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Bob: > We don't need more shepherds; we need someone producing a product, which no > one is. The byfy is nominally a successor to my failure to complete the > dictionary, and they are replacing that failure altogether too well. Nick > cited definition-writing as the primary job to be done; no definitions of > any words have been written. I'd rather see fewer shepherds, actually > writing definitions, rather than discussion in the absence of a focus on > every facet of the language at once, which seems to be what people are > advocating. > > Liberally editing from Nick's instructions: > > http://www.lojban.org/twiki/bin/view/BPFK/GuidelinesForUsing > * The shepherd has the responsibility of formulating the initial > definition of the cmavo in the paradigm, of tracking all previous > discussion of the cmavo, and of incorporating criticisms and any emerging > consensus into the definition. In other words, they start, sustain, and end > the discussion on the definition of the cmavo in the paradigm; that > definition becomes their responsibility. ... > * The shepherd authors a document on the Twiki for each cmavo in the > paradigm. That document serves as the starting point for BPFK discussion, > and is termed a definition page. The definition page starts with an > elaborated dictionary definition of the cmavo, concentrating on the > semantics. It then expands on the grammar of the cmavo, including how it > interacts grammatically and semantically with other cmavo and selma'o. > Where the shepherd feels a non-trivial issue in the semantics or grammar > has not been brought up to date, they are free to include their own > proposals in the document -- provided that the design principles of Lojban > are respected. I have pretty much done this for the one topic I've shepherded, except that I used phpbb rather than Twiki, and followed the necessary policy of taking things one at a time. The formal publishable definitions would follow once the decisions have been made, with the definitions composed and/or edited by whoever has the requisite energies and abilities. It's not surprising that participants tended not to expend energies on defining cmavo that are entirely uncontroversial, since the motivation for participating in the BF is to define the elements whose definition had not been uncontroversially agreed on. IOW, the underlying problem the BF was trying to address was not the inadequacy of documentation but the indeterminacy of the rules and definitions that must be documented. --And.