Avoid first person voice on the wiki?

I think it should be policy to never use the pronouns "I" or even "We" but instead use a proper name, and "he" "she" etc. It may feel odd to talk of oneself in the third person, but the better documentation is worth it.

I was looking at Adrian's Extruder Design on the wiki, and the phrase "I wanted to design a single extruder driver that could" caught my eye.

For anyone who didn't know that Adrian originally designed that particular extruder, you wouldn't know who was talking.

Additionally, the phrasing implies ownership of the documentation there - i.e. I can't edit it and add more stuff without feeling like I'm putting words in Adrian's mouth without him knowing.

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I'm building it with Baling Wire

I like that idea, or at the very least at the top of the page something about who wrote it.

I think it should be policy to never use the pronouns "I" or even "We" but instead use a proper name, and "he" "she" etc. It may feel odd to talk of oneself in the third person, but the better documentation is worth it.

I think casually I'll adopt "I" -> "we".

But "I" -> "we" as policy? In theory that might be a good idea, but the good wiki pages start out as labors of love on the part of folk who did them up, and often the natural voice is first-person narrative.

And considering I we don't like trying to police people's actions, and considering when A tries to police B's actions I we normally deliberately step in and distract A by getting A to work on a new wiki page (or I we create a couple new forums), I'm we're not really in the mood to try to enforce an idea like this. Policing people's actions = ick. "I" -> "we" would mean controlling speech to maximize contribution ...

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Also, for Adrian to use "we" might feel like royal "we", leaving readers felt left out if they disagree with him. Whereas "I"means this is his own take on it, but not the only way to do it? Maybe.

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It's more important to hack up the development template as used in http://reprap.org/wiki/Example to replace the "author" field with "amigos", "comrades", "contributors" or "people".)
... I like "amigos". I mean we. We like "amigos".

And figure out http://reprap.org/wiki/Big_Fat_Upload_Button technology.

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Also, speaking of "I" -> "we", and permission from Adrian, join the super-secret developer mailing list, eh?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/01/2010 01:00AM by SebastienBailard.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

I didn't mean "I" -> "we". I meant avoid "we" as well. I meant "I" -> "he/she/it", and "we" -> "they". as:

Quote

Adrian Bowyer wanted to design a single extruder driver that could

1. Be bolted to the X carriage of Mendel and run as a normal extruder,
2. Be mounted somewhere at the side and drive a Bowden extruder (as invented by eD and developed by Erik), and
3. Be mounted somewhere at the side and drive a Bowden paste extruder, as outlined here.

This is his first hack at a solution.

This approach - "Third Person" - removes both any confusion about who's speaking, and also removes a barrier to updating caused by reluctance to put words in Adrian's mouth.

For instance, consider the different effect of adding a sentence to the final paragraph of the above quote. Add "This extruder was developed around April of 2010, and has proved to be the preferred extruder due to it's higher gear ratio and lower profile as compared to Wades' design"

If it's Adrian speaking - "I" voice, or first person voice (singular/plural doesn't much matter) - then that might be read as bragging. Or maybe "I" developed in then, and didn't write about it until now? Either way, it's putting him in a bad light, or at least a different one. Something that I, for one, and reluctant to do.

Writing in first person amounts to ownership of the documentation, and implies that updates must be suggested to the owner rather that done directly by whoever is walking by.

If it's written in third person, then updating it doesn't imply any reflection on him, and especially it isn't implied that it's his view on things.

I am unwilling to add to or expand documentation that's written in the first person for this reason, without updating it to be third person in the process. So: Is it policy to permit this sort of first person -> third person change? Is it policy to encourage it? I'm sure it isn't policy to require it, as the fewer requirements the better.

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I'm building it with Baling Wire

I can see both sides here, people do not like to interfere with someone else's stuff, yet we are asked to fill in the author field,
I think a wiki is good for such as wikipedia but not the best thing for what we are up to, but then again I do not know what the best thing is, maybe the best thing does not yet exist.

I'll pipe in briefly. With a few rules of thumb, I don't see first person pronouns being unworkable. If it is unclear, edit, and add context. If you were the author, simply saying who you are:

"I'm Adrian Bowyer; I wanted to design a single extruder driver that could..."

If someone else wanted to fix the information but felt uncomfortable writing "I'm Adrian Bowyer"...just use a quoting mechanism:

"Adrian Bowyer wrote: I wanted to design a single extruder driver that could..."


I agree with Sebastian. Encouraging people to add Information takes precedence over making it readable or requiring the author have writing talent and skills; others can come and enhance comprehension for information that exists; they typically cannot do so for information that does not.

I agree that, since it's a wiki, we should avoid using words like "I". Because multiple people will often author a single article, "I" requires the reader to examine the edit history to see who wrote that. The best way to solve the problem, to me, is to use proper writing style.

I'll see if the SpoolHead entry uses any of these; it probably does. If so I'll try to fix them.

Jacob

Agreed, the wiki format does work, And I have seen it used well. Doing good documentation is a skill and some people love it, and would be willing to clean up what are in effect journal entries into full clean "instructions", merge pages etc. This takes time and I suspect most people interest are currently spending time working on getting printers working rather than processing and cleaning up "instruction" pages.

There is the issue of critical mass here, and I suspect a lot of the problem is people come expecting to find full instructions already written and details about how to quickly build and get running a 3D Printer, rather than looking to contribute to the documentation (As is common with most projects on the web from my experience). Whilst I prefer documentation to be in the third person. As long as documentation is going up, I don't have a problem about revisiting pages which have obviously become instruction pages and editing them. It is just difficult to tell which is documentation and which is someone "working journal"

David

So what I'm hearing here is

1. Third person probably should be encouraged, not certainly should not be required.
2. Editing to change to third person is fine, except in cases where it's obviously a person build blog.
3. When we finally have official blog support in the wiki (Sebastian, when is that going to be?) then rule 2 will change to "except in somebody else's blog"

Correct?

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I'm building it with Baling Wire