On 3/18/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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