There are countless initiatives today aimed at helping more developers contribute to open source projects. These efforts are widely championed as “good for open source,” and they are frequently accomplished by tapping into a public sense of goodwill. However, in speaking to maintainers privately, I learned that these initiatives frequently cause them to seize with anxiety, because such initiatives often attract low-quality contributions. This creates more work for maintainers—all contributions, after all, must be reviewed before they are accepted. Maintainers frequently lack infrastructure to
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