I continue to believe that the RSWG should not adopt this draft. I'd
like to make three additional points.
First, I think that framing this as about "ethics" is not really
right. Many of the practices here are simply convention. For example,
as S 3.2 observes:
Some standards development organisations always remove individual
authorship when a document is formally adopted. This is not done for
RFCs.
This is no more or less ethical a procedure than listing the authors
as the RFC series currrently does.
Second, the very first principle seems rather confused:
1. The RFC Series should have a consistent approach across all
streams to the ethical issues surrounding authorship. Thus,
readers can trust RFCs equally, regardless of the stream.
First, no rules about authorship will make RFCs equally trustworthy,
nor are they so. To the contrary, IETF stream documents, especially
those which have been through a WG process and IETF last call, simply
are not comparable to documents published in the Independent Stream,
which in many case have received minimal vetting. Even if the
practices specified in this document were sufficient to make an RFC
trustworthy, this objective is in more or less direct contradiction to
the text in S 2, which does not require any stream to adopt these
practices:
The Editorial stream will apply these guidelines from the date of
publication of this document as an RFC. Other streams which intend
to adopt these guidelines should do so explicitly, also explicitly
defining any exceptions and variations.
If streams have variable practices, then RFCs will not be equally
trustworthy even in this respect.
Third, applying these practices only to the published RFC, as
principle 2 states (assuming ad arguendo that these practices are
good) seems to me to have quite confusing and undesirable results.
2. Each stream determines its own process for the drafting of RFCs;
the guidelines stated here apply only to final copy, and not to
drafts.
Internet-Drafts circulate widely, so to the extent to which it's
important to follow some practice (e.g., labeling AI) in RFCs, it's
hard to understand why it would be unnecessary to do so in
Internet-Drafts. I appreciate that this text and requiring each stream
to independently sign on to these practices are intended to respond to
objections about the suitability of this work for the RSWG by limiting
the scope of this document to what is arguably within the RSWG's
ambit, but the result is an incoherent set of policies. The better
approach is to actually take this document to a body which is set up
to handle it; in the case of the IETF Stream this is GENDISPATCH.
-Ekr
On Sat, Jun 20, 2026 at 2:01 PM Brian E Carpenter <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Another update (the last one I plan before the IETF). I've added a list of
> principles (with thanks to Eliot for the idea and a few off-list messages)
> and otherwise tried to respond to the other actionable comments and clean
> up the logical flow:
>
> * Added list of principles near the front
> * Highlighted relationship to existing practice
> * Moved discussion of copying between RFCs into main text
> * Removed remark about prior art
> * Clarified that author/editor descriptions are only indicative
> * Clarified that the guidance applies specifically to the final draft sent
> to the RPC, not to how the sausage was made
>
> Regards/Ngā mihi
> Brian Carpenter
>
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> Subject: I-D Action: draft-carpenter-rswg-authoring-ethics-05.txt
> Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2026 13:50:07 -0700
> From: [email protected]
> Reply-To: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
>
> Internet-Draft draft-carpenter-rswg-authoring-ethics-05.txt is now
> available.
>
> Title: Guidelines for Assignment of RFC Authorship
> Author: Brian E. Carpenter
> Name: draft-carpenter-rswg-authoring-ethics-05.txt
> Pages: 15
> Dates: 2026-06-20
>
> Abstract:
>
> This document describes ethical guidelines for assigning authorship
> in RFC documents, including guidelines for the use of artificial
> intelligence during document preparation, and for inclusion of
> material from other documents. It also discusses the related issues
> of acknowledgements, editors and contributors. The various RFC
> streams are expected to apply these guidelines, and possibly define
> their own variations, which will have priority.
>
> The IETF datatracker status page for this Internet-Draft is:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-carpenter-rswg-authoring-ethics/
>
> There is also an HTML version available at:
>
> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-carpenter-rswg-authoring-ethics-05.html
>
> A diff from the previous version is available at:
>
> https://author-tools.ietf.org/iddiff?url2=draft-carpenter-rswg-authoring-ethics-05
>
> Internet-Drafts are also available by rsync at:
> rsync.ietf.org::internet-drafts
>
>
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