Document Standardization Act v1.0
The Order, as a highly functioning and evolving body, often and constantly communicates with each other through written methods. This act serves as a set of standards for creating and maintaining all acts and laws passed by the April Knights. The first article ‘Version Standardization’ serves to create a set of standards for upholding document history through nomenclature. The second article ‘Maintenance Standardization’ simply aims to ensure any document created by the April Knights is not lost, altered, or erased without intention.
Article 1 - Version Standardization
Section I
All legislature, referred to throughout as documents, proposed to and passed by the April Knights will be subject to the standards set in the Document Standardization Act.
Section II
Every document passed by the April Knights, both before and after this act was created, will receive a versioning number appended to their title (e.g. “April Knights Act” becomes “April Knights Act vMajor.Minor”).
Section III
The method to be used to identify bills moving forward will follow what has been used previously. This will utilize a two item identifier, “X-Y”, where “X” is the number of the current Grandmaster, and “Y” is the bill number assigned to it. This is not to be confused with the version of the document.
Section IV
The numbers for each version are defined according to the template “vMajor.Minor” where the ‘v’ simply indicates that the proceeding numbers refer to the version number.
- Major: Major refers to the amount of ‘major’ changes made to the document. This number starts at 0 and remains there until passed by the April Knights. At this point the Major number will upgrade to ‘1’. Incrementing this number afterwards will be extremely subjective, but the aim is to change it whenever the intentions of the document change or when the document will become unrecognizable from its previous state.
- Minor: Minor indicates the amount of ‘minor’ changes made to the document that have occurred since the last ‘Major’ version was incremented. Again, this will be extremely subjective, but the aim is to change it whenever grammar, spelling, minor formatting, or small rewording changes have been made. This number resets to 0 whenever the ‘Major’ version number has changed.
Section V
The version number for each document will only be incremented when the April Knights pass changes to a document. The document author can suggest a version number when proposing the document, but ultimately the Grandmaster and First Ranger are responsible for ensuring the new version number is given to the document.
Section VI
For documents that were not versioned prior to the passing of this act the Grandmaster and/or First Ranger will determine values to be approved by the Lower Council by a simple majority vote.
Article 2 - Maintenance Standardization
Section I
For the sake of preservation of April Knight history, the Grandmaster will appoint one Upper Council member, other than the Grand Inquisitor, with the charge of maintaining April Knight documents to be known as the Scribe. This is not considered to be a seat on the Upper Council.
Section II
The Scribe is responsible for ensuring every version of every document is stored securely in an accessible location. The documents should be stored in such a manner that it is easily verifiable that the documents have not been altered. The Grandmaster is responsible for ensuring this is the case.
Article 3 - Implementation
Section I
This act shall take effect as soon as voted and approved by both Councils, and confirmed by the Grandmaster.