Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 08 Jul 2016 18:18:03 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote: 

>> From: Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2016 10:49:50 -0400
>> 
>> Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in
>> many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.

EZ> Great, we are well on our way to explain any fact that contradicts our
EZ> beliefs by quoting from papers on psychology!

That was a citation, not a quote :)

You asked for a plausible explanation for why no one in several projects
complains about high barriers to contribution and I provided it. The
citation was a shortcut so I didn't have to explain it in detail. The
paper was actually a review of studies, showing significant empirical
evidence, and not the original work on that topic by Peter Wason[1].

One way to prove me wrong is to look at the number of new contributors
and churn (how many leave and don't come back) as a function of time,
both in GNU projects and outside them. Is it correlated to the
difficulty of contributing to a project? Is there any statistical
evidence that high barriers discourage contribution? Is there any
evidence of a correlation between code quality or bug counts with high
barriers? That would be an interesting study that would benefit FSF/GNU
as a whole, and would be much more convincing than our personal
opinions.

Ted

[1] Wason, Peter C. (1960), "On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a 
conceptual task", Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Psychology 
Press) 12 (3): 129–140.