Currently, AUTHORSHIP.md defines "contributions" inconsistently.
At the top of the document, contributions are defined broadly, including not only code and documentation but also ideas, community work, and other forms of support.
However, later sections use narrower language, such as:
- "Anyone who has contributed a pull request"
- "everyone who has made a contribution (commits or PR reviews)"
This creates an inconsistency between the document's general principle and its later recognition rules. In practice, the policy reads as if contributions are broad in theory, but recognition is tied mainly to PRs, commits, or reviews.
This can confuse contributors about whether non-code work is actually eligible for recognition in places like AUTHORS.md, release changelogs, or Zenodo authorship.
Similarly, in AUTHORS.md, we have "The following people have contributed code and/or documentation to the project", which is also a narrow definition of "contributions".
Suggested changes
I think we prefer the broad definition of contributions, so we should rephrase sentences in later sections to avoid the inconsistencies, e.g.,
- "Anyone who has contributed a pull request" -> "Anyone who has made a contribution"
- "everyone who has made a contribution (commits or PR reviews)" -> "everyone who has made a contribution"
- "The following people have contributed code and/or documentation to the project" -> "The following people have contributed to the project in a variety of ways,
including code, documentation, reviews, ideas, community work, and outreach"
The issue is found by codex.
Currently,
AUTHORSHIP.mddefines "contributions" inconsistently.At the top of the document, contributions are defined broadly, including not only code and documentation but also ideas, community work, and other forms of support.
However, later sections use narrower language, such as:
This creates an inconsistency between the document's general principle and its later recognition rules. In practice, the policy reads as if contributions are broad in theory, but recognition is tied mainly to PRs, commits, or reviews.
This can confuse contributors about whether non-code work is actually eligible for recognition in places like
AUTHORS.md, release changelogs, or Zenodo authorship.Similarly, in
AUTHORS.md, we have "The following people have contributed code and/or documentation to the project", which is also a narrow definition of "contributions".Suggested changes
I think we prefer the broad definition of contributions, so we should rephrase sentences in later sections to avoid the inconsistencies, e.g.,
including code, documentation, reviews, ideas, community work, and outreach"
The issue is found by codex.