Finding an appropiate manual weight

From the issue https://github.com/sfosc/sourcecred/issues/8

We’re using Sourcecred at SFOSC for attribution. One of the things I find isn’t accurately represented is the value of this commit

It’s a complete book, already written before changes were tracked and no massive PR associated. A second issue is, there’s people credited for helping, which are also not given cred.

It seems to me, at least for Adams contribution here, this is a place where you’d use Sourcecreds feature to set a manual weight for this commit.

But my question is, how do you find an appropriate weight? Is there something better we can do than tweaking till it “looks right”?

One follow up thought I had on this came from today’s office hours where we were talking about using an additional parameter to boost early contributors, at least in terms CredSperiment dollar payout.

and later saw this

In a sense, the way this is described is a retrospective evaluation. Partially thanks to the math teacher’s teaching, great math-related work was produced much later. Since that later work is valued, it reflects positively on the teacher.

That situation feels very similar to this commit and perhaps the value of early contributors in general eluded to in the office hours. Possibly I’m looking at this problem wrong and such a retrospective boosting trait is what I’m looking for.

The best thing would be to get the actual data from the process of writing the book. E.g. if the book had been written using Git, we would have the commits.

I’m assuming it wasn’t written in Git, so we’ll need to create manual nodes to represent the creation process. With the manual plugin, we can still do a pretty good job with specific cred attribution.

If it were written in a text editor with distinct drafts, and the drafts went out to individuals for feedback, then we could make a node for each draft, and connect each draft to its reviewers. Each draft would also flow cred to the previous draft. Then we could also publish the drafts, and future cred-historians can tweak the weights on the individual drafts depending on how much new value each draft added.

However, the manual plugin doesn’t exist yet :sweat_smile:. So for now you could consider having adamhjk make an issue in the repo which is like “placeholder for thanking the SFOSC book reviewers” and contains references to them. Then you could put a really big weight on that initial commit (to flow cred to adamhjk) and a big weight on the reviewers (to flow cred to the reviewers). Later we would remove those weights once we had the manual plugin up and running.

I imagine if the accomplishment is big enough, historians/the internet will do the work of piecing together who did what (e.g. the obsessive pouring over of everything satoshi wrote).

Speaking of books written in git, I did run SC (classic version) on Andreas Antonopolis’ book Mastering Ethereum.

image

He collaborated on it using GitHub (which he talked about at a talk at EthDenver (where I got the idea from)). Lots of authors too, so fairly rich graph: https://s-ben.github.io/ethereumbook-sourcecred-demo/site/prototype/ethereumbook/ethereumbook/

Was thinking of tweeting this at him, but he’s a pretty busy guy, not sure we’d get a response.

The goal of the mana / boost mechanisms in the CredSperiment is to incentivize “curators” to do this work of improving the graph and finding underappreciated contributions. I have more to write on this subject.