John Beckett wrote: > 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 > There are some additional considerations/points I'd like to point out:
* The tip authors made their tips with the understanding that they'd have prominent credit. Probably many don't care, indeed, by this point some have likely "moved on" to (brace yourselves) management and don't use vim much anymore. Removing that credit, however,is a violation of that understanding. * Authorship can convey a notion of reliability (or lack thereof). An article by Tony M would, for example, probably be considered more trustworthy (authoritative :)) than one from (*-* NOTICE: THE NETPOLICE HAVE CENSORED SOME INFORMATION AT THIS POINT *-*). * Other than curiosity, I suspect that most consumers of the tips/articles don't care who wrote them; of those few that do, undoubtedly fewer know how to look up the editing history (and yet fewer have done so). Thus I expect most replies on this thread will be fine with removing authorship notices for the tips -- they didn't write them. * The "right" group with which to discuss this would be, IMHO, with the authors themselves. However, it seems to me that that may be impractical, unless the email addresses of the authors are stored somewhere on vim.sf.net, perhaps by the plugin login database. * The tips were placed on a public forum (vim.sf.net). By this reasoning, the tips are "public domain" and thus authorship may be removed at will (aside: I am not a lawyer, laws vary from place to place, and so I make no representation about the correctness of this advice ...). This point acts as a counter to the first consideration I made. So, ideally, one would obtain permission from the original authors if their work remains largely unchanged. However, this seems to me to be an impractical thing, especially since it may be rather difficult to locate them (email-wise). Anyway, you have my permission to remove authorship from my tips (that'll save you at least one email!) :) Regards, Chip Campbell --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
