agenda+ Editors, authors, and acknowledgements

I'm copying in a few people who may have an interest in expanding these 
ideas beyond the compass of the i18n WG.


The clreq folks have been trying to decide what to do about their long 
list of contributors, given that new publication rules allow only people 
who have an active account to be listed as editors. Fuqiao and i have 
been discussing the possibilities, but quite by coincidence the exact 
same topic came up recently in the Unicode Editorial Committee meetings.

There seems to be agreement that 'Editors' are the people who are 
currently managing the document, ie. approving and integrating pull 
requests, and publishing the document. There are likely to only be one 
or two people in this kind of editor role at any one time.  When someone 
else takes over that role from an existing editor, the name of the 
former editor is replaced, not added to.  This also fits with the new 
publication policy at W3C.

The question is: how to recognise the contributions of those who have 
created the content or served as editors in the past.  In many cases, 
these people may have written much or most of the content itself, and 
the editor may be simply a facilitator.

It seems that it is important to recognise going forward that an editor 
is not necessarily an author, and vice versa.

One possibility is to move all current and former contributor names to 
an 'Authors' list.  The problem with this is that it becomes difficult 
in some cases to determine whether or not someone should be elevated to 
author status. Such a list also doesn't indicate such things as 'X wrote 
the whole document' and Y and Z just contributed suggestions, or worked 
on translation, or submitted review comments, etc.

The approach currently taken by the Unicode folks is to carefully 
maintain an Acknowledgements section, which indicates how each person 
contributed to the document.  You can see an example of this at 
https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/tr14-51.html#Acknowledgments. Note 
how that section describes who the original idea came from, and who were 
the previous maintainers; it also describes who contributed particular 
items of information, who reviewed the content (in whole or in part), 
and so on.

For me, the problem with the Unicode approach is that the reader may 
never have looked at the acknowledgements section, because it is rather 
buried in the end matter. I think the section should appear right next 
to the abstract, or at the very least a clearly noticeable link should 
appear in the front matter (perhaps both).  These people need 
recognition for the work they put in.

Some people expressed concern that references don't point to the 
original authors of the content, given the separation between editors 
and others.  This may however by addressed by listing editors as such 
when citing references.  Also, we have a link trail that people can 
follow to see who was involved in earlier versions of the document - the 
early editors are typically the principal authors in the early stages.

I also think it would be useful to always include a link to the GH 
contributors list (eg. https://github.com/w3c/alreq/graphs/contributors) 
in the acknowledgements section.

What do people think?

ri