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

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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.

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 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.

EOD for me.

wkr,
  Tobias