On Aug 31, 2011, at 4:34 AM, Jari Arkko wrote:
Eric, John,
Would having professional editors make a difference here?
I know it is controversial, but there is at least one other area
in which we should be raising the bar for DS/IS by dropping the
bar for Proposed. If we really want to get PS specs out quickly
while the percentage of people who easily write very high
quality technical English in the IETF continues to go down, we
need to stop the behavior of various IESG members simulating
technical editors or translators to "fix" PS text (or insisting
that the author or WG do so, which, IMO, is less bad but still
often a problem).
I think the existing Discuss criteria already says very clearly that
editorial comments cannot be blocking DISCUSSes.
So nobody has the job of making sure that the documents are well-written in
clear English?
Besides, we pay the RFC Editor a large amount of money every year to do the
editing. Documents need to be clear enough to be understood, but the RFC
editor can handle most of the editorial problems.
If the document is edited for clarity after final review, that's really a botch
in the process. It means that the review doesn't apply to the version of the
document being published. Of course the RFC Editor's resources shouldn't be
used for documents that aren't otherwise deemed worthy of publication, and
you'd like to avoid the RFC Editor having to do multiple reviews, so I admit
that this is tricky to solve.
(That being said, I've seen documents that were sent back because they really
were not understandable. Obviously there is some bar under which you should
not go, or the document cannot advance at all. This happens more in WG stages
than in the IESG. But if you can't communicate your idea clearly then I think
it should be up to you to hire co-workers/editors to help clarify your
idea... not the IETF's problem, IMHO.)
If writing clear specifications isn't the IETF's problem, I'm not sure what is.
Keith
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