On Fri, January 27, 2012 2:35 pm, don kretz wrote:
It would also be well to figure out ways to avoid creating ownership.
I don't know if this would be possible. People will naturally gravitate towards works that they have some special interest in, which will create a sort of de facto ownership no matter what we do. I'm not saying it's not a good idea, I'm just not sure if it's feasible.
Anyone should be able to work on any part of any text, anytime.
This is the "ownership" problem you raised above. No one should feel like "this book is /my precious/!" and feel entitled to back out subsequent improvements. I just don't know how it could be done. The first step, of course, is to have a fairly complete and explicit set of rules about which markup is acceptable and which is not. That way, if there is a dispute there is also a set of standards by which the dispute can be resolved. I suggested a system whereby every user would register with a valid e-mail address. Perhaps the version control system could be configured to send out e-mails to the last three (or so) committers when a file is modified? That way, other people who have a vested interest in the quality of that file could at least review changes made, and object if the changes are non-conformant. If the changes /are/ conformant, but raise other issues, then an argument in a public forum would be appropriate.
Which probably means multiple people work from the same text in parallel and at some point, or periodically, their work is compared and the majority wins (perhaps a weighted majority?) This is in contrast to serial editing where each builds on the previous (which requires extensive orchestration mechanisms, and takes a long time.)
I don't think this follows from your postulate. It should be possible to work in parallel, but I think it unlikely that it /would/ happen; no individual work is so popular that it would attract simultaneous attention from our small group of volunteers. I think it much more likely that serial editing would be the norm. Any kind of concurrent versioning system (as opposed to "check-out" systems like RCS or VSS) should be able to accommodate the small amount of parallel processing that would occur. A highly distributed version control system like git or mercurial is probably not required, although either could certainly do the job. Nevertheless, a mechanism for resolving disputes should be developed.
Pages are the natural unit of work for only some tasks.
Agreed. But the /are/ the natural unit of work for some tasks. I believe a split/merge mechanism could be developed which would not only permit the two disparate processes, but would permit them simultaneously. My initial take is to preserve the books in the repository as a single file with a mechanism to extract and inject page segments dynamically.
Success should be an improving text, not a perfect text.
Beautifully said.