Subject: [Techspec] Non-Author Editing

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 13:33:35 +0100

I'd like to ask a question related to section 4.4. "Non-Author Editing"
in draft-mankin-pub-req-01.

As far as the quality of the English goes, is there a significant subset
of our documents for which "good enough" is good enough?

I mean, can we say that for a significant fraction of our drafts,
we'd rather get them published more quickly, and skip any
editing for style and grammar?

Another way to view it is

   Can we calibrate the copy-editors to say "good enough, I won't waste
   my time on this one" when appropriate?

      Brian

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From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 09:45:24 -0800

>editing for style and grammar?

Why would want the IETF to get a reputation for publishing| publish cruddy*
documents?  When a document is in good shape, the cost of minor editing
is minor .   The draft talks about 40 corrections as if that's a big deal; 
since
the average document is 30 pages, that is slightly more than one correction
per page.  Presumably each document will be read by 100s of people over
the next five years; why do you want to give them junky documents?

About 1% of the documents have no grammatical errors or inconsistencies;
many have minor errors that are easily caught and fixed.  More often the
editing process uncovers real ambiguities and muddiness.  The insistent
noise from the IETF plus the present backlog has forced the RFC Editor
to significantly reduce the amount of editing.  Based upon my
observation, I would guess we now catch 30% fewed real errors in
documents as a result.  Why would you want to reduce it further?

I don't understand this push towards mediocrity in IETF output.  Of course,
there is a small minority of RFC authors who have an emotional thing about
having ANYTHING changed, even blatant errors, in their documents. They
should get over it, IMHO.  The rest of us have.  I would personally ALWAYS
want a competant editor go over my RFC.

Bob Braden

*Cruddy: Technical term meaing bad grammar, confusing or ambiguous 
punctuation,
ambiguities, inconsistencies, ...

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From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:58:28 -0800

Hi, Brian,

>editing for style and grammar?

As a Gen-ART reviewer, I do see very well-written specifications, and the 
percentage is "significant", but I don't think it's a majority. I'm 
questioning, based on current practice, whether we can bypass the 
copy-editing step, but I suspect that we may be able to move it earlier in 
the process.

I thought you were closer to the mark in your previous post:

> In my mind I link this to the whole question of making WGs more
> responsible for quality control of their output. The early copy-edit
> experiment is still young, but I think it's shown that the contractor
> can work effectively with the WG itself to fix up text quality *before*
> approval. That will help everybody - as an AD, I don't like having to
> review a document with incomplete sentences. In one recent case, the
> incomplete sentence was in at least 4 successive versions of the draft,
> and I couldn't tell whether it was a technical omission or just an
> editing glitch. Early editing can speed up IESG review as well as
> RFC publication.

I really liked this point of view.

This was why I was asking the experiment team to include one or two drafts 
that were close to being adopted as a WG draft ("just adopted" may be 
easiest, but that's a detail), in order to see if having competent 
copy-editing early, before a lot of WG tuning happens, allows the working 
group to produce better quality output text (since they aren't starting with 
sloppy text).

But I do understand why you're asking the question you asked above. If I 
might make a proposal:

JohnK has spent the last two years reminding me that we do best when we 
don't assume one size fits all. Is there an opportunity to have the IESG 
review forward an approved document to two queues: "we are comfortable 
publishing this specification as-is", and "this excellent specification 
isn't quite readable enough to publish as-is, please fix it before 
publishing"?

Working groups that care about publishing quickly, can spend the effort. 
Working groups that don't care, don't have to.

Spencer

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From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 12:06:35 -0800

I apologize for the OT, and graciously accept redirection requests, because 
this is bleeding over into Newtrk, or maybe PESCI,

... but it started out here, and I think the same people are reading all 
three lists, so ...

> editing for style and grammar?

We have known for several years that a majority of our Internet Drafts are 
slam-dunked within a week or two of meeting cutoff dates. I can't imagine 
that this practice IMPROVES the quality of the text.

Would we end up with better text if we didn't start out with text that was 
done at the last minute?

Spencer

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From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 09:22:47 -0500

>    my time on this one" when appropriate?

I can't help but wonder if this is asking the wrong question. I doubt
anyone objects to the principle of copy editing so long as its done in
a timely and efficient manner. And the IETF prides itself on technical
excellence in written form. So taking as a starting point that no
further improvements are appropriate/necessary for some documents,
just doesn't sound right as a general principle.

I think the key question is "how much" is appropriate and "at what
cost" (in time and author/AD/WG effort). So long as the cost is not
onerous (i.e., doesn't add significant time to the overall publication
process), I wouldn't want to have a blanket bypass of the copy
editing.

Or stated another way, I suspect that the real requirement being
raised above is "are there some documents for which quick (or
effectively immediate) publication is more important than significant
delay in order to improve the quality of the English text"? I believe
the answer to that question is yes. But there may be other ways of
dealing with that question than just saying "good enough, skip
editing", and I suspect it will be hard to identify which documents
qualify and which don't...

And if we get back to 4.2 (Post-approval timeframe), I think that is
one of the most important principles. Anything that gets in the way
of, say:

>      Req-4 Stable permanent reference one or two months after
>      approval
       
>      Req-5 Published document at a predictable time after approval

Needs to be considered carefully. If copy-editing (in practice)
prevents us from being able to meet the need to get a document
published quickly, I'd say its less important to have it be done (at
the tail end of the process). And I'd say that most IETF documents
(especially STD/BCP docs) need to get published in a timely fashion.

Thomas

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:03:04 +0100

Bob Braden wrote:
> is minor .   The draft talks about 40 corrections as if that's a big 
> deal; since

I don't. But ending a sentence with a proposition is something up with
which I personally will put, if that saves a couple of months of real time.
Hence my question: is there a significant subset of our documents that are
good enough as they are?

I fully agree with Thomas that our goal is good quality and I agree with
Spencer and myself that WGs should be held responsible for quality. But that
doesn't obviate my question.

     Brian

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:08:18 +0100

Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> I apologize for the OT, and graciously accept redirection requests, 
> because this is bleeding over into Newtrk, or maybe PESCI,
> 
> We have known for several years that a majority of our Internet Drafts 
> are slam-dunked within a week or two of meeting cutoff dates. I can't 
> imagine that this practice IMPROVES the quality of the text.
> 
> Would we end up with better text if we didn't start out with text that 
> was done at the last minute?

It's Leslie's list, but this feels on topic to me.

Unfortunately most geeks are driven by deadlines. So while your observation
is certainly correct, I suspect there's little we can do - raw text is
always going to be written against some deadline or other. To my mind the
question is not whether editing is needed, but how we can avoid it
being a late-stage bottleneck.

     Brian