Add Contributor Byline on Articles

[bmartinez287]

To encourage and promote contributed articles. We should add that byline Randy was talking about a while back.
It provides visible contribution credit for those adding blogs to the site.
Contributor is technically the correct term but Added by sounds nicer and more modern. Thoughts?
I'm good with either.
I also thought of Editor or Patron or other terms, but those don't fit in some cases. Like there might be multiple editors, but only one contributor since that person created said PR.

[bmartinez287]

@rfay @mattstein thoughts on this?
It could be an optional field same as the author is and if the author is the same as the contributor then only one displays. If there's is no contributor then that markup is skipped.

[rfay]

I would think "author" would be the right thing for the actual author. I guess you're saying "contributor" for someone who packages up another author's work? Sounds OK to me. "Editor" would be good as well. We can also make sure to do this manually and it's OK with me.

[bmartinez287]

Yeah author would be left to the original creator of the source of information as well as, in cases were it was heavily inspired by someone else recording or work that would then.

An Editor tag could work too, but an article can have multiple editors including Matt and yourself as different ideas come in. We could make it editor if that's preferred, but it could be more confusing than Added by or Contributor which directly refers to the person who added the article to the repo. Either way, the main goal is to give credit to those adding the articles. @mattstein do you have a preference?

[bmartinez287]

For example, the front matter would go from this

title: "ARM64! Apple Silicon! M1! DDEV! What does it all mean?"
pubDate: 2020-11-18
summary: A look at Apple’s new chip architecture and what it means for DDEV.
modifiedDate: 2023-03-12
modifiedComment: "We’ve updated this post to reflect the continued support for Apple silicon since it was first published."
author: Randy Fay
featureImage:
  src: /img/blog/2020/11/apple-ddev.jpg
  alt: Apple M1 logo and DDEV logo side by side
categories:
  - DevOps
  - Performance

to this

title: "ARM64! Apple Silicon! M1! DDEV! What does it all mean?"
pubDate: 2020-11-18
summary: A look at Apple’s new chip architecture and what it means for DDEV.
modifiedDate: 2023-03-12
modifiedComment: "We’ve updated this post to reflect the continued support for Apple silicon since it was first published."
author: Randy Fay
editor: John Doe
featureImage:
  src: /img/blog/2020/11/apple-ddev.jpg
  alt: Apple M1 logo and DDEV logo side by side
categories:
  - DevOps
  - Performance

[mattstein]

Are we overthinking this?

I appreciate that it’s to @bmartinez287 and @kristin-wiseman’s credit that this post exists, for example, but I’d rather either one of you take the author credit than create a more elaborate author+contributor scheme for what I think are simple blog posts. You could do the reverse, and use the first or last sentence to clarify these came from call notes. (Or in my case, don’t bother!)

Unless we’re expecting multi-author posts, or an influx of posts written by people that are not the author, this feels like an unnecessary complication that doesn’t benefit the reader. It encourages a complexity that seems excessive to me, unless we intend to start doing joint reporting on scientific papers or international developments.

[bmartinez287]

That is a fair point. I do agree that it could be an issue but then this could be a strategy that might inspire others to add blogs.
I'm conflicted for a few reasons, but I will add a few examples below.

Take for example this PR.
#115

The author of this PR did not take credit for it. Maybe because they did not want it or maybe because they felt better about giving credit to its original source. Personally, It is hard to watch a DDEV video and feel like an author of the content. If one is mostly transcribing the information and adding a few notes.

I can also relate to it because there is a blog post that I have been working on that's heavily inspired by Randy's contributed training videos and notes. It feels odd to take authorship when half the work was done already.

I'm good with adding it to the body of the article, but that does not carry the same amount of credit.

[bmartinez287]

One way to potentially address the multi-author issue could be to acknowledge the PR as the main contributor and anybody else who might help as a thank you note on the body of the article.

[mattstein]

The author of this PR did not take credit for it.

To me, the issue there is simply that the author did not write the article—not that we’re missing a contributor byline feature.

One way to potentially address the multi-author issue could be to acknowledge the PR as the main contributor and anybody else who might help as a thank you note on the body of the article.

That’s nearly what I’m arguing, except that person is listed as the author and any influences or collaborators are clearly called out in the article itself.

I'm good with adding it to the body of the article, but that does not carry the same amount of credit.

It may be more credit than a person might see via RSS or JSON-LD, where additional authors or collaborators would also need to be included if the formal byline is a thing. Any callouts in the article right now would still appear in those contexts.

One way to potentially address the multi-author issue could be to acknowledge the PR as the main contributor and anybody else who might help as a thank you note on the body of the article.

Is there a multi-author issue? My argument is that we’re potentially creating one and solving a problem that’s not really a problem. Some simple clarity around what sorts of posts we want and how we treat authorship and collaborative efforts may be all we need. I’m not convinced all sorts of guest authors posting as Randy would be a good thing in the first place.

[bmartinez287]

https://docs.lando.dev/core/v3/

I like how Lando adds contributor credit on the footer. Maybe we could do something inspired by it or spin it in our own way. We already pull the sponsors and contributors from GitHub so that could be something similar.

[bmartinez287]

Probably worth adding they also have it on their blogs.

https://lando.dev/blog/2023/09/25/v320-extended.html

I could look into adding something similar in the footer. That could be a different spin on this but potentially a competitive advantage in the long run as well as a good tool to encourage community contributions.

[rfay]

I do like the footer stuff (especially on docs, where you can tell more about how many people have contributed). However, when it's just a little picture it doesn't help me much. A picture with a flyover and a name is better. But when there are many contributors to a page it shows something of the importance of the history.

[mandrasch]

Take for example this PR. #115

The author of this PR did not take credit for it. Maybe because they did not want it or maybe because they felt better about giving credit to its original source. Personally, It is hard to watch a DDEV video and feel like an author of the content. If one is mostly transcribing the information and adding a few notes.

Just as sidenote:

I created a draft PR and got only the article text done, adding/modifying author would be my next step when I have time and resources 🙂 Just duplicated an existing post as starting point.

Personally I don't need a whole author profile on the blog. Would also be okay for me to blog as "DDEV community member".

I like the way statamic displays people as guest authors, but that's just personal taste I guess.

https://statamic.com/blog/tip-using-variables-to-store-tag-results

[rfay]

I like "guest author" as well, but don't really consider you a "guest" at this point :)

[mattstein]

I like how Lando adds contributor credit on the footer. Maybe we could do something inspired by it or spin it in our own way. We already pull the sponsors and contributors from GitHub so that could be something similar.

I also like this! More subtly acknowledging anyone that’s contributed to the source—in this case a blog post rather than a ddev/ddev PR—seems like a nice thing that might also encourage more involvement. IMO this is distinctly different from post authorship and guest author callouts, which attempt to quantify whoever drafted the article.

I like the way statamic displays people as guest authors, but that's just personal taste I guess.

Me too! The visual treatment and the clarity distinguishing a one-off guest author vs. a regular contributor. No idea whether we have such a concept or want one, but it’s worth a thought!