Contribution vs quality, and a few notes on the Platform process

[Sterling Clover]

On Nov 9, 2010, at 7:02 AM, Gregory Collins wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Personally I would be fine with that, providing there was a plan towards a
> community effort to improve the libraries we've *already approved*. To subject
> maintainers of candidate libraries to the "scanning tunneling electron
> microscope" while remaining oblivious to the huge usability/documentation
> problems in our grandfathered libraries --- I'm looking at you, regex-*, HTTP,
> old-*, QuickCheck, OpenGL, html, xhtml, pretty, etc --- isn't fair in the
> slightest and is going to discourage people from submitting libraries in the
> first place.
> 
...
> Maybe we should assemble a posse of volunteers, divide up the libraries, and
> spend a few hours each adding this kind of documentary material to try to make
> a real impact on the average quality level in the platform. The cynic in me,
> however, suspects that the willingness to do this kind of grunt work is greatly
> overshadowed by the appetite to engage in endless rounds of mailing list
> bickering.

That sounds like a great idea! A weeklong(ish?) "documentation strike force".

Step one, a good strong motivation, like here, but a bit more fleshed out, and sent to -cafe, via reddit as well, etc.

Step two, clearance from maintainers of various packages for their willingness to accept and review significant documentation patches. (I'm sure it will be forthcoming, but it should help momentum to say that authors x, y, and z all give approval and support.)

Step three, temporarily clone all the repos over to patch-tag, github, etc.

Step four, a sign-up sheet/central wiki location for co-ordination.

And then that should cover it?

If something like this takes place, I'm definitely up for pitching in.

Cheers,
Sterl.