors are and have been.  This allows them to be fairly specific about how the people acknowledged contributed to the document.

For example in Unicode® Standard Annex #14 Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm the [Acknowledgements](https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/tr14-51.html#Acknowledgments) section describes the original author of the document, and subsequent major contributors and editors (with dates); it lists people who have provided 'background information', people who have done reviews, and people who have contributed text or ideas for specific sections.

A problem with the Unicode approach in my mind (and that of a few others) is that the Acknowledgements section is hidden at the bottom of the document, and probably not read by many people.  I would suggest that that section should be right at the top of the document, or at the very least a prominent link to it should feature in the set of links at the top of the document.

It was also pointed out that the links to previous versions of the document allow those who really want to to figure out who was the editor in earlier versions of the document.  W3C documents, of course, have a similar set of links.

So this is a model that it may be worth looking into, as an alternative to a list of Authors.

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Received on Thursday, 22 February 2024 12:52:25 UTC