Re: draft-many-gmpls-architecture-00.txt

[Jon Crowcroft <J.Crowcroft at CS.UCL.AC.UK>]

In message <200103032044.PAA03724 at ginger.lcs.mit.edu>, "J. Noel Chiappa" typed:

 >>    > From: Bob Braden <braden at ISI.EDU>
 
 >>    > I agree with Noel's implication: are the Internet Drafts and RFCs
 >>    > becoming a vanity press?  

 >>Ah, Noel didn't mean to imply anything - I was just boggled at the size of
 >>the list of names.
 
there's 3 reasons i've seen that this happens commonly (please feel
free to add more:-)

0/ a bunch of people genuinely did write lots of little bits and then
some of them edited it togerther and just wanted to be fair

1/ a bunch of people want to emphasis some thing as really needing
doing, so they enlist lots of "co-authors" from the "great and the
good"

2/ vanity (or tenure track pressure, something thatcher got rid of in
the UK:-)

i spose it wastes a few storage and transmssion bytes, but does it do
much harm?


 cheers

   jon

btw, recently, we've been interviewing people for 2 chairs in the
department here and i found a couple of interesting things to do about
applicants was
1/ look in 
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
for citations of their work
2/ look in a search engine (google, for example) and 
run
link:http://personshomepage.edu
to see how many people link to their home page...

you can do this for rfc's and ietf wg's pages too of course:-)
(and sadly for i-d's even though they aren't sposed to be cited except
as the old work-in-progress (maybe we could allow "personal
communication" too? :-)

i have no idea of the meaning or validity of this, but it sure removes
noise like the number of authors (or number of revisions:-)