[AshamedCaptain]

> What would help me is to have the old geezers consider GitHub issues, PRs, and commits as a type of citation

As a geezer myself I am imagining what this type of request would look like in less than 5 years from now.

"What would help me is to have the old geezers consider Tiktok videos and replies as a type of citation"

i.e. if you open this particular can of worms for a very restricted subset of users (not only programmers but specifically programmers who also happen to use github), you have to open it to everyone else. I am sure plenty of Youtube research qualifies as "citation" if you start counting Github commits.

[mattkrause]

So what?

Papers qua papers aren't the goal. The idea is to advance our collective understanding of a field. Papers are certainly a means to that end, but other things can too, like code, videos, and blogposts, even if they don't fit into the "6000 words and 6 figures" box.

I get that citations and citation metrics feel objective, but they emphatically aren't great measures of research/researcher "quality".

[detaro]

A good youtube video easily can represent more work than a bad (published) paper, so why not.

[fennecfoxen]

Tiktok videos are primarily used for entertainment, rather unlike Jupyter notebooks and source code repositories. Surely you have a more serious objection.

[queuebert]

You don't read git repos for entertainment?!

[fennecfoxen]

For entertainment, I tend to read about things outside my field — things like In the Pipeline where I learn about FOOF and chlorine triflouride and freaky molecules like jawsamycin (insert shark theme here). I also watch Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board videos on YouTube, like that time a refrigerator accident at a poultry plant caused hydraulic shock and released a massive cloud of ammonia, and ~150 contractors hanging out across the river working on Deepwater Horizon cleanup measures got sent to the hospital.