[stonesam92]

You don't become listed as a contributor by merely forking a repo, your fork is just included in the original project's "forks" count.

The project is included in a user's "Repositories contributed to" area when that user creates a pull a pull request or files an issue.

You are listed as a contributor on a project's page only once you have had an accepted pull request.

EDIT: take one of my projects for example[0] - 152 forks recorded but only 8 people are listed as contributors.

[0] https://github.com/stonesam92/ChitChat

[makecheck]

Yes but if you go to "Members" you see all of them, which is confusing at best. The term makes it sound like this is a list of people who are members of your project, when they're not.

And for something like the Linux kernel, it's not hard at all to find people who are about 236,000 commits behind the master.

I agree that GitHub has some accurate views but they're all mixed and it's very easy for a list to look like something that it isn't.

[RyanZAG]

For anyone curious on how to get there:

https://github.com/stonesam92/ChitChat/network/members

It lists all people who have forked instead of only contributors. The 'members' tab in general doesn't appear to make much sense.

[stonesam92]

Ah, I'd never seen the "Members" tab until you pointed it out.

I agree, that could indeed be misleading and doesn't seem very useful!

[nathancahill]

I think @makecheck is talking about forked repositories showing up on a user's public account page, making them appear to be contributors to jQuery or NodeJS because they forked the repo instead of starring it.