Re: agenda+ Editors, authors, and acknowledgements

Hi,

I agree giving credit is important, so I have thought about this and 
related variants in the past, but find no easy answer. This is a tricky 
topic in part because it's trying to balance different needs that are in 
tension with each other:

Typical readers of the spec mostly benefit from knowing who is currently 
Editor, so that they know who to approach for questions/suggestions if 
they're not comfortable approaching the group as a whole, and so that 
people within the group / within W3C know who to bug about making 
publications happen. This suggest trimming away past editors who are no 
longer doing maintenance.

This is however unfair to historical editors, who may have done just as 
much work, or possibly much more, as the listed editors, since they 
would not be getting credit. Moving them to "Previous Editors" helps 
within the document, but it removes them from being cited in 
cross-referencing, which is bad. Same thing with listing people as 
"Authors".

As for contributors who never were editors, I think i18n is somewhat 
unique (or at least atypical) in having contributors who author the bulk 
of a document without ever being its editors. Editor-driven is typical, 
and so is group-driven, but driven/written by an individual who is not 
an editor is unusual in other contexts.

When someone has made a meaningful contribution among many, the 
Acknowledgement section seems appropriate. But if they wrote like 90% of 
the document, it seems insufficient. I guess that's where the "Author" 
piece of metadata comes from, but since it's not picked up by tooling, 
that doesn't really work.

I don't have a good answer.

—Florian


On 2024/02/27 2:22, r12a wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 

—Florian

Received on Tuesday, 27 February 2024 08:50:30 UTC