On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 15:34 -0400, Eric Christensen wrote: Specifically with regard to wiki additions, it would not be impossible for either a plugin to assemble a list of names who contributed to beats that became guides -- but there would need to be a set of rules so that minor proofing edits (punctuation, spelling, rephrasing, etc.) were identified in a different class from the main content contributions. Anyway, the basic idea I have to simplify things is have a plugin which generates a back-page on the wiki, say on a tab next to the "discussion" back page (or drops a file somewhere, or whatever), that contains a list of names with contribution category tags (edit, proofing, writer, etc.) if possible. That list would be folded into the attribution page/section of the formal documentation and we'd at least know who was involved in writing what. This may be too simple in theory and too complex to implement (that is, a bad idea) but an idea it is, no less. -Iwao

On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 19:21 -0400, Eric H. Christensen wrote: I was thinking this, but the consistency issue you point out is why I said nothing of it. Someone is going to think their addition of a few critical sentences of truly fresh information is a minor edit while another is going to think that their accumulated punctuation corrections constitute a major contribution. So... automating this process with the diff function built in to Wikipedia is where I would go with things. And herein lies the creeping complexity. The alternative is to just not classify any wiki edits and provide an un-classed list of names of people who have touched the beat page. The complexity lies in deciding the threshold for classification, not in the mechanic of gathering names. In the interest of simplicity, adding an Appendix E or an additional section to D (Appendix D is usually "Revision History" in the final documentation it seems) which just contained a list of contributors would at least be a standard way of doing this. In any case, they should be at the end, not the beginning, of the document. Consider that some beats accumulate a lot of edits from a lot of people -- a ten-screen list of names is not something I want to scroll through every time I open a new guide on docs.rh.c or docs.fp.o. Of course, a completely different solution could be to lock the beat page that became an official guide (sort of how rawhide is forever, but Fedora versions get frozen at a certain point) and place a link to the history page of the wiki beat in the final guide document. This would require that the URL never changes, of course. Not sure how well this would sit with people, either -- but its an alternative idea. -Iwao