Making handbook editable by all (was Re: [documentation] the documentation site...<snip>)

[Charlie Lowe]

Dries Buytaert wrote:
>>> I'm willing to do the experiment, but I'm not confident it will work.
> 
> 
> We all had our say.  It is time to make some concrete decisions  because 
> I'd like to know what changes to make to drupal.org's  infrastructure.
> 
> (Charlie should make those decisions based on the input from the  
> documentation team.)

Since Dries has some doubts, why don't we start with giving 
authenticated users the "maintain books" permission, but let's not 
announce it on drupal.org it as a new, permanent feature. Sort of a 
trial period to see how it works. Those who want to edit will notice the 
availability of the edit tab.

Meanwhile, in reviewing Dries's earlier comment, I think he did hit upon 
on important point that we might consider about our documentation 
construction process:

"Thus, you don't need to understand the entire  Wikipedia website before 
you can contribute an article, however, you  should have a pretty decent 
overview of the Drupal handbook, before  you should be able to add a new 
page."

This is just guess, but we may find that giving everyone the ability to 
edit pages works very well because they have an existing page as a 
guideline. One edits to improve what already exists.

It's the ability to create pages which all authenticated users already 
have which may be more the problem. I don't want to suggest this as a 
new policy, but perhaps the Vancouver discussion on documentation could 
consider whether we want to allow edit but not create. For creation of 
new pages, authenticated users would be asked to submit a documentation 
issue with the text of the new page, have it reviewed, and make 
revisions. Then someone on the documentation list could create the new 
page once it is approved. Right now, the process is not very 
collaborative. This would also eliminate all of the test book pages that 
are created by people.