Style repository maintenance?
Actually there are 102 open Pull requests (https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/pulls), the oldest dates back on 21 Sep 2015. Does anyone know the reason for this? Is there a way to help?
The style repository gets a lot of PRs from first time github users and it often involves some hand-holding. The stats you cite are also a bit misleading. The oldest PRs typically have unresolved questions, so that's not really an indicator, and as you can tell, we are continuously merging or closing pull requests (200 in the last 5 months, e.g.). Almost all people waiting to get a style merged get it reviewed within a couple of weeks and most PRs are merged within 4 weeks (yours was merged in a week afaict), only in some cases does that require an additional ping from authors.
Some options to improve on the situation:
* Professionalize the maintenance of the style repository. We have been able to get a little bit of CSL funding in recent years (typically $5000-10000/year for a good year), but the vast majority of companies using CSL (see https://citationstyles.org/ for a list) don't contribute upstream (financially or otherwise). Personally, style repository maintenance feels like a job, and to the extent that I've been reimbursed for my work on the repository through these corporate donations, I've worked well below the minimum wage for rather mundane and repetitive work. A decent hourly wage would certainly entice me to dedicate more time to this task.
* Recruit additional maintainers to reduce the burden on the core CSL developers, to give us a bit of a breather and allow us to spend more time on developing the CSL language itself. Like @adamsmith said, this role requires a good understanding of CSL and a high attention to detail. We'd be happy to train people, but it's something that takes quite a bit of commitment and building of trust.
* We're also always short-staffed on programmers. There are some ways in which we could further automate the reviewing process, but we don't have the skills in-house to implement those improvements.
1. is https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/issues/3722 to provide more human-readable error reports
2. is to automatically output a small set of sample citations for changed/new citation styles as part of the CI build -- the one doesn´t have a ticket, but happy to create one.
For both of these, Rintze and I are happy to help best we can (e.g. supply error messages, good sample citations, etc.
And it would simplify reviews if there would be some (non-failing) checks on just the styles added, e.g. whether it has a default-locale, documentation link, template link, etc. There are quite a few cases where we don't require these things, so I rather not have a hard-coded exception list, but it would be very nice if the PR could highlight things to look at.