On Mon, 22 Dec 2008, Mark Brown wrote: > things. My concern with sending out the e-mails to all and sundry is > that it's taking things too far in the initial stages of the process and > that adding that further down the line when the system is established > would be a better approach.
Ok. Looks like a fairly reasonable request. > > > > information reported is only going to be as good as the people filling > > > it in make it and there's little motiviation to make much effort with > > > the data. > > > Can you expand ? > > The data being entered on the form has pretty much no utility for the > person filling in the form which means that a lot of people are just > going to fill it in as quickly as possible. Ok, I understand this point but note that your remark applies equally to the creation of the Description: field in debian/control. Yet we have people who care about good description fields. It's a matter of understanding why it's important to do the work (like you suggest later in your mail). > This will degrade the > quality of information produced, particularly when people are > resubmitting the second time around (since repetitiveness reduces the > amount of thought required). If people don't feel that there's some > importance beyond the act of filling in the form then there's a real > possibility that many of them are only going to care about the fact the > form has been submitted, not what was on it. More targetted, human > generated, requests tend not to have this problem so much since the > human part of it provides a cue that the data will be used. Yes, that's true. That's why every time that the user has to submit it again, the form must be presented in a way so that it highlights the cases where the expectations (as defined by his own self-assessment) are not met in practice. Ideally those differences should even be reported in the mail itself (it would help reduce the impression of a useless automatic mail). Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qa-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
