On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 6:20 PM, Frank Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > Pre-flight vetting of submissions could be automated at the first > stage. The idea would be to provide something similar to Amazon > CreateSpace (but for freely distributed styles, of course)
I strongly support something like this. It can be a well-defined project, suitable for a grant, and can be implemented without too much work. The current (preferred) workflow for users to contribute styles is this: 1) the user edits a style, either by hand or via the Visual Editor 2) wanting to contribute the style, the user navigates to the styles repository and finds https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md 3) based on the "contributing" instructions, the user makes sure the style is valid CSL (https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki/Validation) 4) based on the "contributing" instructions, the user makes sure the style follows the additional requirements we have for repository styles (https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki/Style-Requirements) 5) the user creates a pull request I tried to make our instructions as clear as possible, but while many users manage to create pull requests, a significant fraction of those have problems. Many pull requests have an incorrect file name (if a style lacks a .csl extension, Travis-CI currently doesn't recognize them), are invalid CSL (or even XML), or don't follow our guidelines for the style metadata. I rather not accept pull requests that fail in Travis. Instead, we ask users to fix up their pull requests, which often requires detailed instructions (see e.g. https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/pull/457#issuecomment-15909207 ). I think a pre-flight tool would help with steps 3 and 4. The tool could be standalone, or bolted onto the Visual Editor. I would still like to have users create GitHub pull requests themselves for now. Having a user register with GitHub and create a pull requests gives us an easy way to publicly communicate with the user. But what the tool could do is: 1) allow the user to copy/paste or upload a CSL style, or import it directly from the Visual Editor 2) allow the user to validate the style (e.g. by incorporating http://simonster.github.io/csl-validator.js/ ) 3) assist the user with completing style metadata via a wizard-like interface. E.g. we could ask the user questions, and generate the required metadata from the responses ("Is this a style for a journal?", "Does the journal publish in a single language?", "Can you find the print and online ISSNs of the journal?", "Is this citation style described online?", etc. 4) pretty-print the style 5) after completing the style, give instructions on how to submit the style via pull request The tool could also cover the creation of dependent styles, in which case steps 1 and 2 would be skipped. Rintze ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ xbiblio-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xbiblio-devel
