Committing Writing

For writers working on documentation, story prose, announcements, and all kinds of Wesnoth text.

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melinath
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Committing Writing

Post by melinath »

Right now, the description thread has been fairly active. Personally, I think that at least one of the descriptions that's come out of it is good enough/enough of an improvement to be included in mainline.
An Example:
Now it could be that there are forces beyond my ken that are at work here, but it bothers me that, although one of the purposes of the Writer's Forum is to improve mainline writing, there's been no discussion of whether the descriptions could be committed. After thinking about this a bit, I realized that:
1. Wesnoth Writers have no standards
2. I don't even know who would have the power to commit writing (esr, maybe?) and I don't know of any case (as of yet) where writing has been committed to mainline from the Writer's Forum.

I'm guessing that the latter is just because the forum is so new and the main project (I think) is/was the manual redraft. But it creates an uncertain space: is it worth it to put time into a new or improved description/dialogue sequence/whatever for mainline?

The ideal solution would be if one of the descriptions were good enough to commit as a precedent. However, it would also be nice to just have a concrete statement that yes, if something is good enough, it will be used. (And given a fancy colored "Committed." Very important!)
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Turuk
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by Turuk »

melinath wrote:1. Wesnoth Writers have no standards
That's kind of a harsh statement, I am sure that they manage to do alright for themselves in meeting people.
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by Soliton »

melinath wrote:The ideal solution would be if one of the descriptions were good enough to commit as a precedent. However, it would also be nice to just have a concrete statement that yes, if something is good enough, it will be used. (And given a fancy colored "Committed." Very important!)
It should go without saying that if something is good enough it will be used. The issue (for me anyway) is making it known to a developer that some description is considered good enough/better than what we have currently and is ready to be committed. I'd be happy to commit something then but I don't have time to chase after it.
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Simons Mith
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by Simons Mith »

We need an approved writer with commit access. At present only the Lord of Prose ticks both those boxes.

I believe esr has a mental list of the items he thinks need priority. I would at least like to see that list.

For campaign-specific content, final say should go to either a campaign maintainer or esr.

For non-campaign-specific content, I suppose it would be a toss-up between esr and the dev responsible for that part of the game.

Maybe we could run off a couple of Eric clones ... ? It's clear that having a Lord of Prose who is as busy with non-Wesnoth work as Eric is not going to be tenable. I'd propose some sort of coup or writers' insurrection, but my own plans for world domination aren't yet fully ripe.
 
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Turuk
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by Turuk »

Or perhaps just find an interested user on the developer team with a background in writing who could be persuaded to cover in his absence by reviewing the work and then having it committed.

His ideas and thoughts have been clear enough in older forum threads and on IRC that an interested dev would have a clear idea of the intentions for each faction, and then it's just a matter of finding someone willing to devote the forum time to watching and guiding it all.
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melinath
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by melinath »

We could do it Soliton's way (i.e. tell him when something's good enough), but then someone still needs to be designated to decide whether something's good enough to commit. Or we could decide what's good enough by voting.
Turuk wrote:Or perhaps just find an interested user on the developer team with a background in writing who could be persuaded to cover in his absence by reviewing the work and then having it committed.

His ideas and thoughts have been clear enough in older forum threads and on IRC that an interested dev would have a clear idea of the intentions for each faction, and then it's just a matter of finding someone willing to devote the forum time to watching and guiding it all.
You're right - that would be a good solution. But who knows the devs well enough to find one that's interested? I mean, I would feel very very presumptuous sending every dev a PM asking if they'd be interested in helping.
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by thespaceinvader »

Raising the question in #wesnoth-dev is usually a good way to get an opinion from those who matter on any given issue...

Personally, I'd have no problem committing description upgrades I think are good enough, but I don't currently know the protocol for such things. I'll ask on IRC...
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Turuk
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by Turuk »

melinath wrote:You're right - that would be a good solution. But who knows the devs well enough to find one that's interested? I mean, I would feel very very presumptuous sending every dev a PM asking if they'd be interested in helping.
You've now got one. I will review the potential writing changes and work with all of you to get it to standard so that it can be committed.
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melinath
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by melinath »

Turuk wrote:You've now got one. I will review the potential writing changes and work with all of you to get it to standard so that it can be committed.
Wonderful! Out of curiosity, does this mean that there actually is a writing standard for Wesnoth (other than correct spelling and grammar)? That could make the discussion about what the writing standard should be a bit superfluous.
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Turuk
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Re: Committing Writing

Post by Turuk »

Other than displaying a degree of competency at a reasonable level, no, not really. I'm currently working to draft up some plans for what we can do to get this ball rolling, but I'm currently thinking of a few things we need to do.

One of which is to establish a thread for each faction, and send the users on a hunt. They can post any relevant information by combing through old threads (preferred), interpreting key dialogue from existing campaigns that gives details about a faction, pulling info from the wiki, from race descriptions, unit descriptions, whatever. We can work to fill in the gaps and draft up an overview of the society of each faction, which will work towards adding a bit more structure to the world of Wesnoth.
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