Starring a repository you've contributed to should make it show up on your profile, just like how it was for the past 10+ years · community · Discussion #128895

This seems very unfortunate, especially for Open Source developers. Not everyone is in a strictly defined 'Team' (we don't all work for Microsoft) and nor are all our contributions made on GitHub, it is an open source world after all.

Amen to all of this. Wish I could "upvote" this comment more than once. 👍

I suspect this was done mostly to prevent spoofing and squatting of contributions via unclaimed email addresses or something?

Doesn't really explain why us with a confirmed email address are being "punished", does it now? Furthermore, email address may and often will change over time, but it doesn't really matter e.g. from a copyright perspective - changing your email address does not invalidate your rights as an author to your past work. :)

And MediaWiki itself has the whole SVN-to-git migration as a separate yet related issue: people were auto-assigned < SVN username >@users.mediawiki.org "email addresses", though 1) said email addresses do not exist and never did, and 2) their USERINFO file might've specified a (different, actually usable) email address.
I think, but I'm not sure, that in the past on GitHub adding the < SVN username >@users.mediawiki.org address did allow you to claim those commits.

Or were there performance problems that led to this decision ?

If only there was a place where the author or authors of a patchset could explain the motivation behind the change(s) instead of merely naming what file was updated... 🤔
(I really do have a thing against the "Update < file name >" commit message, it's genuinely useless as it doesn't describe the motivation for the change; version control systems already provide you with a way to see what file or files was/were changed...)

Is there not some better or alternate way we can facilitate this ?

Perhaps this request would fare better if it was coming from the Wikimedia Foundation instead of a random developer. I don't know, but given that the WMF (AIUI) has contacts with Google and such, it'd make sense that they'd have a contact person at GitHub or at least would know someone who knows someone else etc.

Regardless, I'm somewhat surprised by how:

• this wasn't really announced anywhere (or maybe I missed the announcement? Don't think I'm the only one, though.),
• the change impacts users retroactively; IMHO this is pretty much the equivalent of if a Wikipedia article contained a link which would get added to the spam blacklist, and then upon that addition taking place, the link would magically "vanish" from the page histories as if it was never there to begin with; thankfully that's not how things work at Wikipedia and e.g. old versions of content pages display the content from that precise moment in time!
• no-one from GitHub has yet commented and explained their take on this; making code and documentation changes takes always takes effort and thus has to be intentional, whereas not doing anything usually doesn't take much. It seems highly unlikely to me that this was an unintended side-effect of some other change or otherwise not deliberately planned, given that the documentation was updated and all. The requests for more info on the documentation commit were and remain unanswered by the people who could clarify matters.

Indeed, so I've come to understand; but as you said, it's a workaround instead of a proper fix, i.e. better than nothing but not really ideal. Plus it always seemed both wasteful and pointless to me (although I guess it's nowadays only wasteful, not really pointless anymore since it's apparently the only way to properly populate your profile if and when you can't be added to an organization etc.).