collab

i've always been fascinated by collaborative projects of any kind. fascinated and trepidated, to use a big word incorrectly. they always get me happyexcited, but i must admit on some days and with certain kinds of tasks i'm not too good at working in teams. maybe that's the side of me that emerges when i edit. i kind of like the loneliness of the work. i like being able to sit in a corner and bury myself in something for days. and then i like being able to emerge from it, as if breaking water, dying to talk, share, meet people. and then go back into it when my batteries run out. that's probably also the introvert in me talking. (reminds me of this piece i found via rands on twitter. mostly true but for the "exuding calm" part. if anything introverts exude awkward restlessness, i feel).

so i felt a bit understandably shaken when i came across bite-size edits (all hyphenated and all!), a collaborative editing project. well, proofreading is the better word. but that's meant to be a solitary job, i damn near wailed when i saw this. and in the next instant thought, but that's how people used to think about writing once upon a time too. right? and about a whole lot of things that are being done in a collaborative way today.

i know this discussion is very old school web, circa 2005, but having been in such situations before, i can't help thinking editing is something best done by a single person, or at least a select group of people carefully coordinating with each other. and proofreading even more so. should the compound adjectives be hyphenated? is it british or american grammar? is there an oxford comma? these are the kind of answers style guides offer, the kinds of decisions arrived at after some amount of discussion. and some might argue readers don't care about this stuff being inconsistent, only editors do, but truth is a reader will notice inconsistent punctuation and poor formatting. no not consciously. very few will say, "o this semicolon is incorrect and look no indent before this one paragraph!" but these inconsistencies make an overall impression on the reader's mind that he can't quite specify but simply feels.

reminds me of when i first started working in digital and would often find myself saying things to designers like, "i'm not sure, there's something about this page, it just doesn't work," and only later learned to say, "well the form fields are all different sizes and the text isn't aligned and the footer's position changes from page to page by a few pixels." i couldn't quantify it, but i knew something wasn't quite right.

so my worry with collaborative projects is with these not-quite-rights.

but there are two things here. one, the collaborative model lends itself to to some projects very well. crowd sourcing is sufficient proof of this and i don't need to editorialize. and two, no collaboration is 100% collaborative. the line's usually always drawn somewhere. there is often clarity between the input of different participants. and someone usually cracks the whip. and that's all i'm asking.

rant complete.