On 3/18/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
The main harm they do is maintenance effort. I can tell you from watching the stubs that I've created that even very short stubs seem to require a lot of cleaning and polishing. [...]
That seems like a good description of things happening normally. Are you saying that it's harmful for people to be doing normal work. As our subject base gets deeper into more obscure territory we can also expect that the time lag for fixing these things will get longer. The universe is unfolding as it should.
I would agree. I *do* think that it is unfortunate that people spend more effort on classifying a stub than actually helping improve it, but in a volunteer project, people do what makes them happy; stub sorting makes some people happy.
I think, Steve, that you're applying a commercial project's logic to a volunteer project. In a commercial project, workers can be reassigned to things that are 'more important'. In a volunteer project, people assign themselves tasks that are 'more interesting', for their personal definition of interesting, naturally. I think it's fallacious to think that if we cut down on stubs, the people that spend all their time doing these little maintenance things would do something 'more useful'.
-Matt