Re: [brlcad-devel] documentation authorship

[Christopher Sean Morrison]

On Aug 30, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Tom Browder wrote: On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 9:46 AM, Christopher Sean Morrison <brl...@mac.com> wrote: On a related note, the authorship on many of these "new" old documentation files is ... Any thoughts on tracking authorship or doing like is done with sources and removing all personal authorship or just trying harder to expand the list of individuals How about for such old or original contributed docs, show the "original" authors as such.  Then add "BRL-CAD Team" after them in some fashion, e.g., for the Butler/Anderson one: Possibly except I think that gives a bias to the original authors and in many (most?) cases I think the authorship credit is often inadequate/incomplete especially the older the work.  For presentations, it often ended up being the person who happened to stand up and talk at one time when in fact it was a presentation predominantly authored by someone else or really had multiple people involved.  I don't know if that would necessarily be a "bad" bias.  Would it potentially discourage a future author or encourage them to write something new?   There's also something to be said for magnitude of effort.  Should someone starting a document get more prominence than someone else that maintains and update the document over a decade? Perhaps this resistance I'm mentally trying to come to grasp with is specific to certain types of documentation.  I know that manual pages, for example, tend to be pathologically wrong when it comes to authorship credit. Of course, I adamantly don't want to diminish anyone's efforts (particularly where there was a single original author) and think we should always recognize said contributions to the maximum extent possible, at least as long as it's genuine and without question.  If you closely directed someone to write a guide, basically told them what to write, but didn't actually write a single word of it yourself, should your name be on the documentation as an author?  That's of course an extreme, but we actually have some documentation exactly like that. To some extent, every single piece of documentation, even those written by just one person, was significantly influenced by others an the works of others. I came across this interesting graphic that seems very appropriate if you replace "in-person" with "online": Cheers! Sean

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