No I have denied PRs that _only_ fixed a typo. Edited to be more clear.
I've also submitted PRs that just fixed typos, and I've considered that a legit contribution.
But if I maintained a high-profile project right now, I'd at least take pause in thinking some of these accounts could be spam reputation-boosting accounts that only make comments/PRs to lend legitimacy to the account when it ultimately stars some artificially boosted repo.
And making it harder to detect star manipulation erodes the signals of trust which have been used on Github, and ultimately can be a security concern (historically I've looked at numbers of contributors, stars, downloads, and issues open/closed as a rough idea of how secure some npm dependency might be.. basically the idea that "more eyeballs" can mean slightly less chance of a massive security issue, especially in security-critical code like oauth libraries)
I don't know what the solution is here. Maybe requiring people sign a CLA like some corporate open source projects do is at least enough of a barrier
I imagine contributors won’t exactly be happy with that though.
OK, a credit, but really, who cares? People can see what an accepted pull request consisted of, so I'm not sure they're kidding anybody in terms of boosting their reputation with credits for fixing typos.
All the same, I'm just glad to see people improve their presentation, especially typos.
I do that when I see typos in documentation.
IMO, the solution is simple: allow project maintainers to disable pointless metrics that would incentivize the GitHub equivocal to karma farming.
I also think the quality of comment on HN suffers for the fact that the karma score is visible metric to the end-user. Reddit particularly. The view count on tweets too.