Open source software projects usually acknowledge contributions with text files, websites, and other idiosyncratic methods. These data sources are hard to mine, which is why contributorship is most frequently measured through changes to repositories, such as commits, pushes, or patches. Recently, some open source projects have taken to recording contributor actions with standardized systems; this opens up a unique opportunity to understand how community-generated notions of contributorship map onto codebases as the measure of contribution. Here, we characterize contributor acknowledgment models in open source by analyzing thousands of projects that use a model called All Contributors to acknowledge diverse contributions like outreach, finance, infrastructure, and community management. We analyze the life cycle of projects through this model's lens and contrast its representation of contributorship with the picture given by other methods of acknowledgment, including GitHub's top committers indicator and contributions derived from actions taken on the platform. We find that community-generated systems of contribution acknowledgment make work like idea generation or bug finding more visible, which generates a more extensive picture of collaboration. Further, we find that models requiring explicit attribution lead to more clearly defined boundaries around what is and what is not a contribution.
翻译:开放源代码软件项目通常承认文本文档、网站和其他特殊方法的贡献。 这些数据源对于我来说很难,这就是为什么最经常地通过对储存库的修改,例如承诺、推力或补丁来衡量贡献。最近,一些开放源代码项目开始用标准化系统记录贡献者的行动;这为了解社区产生的将贡献地图贡献到代码库的概念作为贡献的衡量标准提供了一个独特的机会。在这里,我们通过分析在开放源代码中确定贡献者认可模式,方法是分析数千个项目,这些项目使用被称为“所有贡献者”的模型来确认各种贡献,例如外联、金融、基础设施和社区管理。我们通过这一模型的透镜分析项目生命周期,并将项目贡献的表达与其他承认方法提供的图片,包括GitHub的顶级承诺者指标和平台上行动做出的贡献加以对比。我们发现,社区贡献承认系统使工作更加明显,比如产生思想或错误发现错误,从而产生更广泛的合作图象。此外,我们发现,需要明确归属的模型导致更明确地界定什么是和什么不是贡献的界限。