Re: [office-formula] Wiki and work habits

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

I'd make the distinction between collaborative
authoring and editing.  Wiki's are great for the former.  But
when it comes down to the detailed work of checking cross references, perfecting
the formatting, proof reading and voting on line-by-line changes, we need
to get the document into the final distribution format which will be ODF.
 

Think of it this way -- Philadelphia
1789, Constitutional Convention.  A wiki would have been a great help
for them, as a group, as they hashed out what they wanted.  But at
some point you need to stop making changes as a group, and hand off the
notes to the guy with the nice handwriting (Jefferson) to make a formal
draft, receive comments, note amendments in a well-defined process, and
then produce the final document.  

I think we'll require a similar thing.
 At a certain stage, once the rate-of-change has slowed, we transition
into a technical editing phase where the work is more about style, layout
and presentation and less about content.  At the same time, we want
to be more careful about introducing substantive (non editorial) changes
outside of a well-defined process.

I'm certainly in favor of pushing out
this transition into the last possible moment, but no later. 

-Rob

Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com> wrote on 02/21/2006
07:40:08 AM:

> Hi David,
> 
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 14:43:53 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> 
> > We also don't have a wiki of any kind at this tiime.
> > Michael Brauer didn't want to ask for a wiki until we knew how
> > we wanted to work on the document.  So, I guess we can
> > discuss that right now... would there be value in having a
> > Wiki?
> 
> I think so, yes. Especially in the initial phase it should be convenient
> if everyone could edit things, correct typos and other errors. Important
> changes should be announced on this mailing list and could be discussed
> then. The definition of 'important' here is still missing though.
Will
> "sanity and common sense" be enough?
> 
> > I'm presuming only members of the SC could edit the Wiki.
> 
> I hope so, otherwise having a wiki would not be useful.
> 
>   Eike