Contributor Recognition

Contributors make this handbook more accurate, practical, and useful. Accepted contributions should receive visible credit without requiring a large feature or code change.

Contributor History

These GitHub-native views remain the source of truth for individual contribution history.

How Contributions Are Recognized

For accepted community pull requests, maintainers should use the following recognition pattern when applicable:

  • keep the contributor as the pull-request author so GitHub attributes the merge correctly
  • mention first-time contributors in release notes or launch summaries
  • call out substantial new guides, workflows, or verification work in the relevant release notes
  • preserve co-author attribution when multiple people materially contributed to a change
  • link contributor-authored discussions or examples when they become durable handbook references

What Counts

Recognition is not limited to large features. Useful contributions include:

  • documentation corrections
  • official source verification
  • safer permission or security guidance
  • platform-specific install notes
  • prompt and workflow improvements
  • examples for frameworks or languages
  • accessibility fixes
  • broken-link and navigation fixes
  • reproducible bug reports that lead to a fix

First-Time Contributors

A first pull request should be intentionally small. Good first contributions should not require understanding the entire repository.

Start with:

Maintainer Commitment

The maintainer goal is to make contribution status obvious:

  • actionable issues should have clear acceptance criteria
  • completed or obsolete starter issues should be closed instead of left open indefinitely
  • contributor-ready issues should identify the exact file or page involved
  • review feedback should explain what needs to change and why
  • merged community work should remain attributable to the contributor

This policy is intentionally lightweight. GitHub's native history remains the authoritative record rather than maintaining a manually synchronized list of names in Markdown.