On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 1:15 PM Michael StJohns <mstjohns@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Content consensus of a draft document is judged formally only during WGLC. The consensus to rebrand the draft document to a WG draft is mere housekeeping that has no meaning outside of the WG and does not necessarily affect the way the draft is edited and updated. WG drafts can and do fail of achieving WG content consensus.
When I'm acting as a document editor, it's my job to record the consensus of the working group. (Is it different if I'm an author? Maybe not.) Effectively what I'm doing in that role is judging the consensus of completed discussions on this point or that one and modifying the document accordingly. Sometimes that might just be writing down what the chair declares to be consensus, or sometimes I'm being trusted by the chair to do that on my own for each revision I publish, and in either case WGLC is the last big chance for the WG to verify that I did it correctly.
Also what you're saying is strictly true, but the fact that the tools treat them differently these days based on the name, and the published guidelines do establish a naming convention, could be perceived as more than mere housekeeping.
In my experience, the WG does NOT gain control of the document (and I have several worked examples in the DNSOP WG). In some cases, if it did, I might be more successful at getting fixes adopted against the author's will, but I think making the WG directly in control of the content of a given document prior to the WG submitting it for publication is generally a bad idea.
If the content must ultimately contain the consensus output of the working group on a particular topic, I don't understand how that sidesteps what I think of as "control".
-MSK
