Steve Holden writes: > Could the PSF help here by offering annual prizes for the best > contributions to the documentation, or wouldn't that be an adequate > motivator?
Money is not a very effective motivator for this sort of work. (Well, in sufficient quantities it is, but the quantities required are quite large.) Offering *credit* is more effective -- a mention within a contributors list perhaps. Even more effective is offering the chance to make a difference: immediate feedback (seeing your edit in place). Thus, I'm a big fan of amk's suggestion: > I think the most effective thing would be [...] > to build a real comment-on-the-docs system. But I agree strongly with Fred's concerns: > he was worried about whether > anyone would garden the comments to remove spam. and as Michael Hudson put it: > Writing good documentation is hard. > > And sometimes the problem is that the document isn't really structured > right, or it has been hastily updated to cover too many changes that > it's a dogs breakfast, or some other 'global' problem and these > *really* take time to fix. My own favorite idea is to create a comment-on-the-docs mechanism allowing both COMMENTS, and PROPOSED EDITS. The proposed edits would need to be reviewed by one of a small number of skilled and dedicated editors (Fred Drake... you're a hero!) before being officially incorporated. That's not all that different from the current system (submit a patch to sourceforge), except that the format for entering the change would be simpler. Of course, the person who REALLY gets to decide how it works isn't me; it's whoever decides to spend the time to BUILD this system. -- Michael Chermside _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
