Qualifications of an author

[Roy Smith]

> In article <251 at desint.UUCP> geoff at desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) says that
he is writing a chapter in the upcoming Waite book and needs information
about paging and VM in BSD and Sys5.  This evoked the following response:

In article <429 at rtech.UUCP> daveb at rtech.UUCP (Dave Brower) writes:
> At the risk of being flippant, how can you then be qulified to write
> about these subjects?  It sure makes me question the credibility of
> the finished work.  

	I don't know Geoff so I can't comment on his qualifications.  I
would like to point out, however, that I don't see anything improper about
his request for information.

	In the field that I am most familiar with (biology), people are
often asked to write review papers on subjects of which they are leaders in
the field.  Typically, the first thing such an author will do is hit the
library to find out everything about the subject that he doesn't already
know.  Often he will write to everybody he can think of in the field and
ask for copies of any recent papers, or preprints of manuscripts in
preparation so he can get caught-up on recent advances.

	I would be more disturbed if Geoff took that attitude that he
already knew everything there was to know and wrote the chapter off the top
of his head.  From what I can tell, VM is not the main subject of his
chapter, but a peripheral issue.  His willingness to do research into those
aspects of the field in which he isn't an expert should be viewed as a Good
Thing.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016