[FM Discuss] Recruiting more editors for book sprints

[Andy Oram]

Had a day to think about editing and group writing...

FLOSS Manuals has shown some pretty surprising things about group
development. It shows that cooperating amateur authors can produce
long content. Wikipedia, in contrast, shows that they can produce a
lot of content, but in relatively short pages. The other achievement
FLOSS Manuals is striving for, as I understand it, is long content
that's cohesive and builds from start to finish, like good books
traditionally do. That's where you have to measure your output against
the top authors and editors. I admit, lots of traditionally published
books lack cohesion and don't build well. But we want great results,
not average results.

I think you've shown that the cooperating authors can present content
from the reader's point of view. They can choose relevant topics and
arrange them in a reasonable order. They can even eliminate most of
the redundancy that tends to insert itself when many people write at
the same time. But I don't believe you've shown that they can do all
the things I do as editor, such as make sure introductory material
appears in the right place, justify new material to make readers see
its relevance, and highlight the most important concepts (which are
often implicit). In short, there's kind of a high-level overview of
the manual that is more likely to come from an editor than from
authors (or from tech reviewers, as I noticed at O'Reilly). This is
why I noticed lots of scattered problems along those lines in the
second edition of the CiviCRM manual after it was finished, although
it was still an impressive product.

Andy