[TOS] textbook 0.8.1

[Matthew Jadud]

2010/8/16 Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com>:
> Thoughts?

My biggest concerns, when editing version 0.8, were that:

1. Each chapter clearly had a different "voice," and it was annoying
to me as a reader. At some point, it seems that someone should do a
pass through the book and unify the voice.

2. I felt much of the text was written in an incredibly terse style,
which I thought left out a lot of critical detail. (More than just
copyediting was required---I found myself expanding a single sentence
into a paragraph just to make sure that the concept could be
understood by a novice.)

3. There is no clear indication that contribution/editing at this
level is desired at this stage, nor is there any indication of what
kind of contribution this is. (Eg. is it authorship? Editing? Is is
something that should be acknowledged?)

I remain concerned about the authoring environment -- perhaps because
I don't understand it. With version control, you can submit patches,
and they can be reviewed and discussed. On the wiki, there is a live
environment that can neither be reviewed before submission nor
"branched" in multiple directions. I'm hesitant to contribute to the
process simply because I think a lot of the text needs
revision/expansion/clarification, but I'm not an author. And since I
can't "submit a patch" and discuss it with anyone, I simply have to
edit the one live master environment, and hope that the changes are
acceptable. While Greg had encouraged me to "be bold" during the
sprint, I was mostly working on his chapters at the time, and I don't
know if all the authors really feel the same way about their words
("hey, you completely rewrote those paragraphs!") as many people feel
about their code ("wow! you made it 100 lines shorter and 3x as
fast!").

It might be that the kinds of contributions I feel I could make to the
book (like the edits I was making during the sprint) are problematic
(for the reasons stated).

Thoughts?

I have other writing I should be doing at this stage, and classes
start in a week... but these were the concerns I had when I was
working on the book before, and they're the concerns I still have, so
I thought I'd share them, and hope someone can set me straight/clarify
any confusion I might have.

Cheers,
Matt