Contribution Log

Ten weeks of real contributions to a real project, logged with their diffs, their outcomes and an honest account of what happened to each one

Due: 17 May 2027 · Weight: 30%

The brief#

Contribute to a real project every week for ten weeks, and keep a log that a stranger could use to learn what you learned.

The log is the spine of this course. Every Shift from week 2 produces something that goes into it, and by week 11 you have a record of your own apprenticeship: the norm map, the first edit, the revert and what you did about it, the sourcing dossier, the closing rationale, the queue shifts, the audit.

The marking weight is deliberately on the annotation rather than on the contributions. A student whose edits were all accepted and who cannot say why is in worse shape than one who was reverted six times and understood it by the fourth. What earns the marks is the gap between what you predicted and what happened, closing over ten weeks.

Your conduct is part of it, because it is public. We read the record, including the talk pages. Nobody has ever lost marks here for being wrong; a student lost marks in 2026 for being right rudely, to a volunteer, in a thread that is still the first result for their username.

What you submit#

A single document, one entry per week from week 2 to week 11, each carrying:

• a link to the contribution in the project’s public history, so the diff resolves
• what you expected would happen, written before it did
• what actually happened, including silence
• one paragraph on what you had misunderstood about the community

Ten entries. A missed week is logged as a missed week, with a sentence saying so, and costs less than a fabricated one.