[documentation] Contributors to docs need more public recognition

[Shai Gluskin]

Steve P. wrote:

> This is not a performance question as far as I am concerned, this is a
> benefit of
> joining the community.


@steve-p I disagree with this assertion. It suggests that one of the goals
of Drupal.org is to try to get people to join the community via registering
at the site. It suggests that drupal.org withholds goodies in order to get
them to register.

There are many legitimate reasons to hold back various functionalities from
anonymous users (e.g. security, system resources etc.), but I don't believe
that restricting project transparency for the sake of increasing the number
of registered users at Drupal.org is a valid reason.

I have been really impressed with transparency in the Drupal project. The
proceedings of the project are available for public review. I find that
inspiring. That kind of transparency is rare in the worlds of government,
business, and sadly, non-profits as well. Leaders are typically concerned
with message, spin, and control. I haven't seen much of that in Drupal. (I'm
user/50259, joined in 2/06 and have gotten steadily more involved over
time.)

I often need to explain to people that open-source does not mean
"egalitarian" -- we are not all equal in the project. And Dries as project
leader has the final say on many things, especially as regards to core. It
isn't a democracy. But the success of the project does rely on highly
motivated people becoming involved. I believe that the significant
transparency of this project is one of the motivating factors for people to
become involved.

The Revisions Tab is a small part of Drupal's transparency profile. But it
worries me, even in this little arena, to think of access to certain
information being used as a reward for registration. That feels controlling
to me. It feels counter to Drupal's open approach.

Shai

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Steven Peck <sepeck at gmail.com> wrote:

> We are not enabling revisions for anonymous users.  This is not a
> performance question as far as I am concerned, this is a benefit of
> joining the community.
>
> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 2:12 PM, catch <catch56 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:10 PM, Peter Wolanin
> >  wrote:
> >>
> >> Regarding making revisions available to anonymous users - you'd better
> >> talk to Gerhard and Narayan (and other infra people).  The scalability
> >> problem might be that you've essentially doubled the number of
> >> handbook pages that will be spidered.
> >
> >
> > If we excluded *revisions* in robots.txt we could probably avoid the
> > spidering. That's probably one post subdomain-split anyway.
> >
> > http://drupal.org/handbook/updates was exactly the page I meant,
> couldn't
> > place it when I typed the e-mail. Ta!
> >
> > Nat
> > --
> > Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> > List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
> >
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>
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