Topic Type:
Question
Maintainer model (only a self selected few are authorized to make edits)
Pros: May be more productive for Tools that are currently being developed. Much clearer distinction who is driving the tool's development. Tool maintainers may prefer this method as opposed to letting everyone edit and trying to manage it.
Cons: If Tool maintainer abandons the Tool, we need a process for allowing folks to take over maintainership. This could be a community bottleneck.
Wiki model (Everyone can edit, votes are taken when there is a disagreement on an edit)Pros: Everyone can edit so there is no possibility that a tool would be abandoned and willing individual would not be able to take over gardening the tool.
Cons: Everyone can edit... all the voting may be a slow way to develop quickly... maybe.
Per my first pro points on each model, the former has been proven to work well when developing software where forking is a possibility (forking helps to mitigate the issue of abandonment), the later has worked well for Wikipedia when documenting things that already exist.
At the moment I'm feeling like we should allow both methods because it depends on the kind of Tool being documented.
It looks like a good way to start might just be a loose "Volunteer as a maintainer" function on each Tool page that allows users to say who they are and how they plan on contributing. This can be accomplished by just pencilling yourself onto the Tool's Wiki page but it could be massively helpful when sorting Tools to be able to have that extra metadata that shows where people have volunteered to answer questions and where no one has.