Re: [gentoo-dev] July Council Meeting: Requested Agenda Item

[Christel Dahlskjaer]

On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 09:35 +0200, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> First of all, someone from infra/recruiters might please revoke my write
> access to gentoo/xml/htdocs/news/gwn. I'm no longer interested in
> contributing to the GWN.
>
> > I also believe that when posting an article or interview, a copy should
> > be sent to the relevant people to ensure that they are ok with what is
> > being posted (my dev of the week interview, for example, was rather
> > screwed up and misrepresentative).
>
> That's why Ulrich posts a draft to the core mailinglist, both for
> technical and grammar/spelling review. Also it is (at least it was)
> "expected behavior", to give "devs of the week" (and devs mentioned or
> affected in/by other articles) a chance to review the article about
> them. If this wasn't the case with your article this is a problem we
> need to address.
>
> > When someone contacts GWN to have
> > something corrected, it would be appreciated were the GWN staff to at
> > least deign to acknowledge receipt, even if for some reason they choose
> > not to honour the corrections or post a retraction (although refusing to
> > publish corrections is extremely insulting to those wronged).
>
> That's what I did in the past, of course: Only if I knew that there's
> something which needs to be corrected. (i.e. if there's a mail to the
> gwn-feedback@g.o alias).
>
> > Another thing that concerns me is the way the articles are written. It
> > is blatanly obvious that the GWN writers are not native English speakers
> > as both the grammar and the flow of the articles is far from attractive.
> > Having read through the archives, I notice that there was once a time
> > when the GWN was a great publication, and I would like to think that it
> > could become great yet again; in its current state, though, it is doing
> > more harm than good.
>
> Once again: We have a draft posted to core to catch grammer/spelling
> mistakes.  That doesn't improve the language used in GWN at all, but as
> you mentioned, none of us is a native speaker. I'm sorry for not being a
> native speaker.

I don't actually have a problem with the GWN being written by non-native
speakers, English isn't my first language either. I do however think
that we could benefit from improving the flow of the articles somewhat. 

> Finally, reading your mail makes me really angry. I'm seeing myself as a
> somewhat regular contributor to the GWN and would have expected, that
> someone who draws a negative picture of the GWN like you, tried to
> talked to me before posting such a mail. Also I see nothing the Council
> can decide to improve the GWN, besides stopping further GWN releases.

I had no intentions to make anyonee angry. And as you aren't listed on
the GWN page I had no idea that you were a GWN team member, to my
knowledge the only two people who "do the GWN" are Ulrich and Patrick,
both of which I have attempted to speak with/spoken with. 

And the last thing I want is for the Council to stop the GWN, I am
however hoping that they may choose to help the GWN get back on track.
If nothing else I believe the council to be made up of people who care
about Gentoo a lot, some of which have been around for some time and
still remember the old unifying vision, some of which remembers how the
GWN was run when it was 'totally awesome' (to use a blonde-ism) and
people who hopefully would take the time to try help the GWN explore
new/different ways of improving/growing. 

> I fully agree that we have lots problems and much room for improvement
> with the GWN, but I can't agree with the way your trying to achieve
> this.

What is wrong with it? Would you rather I attempted to have the current
GWN staff replaced? Or the publication shut down?