Why is the author field suppressed on handbook pages? To protect them from getting contacted via the contact form? I just love Drupal's transparency and I think this works against it and makes Drupal more mysterious.

Of course it is pretty easy to find out the author of a handbook page. You just leave a comment and then go to your own tracker page and voila, a link to the author's user page. But that is pretty inefficient, and not everybody would think to do that, especially if they don't have a comment to leave.

I realize this might have been a decision made by the infrastructure folks...

Shai

Comments

webchick’s picture

webchick
she/they
Primary language English
Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
commented

I'm not sure...

a) Documentation pages are different from forum topics and blog entries and things like that. With those, there is a clear author of the post. But for documentation, most of the time what's there is the aggregate of knowledge from several people, not just a single person.

b) If you look at other projects' documentation, such as https://help.ubuntu.com/ or http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/, nowhere is there an attribution on each specific page. Rather, they usually opt for a global documentation "credits" page, analogous to our http://drupal.org/node/109372 or http://drupal.org/node/14205 pages.

c) Further, the handbook is community-owned documentation, and people should feel free to edit other peoples' pages and not wait for the "author" to do so. I've often simply stubbed out pages and others have gone in and added the actual documentation. It's kind of silly for me to be considered the "author" of those pages. Similarly, I've written actual documentation that's been substantially changed over time by a number of people who came after me. Who's the author then?

So I'm inclined to -1 this proposal. I think the one about adding a last updated field is a good one, though.

Shai’s picture

Shai commented

webchick, those are good points. Hmmm...

Here is an idea... Does the Diff module associate an author with a revision (I haven't used it, but I'm guessing it does). I'm assuming that the diff module can be used with any content type, as long as revisions are turned on for that node, yes?

Then the question is: Can you give an anonymous user diff viewing privileges without giving them write access? Why not! (but I don't know.)

Another question, how stressful is diff on the system? It's so awesome that d.o. is snappy now, but we want it to stay that way!

I do think that adding diff to handbook pages could be awesome!

Shai

add1sun’s picture

add1sun commented

As I understand it we already have the OK from infra to add Diff to d.o, it just needs to be reviewed and OK'd by security team, which understandably takes a little bit of time for a thorough review.

I agree with webchick that author names are useless at best and have potential to just be confusing in many circumstances. I do however think allowing folks to see the doc revisions is useful.

webchick’s picture

webchick
she/they
Primary language English
Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Ok, let's won't fix this one, and talk about diffing/revisions over in http://drupal.org/node/183920