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🧠 Research & Foundations phase — building the KB from the ground up. See the roadmap →

07 · Contributor attribution across paths

Updated

The assignment

Section titled “The assignment”

The vault vision includes “show contributors at the top of each page with pic and contributors page.” Contributions come from 3+ surfaces: Obsidian+Git push, Web CMS PR (fork-and-PR via Decap), and GitHub direct edit. Your job: design a unified attribution model that works across all paths.

This isn’t just a UI question — it’s a data-model question. Where does contributor identity live? How does it survive the translation layer? What about anonymous contributors?

What to investigate

Section titled “What to investigate”

  1. Does git blame work across all paths? When a contributor edits via Decap’s Open Authoring (fork → branch → PR → merge), does git blame correctly attribute the lines to the contributor’s GitHub account? Or does it show the merge commit author (the vault owner)? Test with a real Decap Open Authoring workflow.

  2. Anonymous / pseudonymous contributors. The vault vision mentions “anonymous secure editing sessions.” If a contributor doesn’t have a GitHub account, how are they attributed? Options: anonymous with session ID, email-based identity, OAuth with non-GitHub providers. What’s the CLA implication — can you accept anonymous contributions under AGPL + CLA?

  3. Contributor profiles. The dream: photos, contributor pages, edit history, contribution stats. Where does this data come from? GitHub API (avatar, profile link)? A custom contributor database? What about contributors who use different identities across paths (GitHub account for PRs, different name in Obsidian commits)?

  4. Attribution in the published UI. How do existing wikis show contributors? Wikipedia’s history tab, GitBook’s page history, Notion’s page analytics. What UX patterns work for a reader who wants to know “who wrote this”? Where does it go — page header, footer, sidebar, dedicated tab?

  5. Attribution through the translation layer. If contributor info is stored in git history, does the Astro build extract it? Starlight has lastUpdated: true (git-based). Can it also extract contributor LIST per page? Does astro-loader-obsidian support this?

  6. The CLA + attribution interaction. The CLA grants the maintainer sublicensing rights. Does attribution need to be legally preserved (like Creative Commons BY), or is it purely a UX/community feature? What does the AGPL require regarding contributor acknowledgment?

Context to read first

Section titled “Context to read first”

What success looks like

Section titled “What success looks like”
  • Attribution data model: where contributor identity is stored (git, CMS metadata, external DB), how it’s extracted at build time, how it’s displayed
  • Path-specific attribution table: for each contribution path (Obsidian+Git, Web CMS, GitHub direct, anonymous), how the contributor is identified, what data is available, what’s lost
  • UI mockup or reference: sketch of how contributor info appears on a published page (can be ASCII or a reference to an existing implementation)
  • CLA/legal summary: what’s required vs optional for attribution
  • Validity: holds until the CMS choice is finalized (attribution implementation depends on CMS capabilities)

What this does NOT decide

Section titled “What this does NOT decide”