Citations

Hi, I've been helping out the Ubuntu Documentation Team get our version
of the Gnome user guide into shape for the 11.04 release. I intend to
help Gnome out directly with docs too as time and priorities allow now
that 11.04 is basically done.

I probably would have posted to this list sooner because j1mc said that
he had posted something about citations to the Mallard discussion list
but when I checked this list's archives, I didn't see anything posted
since December and didn't even bother subscribing to the list.
Hopefully, shaun will be able to get the archives working again this
week, but it's hard to fix a problem you don't even know about.

So I'm going to be "that guy" who jumps into the conversation without
any clue about what's been said already.


j1mc and I were talking about citing AskUbuntu. While it basically falls
under the same license as the Gnome and Ubuntu docs, the site founder
requires very specific attribution[1] which I don't think is well suited
to the way our user docs work (but that's a different conversation). A
bigger issue is that it doesn't look like Mallard has sufficient
attribution support.

There are two already existing tags that could do this, <comment> and
<credit> but credit seems like the better choice to me. I suggest adding
a minimum of <link> and <title> to credit and maybe even <p>'s.

By the way, I was able to stuff a link in <email> without validation
failing so maybe the schema needs to sniff for basic email syntax there.

And the other issue is that Yelp doesn't expose any of this info to end
users who want to see it, even in the "editor-mode" that is not an
editor. I think there needs to be a balance with cluttering the help but
I don't believe we're really meeting the basic attribution requirements
of CC-BY-SA either.

[1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/

Jeremy Bicha

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