Re: we now have "lilypond" organization on GitHub

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 23/09/13 03:16, Graham Percival wrote:
> The experience from the Grand Documentation Project is that only
> 25% of new doc contributors ended up being a net benefit.  Having
> an up-front hurdle, provided that it's well-explained, is a useful
> way to weed out people who are likely to fall into the remaining
> 75%.  Granted, some of the 25% might also be turned away.  So it's
> a question of the
>    sum of values from all E(contributor | uses git-cl)
>      % noting that the value from a contributor can be positive
>      % or negative
> vs.
>    sum of values from all E(contributor)
>
> I'm confident that the sum of the first is greater than the
> second.

There is research on Wikipedia which suggests that many of the most useful 
contributions to articles come from "Good Samaritans" who show up once, make one 
or two crucial improvements, and never touch the article again.

So, you should not consider the 75% to be without value -- you may find there is 
a better docs experience from many, many more people submitting rare patches, 
than from having a few more people submitting patches regularly.

If you have a bad experience dealing with volume, I'd suggest that might be more 
to do with your choice of documentation system than a problem with volume per 
se.  Finnicky problems with TeXinfo markup, Lilypond's custom extensions of it 
and so on will generate a lot of noise.

On the other hand, if your docs were hosted on a Wiki with a couple of custom 
plugins to allow users to insert Lilypond source and auto-display the compiled 
image, you might find there to be far more people making _useful_ contributions 
without noise; and also, far more people being capable of offering supervision 
and management of the docs.