[CentOS-docs] Re: centos-doc] wiki and author/maintainer name

Thu Oct 25 17:49:33 UTC 2007
Akemi Yagi <amyagi at gmail.com>

On 10/24/07, Akemi Yagi <amyagi at gmail.com> wrote:
> The wiki's principle is participation of anyone who wants to
> contribute.  With the way it is set up now, it is rather difficult for
> people to figure out how to get their voice heard.  Naturally, it
> would be best if the maintainer's name appears on the page.  But
> wherever this is not practical, displaying more general contact /
> feedback info will help.
>
> Akemi

Thanks all for sharing your thoughts.  No one quoted my bottom line
above, so I'm doing it myself :-)  This is because, despite some
opposing views, we seem to agree on what I wrote above (except for the
maintainer stuff).

Personally, when I have some comments on a wiki page (not just CentOS
wiki) and if I see the name of contact, that would *encourage* me to
write.  So, I came up with the idea of putting the name of the
author/maintainer.  Apparently others do not feel the same way, and
seeing the author name may actually prohibit them from taking an
action.  The objective here is to come up with methods to collect
people's contributions -- the methods that make them feel comfortable
making contributions.  I think that offering more than one avenue will
be good.  For example, if sending to the centos-docs is the only
choice, that would discourage some people.

As for the CentOS wiki, I always ask the author when I notice
something to be corrected or added IF I know that page is being
maintained by a particular individual.  On the other hand, if the page
is of general type, I will go ahead and edit it as mentioned earlier
by Johnny.  Although not written as a policy, I guess that is what we
have been customarily doing.   And perhaps, each author or maintainer
should decide whether or not they "sign" their page as orc_orc ..err
.. R P Herrold said.

Akemi