Re: we now have "lilypond" organization on GitHub

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:55:35PM +0200, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 23/09/13 03:16, Graham Percival wrote:
> >The experience from the Grand Documentation Project is that only
> >25% of new doc contributors ended up being a net benefit.
> 
> So, you should not consider the 75% to be without value -- you may
> find there is a better docs experience from many, many more people
> submitting rare patches, than from having a few more people
> submitting patches regularly.

Suppose somebody sends you a bad patch that would take you 5
minutes to re-implement from scratch.  Do you:

1) spend 30 minutes explaining how to fix the patch
2) tell them to go screw themselves
3) ignore the patch silently and give the person no indication of
what went wrong.

I've done #1.  I spent a WHOLE YEAR doing #1.  It was an
experiment.  I was absolutely committed to teaching people how to
do docs.  However, #1 gives a net penalty of 25 minutes.

"oh, but maybe that person will do better next time"

Yes.  In many cases they did.  So the next patch only took me 20
minutes to explain how to fix it.  The one after that took 10
minutes.  Then, on the 4th patch, it was ok without needing any
fixes.  So... currently we're at a deficit of 45 minutes.  If they
send in another 9 patches, each one doing a 5-minute fix, then
we've broken even.


Your "suppose" and "maybe" does not trump my empirical evidence.

- Graham