[documentation] Contributors to docs need more public recognition

[Steven Peck]

So my kids birthday was this weekend and as a result I was off line.

Some random responses in no particular order.

-  I will not turn on book author display in the theme.  This was a
community decision a long time ago that I agree with.
-  I really would prefer not to add long lists of names to individual
pages in the body content.  In the past, this tended to have the
effect of suppressing contributions and updates in that area so we
stopped doing it.
-  The changing of 'author' info for those without Edit nodes is a bug
as far as I am concerned, I believe it existed in 4.7 as well.  It is
fixed in Drupal 6 book module, I worked very hard to make sure that
was fixed in Drupal 6.  We are not on Drupal 6 at this time.
-  How will people know they can contribute?  How can we make it more
visible that they can?  The very first paragraph on the /handbooks
page, please read it.  It has two links on this information.  This is
an issue I have been pondering for quite some time but no matter how
many places we add this information, no matter how many times we tell
people it seems we always have people that don't see the information.

I am unsure what a 'block' of author information on each page will do
for people that the revisions tag does not.  I will have to re-read
this thread to see if I can figure that out.  There is a lot of old
content on this site under different original authorship that I have
re-written from scratch and I still did not change the author info
for.  Far more then the '80' pages I have credit for.  My page count
used to be over 100 but the 'edit nodes' behavior has reduced that
over time.  <shrug>.

Another block with contributor information?  If such a block is added
where visually would this block be placed?  Left side  Right?  Top
block, bottom, verbiage?

I do not buy the 'what if' guess about how new people might feel as a
justification to change anything.  I am certainly open to increasing
visibility for contributors and how to contribute but please, don't
use 'guesses' or suppositions to support your ideas.  Good ideas will
remain good ideas without such speculation.  The very first paragraph
on the /handbooks landing page has links on how to contribute as does
the /contribute page has this information as well.  I have talked to a
lot of new people about this and have added/changed wording on a
annual basis based on these real conversations with new contributors.
We have 284 people with documentation maintainer rights.

I will have to re-read this thread later to see what else I missed.
Back to my day (and lately night/weekend)  job.

-Steven