In message
<200103032044(_dot_)PAA03724(_at_)ginger(_dot_)lcs(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu>, "J.
Noel Chiappa" typed:
> From: Bob Braden <braden(_at_)ISI(_dot_)EDU>
> I agree with Noel's implication: are the Internet Drafts and RFCs
> becoming a vanity press?
Ah, Noel didn't mean to imply anything - I was just boggled at the size of
the list of names.
there's 3 reasons i've seen that this happens commonly (please feel
free to add more:-)
0/ a bunch of people genuinely did write lots of little bits and then
some of them edited it togerther and just wanted to be fair
1/ a bunch of people want to emphasis some thing as really needing
doing, so they enlist lots of "co-authors" from the "great and the
good"
2/ vanity (or tenure track pressure, something thatcher got rid of in
the UK:-)
i spose it wastes a few storage and transmssion bytes, but does it do
much harm?
cheers
jon
btw, recently, we've been interviewing people for 2 chairs in the
department here and i found a couple of interesting things to do about
applicants was
1/ look in
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
for citations of their work
2/ look in a search engine (google, for example) and
run
link:http://personshomepage.edu
to see how many people link to their home page...
you can do this for rfc's and ietf wg's pages too of course:-)
(and sadly for i-d's even though they aren't sposed to be cited except
as the old work-in-progress (maybe we could allow "personal
communication" too? :-)
i have no idea of the meaning or validity of this, but it sure removes
noise like the number of authors (or number of revisions:-)