Jonathan Jones wrote:
It is enabling Robin to get his job done, with as little possible
demands on his limited time.
The main job right now is editorial, and we haven't come up with a
way to farm out editorial tasks. (Perhaps if the original byfy
structure had been organized around CLL chapters rather than
selma'o, we might have learned how, but the original focus was on
making decisions, not on documenting things to any consistent
standard, and the documentation never got done.) As such, we are
stuck with having one editor attempting to get things done in his
limited spare time.
Perhaps crowd-sourcing? I had some success with that when I wanted to
get human audio for all the gismu. I had started out with the intention
of doing that work myself, but after about 180 gismu, I got sick of it,
so I parsed it into chunks and sent an announcement on the group saying,
basically, "I don't want to do this anymore! You guys do this now!". As
of today, all but ~100 gismu have been done, and 50 of them are my fault.
Possibly something similar could be done in this scenario? It takes a
bit of setting up the "chunks", but I can tell you, the chunk setup is
much, much, MUCH less work than doing the work on your own.
I could be misunderstanding the concept of crowdsourcing, but I think that is what the old (failed) system was. The crowd were the byfy members (basically anyone who wanted to work), and the chunks are as defined on the byfy page. There was a volunteer "shepherd" assigned to each section who would attempt to consolidate the crowd's efforts.
The only problem is that the "crowd" never did anything. Generally, if anyone did anything, it was the shepherd acting on his/her own. The crowd mostly argued with each other, and so much effort was spent in the discussions that no one had any time left to actually do any work (and people like me with limited Lojban time can't even manage to keep up with the discussions - I still have some 23 messages to go through in the "Polysemy of nai" thread that I actually tried to participate in, and it ended a week ago - but the really major discussions could generate more than 100 messages a day).
These discussions for the most part were more or less the same kind of thing that happens on Lojban List itself. Lots of quick back-and-forth, and you need to read all the messages to understand the context what any given posting is talking about.
The other problem is that the writeups weren't in themselves usable as sections for CLL. They were selma'o and cmavo definitions, perhaps suitable for an annotated dictionary that does not exist. (To be accurate, the predecessor for CLL was something called the "selma'o catalogue, and the byfy writeups weren't all that bad as submissions to such a catalog. But the catalog gave way to CLL, remaining only as a quasi-appendix "index" chapter at the end of the book. The byfy chunks were producing annotated selma'o catalog entries, but no one was turning those into CLL text).
----John Cowan came up with a concept called "The Elephant" which would allow crowdsourcing of ideas and their documentation, with the added proviso that it would be organized in such a way that people could easily find preceding discussions on the same topic, so that we wouldn't end up with the same discussion being repeated every couple of years with only nuanced variations. But no one ever implemented the thing.
----The closest we ever came to a workable system for dealing with concept documentation was just before CLL 1.0 when John Cowan and I instituted a change proposal system for the YACC grammar (which also effectively entailed the most major changes to the CLL text). To talk about a change topic, someone had to write the thing up FIRST (typically a screenful of text), and then discussion was more or less confined to the pros and cons of what was written up - an alternate proposal would need an alternate writeup.
But it didn't work either because only Cowan and I ever did actual writeups. On a couple of topics, a few people wrote things akin to our writeups but with no standard form, and we used them anyway for purpose of discussion, eventually massaging them into standard form.
The current system needs the same thing to do any sort of crowdsourcing, with the "proposal" including the actual CLL text, as well as some sort of rationale for any changes. But no one will do this kind of work; they just kibbitz about everyone else's work until no one is doing any work to kibbitz on, just engaging in back-and-forth.
It'd kinda be like Wikipedia if almost no one ever edited anything, just engaged in back-channel arguments about the most controversial edits that others have made.
(Another version of crowdsourcing was used in the Alice in Wonderland section. People could check out a section, add to or change it, and put it back. There was a good group effort for a while, but the translation got finished because xorxes did the bulk of it by himself. This is more or less what we've been reduced to in the CLL update, with Robin doing all the work. But at least in theory, Alice was a crowdsource.)
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