Thanks for raising this Goffi,

I can see how "take responsibility" can be interpreted as being too vague. If it is interpreted as imposing legal liability on the individual author, that could be problematic. I don't think it obviously does, but prevention is probably pretty easy and cheap. I suggest to slightly modify your suggested text, into this:

"You must understand and verify every part of your contribution, and ensure that material derived from other sources is properly attributed."

I'm less keen on "ensure that your work is original", since XEPs necessarily build on existing specifications and prior work, and "original" could be ambiguous.

This wording keeps the requirement tool-neutral: it applies equally to copied text, AI-generated material, machine translation, etc. The important point is that the author understands and verifies what they submit, which was the motivation for the PR in the first place.

Kind regards,

Guus

On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 4:26 PM Goffi <goffi@goffi.org> wrote:

Hi,

Le mardi 25 août 2026, 11:46:15 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Daniel Gultsch a
écrit :
> [SNIP]
> a) XEP-0143: Add author responsibility to submission process
> https://github.com/xsf/xeps/pull/1552

I'm not sure about the wording "take responsibility" here, it seems a bit
vague to me. Does that mean responsible of legal liability? Plagiarism of
existing specs? Or responsible if things are not working? Something else?

What does people think about that?

Also, on one hand it's important that somebody contributing take care of
proposing original work, and check that there is a minimum quality
requirement, but we should not put too much burden on specification author
(i.e.; in case of any legal trouble, it should be handle by/with the XSF in my
opinion, not by the author(s) alone).

Maybe something like that:

"You must understand and verify every part of your contribution. You must
ensure that your work is original and not a plagiarism of other people work."

> [SNIP]

Best,
Goffi_______________________________________________
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