On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:55:35PM +0200, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote: > 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. > > 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.
Suppose somebody sends you a bad patch that would take you 5 minutes to re-implement from scratch. Do you: 1) spend 30 minutes explaining how to fix the patch 2) tell them to go screw themselves 3) ignore the patch silently and give the person no indication of what went wrong. I've done #1. I spent a WHOLE YEAR doing #1. It was an experiment. I was absolutely committed to teaching people how to do docs. However, #1 gives a net penalty of 25 minutes. "oh, but maybe that person will do better next time" Yes. In many cases they did. So the next patch only took me 20 minutes to explain how to fix it. The one after that took 10 minutes. Then, on the 4th patch, it was ok without needing any fixes. So... currently we're at a deficit of 45 minutes. If they send in another 9 patches, each one doing a 5-minute fix, then we've broken even. Your "suppose" and "maybe" does not trump my empirical evidence. - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
