Contributing is about giving. People do so for many reasons but at it's core it is about giving.

For me, it is not now nor has it ever been about 'getting back'. It has not been about reputation, karma, fame. It has been about solving my needs and helping others solve theirs in a way that encouraged them to share so I too could learn in kind.

Many years ago, authorship was turned off on Drupal.org book pages to encourage this selfless and unconditional giving. At the time the revision tag was fairly useless because, without the diff module, making a comparison is a lot of work. It allowed someone to revert content if a mistake was made. All revisions are is a record of the changes in content of a given node. A way to see what changes were made by whom. It has helped us prevent vandalism and allowed us to see our own mistakes and learn from them that others caught. It is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

Back to giving. Many years ago, in the early days of documentation, we had the author displayed on handbook pages. This actually caused a lot of problems;

• Should they change the author name on editing? Minor edits? Major edits? What defines major?
• It has an author, I should send them an email asking if I can edit the page.
• I should wait
• The author knows more then I ever will I am unworthy to edit the page.
• I can send support requests to them (and get angry that they don't respond)
• I am afraid

But it's important to acknowledge your contributors. There is the checkbox on the user profile page, but anyone can check that. So to solve this a page was added about contributors. Over time, tools changed and we were able to enable visibility of things that were not so useful before. Revisions only became somewhat useful after we added diff module. Revisions are not a way to display author information, just know who worked on the page last You shared your knowledge with the community and now the community gets to play with it. Revisions is a tool to track changes. What were made. It is useful, how did someone modify my contributed content? Ahhh, that is a better way to phrase it. Revisions help recovering from vandalism (which is rare but does happen). Revisions are not a way to achieve / obtain status and ownership of content. The content belongs to the community. Over time, this page has drifted a little deeper then it should perhaps in the menu tree. That should be changing in the near future, there is an outline floating around for the /about book I hope to get to soonish. But we have left out a group. It's an important group, the folks who spend time editing things, from one comma, to one word to entire pages, these people are unsung heroes without which our content would suffer. Chx created an editors page for me so we can credit these folks too.

One of the other things we had to define early on is who are we writing for? In the early days we tried to write for everyone. In the end we achieved little to nothing but frustration. Writing for everyone has just not been possible. So we defined our audience. We write for users (http://drupal.org/node/21781). Not end users, but for users, those people who build sites. it is the job of the site implementor to provide tools and documentation to their community. The more we get powerful tools into core the better, but this is a seperate thing from writing documentation on Drupal.org.

Drupal is complexity hidden. What it allows is someone like me, with little php knowledge at all, to do is phenomenal. Few can know all of Drupal or it's capabilities. What a lot of the top tier developers and site builders do is contribute back. They do very complex things and share how. As a result, when they get stuck on something, they can ask and even if it's not a complete solution, they can get back a direction that allows them to solve this need. This process also works for the new folks or the folks who build from others work. Everytime you help someone else, you learn something. It's how you pay back those who helped you.

Dries has made a statement several times, with Drupal you can eliminate the web master. It already does this but you have to pay attention. A traditional webmaster is nothing more then a secretary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary). Really. Their typewriter is a web site but what they do is take content, format it and post it to a site. I found Drupal because I was tired of being that secretary. I gave several people control of their sites content. Not the site itself, but the content. That is powerful beyond belief. And this is because of Drupal 4.4. Drupal keeps getting better.

Giving is also powerful. I don't give because I earn something, I give because the return is far more then the contribution.