On 23/09/13 03:16, Graham Percival wrote:
The experience from the Grand Documentation Project is that only
25% of new doc contributors ended up being a net benefit. Having
an up-front hurdle, provided that it's well-explained, is a useful
way to weed out people who are likely to fall into the remaining
75%. Granted, some of the 25% might also be turned away. So it's
a question of the
sum of values from all E(contributor | uses git-cl)
% noting that the value from a contributor can be positive
% or negative
vs.
sum of values from all E(contributor)
I'm confident that the sum of the first is greater than the
second.
There is research on Wikipedia which suggests that many of the most useful
contributions to articles come from "Good Samaritans" who show up once, make one
or two crucial improvements, and never touch the article again.
So, you should not consider the 75% to be without value -- you may find there is
a better docs experience from many, many more people submitting rare patches,
than from having a few more people submitting patches regularly.
If you have a bad experience dealing with volume, I'd suggest that might be more
to do with your choice of documentation system than a problem with volume per
se. Finnicky problems with TeXinfo markup, Lilypond's custom extensions of it
and so on will generate a lot of noise.
On the other hand, if your docs were hosted on a Wiki with a couple of custom
plugins to allow users to insert Lilypond source and auto-display the compiled
image, you might find there to be far more people making _useful_ contributions
without noise; and also, far more people being capable of offering supervision
and management of the docs.
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