[FM Discuss] Recruiting more editors for book sprints

[adam at flossmanuals.net]

Just landed in frankfurt. I think we are talking in fundamentally
different languages andy. I don't challenge the importance of an editor at
a publisher like oreilly. I do challenge that role in a book sprint.
Adam

> 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
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