I would like to address a few concerns raised by the private comments:
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- 1) '''lead editor''' is not any kind of power position. By this term I meant lead editor for the first draft on the style guide, nothing more.
Then, to avoid confusing people by the name--"lead editor" will be understood by most people that the person
takes the lead in the workgroup generally, regardless of what you say it means--you should give a different to the position. Perhaps it could be "Lead Pedant,"
or, more seriously, "Lead Format Editor," or something like that.
Similarly, since you say that the rules this person will shepherd will not in fact be "style of prose," you ought to clarify the proposal by giving the rules some other name than "Style Guide." "Style," especially as used in "Style Guide," for most readers (who are not all scientists and technical people, remember), means "writing style." You could use "format," or perhaps some other such word.
This latter clarification does not actually quite solve the second problem I raised, though. Some Lead Format Editors (or whatever) might, flushed with their awesome power,
actually decide to rewrite general rules that are contained in, for example, [[CZ:Article Mechanics]], [[CZ:Naming Conventions]], or even (heavens forfend) [[CZ:Neutrality Policy]]. If we cannot quote any policy to them that says they may not do this, we will be at an impasse, especially if the Lead Whatevers are, as certain History Editors with this authority might prove to be, really stubborn cusses.
As to the rest, I think those clarifications would be very useful to put some of them in the resolution itself.
There is another issue I just thought of that you ought to consider. It sounds like an awful lot of work to find Lead Whatevers for the various workgroups. How--not in general, but in tedious specifics--will they be found and confirmed? This is the sort of thing I have to deal with on a daily basis. Surely you aren't expecting
me to do it?
What I would expect to happen is that there will be one or two persons--
maybe one--who volunteer for this position anytime in the next few months (in all workgroups). I'm sure that's all right. But then we need to make it clear to workgroups without Lead Whatevers that they can (through whatever the process is) add a new Lead Whatever, as well.
But let me tell you what I really think--if I were trying to solve the problem you're trying to solve. Instead of establishing a new position, what the resolution should do is establish a category of
pages and some (very general) guidelines for just anyone to edit the pages. That way, we do not have the bottleneck of a recalcitrant Lead Whatever, or the lack of a Lead Whatever. Instead, we solve your problem in a bottom-up fashion. Experience dictates that in a project like this, such an approach is much more likely to succeed.
