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Yeah--in retrospect, I was envisioning something that might not
necessarily be the case, so I take back what I said. Clearly, even I do
not intend to universally apply my thought. That is, I had a sense that
there were some internal technical documents that did not need names, or
documents that were the result of collaboration, and someone was
clamoring to put their name on it--the document is not theirs and my
opinion is that they should not consider it theirs.
I have seen companies try to assign ownership to teams, though not docs,
and sometimes it even works. (I worked at one company where the teams
were required to sign off on, and ship, the product even if the team
believed the product was not done and needed more work . . ..)
For technical docs, I'm not sure the ownership thing is a good one. For
example, in some of my jobs as a technical writer, I've been part of a
team that was not entirely comprised of authors--and identifying the
actual authors can be tough. Although many of my docs are entirely my
own work, I have often been influenced by requirements from managers.
Oftentimes, those influences have been detrimental to the document, in
my professional opinion, and if I held personal stake in the document,
such that it was my baby, I'd have gone off the deep-end long ago.
Taking an impersonal approach to the documentation also helps when
receiving unduly harsh criticism, especially from incompetents or idiots
up the food chain.
-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Horn [mailto:mhorn -at- macromedia -dot- com]
Funny. The guy who decided to add the writer's, editors and project
managers names to our books is both experienced AND mature.
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