Recognising contributors: a contributors table by contribution type, without rankings

What it is

Two complementary mechanisms. At project level, the All Contributors specification: a Contributors section in the most prominent documentation (usually the README, or a CONTRIBUTORS file linked from it when the list grows), formatted as a table with each person's name, a link to more information about them, and their contribution categories shown as text or emoji from a defined key. The specification states that the order is immaterial, that contributors are people who contribute in any category at any level, and that it recommends against excluding an individual from the list based on the perceived level of contribution. At commit level, the Co-authored-by: Name <email> trailer: GitHub's documentation describes adding one trailer line per co-author after a blank line in the commit message, using an email address associated with the person's account so that the commit counts as their contribution, or their no-reply address if they keep it private.

Why it matters

Commit logs only show code. Triage, documentation, translations, design, answering questions, reviewing and reporting bugs are invisible there, and they are the work that keeps a small project usable. Credit is one of the few things a volunteer project can give, and it costs a table row. Rankings and counts, by contrast, reward volume over usefulness and discourage the person who fixed one important thing.

How to apply

• Adopt the categories from the specification's emoji key, or a subset, and state in CONTRIBUTING that every kind counts.
• Add a row at the first contribution and ask for the preferred name and link; let people decline to be listed.
• Credit bug reporters and security reporters in the changelog and the advisory, not only in the table.
• Use Co-authored-by when a change was written by more than one person, including a commit that a maintainer finished from someone else's draft; a person who reviewed is credited in the pull request, not as an author.
• Never sort the table by amount, and never attach scores or badges of rank.
• Keep the table machine-readable enough that a bot or script can add rows, so that recognition does not depend on a maintainer remembering.

Pitfalls

Listing an email address without asking. Adding only people with GitHub accounts and forgetting contributions that arrived by mail or chat. A table that stops being updated, which reads as a cut-off date for who mattered.