Vim Tips Wiki - Remove author?
Each tip on the wiki has a header. We've pruned some of the information
that was originally imported from vim.org, and now we're wondering
whether to also remove the author field.
The wiki way of dealing with authorship is to use "History", which
records the edit summary, user name, and changes performed by each user.
Wikipedia has thousands of magnificent pages where there is no visible
author.
On the Vim Tips wiki there are lots of cases where the original tip was
pretty weak, and it's only the subsequent editing on the wiki that has
provided polish. Sometimes we manually remove the author when we notice
that removal appears appropriate, but it's a fairly arbitrary and
time-consuming process.
To summarise discussions (most recent being [1]):
* It is unfair to credit some authors when the original tip was
simplistic or defective, and it's been fixed by wiki editors (sometimes
by merging in the imported comments). We should either credit every
significant contributor or none.
* We could replace "author" with "original author" to clarify its
meaning. The idea is that a contributor shouldn't be discouraged from
editing because some author "owns" the tip, or wonder whether to add
their own name as an author if substantial edits are performed. Of
course, if a tip does have an active author (someone who cares about
it), they are welcome to clean up or remove any inappropriate edits, but
no one owns a tip (if they do, it should be removed from the wiki).
* I have done a temporary manual edit of one tip[2] to show what
"original author" looks like.
* Adding words to the header doesn't help the tip. We should clarify
that "version" in the header means "minimum version of Vim required to
use the tip, we think". It might be useful to say "minimum version", but
"original author" doesn't help.
* We could remove the author field after ensuring that the author's name
is shown in the edit history (by having a script edit each tip to put
"original author NAME" in the summary).
I am posting to the vim-l (Vim Tips Wiki) and vim_use (Google Groups)
mailing lists to seek opinions on the future of the author field. You
might like to comment on other fields in the header as well.
The current position favoured by the discussion[1] is that the name of
each author should be copied to an edit summary in the history, and then
the author field should be removed.
[1] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:JohnBeckett
[2] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Moving_to_matching_braces
John
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