Re: CfC: publish WD of XHR; deadline November 29

On Tue, 04 Dec 2012 01:50:35 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> ... This is just plagiarism.

Ian, this accusation against colleagues of yours working in good faith is  
offensive, and it is untrue. It is therefore inappropriate for this  
mailing list.

I will repeat, since you may have missed it, what I said [1] in an earlier  
side-branch of this thread discussing how credit should be given to Anne  
for his work on this specification. The general principle is that we  
expect to give credit for contribution (but recognise that this is always  
an approximation). This is orthogonal to W3C's referencing policy for  
specifications.

The process, and W3C's publication rules, are off-topic for this working  
group. If you want to discuss issues, please do so in the relevant forum.

You are able to write to the Advisory Board, request Google's Advisory  
Committee representative to raise the issue.

Anybody can participate directly in the W3Process Community Group[3].

[[[
In particular I note consensus that we don't want to misrepresent
contribution to the work. I considered it obvious - it is how civil adults
work and it is an accepted part of W3C process and practice.

On Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:34:02 +0400, Glenn Adams <glenn@skynav.com> wrote:

> Is Anne the *sole* author?

As I understand it, Anne wrote the words of various specifications. In
other words, the person whose "artistic expression" is reflected in the
document. Although various bits of boilerplate are just pattern
repetition. he also did a significant proportion of the testing, thinking,
and developing the content at a conceptual level.

But no, I believe other people did parts of this work, unless Anne simply
ignored anything other people had already done, or we accept that by
repeating other people's work he has produced original work, which runs
against what I believe is a common definition.

In particular, other people contributed information to Anne as members of
the Webapps working group - with an understanding that the resulting
documents would be published by that working group. To try and whitewash
that out of history seems to be somewhere down the slippery slope of
plagiarism.

Nobody has suggested that the contributions of those beyond the working
group should be ignored or misrepresented, the arguments have been about
the precise editorial details of how that is done - what is generally
called "wordsmithing" or "bikeshedding" (depending on whether it is "us"
or "them" doing it).
]]]

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2012OctDec/0574.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/community/w3process/

I note that I have now raised the issue of pubrules with Philippe le  
Hegaret, and expect that the document will be clarified. Since W3C works  
by consensus of its stakeholders, this is unlikely to happen instantly,  
but I will continue to follow the issue.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2012 22:12:25 UTC