[R-pkg-devel] Best practices for a contributor who prefers to be cited only by their GitHub ID?

[Hugh Parsonage]

> - You as maintainer of a project are its steward; do you feel you can entrust
  the experience the users of your package will have to someone for whom you
  yourself have no email or name?

My initial reaction too. However, it's entirely possible that a GitHub
username is a more important form of reputation in this context than
their true name: it aggregates their code contributions and community
endorsements more readily and singularly. It may strengthen
accountability to use it (as opposed to omission entirely from the
author field), since any code lapses elsewhere would affect that
user's credentials. I agree it's not as strong as both a real name and
a username, however.

On Thu, 29 May 2025 at 05:30, Michael Chirico <michaelchirico4 using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks Dirk. Indeed, these are useful questions; ultimately, it's why
> I'm emphasizing this is a 'ctb' role, from ?person
>
> > Use for authors who have made smaller contributions (such as code patches etc.) but should not show up in the package citation.
>
> I think anonymous/pseudonymous contributions in that role are fine.
> Authors+maintainers still own responsibility for vetting such
> contributions for potential security risks, etc.
>
> For R CMD check, yes, there are ample false negatives on person()
> entries, but false positives carry different weight. They should be
> removed, modulo effort to implement, if we agree they're indeed false
> positives.
>
> Mike C
>
> On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 12:06 PM Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Two meta-issues
> >
> > - You as maintainer of a project are its steward; do you feel you can entrust
> >   the experience the users of your package will have to someone for whom you
> >   yourself have no email or name?
> >
> >   Now, that question is rhetorical in the context of your repo as the thread
> >   demonstrates. However, other maintainers may choose differently.
> >
> > - Given both the above, and that you know R CMD check will nag over a lack of
> >   (first and) family name, do you think you must add a contributor (who
> >   seemingly prefers to anonymous) to the DESCRIPTION file? You could simply
> >   decide not to.
> >
> > All this is of course somewhat acadenmic as we have packages on CRAN with
> > author / contributor / creator tags of first and family name which ... are in
> > fact 'noms de plumes' i.e. not actually theirs so overall all this really is
> > a call to the shrug emoji. Turtles all the way down.
> >
> > ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> >
> > Dirk
> >
> > --
> > dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-package-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel