RFC: Proposal: add a "Community reviewed"-like badge for repositories

[dlsniper]

Hi,

You asked for this so here it is.

I've originally opened this against godoc but maybe this project will move faster than it. golang/gddo#445

As a follow-up of: golang/go#17244 (comment) I'd like to open here this request for comments.

Current problems

One of them is finding packages which are considered to be stable, idiomatic or otherwise good for usage. There are plenty out there and while the common knowledge will build up to that, especially for beginners this is hard to find out. Plus you'd have to trust a random person on the Internet telling you what's good what's not, and I'm sure to have the best example of when that goes wrong.

Github stars are also largely irrelevant because they ultimately can be faked, people that have no clue what the repository does or the quality of code it has can just star it (some use stars as bookmarks) so that can have dramatic consequences when people are pushed to think that the repository is of good quality when in fact it's not.

Yet another problem is that people put too much pressure on the Go team / contributors to review their stuff and somehow bless implementations in order for users to feel safe to use the code base. This clearly is not scalable and I'd much rather have the Go team do what they do best, work on the language and tools around it and do reviews whenever they feel like it (if ever).

So, in order to fix these problems we need to somehow be able to identify and mark Go repositories as being: "community reviewed", "idiomatic Go" or whatever fitting label we find for it.

The proposal

We should add a flag to projects that would show them in as such on godoc.org and maybe have a badge for them to add to their readme.

The reviewers should be part of the community and it should work on a trusted model and only reviewers can add new reviewers.

For an issue to be flagged as an issue at least a few reviewers would need to agree on it and the reviewers could get some form of recognition (karma) for having the most accurate reviews, basically gamify this but not for the number of repos reviewed or for the owners of the repositories but for the reviewers themselves and the quality of issues found.

We can start with a list of know gophers that can review packages or add reviewers they trust for writing high quality code / doing good reviews.

Why would this work?

I'll take the example of Gophers Slack where we have a channel dedicated to reviews https://gophers.slack.com/messages/reviews/ and we also have a lot of other channels (both in Slack but outside as well, like Reddit) and people ask for reviews on their repositories. Integrating this with godoc would benefit everyone involved and the whole eco-system would be better at this.

Conclusion

I'm looking forward to hear your thoughts on this.

Thank you.