On Tue, Oct 02, 2018 at 05:23:01AM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
> Michael,
>
> Agreed, but note that, if you want such acknowledgments to be
> useful for some of the purposes you and others have argued they
> would help with, you may need to figure out how to differentiate
> between a review that addresses the document substantively and
> makes a contribution to its quality and one that has substantive
> content equivalent to "I'm the designated Fubar team reviewer. I
> know nothing about the subject matter of this document, but I
> found a comma out of place in the middle of the second paragraph
> of Section 6.6.6".
I got reviews about the quality of the language being bad, so i always
weelcome good language review feedback, and often there are more people
willing to do this in the broader IETF review than in a WG. I am curious
though how much of that language review should happen through the
formal IETF review or through RFC editor. The RFC editors are IMHO
(no offense to IETF community meant) degrees better on language
review than any IETF review i've seen. But of course i worry about what
is an appropriate low bar to pass on to them. I also felt bad about
the language i passed on to them, so i compared the latest draft
version and final RFC from a couple of "native" english speakers RFCs,
and felt a lot better about my own documents afterwards (grin).
I think it will be quite common that specific areas will have no
reviewer available who is familiar with subject matter. I would
encourage those reviewers to not only help improve the language but also
not be afraid to ask "dumb question" when they do not understand the
document. In parenthesis, because i think there are no dumb questions.
Just badly written documents. Aka: non-experts can very well help
to improve the readability of documents by forcing authors/editors
to insert explanations that experts most likely will have thought to
be common sense. But IETF work gets more and more compartmentalized,
so that expectation is actually less and less true.
Cheers
Toerless
> Speaking as someone who has always tried to acknowledge the
> authors of review comments that are actually helpful and who
> generally tries to resolve questions in which there is doubt
> about whether an acknowledgment is needed by including it, I'm
> not completely sure what the issue is. As I read our IPR rules,
> that behavior is just about required. Or, put differently,
> whether we need actual additional rules and procedures or just
> more attention to general guidance.
>
> Would you consider it useful if, following the example of many
> journals, we simply posted a list of active "team" reviewers (or
> all reviewers during IETF Last Call at regular (annual?)
> intervals? That at least would not require acknowledging
> content-free reviews in the documents themselves, thereby
> diminishing the perceived value of acknowledgements for actual
> contributions.
>
> best,
> john
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