[documentation] This isn't a "major re-write", is it?

[Angela Byron]

Mike Booth wrote:
> Fellow documenters,
>
> Having just joined the docs team, I find that I have apparently  
> become drunk with power -- I have edited the "Contributing to  
> documentation" page to reorganize it and make it easier to read:
>
> http://drupal.org/node/24572
>
> I presume that this is not a "major re-write", for which I should  
> have asked permission in advance. But, as a first-timer, I feel that  
> I should ask, just to make sure.
>
> If I'm out of bounds, please let me know before I sin again. :)
>
> Thanks,
>    Mike Booth (aka "mechfish")
>   

LOL @ drunk with power. :) Just how we like our docs team members! 
Mwahahaha...

Great job on cleaning up that page. And yeah, the line for "major 
re-write" is somewhat fuzzy.

I guess one guideline would be, "Are the changes I want to make going to 
take me longer than a couple hours to do?" If so, that might constitute 
as a "major" change, and worth starting a discussion on the issue queue. 
Taking a chunk of the handbook, ripping it apart to its base components, 
and putting it back together again with a bunch of completely new 
content, for example, is probably not a lazy Sunday afternoon task. ;)

Another rule of thumb is, "Are you changing enough stuff that the 
original author could conceivably come back to this page and barely 
recognize it as his/her own?" If so, you're probably doing a major 
re-write, and it might be worth getting a couple more opinions. Although 
an exception would be cases where the existing page is just awful, or 
completely out-of-date, or a simple stub... basically where *anything* 
would be considered an improvement. Then probably feel free to jump in.

At any rate, your changes still definitely capture the same message that 
was there before, it's just more nicely formatted, a bit shorter in 
places, and so on. So that's A-OK, at least in my book.

Btw, another nice next step might be to write up a synopsis of this 
thread once everyone's kind of weighed in, and add somewhere in the 
sub-pages of the one you just re-wrote, in order to help answer this 
same question for future contributors. :)

-Angie