On 22/04/2015 03:08, John Levine wrote:
In article <D96D1B26-7782-4E36-9A1A-3BD94607B176(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> you
write:
Be nice if the posting tool confirmed co-author(s) whenever a co-author(s)
is "new" (all
would be new for -00). This would require keeping a database of the drafts
and co-authors.
It already knows who the authors are -- if a new version of a draft
has an added author, one of the previous authors has to confirm it.
It seems to me that it would be reasonable to require that each author
confirm at least once that he or she wants to be an author of a draft,
which means all of the authors on -00 and any added authors on
subsequent versions. The issues about cutoffs can be finessed by
merely leaving off (or commenting out in the XML) the names of authors
who won't be able to confirm and adding them in a later version. If
you want to put in a note like [[ Joe Blow to be listed as co-author
in future versions ]] that's fine.
This should both be a small change to the software and a small change
to the way we work.
It would also be a small degradation in our social contract: we can't
trust each other enough to trust that the listed authors are, in fact,
the authors. I think it's abominable that some people violate ethics
in this way, but I *strongly* object to solving this with tooling
that adds inertia to the normal case.
(I've been fortunate in that nobody has ever added me as an I-D author
without my knowledge, but it has happened to me in academic publishing,
and it made me mad as hell and I had the paper withdrawn. So I do
sympathise with the problem. Just not with the proposed solution.)
Regards
Brian