BTW Goba, can we make things move for the notes maintenance ?
Absolutely ;)
1 - Who's and who's not
From http://cvs.php.net/co.php/phpdoc/RFC/2003_meeting_findings.txt?r=1.1 :
"Types of other contributors:
- user note maintainers:
andrew, meebay, didou, ... The list can be generated from the php-notes
mailing list archive. Wez is going to do make a script pull it out from
archives, and after that we're going to put up guidelines for who is a
maintainer and who is not."
My statistics can be a reference to start discussing this issue again ?
Here's what I suggest regarding this:
What I mean by "action" in the following is deleting, rejecting, editing a note. Adding a note in the manual isn't an action.
Is a note maintainer:
- Any moderator who have reached a certain ammount of actions (how much ?)
- Any regular moderator (a certain number (?) of actions / month).
Here's a first layout, feel free to add/discuss points.
As I have said earlier, I am not a friend of listing based on statistics, but we cannot do anything else with historical note maintainers, and also most of our are not maintaining notes, so we are not aware of who deserves to be listed. Therefore it seems we can only depend on the numbers. Your statistics can be used as a reference IMHO, it seems reasonable. As I am not in everyday note maintanence work, I don't have a clue on what numbers we should define...
heh, topic is who is a maintainer so that he can discuss this point ?
Here's another approach : we can have an internal voting system. The note maintenance team will regularly have a look at the statistics and discuss the status of each new commers. We can for example set up a crontab that will send us some statistics when sending the weekly notes status.
Inactivity of a note maintainer will also be noted, if he's AFK for a month, this shouldn't affect his status, but if he seems to have give up with note moderation => not a note maintainer no more.
Basically, we need to set up the original team. What about the top 10 users ? Seems it can be a good start.
2 - The notes system
From the same URL, topic "3. User note handling"
"Most people think that the approval system should go back in, but also there
should be a possibility to provide a reason when rejecting a note as to tell
the note provider why the note was rejected. If an email address of the note
provider is available, this should be mailed to him/her."
For me, the approval system can be included (it will avoid some mails like this one : http://news.php.net/article.php?group=php.mirrors&article=20026)
(The note was http://news.php.net/article.php?group=php.notes&article=53673)
We receive a lot of notes of this kind, and from time to time we get "attacked" by a redundant humorist..
About providing reasons when deleting/rejecting a note, I think that it's a true need. Here's some reasons I suggest :
Do you mean automatic reason mailing, like we have for bug reports, which would help you provide typical reasons quickly?
That's it, it will help us for two things :
- providing reasons quickly to the note submitter in case there's a mail that should be sent.
- giving _the_ reason why the note have been deleted. I sometimes see a good note, really usefull, getting deleted (randomly ?) by one of us without being integrated to the manual. It's sad :/ (I'm not thinking about someone particularly)
When deleting :
- outdated : for example, a note helping to configure some library with PHP 3.X, a note using a function that is no more part of PHP.
- replying : the note is a reply to another note asking for help. The original note should be hunted down and rejected (as stated in the HOWTO)
- bogus : for example, a note giving an example for a mysql_* function on a mssql_* function page.
- trash : spam, bad words, an _old_ (more than 6 months is a good limit) note asking for help, a non-english note, a note that should be rejected but have a wrong email address ..
- duplicated : there's already a note saying the same thing, differently. If there's a lot of duplicated entries stating the same thing, we should think about integrating the note in the manual
- added : the note content was added to the manual. We can even send a mail to the note submitter, giving him a link to the updated CVS file and thanking him for his add-on.
When rejecting :
- support : a note asking for help
- bug : a note talking about the bug : why the user didn't fill out a bug report as stated 4 times while he was adding the note ?
- notourthing : a note complaining about a parse error on another website. The user will receive a mail telling him to contact the webmaster of the visited site.
Any comments ?
When the text for these categories begin to mature, it will turn out what is needed, and what can be grouped to one...
I've tried to dissociate the whole stuff to be sure to cover all the situations (even if it's unpossible). Sure, we could merge "duplicated", "bogus" and "replying" into "trash", but this time, other note maintainers won't know exactly why the note was deleted and this can lead to some confusion/unneeded threads on php-notes.
I'm ready to help coding this new system if needed.
btw, is there a HOWTO for this ? who do I need to contact to have karma ?
Mehdi
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