Friendly Peer Contributor

Somebody who marks and signs their stuff in another author's contribution. Instead of intrusive editing, they give some EditHint to the original author. They do this by marking stuff to be edited and give some explanation or motivation for change.

A FriendlyPeerContributor is one form of a friendly PeerReview'er.

This contribution is signed, because it is not a convention in Wiki but my personal style suggestion -- FridemarPache

Discussion:

I think that this is in the right spirit but that it has too much ceremony attached to it [I now deleted ceremonial redundancy in my page intro by refactoring it. -- fp]. There is clearly some editing that can be done without the original authors permission and clearly (to me anyway) some that shouldn't and there is a fairly large grey area as well. I think that there ought to be different rules for editing ThreadMode discussion and DocumentMode OpeningStatement's. DocumentMode editing should be done by collaboration using ThreadMode (in my most humble opinion). ThreadMode ought to be edited a little more freely but you should still RefactorWhileRespectingSignatures and avoid UnethicalEditing. Good thread mode should be separated into sections. Really good ThreadMode should get its own page. Some thread mode really ought to be deleted and some should just sit there waiting to either grow or die.

So I don't think that this is the best way to edit DocumentMode because I think ThreadMode is better for that. Thread mode presents some interesting problems: How do you deal with redundancy; how much can you reword what someone else has written; how to you separate out inlined commentary; how do you make anonymous contributions make sense etc... This suggestion might be helpful for dealing with redundancy or for asking for approval for major edits. In those cases the amount of ceremony is swamped by the amount of work being done anyway. It's still unlikely to be effective in most situations, however, because this kind of communication has too much time sensitivity and too vague an audience. If you don't know for sure that someone will read a suggestion like this, then it's probably better to find some other way to collaborate. -- PhilGoodwin

Phil, you gave a nice example, how to undermine the FriendlyPeerContributor concept: You deleted the original signature and then freely deleted the InsertHint? part. I see the problem behind it. Others may see it too. I see the blessings of a FriendlyWikiMasterContributor? , who summarizes, moves, links and gives other useful service to enhance the value of original contributions. But that's a daunting task that could be made easier in accordance with the primary authors, on whose contributions friendly WikiMasters operate. A very subtle point for HumanBeings. Cordially -- Fridemar

A lot of pages have DocumentMode stuff on the top and ThreadMode at the bottom. I thought that you had made a mistake while trying to follow that style so I tried to fix it. For what its worth what you have here is not correct english -- it's pretty hard to read in fact. You also misspelled "felt" above, by the way. Normally I'd just correct it, but... There has to be a middle ground between Richard's wanting to delete everything in sight and your wanting to do an intricate dance everytime you want to do the simplest little thing. -- PhilGoodwin

Focus on the magic, not the tricks.

PhilGoodwin: Thanks for the ReplaceHint? 'felt'. It is a good example for a simple thing. Taking the spirit of your friendly meant implicit DeleteHint? for deleting the middle item, you could have made it explicit by saying: "You can omit this redundant part, because each insert-operation is a special case of a change-operation". Another EditHint could be : "What about eliminating the change-operation, because each change is a sequence of deletes and inserts". It's really a pleasure, when friendly people help each other to learn. The signing author thinks: learning and working by gentle hints is more enjoyable and more efficient in the long run, than learning by getting forcefully changed. Some EditHint will do the magic. Being changed forcefully is a trick that could do harm the original author, the external change-maker and the whole Wiki. -- fp (a FriendlyPeerContributor)

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From ExampleStuffInMouth, ExampleStuffOutOfMouth

CategoryCollaboration