Alex, thank you for such a clear and concise description of the CSA nomenclature, (https://mail.gna.org/public/relax-users/2006-10/msg00020.html, Message-id: <481156b20610060807v768437bcw2d58f620652c1a0a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>), that was awesome! I was talking to Andrew Perry and he mentioned that the information content of a number of posts to these lists was of such a high standard, Alex's CSA description/tutorial being a prime example, that it would be useful to collate all the information into a static web page (at http://nmr-relax.com), possibly in the form of a FAQ. Alex, would you mind if your post was to used in such a way? I've started this new thread on relax-devel so that we can discuss Andrew's idea. A few questions/points I have are:
1. Is a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page the best option? Does anyone have an opinion or suggestion for an alternative name for the page? It could however be a FAQ split into sections such as 'running relax', 'NMR theory', etc.
2. Licence.
The new web page should be placed under some free documentation licence. This could be the GNU Free Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or maybe one of the Creative Commons licences (http://creativecommons.org/icense/?format=text). As an example I've created a skeleton HTML file for the FAQ web page at http://www.nmr-relax.com/faq.html with the HTML code required for the "Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License" (it may take a few hours for the page to appear on the site).
The text of the messages sent to the relax mailing lists is the property of the person who sent it. For the addition of any information to the web page, permission from the original author to licence the text under the chosen licence will probably be necessary. They could be asked on the list and then their response will be the written permission (if positive).
3. Attribution.
The web pages you see at http://nmr-relax.com are stored in a CVS repository (see https://gna.org/cvs/?group=relax). The original author of text should be named in the commit log file when the change occurs.
I personally believe that names should not be added to the web page. The reason is because the page will become messy as the text evolves and entries are modified and expanded. People other than the original author may make significant contributions to an entry. But then there will be the question of what is significant enough to warrant inclusion as an author. And what if the editor of the HTML code makes significant changes? How do you define significant? Because of all the scales of grey involved, it would be best to avoid these situations by not having names on the page.
Although the names of the original authors will not be visible on the page, their names will be forever stored in the CVS repository of the nmr-relax.com web pages. We could add some text at the bottom of the page which says something like: "The text of this page has been written by multiple authors. The original text can be found in the archives of the relax mailing lists. See http://www.nmr-relax.com/communication.html."
4. Links.
Do you think links to the original post should be included? This would be a form of attribution for the author, the viewer will be able to then easily find out who wrote the original text. Again this could become quite messy after a time.
5. Editor of the web page.
Should the web page be a free for all where everyone makes changes, or should there be a single person who makes the changes? The benefit of a single person looking after the page is that the formatting, English, etc, would be consistent. This would result in the viewer having a much better user experience.
Edward