Revised:
It would be well to figure out ways to avoid creating exclusive ownership
of a document entirely, or in any part. Any work is done with the understanding
that it will be incorporated by harmonizing it with other work that may be being
done by others simultaneously.
Workers will be registered and uniquely identified by a valid e-mail address,
in order to associate them with their contributions and make available selective
optional advisory when certain events of interest occur.
(Possible addition: No public display (meaning general public or other workers)
will be made of individual information, whether provided by the worker or derived
from their work.)
Personal interest and commitment of individuals should be reinforced with some
kind of incentive, maybe weighted influence, maybe acknowledgment, ...)
To that end, and thinking in source control terms, the basis for the document
at any point in time might be a single version, or "release", that is produced
periodically (period to be determined, and maybe automatic, maybe on a schedule,
maybe by someone explicitly, maybe based on some set of conditions.)
A precondition is to have a fairly complete and explicit set of rules about which
markup is acceptable, necessary, and sufficient (which may if necessary differ
by project, but differences should be avoided.) The accomplishment of the
application of the necessary and sufficient markup should produce a single
version which would comprise a canonical source for all final published versions
by the application of stylesheets, translators, XSLT transformations, unix-style
filters, manual adjustments and enhancements, or other means. (Additional
resources may require inclusion, such as images for illustrations, etc.)
When there are disputes there will also be a set of standards by which they
can be resolved.
"Units of work" need to be defined. These determine how much text can be
submitted in one chunk. The assumption is that, for the entire chunk, the
submitter believes they have completely accomplished some task. (Tasks
is another topic for discussion, but I'm thinking of such things as "I proofed
it" or "I proofed and formatted it" or "I checked and marked all the chapters'
or "all the footnotes" or "this table" or "all the greek content" ...)
Any document has some implicit or explicit structure. This mieght be as simple
as title page, toc, snd chapters. It could also include sections/subsections,
tables, footnotes, etc. This structure needs to be captured and defined as to
content and and relative location in the text.
The fundamental goal is to preserve the books in the repository as a single file
with a mechanism to extract, inject, and harmonize units of work dynamically.
Success should be an improving text, not a perfect text.