[Vim-l] Comment signing

[John Beckett]

Martin Tournoij wrote:
> I would to remind everyone to please sign your comments.
> 
> Most of the regulars picked up the habit, but new people or 
> people who only make a few occasional edits often forget to 
> sign their comments.

Hmmm. On talk pages, we are in total agreement: Sign your comments.

I'm not sure about the "Comments" section that we have purposely retained in each
tip. We imported 1200 tips from vim.org, and almost all of them had several
comments, each with a signature and date/time. One of the first things we decided to
do was to prune out unhelpful information. 

In fact, every one of the 1200 tips has been manually edited to remove fluff such as
signatures and timestamps. That's a lot of editing! Most comments have been entirely
deleted, possibly after merging, although there are a couple of hundred tricky tips
left where we haven't yet been able to merge the useful information. However, we
have deleted distractions such as "Great tip" comments, and all signatures.

I've kept a few recent signatures because the comments were more about policy than
the actual tip, and it can be useful to know which of the regular contributors made
the comment. However, in the medium term, it is my intention to revisit those tips
and delete the signatures (if not the whole comment). I'm aware of only one or two
cases where having the signature is actually helpful to readers.

The long-term aim, of course, is to delete all comments. If they are helpful, merge
them into the tip. If they're not, delete them. BUT DON'T DELETE USEFUL INFORMATION
just because it doesn't fit with the current tip.

I don't see any problem encouraging timid readers to make an anonymous comment on a
tip. 

I don't think a signature is needed for the new comment at the bottom of:
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Editing_remote_files_via_scp_in_vim

Here's an example of a policy comment where I thought a signature was appropriate:
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Mac_style_Vim_icon

I'm not going to get very excited about controversies such as this, and am happy to
agree to disagree. But I intend continuing to delete signatures!

John