discuss: General TLDP question
Subject:
Re: General TLDP question
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
8 Aug 2003 23:03:38 -0000
Message-Id: <20030808231349.GA808@lafn.org>
On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 10:01:11AM -0500, Howard Shane wrote:
> After spending much of my free time lately revising my latest document,
> I had a rather heretical thought. I know that the webspace for the
> project is donated by ibiblo (thanks!), but what about accepting
> financial donations? This way if there were a particular need identified
> among those using/administering Linux for a HOWTO subject, a stipend
> could be offered for whomever submitted the best proposal for that document.
>
> As has been discussed on this list, TLDP suffers from a lack of
> peer-review in some cases.
This is only one problem. Another of equal importance is that authors
tend not to put enough time into constantly reviewing and maintaining
their docs. A well maintained doc doesn't need peer review. But many
authors don't have time to adequately maintain their docs and should
turn them over to someone else. I was hoping that Lampadas would help
people find new maintainers, (or co-maintainers) for their docs.
> A small one-time allowance would go a long way toward increasing the
> interest of skilled peers to want to review such a document for
> technical errata and readability. Some documents that no longer have
> maintainers are in need of an update or a rewrite, and an allowance to
> do this would probably increase the willing and capable hands to
> perform such tedious and never-ending tasks.
Good idea but who gets the money? My suggestion would be to make every
author eligible for substantial prizes to be awarded by judges. With
Lampadas, people would rate docs. The docs with the highest ratings and
the docs with extremely mixed ratings would go to the judges for their
final decisions. By extremely mixed, I mean ones with a lot of both top
and bottom ratings which implies that people who are giving the ratings
are cheating. The author may be getting friends to rate it the highest
or an enemy of the author may be getting people to rate it the lowest.
I've seen this happen on Amazon. Rating is complicated since if there
is money involved, some people are likely to cheat by trying to vote
more than once, getting friends to vote (who may not have even read the
doc), etc.
A high rating would not depend too much on the number of people rating it.
A seldom used doc for developers may result in a millions copies of an
application program written by that developer. And the doc indirectly
helped create that important program, yet few people ever read that doc.
> I'm sure companies that benefit from including all the TLDP docs in
> their distributions would not be adverse to donating, especially if they
> know their donation will ultimately increase in the quality of the
> documentation they repackage. Also, if a company that makes hardware
> wanted a 'configuring card X in Linux HOWTO' they could simply donate
> money to TLDP for the project rather than outsourcing or (more commonly)
> not providing any linux documentation at all.
I think it's a good idea if we had people to manage it, but we don't.
We would have a pool of people who want to write free docs for pay. To
qualify for this pool, one would have to submit a doc to the LDP which
would be reviewed (and not just for English). Just asking for samples
of their writing would invite cheating unless it was published samples.
Thus this would perhaps get us some more docs. However, each writer
would have certain subject areas so we would need a lot of such writers
to cover all topics.
David Lawyer
