Justin, folks:
Some proposed guidelines for collaborative documents:
For Comments:
The comments form should prompt the submitter for some kind of name or
e-mail address; I personally find it useless to receive half a useful
suggestion from someone I then cannot contact again. See the GUI
Tools for an example of this. Users should be able to select
"anonymous", but admins should be entitled to remove anonymous comments
with impunity.
For Collaborative Unitary Documents:
such as the Press Release: Each user should be required to submit a
comment, and their name, on editing the document. The comment should
explain what the user changed. Somewhere, the document should also
contain a list of contributors.
For Catalog Documents:
such as the GUI Tools: Each contributor should identify their
contributions with initials and a date after their entry.
Unidentified contributions should be removed. (To see an example of
this problem, see the entry about SyBase Power Designer. The entry
says "more advanced than Data Architect." In whose opinion? It is
unattributed.)
For Sensitive Documents:
such as the Press Release: We should have a 3rd category of documents
that only authenticated users are allowed to see, as well as edit.
This way, we can preserve "working areas" for this list and others
without attracting a slew of public commentary before the document is
complete.
Comments? Disagreement? Agreement?
-Josh Berkus
