On 10/6/2012 8:36 AM, Greg Newby wrote
This is, more or less, exactly what I said we needed. There is no resistance to any of this. I even asked for input on figuring out what the requirements & enforcement would look like
Last question first: "enforcement." This is the easy one. Standards are enforced by "the community." When a person or organization uploads a document to PG, he/she/it should be required to accept a disclaimer that the text is being donated to the public domain, and that it may be modified in any way by any other volunteer; no more claims of "ownership". Any volunteer may make any change to any document. All changes will be tracked (you use Subversion; I think CVS would be a better choice, but that's a conversation for another day), so any change can be backed-out. No anonymous volunteers allowed (registration required, validated by e-mail confirmation -- not perfect, but helps keep out the 'bots). Errata is handled by the Trac bug tracking system. The state of all errata can be viewed by the world at large, and new errata can be entered by any person. Any registered volunteer can fix any problem, and change the state of errata. A bug is entered into the issue tracking system for every document that does not meet formatting standards. (It might be interesting to develop categories of non-compliance, and allow volunteers to add a document to one of more categories.) In the case of format wars, where one volunteer thinks a thing should be done one way, and another thinks the thing should be done a different way, the issue can be presented on this list. If the standard is clear and unambiguous the resolution should be straight-forward. If it is not, then we will need a consensus on how to clarify the standard. If the standard does not cover the issue, we will need to enhance the standard. Rogue volunteers can have their write privileges suspended. In any case, non-compliant files can still be hosted at PG, they will simply be labeled as non-compliant, and bugs will be entered into the issue tracking system indicating what changes will be required to make a file compliant.