giving credit to translators

[drammock]

I realized today that our Transifex workflow makes it so that all the credit (commit authorship) for translations goes to the transifex integration bot and the autofix CI bot. I wonder if there's a not-too-painful way to make the autofix bot extract the last-translated-by field before it gets removed, and add that name/email as a Co-authored-by trailer somehow? Offhand it's not obvious (to me) how we would do it, but I think it's worth spending some time thinking about it / attempting it.

[12rambau]

if people are not registering on transife using their github account it will be complicated to find back who to add as co-author

[drammock]

if people are not registering on transife using their github account it will be complicated to find back who to add as co-author

No knowledge of GitHub username is needed for the co-authored-by trailers. However, my suggestion does rely on the assumption that they use the same email address for both. If they don't, then the trailer won't associate the commit with their account correctly, but it won't hard-fail in any way.

[melissawm]

This may be a good job for the All contributors bot. I'm happy to submit a PR to set it up if you decide to use it. Someone would still need to trigger it manually by extracting the list of translator from transifex, probably. See also https://book.the-turing-way.org/community-handbook/acknowledgement/acknowledgement-record.html

[drammock]

Thanks @melissawm for offering to set it up! My personal bias is that if we can make it fully automated, we should --- I don't trust myself to always remember to trigger the bot when someone deserves credit, so I'm much more comfortable knowing that it happens automatically. But if we can't find a way to automate it, I'm open to something semi-automated like AllContributors.

ps: I do realize that AllContributors has other benefits, e.g., it lets us credit folks for e.g. particularly good bug reports, or design work that someone else implements, etc. Ideally I'd like to have a fully automated solution for that too 😄. My resistance to tools like AllContributors is based on knowing that maintainers are busy/absent-minded/forgetful and might fail to credit some folks (at random), and also that people have biases and might subconsciously devalue some folks' contributions and therefore fail to credit some folks (systematically). I feel a lot more comfortable with a system with public rules for credit-giving and no case-by-case human intervention. I'm willing to change my mind though if other maintainers feel strongly that those downsides are outweighed by the benefits.

[melissawm]

💯 agreed - maybe we can think of a better solution. Thanks for raising these points!

[trallard]

I am +1 on adding the All contributors bot - I am not sure if this can be automated and a quick search did not return anything immediately.
For translations, at least we can make sure we add any new translators as we review the automated Transifex PRs.

I definitely think that adding this is a net benefit as it would allow us to proper acknowledge folks like @smeragoel who has made a lot of valuable contributions outside what GH immediately recognises as such