I had PR #4093 rejected as "AI generated" and I think this decision misunderstands what actually happened. I'm raising this publicly because I want clarity on the policy and I believe this rejection was incorrect.
I've been working on a list of historical map resources since at least January 2023, and one of my main sources was maphistory.info, a site run by Tony Campbell (former Map Librarian at the British Library) that's been the authoritative gateway for history of cartography since 1997. I have had a lot of life events what left me with little bandwith to figure out the linter (I am a humanities person, all tech work is self-taught), so I didn't submit for 3 years.
On 1 January 2026, Tony Campbell announced the site was shutting down after 30 years. So in Feb, I used Claude Code to overcome the linting barrier so I could finally submit some preservation work before the resource disappeared completely as well. This included setting up the GitHub page and reformatting it for the linter as I had a number of design choices that did not pass. It tagged those commits with "Co-Authored-By: Claude" to be transparent about using AI for the technical formatting. You can see this here in my first commit of 2026: https://github.com/stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps/commit/2acc2f0f334a40cd920fcc58be8a8e979181232e
For the most recent batch of links, I went through pages from maphistory.info, checked which links were still alive, and selected the ones worth preserving. I also dug out other links I have been passively collecting. If that's not manual curation, I don't know what is. It's literally curated content derived from a curated directory and I can provide the spreadsheets I am working from. There are thousands of links in my files I have not gotten to yet for obvious reasons.
My PR was rejected with "AI generated lists are not accepted" and "All your replies here are clearly AI generated too."
Why I think this is wrong:
This is a 3-year old project that existed before Claude Code existed. The base of this project was set up before GPT had web search access.
The commit history shows manual work: Feb 2023-Jan 2026 commits are incremental manual additions. The rep shows nearly 200 commits, most small and incremental, i.e. several one line changes within an hour.
I used Copilot to help walk me through this pull and grab my history, I can provide the conversation as well, but it is just me trying to get the linter to work correctly and pass this off my plate. AI was used to format markdown and set up Jekyll so I could meet linting requirements, not to generate or find the curated content.
I quite literally research this topic academically and professionally and have been contributing to other Awesome lists incrementally for years.
The list is blatantly asymmetrical in coverage and specificity, AI does not output that kind of work.
So, I am asking:
Is this rejection correct under the policy? If AI assistance for overcoming technical barriers disqualifies 3 years of manual curation and link verification, that needs to be explicit. The linter forced me to remove my human touches, so I'm not sure what you want. I would be more than happy to add some back.
What evidence is sufficient? I provided verifiable sources, commit history, archive snapshots showing pre-AI existence, and offered source files. What else could possibly demonstrate manual curation?
Did transparency backfire? Would hiding the AI assistance have resulted in acceptance?
This is partially a preservation work of a significant scholarly resource that just shut down and I am also doing it for accessibility of these resources. I think this deserves reconsideration, but at minimum I need clarity on what the actual rules are.
In addition, issue 732 expresses a need for non-tech lists, yet this rejection suggests that if a Humanities expert uses developer tools to meet technical standards, their domain knowledge is dismissed as 'AI-generated.' This creates a barrier for the very contributors that issue claims to welcome.
Originally created by @stark1tty on GitHub (Apr 12, 2026).
Original GitHub issue: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome/issues/4094
I had PR #4093 rejected as "AI generated" and I think this decision misunderstands what actually happened. I'm raising this publicly because I want clarity on the policy and I believe this rejection was incorrect.
I've been working on a list of historical map resources since at least January 2023, and one of my main sources was maphistory.info, a site run by Tony Campbell (former Map Librarian at the British Library) that's been **the** authoritative gateway for history of cartography since 1997. I have had a lot of life events what left me with little bandwith to figure out the linter (I am a humanities person, all tech work is self-taught), so I didn't submit for 3 years.
On 1 January 2026, Tony Campbell announced the site was shutting down after 30 years. So in Feb, I used Claude Code to overcome the linting barrier so I could finally submit some preservation work before the resource disappeared completely as well. This included setting up the GitHub page and reformatting it for the linter as I had a number of design choices that did not pass. It tagged those commits with "Co-Authored-By: Claude" to be transparent about using AI for the technical formatting. You can see this here in my first commit of 2026: https://github.com/stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps/commit/2acc2f0f334a40cd920fcc58be8a8e979181232e
For the most recent batch of links, I went through pages from maphistory.info, checked which links were still alive, and selected the ones worth preserving. I also dug out other links I have been passively collecting. If that's not manual curation, I don't know what is. It's literally curated content derived from a curated directory and I can provide the spreadsheets I am working from. There are thousands of links in my files I have not gotten to yet for obvious reasons.
My PR was rejected with "AI generated lists are not accepted" and "All your replies here are clearly AI generated too."
Why I think this is wrong:
- This is a 3-year old project that existed before Claude Code existed. **The base of this project was set up before GPT had web search access.**
- The commit history shows manual work: Feb 2023-Jan 2026 commits are incremental manual additions. The rep shows nearly 200 commits, most small and incremental, i.e. several one line changes within an hour.
- The source is real and verifiable: The maphistory.info shutdown announcement is [[publicly documented](https://web.archive.org/web/20260101000000*/maphistory.info)](https://web.archive.org/web/20260101000000*/maphistory.info) and you can compare the links.
- I used Copilot to help walk me through this pull and grab my history, I can provide the conversation as well, but it is just me trying to get the linter to work correctly and pass this off my plate. AI was used to format markdown and set up Jekyll so I could meet linting requirements, not to generate or find the curated content.
- The intent to do these things to this repo was listed in early 2023: https://github.com/stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps/commit/481ca0f78d0f7b3180e0f7fa04a4ba930c1f4332
- I quite literally research this topic academically and professionally and have been contributing to other Awesome lists incrementally for years.
- The list is blatantly asymmetrical in coverage and specificity, AI does not output that kind of work.
So, I am asking:
1. **Is this rejection correct under the policy?** If AI assistance for overcoming technical barriers disqualifies 3 years of manual curation and link verification, that needs to be explicit. The linter forced me to remove my human touches, so I'm not sure what you want. I would be more than happy to add some back.
2. **What evidence is sufficient?** I provided verifiable sources, commit history, archive snapshots showing pre-AI existence, and offered source files. What else could possibly demonstrate manual curation?
3. **Did transparency backfire?** Would hiding the AI assistance have resulted in acceptance?
This is partially a preservation work of a significant scholarly resource that just shut down and I am also doing it for accessibility of these resources. I think this deserves reconsideration, but at minimum I need clarity on what the actual rules are.
In addition, issue 732 expresses a need for non-tech lists, yet this rejection suggests that if a Humanities expert uses developer tools to meet technical standards, their domain knowledge is dismissed as 'AI-generated.' This creates a barrier for the very contributors that issue claims to welcome.
@sumankarn2063-code commented on GitHub (May 2, 2026):
I had PR #4093 rejected as “AI generated,” and I believe that decision misunderstands both the history of this project and the role AI tools played in my submission. I’m raising this publicly because I would like clarity on the policy, and because I think this rejection was incorrect.
I have been working on a list of historical map resources since at least January 2023. One of the main sources I relied on was maphistory.info, the long-running history of cartography gateway maintained by Tony Campbell, former Map Librarian at the British Library. It was an authoritative resource that had existed since 1997.
I am not a software developer by background. I work in the humanities and all of my technical work is self-taught. Because of that, I struggled with the repo’s linting and formatting requirements for a long time, which is why I did not submit earlier despite maintaining the project for years.
On 1 January 2026, Tony Campbell announced the closure of maphistory.info after nearly 30 years online. At that point, I used Claude Code to help me overcome the technical barriers preventing submission so I could preserve and organize resources before more of them disappeared.
The AI assistance was used for:
fixing markdown formatting,
setting up GitHub/Jekyll configuration,
passing the linter,
and helping me understand the repo requirements.
To be transparent, those commits were explicitly tagged with "Co-Authored-By: Claude". For example:
"stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps@2acc2f0"
The actual content curation was manual.
For the recent additions, I:
went through archived pages from maphistory.info,
checked which links were still alive,
selected which resources were worth preserving,
and incorporated additional links from my own long-maintained research files.
This was not generated from prompts. It was manual scholarly curation derived from years of accumulated work. I can also provide the spreadsheets and working files I used.
What concerns me is that the PR was rejected with:
«“AI generated lists are not accepted”
and
“All your replies here are clearly AI generated too.”»
I do not think those statements fairly reflect the evidence available.
Some relevant context:
The project predates widespread AI tooling.
The repo history contains nearly 200 incremental commits across multiple years.
The original intent and structure existed publicly in early 2023:
"stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps@481ca0f"
The source material is verifiable and historically real.
The resulting list reflects uneven, domain-specific scholarly interests and preservation priorities that are characteristic of human curation, not generic AI output.
I also want to raise a broader concern about contributor accessibility.
Issue #732 discusses encouraging more non-technical contributors. But if humanities researchers using AI tools to overcome formatting or tooling barriers are treated as submitting “AI-generated content,” then domain experts are effectively excluded unless they already possess strong developer skills.
That creates a contradiction:
technical contributors can use tooling freely,
while non-technical contributors risk dismissal for using accessibility tools to meet repo standards.
So I would appreciate clarification on the following:
Is AI-assisted formatting or linting support enough to disqualify a manually curated submission?
What evidence is considered sufficient to demonstrate human curation?
Does transparency about AI assistance count against contributors?
How should non-technical experts contribute preservation or research work without risking automatic rejection?
I am still happy to cooperate, provide additional evidence, or revise the submission if needed. But I believe this PR deserves reconsideration based on the actual provenance of the work.
<!-- gh-comment-id:4363369597 -->
@sumankarn2063-code commented on GitHub (May 2, 2026):
I had PR #4093 rejected as “AI generated,” and I believe that decision misunderstands both the history of this project and the role AI tools played in my submission. I’m raising this publicly because I would like clarity on the policy, and because I think this rejection was incorrect.
I have been working on a list of historical map resources since at least January 2023. One of the main sources I relied on was maphistory.info, the long-running history of cartography gateway maintained by Tony Campbell, former Map Librarian at the British Library. It was an authoritative resource that had existed since 1997.
I am not a software developer by background. I work in the humanities and all of my technical work is self-taught. Because of that, I struggled with the repo’s linting and formatting requirements for a long time, which is why I did not submit earlier despite maintaining the project for years.
On 1 January 2026, Tony Campbell announced the closure of maphistory.info after nearly 30 years online. At that point, I used Claude Code to help me overcome the technical barriers preventing submission so I could preserve and organize resources before more of them disappeared.
The AI assistance was used for:
- fixing markdown formatting,
- setting up GitHub/Jekyll configuration,
- passing the linter,
- and helping me understand the repo requirements.
To be transparent, those commits were explicitly tagged with "Co-Authored-By: Claude". For example:
"stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps@2acc2f0"
The actual content curation was manual.
For the recent additions, I:
- went through archived pages from maphistory.info,
- checked which links were still alive,
- selected which resources were worth preserving,
- and incorporated additional links from my own long-maintained research files.
This was not generated from prompts. It was manual scholarly curation derived from years of accumulated work. I can also provide the spreadsheets and working files I used.
What concerns me is that the PR was rejected with:
«“AI generated lists are not accepted”
and
“All your replies here are clearly AI generated too.”»
I do not think those statements fairly reflect the evidence available.
Some relevant context:
- The project predates widespread AI tooling.
- The repo history contains nearly 200 incremental commits across multiple years.
- The original intent and structure existed publicly in early 2023:
"stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps@481ca0f"
- The source material is verifiable and historically real.
- The resulting list reflects uneven, domain-specific scholarly interests and preservation priorities that are characteristic of human curation, not generic AI output.
I also want to raise a broader concern about contributor accessibility.
Issue #732 discusses encouraging more non-technical contributors. But if humanities researchers using AI tools to overcome formatting or tooling barriers are treated as submitting “AI-generated content,” then domain experts are effectively excluded unless they already possess strong developer skills.
That creates a contradiction:
- technical contributors can use tooling freely,
- while non-technical contributors risk dismissal for using accessibility tools to meet repo standards.
So I would appreciate clarification on the following:
1. Is AI-assisted formatting or linting support enough to disqualify a manually curated submission?
2. What evidence is considered sufficient to demonstrate human curation?
3. Does transparency about AI assistance count against contributors?
4. How should non-technical experts contribute preservation or research work without risking automatic rejection?
I am still happy to cooperate, provide additional evidence, or revise the submission if needed. But I believe this PR deserves reconsideration based on the actual provenance of the work.
I am the original author of this issue. I do not know why @sumankarn2063-code has reposted my argument; that is not me, and I am only speaking from this account. Additionally, this user has submitted a botted submission to the list and two issues for the same item, which was briefly added and removed once I realised. Feel free to check out my fumbling attempts of removing their PR requests. I am not good with git, but I am trying. I am working on figuring out how to report this person.
<!-- gh-comment-id:4370164348 -->
@stark1tty commented on GitHub (May 4, 2026):
I am the original author of this issue. I do not know why @sumankarn2063-code has reposted my argument; that is not me, and I am only speaking from this account. Additionally, this user has submitted a botted submission to the list and two issues for the same item, which was briefly added and removed once I realised. Feel free to check out my fumbling attempts of removing their PR requests. I am not good with git, but I am trying. I am working on figuring out how to report this person.
Heads up I ran your issues through AI which you might have done already but the clearest response from the information given is the following:
I’d like to offer a professional perspective on this, because there appears to be an important distinction being blurred.
There is a clear difference between AI generating work and a person using AI as a tool to help complete technical steps.
In simple terms:
If someone asks AI to create a list, write the content, choose the resources, and produce the contribution — that is AI-generated work.
If someone has already done the research themselves, manually selected the resources, verified links, and built the contribution over time — but uses AI to help with formatting, linting, or technical setup on GitHub — that is human work assisted by tooling.
Those are not the same thing.
From what has been presented here, the contributor’s core work appears to be:
years of manual research,
manual curation,
manual verification,
subject-matter expertise,
and documented project history that predates recent AI tooling.
The AI use appears to have been for overcoming technical barriers — essentially helping translate human work into the format required for submission.
That matters, because many experts in fields like history, humanities, archives, and research are not professional developers. If they use modern tools to navigate technical requirements, that should not automatically invalidate genuine scholarship or manual effort.
The right question is not:
“Was AI involved at any point?”
The right question is:
“What part of this contribution was actually generated by AI?”
Was it:
the research?
the selection of links?
the written descriptions?
the verification process?
or simply formatting and repository setup?
That distinction is the difference between rejecting generated content and rejecting legitimate contributors who used available tools to participate.
Transparency should also be viewed positively. Openly disclosing tool use is usually a sign of honesty, not evidence of wrongdoing.
A practical way forward would be:
Review the substance, not just the signals
Assess whether the underlying research, curation, and verification are genuinely human-led. Commit history, working notes, source spreadsheets, and archived references can demonstrate this clearly.
Ask for provenance where there is doubt
If authenticity is questioned, request:
source notes,
selection criteria,
verification records,
or research files.
These are stronger indicators of authorship than whether AI was used for formatting assistance.
Encourage contributor-safe workflows going forward
For contributors:
Do the research manually.
Keep notes/spreadsheets.
Verify links yourself.
Write descriptions in your own voice.
Submit smaller, clearly scoped PRs.
If using AI, limit it to:
linting fixes,
syntax help,
formatting,
debugging,
setup guidance.
Avoid using it for selection, summarisation, or prose that forms the substance of the contribution.
If AI is used, describe its role precisely
Instead of wording that implies authorship (“co-authored by AI”), use language such as:
“Formatting / lint remediation assistance only — research and curation completed manually.”
That makes the boundary clear.
Clarify policy for everyone
A simple standard helps:
AI-generated content → not accepted.
Human-created content with technical AI assistance → acceptable, provided provenance can be shown.
That approach protects quality, encourages honesty, and avoids unintentionally excluding subject experts simply because they needed help navigating technical contribution requirements.
<!-- gh-comment-id:4412826497 -->
@BEQ25-coder commented on GitHub (May 9, 2026):
Heads up I ran your issues through AI which you might have done already but the clearest response from the information given is the following:
I’d like to offer a professional perspective on this, because there appears to be an important distinction being blurred.
There is a clear difference between AI generating work and a person using AI as a tool to help complete technical steps.
In simple terms:
- If someone asks AI to create a list, write the content, choose the resources, and produce the contribution — that is AI-generated work.
- If someone has already done the research themselves, manually selected the resources, verified links, and built the contribution over time — but uses AI to help with formatting, linting, or technical setup on GitHub — that is human work assisted by tooling.
Those are not the same thing.
From what has been presented here, the contributor’s core work appears to be:
- years of manual research,
- manual curation,
- manual verification,
- subject-matter expertise,
- and documented project history that predates recent AI tooling.
The AI use appears to have been for overcoming technical barriers — essentially helping translate human work into the format required for submission.
That matters, because many experts in fields like history, humanities, archives, and research are not professional developers. If they use modern tools to navigate technical requirements, that should not automatically invalidate genuine scholarship or manual effort.
The right question is not:
“Was AI involved at any point?”
The right question is:
“What part of this contribution was actually generated by AI?”
Was it:
- the research?
- the selection of links?
- the written descriptions?
- the verification process?
- or simply formatting and repository setup?
That distinction is the difference between rejecting generated content and rejecting legitimate contributors who used available tools to participate.
Transparency should also be viewed positively. Openly disclosing tool use is usually a sign of honesty, not evidence of wrongdoing.
A practical way forward would be:
1. Review the substance, not just the signals
Assess whether the underlying research, curation, and verification are genuinely human-led. Commit history, working notes, source spreadsheets, and archived references can demonstrate this clearly.
2. Ask for provenance where there is doubt
If authenticity is questioned, request:
- source notes,
- selection criteria,
- verification records,
- or research files.
These are stronger indicators of authorship than whether AI was used for formatting assistance.
3. Encourage contributor-safe workflows going forward
For contributors:
- Do the research manually.
- Keep notes/spreadsheets.
- Verify links yourself.
- Write descriptions in your own voice.
- Submit smaller, clearly scoped PRs.
- If using AI, limit it to:
- linting fixes,
- syntax help,
- formatting,
- debugging,
- setup guidance.
Avoid using it for selection, summarisation, or prose that forms the substance of the contribution.
4. If AI is used, describe its role precisely
Instead of wording that implies authorship (“co-authored by AI”), use language such as:
“Formatting / lint remediation assistance only — research and curation completed manually.”
That makes the boundary clear.
5. Clarify policy for everyone
A simple standard helps:
- AI-generated content → not accepted.
- Human-created content with technical AI assistance → acceptable, provided provenance can be shown.
That approach protects quality, encourages honesty, and avoids unintentionally excluding subject experts simply because they needed help navigating technical contribution requirements.
@stark1tty I guess the replies here give you an idea why entries that look AI generated meet unusual friction.
Personally, I think your list looks good. To me the rejections looks like collateral damage from Sindre's lack of time for this repo. Have some understanding please, they have to wade through dozens of AI slop PRs in their free time.
Only feedback I can offer to you, is that you could write more succinctly. Most maintainers don't want to read through paragraphs of justification and rhetoric. Keep the kind voice, but try to get to the point quickly.
Personally, I'd avoid to use AI to "enhance" writings. I prefer to read your actual words, even if they're less polished or contain some grammar issues.
<!-- gh-comment-id:4487401748 -->
@Mo-way commented on GitHub (May 19, 2026):
@stark1tty I guess the replies here give you an idea why entries that look AI generated meet unusual friction.
Personally, I think your list looks good. To me the rejections looks like collateral damage from Sindre's lack of time for this repo. Have some understanding please, they have to wade through dozens of AI slop PRs in their free time.
Nevertheless, 0Marchy was accepted, in October, after your rejection, and top contributors are copilot and claude:
https://github.com/aorumbayev/awesome-omarchy#readme
Only feedback I can offer to you, is that you could write more succinctly. Most maintainers don't want to read through paragraphs of justification and rhetoric. Keep the kind voice, but try to get to the point quickly.
Personally, I'd avoid to use AI to "enhance" writings. I prefer to read your actual words, even if they're less polished or contain some grammar issues.
Blocking a user prevents them from interacting with repositories, such as opening or commenting on pull requests or issues. Learn more about blocking a user.
Originally created by @stark1tty on GitHub (Apr 12, 2026).
Original GitHub issue: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome/issues/4094
I had PR #4093 rejected as "AI generated" and I think this decision misunderstands what actually happened. I'm raising this publicly because I want clarity on the policy and I believe this rejection was incorrect.
I've been working on a list of historical map resources since at least January 2023, and one of my main sources was maphistory.info, a site run by Tony Campbell (former Map Librarian at the British Library) that's been the authoritative gateway for history of cartography since 1997. I have had a lot of life events what left me with little bandwith to figure out the linter (I am a humanities person, all tech work is self-taught), so I didn't submit for 3 years.
On 1 January 2026, Tony Campbell announced the site was shutting down after 30 years. So in Feb, I used Claude Code to overcome the linting barrier so I could finally submit some preservation work before the resource disappeared completely as well. This included setting up the GitHub page and reformatting it for the linter as I had a number of design choices that did not pass. It tagged those commits with "Co-Authored-By: Claude" to be transparent about using AI for the technical formatting. You can see this here in my first commit of 2026: https://github.com/stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps/commit/2acc2f0f334a40cd920fcc58be8a8e979181232e
For the most recent batch of links, I went through pages from maphistory.info, checked which links were still alive, and selected the ones worth preserving. I also dug out other links I have been passively collecting. If that's not manual curation, I don't know what is. It's literally curated content derived from a curated directory and I can provide the spreadsheets I am working from. There are thousands of links in my files I have not gotten to yet for obvious reasons.
My PR was rejected with "AI generated lists are not accepted" and "All your replies here are clearly AI generated too."
Why I think this is wrong:
So, I am asking:
Is this rejection correct under the policy? If AI assistance for overcoming technical barriers disqualifies 3 years of manual curation and link verification, that needs to be explicit. The linter forced me to remove my human touches, so I'm not sure what you want. I would be more than happy to add some back.
What evidence is sufficient? I provided verifiable sources, commit history, archive snapshots showing pre-AI existence, and offered source files. What else could possibly demonstrate manual curation?
Did transparency backfire? Would hiding the AI assistance have resulted in acceptance?
This is partially a preservation work of a significant scholarly resource that just shut down and I am also doing it for accessibility of these resources. I think this deserves reconsideration, but at minimum I need clarity on what the actual rules are.
In addition, issue 732 expresses a need for non-tech lists, yet this rejection suggests that if a Humanities expert uses developer tools to meet technical standards, their domain knowledge is dismissed as 'AI-generated.' This creates a barrier for the very contributors that issue claims to welcome.
@sumankarn2063-code commented on GitHub (May 2, 2026):
I had PR #4093 rejected as “AI generated,” and I believe that decision misunderstands both the history of this project and the role AI tools played in my submission. I’m raising this publicly because I would like clarity on the policy, and because I think this rejection was incorrect.
I have been working on a list of historical map resources since at least January 2023. One of the main sources I relied on was maphistory.info, the long-running history of cartography gateway maintained by Tony Campbell, former Map Librarian at the British Library. It was an authoritative resource that had existed since 1997.
I am not a software developer by background. I work in the humanities and all of my technical work is self-taught. Because of that, I struggled with the repo’s linting and formatting requirements for a long time, which is why I did not submit earlier despite maintaining the project for years.
On 1 January 2026, Tony Campbell announced the closure of maphistory.info after nearly 30 years online. At that point, I used Claude Code to help me overcome the technical barriers preventing submission so I could preserve and organize resources before more of them disappeared.
The AI assistance was used for:
To be transparent, those commits were explicitly tagged with "Co-Authored-By: Claude". For example:
"stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps@2acc2f0"
The actual content curation was manual.
For the recent additions, I:
This was not generated from prompts. It was manual scholarly curation derived from years of accumulated work. I can also provide the spreadsheets and working files I used.
What concerns me is that the PR was rejected with:
«“AI generated lists are not accepted”
and
“All your replies here are clearly AI generated too.”»
I do not think those statements fairly reflect the evidence available.
Some relevant context:
"stark1tty/awesome-historical-maps@481ca0f"
I also want to raise a broader concern about contributor accessibility.
Issue #732 discusses encouraging more non-technical contributors. But if humanities researchers using AI tools to overcome formatting or tooling barriers are treated as submitting “AI-generated content,” then domain experts are effectively excluded unless they already possess strong developer skills.
That creates a contradiction:
So I would appreciate clarification on the following:
I am still happy to cooperate, provide additional evidence, or revise the submission if needed. But I believe this PR deserves reconsideration based on the actual provenance of the work.
@stark1tty commented on GitHub (May 4, 2026):
I am the original author of this issue. I do not know why @sumankarn2063-code has reposted my argument; that is not me, and I am only speaking from this account. Additionally, this user has submitted a botted submission to the list and two issues for the same item, which was briefly added and removed once I realised. Feel free to check out my fumbling attempts of removing their PR requests. I am not good with git, but I am trying. I am working on figuring out how to report this person.
@darthreaper49-gif commented on GitHub (May 4, 2026):
@stark1tty I feel you bro. I'm also new to git🥀🥀🥀
@BEQ25-coder commented on GitHub (May 9, 2026):
Heads up I ran your issues through AI which you might have done already but the clearest response from the information given is the following:
I’d like to offer a professional perspective on this, because there appears to be an important distinction being blurred.
There is a clear difference between AI generating work and a person using AI as a tool to help complete technical steps.
In simple terms:
Those are not the same thing.
From what has been presented here, the contributor’s core work appears to be:
The AI use appears to have been for overcoming technical barriers — essentially helping translate human work into the format required for submission.
That matters, because many experts in fields like history, humanities, archives, and research are not professional developers. If they use modern tools to navigate technical requirements, that should not automatically invalidate genuine scholarship or manual effort.
The right question is not:
“Was AI involved at any point?”
The right question is:
“What part of this contribution was actually generated by AI?”
Was it:
That distinction is the difference between rejecting generated content and rejecting legitimate contributors who used available tools to participate.
Transparency should also be viewed positively. Openly disclosing tool use is usually a sign of honesty, not evidence of wrongdoing.
A practical way forward would be:
Review the substance, not just the signals
Assess whether the underlying research, curation, and verification are genuinely human-led. Commit history, working notes, source spreadsheets, and archived references can demonstrate this clearly.
Ask for provenance where there is doubt
If authenticity is questioned, request:
These are stronger indicators of authorship than whether AI was used for formatting assistance.
Encourage contributor-safe workflows going forward
For contributors:
Avoid using it for selection, summarisation, or prose that forms the substance of the contribution.
If AI is used, describe its role precisely
Instead of wording that implies authorship (“co-authored by AI”), use language such as:
“Formatting / lint remediation assistance only — research and curation completed manually.”
That makes the boundary clear.
Clarify policy for everyone
A simple standard helps:
That approach protects quality, encourages honesty, and avoids unintentionally excluding subject experts simply because they needed help navigating technical contribution requirements.
@Windr588 commented on GitHub (May 13, 2026):
哦
@Mo-way commented on GitHub (May 19, 2026):
@stark1tty I guess the replies here give you an idea why entries that look AI generated meet unusual friction.
Personally, I think your list looks good. To me the rejections looks like collateral damage from Sindre's lack of time for this repo. Have some understanding please, they have to wade through dozens of AI slop PRs in their free time.
Nevertheless, 0Marchy was accepted, in October, after your rejection, and top contributors are copilot and claude:
https://github.com/aorumbayev/awesome-omarchy#readme
Only feedback I can offer to you, is that you could write more succinctly. Most maintainers don't want to read through paragraphs of justification and rhetoric. Keep the kind voice, but try to get to the point quickly.
Personally, I'd avoid to use AI to "enhance" writings. I prefer to read your actual words, even if they're less polished or contain some grammar issues.