Andrew, You're certainly correct that it's an RFC Editor issue, but some aspects of it may be special for IETF stream documents. A decade ago, I thought this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-carpenter-whats-an-author/ (Sections 7 and 8 in particular). Regards Brian Carpenter On 24-Jul-25 15:06, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
Dear colleagues, I cannot claim to be an active participant in the IETF of late, but I was prompted to have a look at the plenary recording, where I was a _little_ surprised to hear the discussion about how authorship of RFCs is credited when a new RFC is being produced on the basis of a prior RFC. The reason for my surprise is that this is hardly a green field: the publishing world has lots of experience with what to do when updates happen to older texts in the absence of the original author. The reason that my surprise is little is because the IETF community (and the RFC series) sometimes appears to want to re-invent wheels. I completely agree that an RFC that is published as a product of the IETF is under the change control of the IETF, and a new RFC can be produced with a totally disjoint set of authors from the original RFC under those circumstances. Moreover, due to other rules in the RFC series about the number of "authors" on an RFC, it is obvious that an older RFC that is being updated but that already had the maximum number of authors cannot be updated with all those authors included as authors of the "new" RFC. Nevertheless, there are traditions in the English-language publication community for how to do these things, and it seems to me that the person or body who ought to be responsible for this decision is not the IESG, but the RFC Editor. It seems to me quite plain that, whatever the feelings in the community about these matters, the point of having an editor is exactly to make decisions about this sort of thing so that the results are consistent across the series. Best regards, A PS: I will note, for authors who are taking up a document of this sort, that in English the usual rule involves judgements about how much the earlier text changed. An instructive example is the original _A Dictionary of Modern English Usage_ by Henry Fowler, which was published in 1926. In 1965, the original was substantially revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers; this is generally cited with Fowler as the author and Gowers as the editor. In 1996, a third edition came out. It was very nearly a complete rewrite of the text, by Robert Burchfield, and it usually is cited with Burchfield as the author. (Several traditionalists were quite angry about this edition, and thought it should not have been called "Fowler's" at all. Fortunately, for IETF purposes, that kind of disagreement is not a problem for upating standards documents, because only one set of documents can be the current definition of a given protocol.) It was revised in 2004 by Burchfield, who is generally still listed as the author even though the edition number changes. The original Fowler was then re-published in 2009, with credit to David Crystal (who contributed a new Introduction and copious notes), but with the author again listed as Fowler. Finally, the fourth edition came out in 2015, again with substantial revisions from the 3rd edition, so the authorship is generally attributed to Jeremy Butterfield. None of these editions, however, save the first, neglects to refer to the original work of Fowler; and if IETF participants are neglecting to make similar references to prior authors, I have to agree with John Klensin that it's pretty corrosive of the community sprit that ought to be part of the IETF. There is plenty of room in the Acknowledgements and Contributors sections to note all of that, and I would hope we would all expect such recognition of the earlier achievements that those of us, coming later, have built upon. --A
