Policy discussion about editing GitHub comments and PR/issue descriptions

[John H Palmieri]

This message comes from the Code of Conduct Committee, in response to a question from Kwankyu (labeled A4 in his message) about the authority to modify a comment by someone else (including PR and issue descriptions).

1. Proposed policy regarding editing comments: of course users can edit their own comments. The Sage Code of Conduct Committee may hide comments if they are found to violate the code of conduct. If part of a comment is problematic but other parts are deemed useful, then the committee may hide the comment and post a new comment, quoting the useful parts. In rare cases, the committee may instead choose to edit the original comment to remove content that is considered too harmful to remain even in hidden form or to remove problematic parts from an otherwise useful message.  No one else should edit another person’s comments.

2. Proposed policy regarding editing PR/issue descriptions: anyone with appropriate Github permissions can edit these descriptions, but if the original author objects, then the editor has the responsibility to remove their edits and restore the original content. There are plenty of occasions where people want to add content: fix a typo, fix a dead link, add links to other issues, add context. At least for PRs, the text gets entered into the git log, and so we want the description to be as helpful as possible, and we want the default to be a collaborative environment.

Discussion?

[Matthias Koeppe]

On Thursday, August 22, 2024 at 11:08:51 AM UTC-7 John H Palmieri wrote:

This message comes from the Code of Conduct Committee, in response to a question from Kwankyu (labeled A4 in his message) about the authority to modify a comment by someone else (including PR and issue descriptions).

Discussion?

This discussion is not meaningful without the larger context of the duties and responsibilities of the Maintainer role on GitHub.

In general, projects only appoint individuals to these privileged roles that can be trusted to act responsibly. 

After all, the powers that come with these roles are extensive, going far beyond what is discussed here (editing individual comments).

That said, a review is necessary of who currently holds such privileged roles and for what purpose -- both on GitHub and in other parts of the project's infrastructure.

I started such a review in June 2024 (on and off the sagemath-admins list) and will follow up on this.

See https://github.com/sagemath/sage/wiki/Infrastructure (thanks to Kwankyu Lee for helping with the organization of this material).

[Matthias Koeppe]

I'll note that I have at several times edited other (privileged) people's comments after they (by mistake) clicked the "edit" button instead of the "reply" button on someone's comment, to restore the flow of the discussion.

This is an example of a typical administrative actions that responsible people in the Maintainer role can do. 

It's not a matter of conduct, so the CoC committee has no role in such matters.

[Martin R]

I would be happy with the proposed policy.  I would tend to allow fixing typos and updating links in all comments.  However, since there is already a lot of tension between some developers, it is probably easier to refrain from that.

Martin

[Kwankyu Lee]

Of course, minor edits and fixes to help the author is not a concern here. This thread is for the cases when the author objects to the action of the editor, and about how to resolve the dispute.