[documentation] Contributors to docs need more public recognition

catch catch56 at googlemail.com
Mon May 26 09:16:51 UTC 2008


I haven't done a great deal of work on the handbook, but nearly all my edits
are fixing typos and more recently 'archiving' old and out of date pages. In
both of those cases I really, really don't want my username listed on the
page next to those pages.

Additionally, sometimes I'll see a page that looks completely wrong to me,
but then I'll notice a greggles or a webchick attached to the revisions tab
- and then realise they were only moving it's location or fixing a typo. So
I agree this opens up people to a lot of e-mail support, and making pages
look more of less authoritative simply due to who's edited it or how many
different people have.

Having said all that, +1 to making the documentation contributors list more
prominent. There's the 'most active developers' block on
http://drupal.org/cvs which is fun to look at sometimes - probably wouldn't
be that hard to have a 'documentation commit messages' page as well (maybe
this already exists somewhere as recent changes?).

Another thing with this - the cvs metrics that greggles does for core
releases are always interesting to see - both who's contributing, and the
distribution of patches. Individual cvs commit messages don't provide this
so well (and never exactly match who contributed to a patch, and hardly ever
the person who might have typed up the initial bug report) - but at an
aggregate level they're good for seeing trends in the project. So I'm not so
interested in attribution for individual pages (I guess people who really
want that post documentation planet rather than in the handbook), but I am
quite interested in getting some statistical data on documentation
contributions in general.

If you're reading this conversation, and haven't seen
José<http://groups.drupal.org/user/9198>'s
post on the Drupal.org redesign group [1], then this'd probably be worth
looking at together with that. It's the sort of thing that'd be easier to
implement on a separate subdomain.

Nat

1. http://groups.drupal.org/node/10223
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