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Comment by craftkiller | Hacker News Reader

Are spelling correction PRs not welcome? I'd never put it on a résumé but if I'm following a README and I see a typo, I'll generally open a quick PR to fix that. (no automated tools, not scanning for typos, just a human reading a README).

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> Are spelling correction PRs not welcome?

I think a true spelling correction would be welcome. But I think the kind BS attitude the GP is describing often leads to useless reformatting/language tweaks, because the goal isn't to make the repo better, it's to make a change for making a change's sake with as little effort as possible.

Kind of like how on the Salesforce support forums, there are a lot of incorrect answers from people who don't appear to have understood the question, but they all have "Please mark my answer as helpful" at the bottom. (And this started long before AI.) If there's an incentive to "contribute," even if it's something as small as being able to put "Salesforce support volunteer" on your LinkedIn page, and it's very easy to do so, you'll get a lot of low-effort (or worse) contributions.

I’ve always wondered how salesforce and Microsoft get such huge numbers of supporters doing that unpaid work for them. They’re often Indian sounding names so I suspect that one or more of the big consultancy or outsourcing companies uses it as a hiring signal.

A real improvement to the documentation or readme is welcome, even if it is only a minor improvement. I have put in small grammar PRs on some documentation myself.

On the flip side, I used to get a lot of spam PRs that made an arbitrary or net neutral change to our readme, presumably just to get "contributor" credit. That is not welcome or helpful to anyone.

> Before LLMs were a thing I also received worthless spelling-incorrection pull requests with the same aim.

I always find it a pity when someone has been clever and it's missed. "Spelling incorrection", get it? It's not a correction. It's the opposite.

Ah, you're right, I totally missed that! But tbh that makes less sense to me. If this was pre-LLM then this is suggesting that humans were opening pull requests that change correctly-spelled words to incorrectly-spelled words? Is that some weird attempt at steganography?

Nope, just a large number of people who don't know English. As an example in context, someone might run a spell check and decide "incorrection" is an error, removing the humor.

Depends on the project.

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