The novathesis repository has passed a thousand stars on GitHub. A thousand and one, at the time of writing.
A star costs nothing and means little on its own. What makes this one worth a short post is what sits underneath it. The first commit in the repository is dated March 2010, four years before the project arrived on GitHub. In the sixteen years since, it has grown to 3142 commits and 49 people in its history, and today it carries 67 school configurations across 10 universities and writes theses in 16 languages — from Portuguese and English to Greek, Ukrainian, and both written forms of Chinese.
Those 49 names are the part that matters. Almost every school in the template is there because someone who had to write their own thesis sat down with their faculty's formatting rules and turned them into a configuration that everyone after them could use. Some contributed a full school, some a single fixed cover, some a bug report precise enough to make the fix obvious. The template is the accumulation of those.
The 182 forks tell a quieter story. Some are contributions on their way back; most are people who took the template somewhere it did not officially go — a school we do not support, a set of rules we have never seen. That is what the licence is for, and it is a fine thing to do with it.
If you want to add to the number
The most useful thing you can do is not a star.
- Your school is missing? Open a New school issue with your faculty's formatting rules and media kit. That is how most of the 67 got here.
- A translation reads badly? Several were done automatically and have never been reviewed by a native speaker. Corrections are very welcome.
- Something is broken? A report that says which school, which command, and what the log said is worth more than a star.
To everyone who has filed an issue, sent a pull request, corrected a translation, or simply told a colleague that this exists: thank you. The number is yours more than mine.