GitHub Achievement Encyclopedia v1.2.0

Validation date: 19 July 2026
Release type: Research infrastructure and maintenance release
Release target: main

This release makes the encyclopedia’s supporting research traceable, monitorable, and contributor-ready while preserving the evidence model and public API introduced in earlier releases.

Added

• A privacy-safe public evidence register containing one baseline record for every canonical achievement.
• A machine-readable evidence endpoint with claim, classification, dates, reproduction status, reviewer decision, privacy status, limitations, and guide location.
• A weekly monitor for six official GitHub documentation pages using normalized visible-content fingerprints.
• Automatic review-issue creation when a scheduled monitor detects a material official-document change.
• Nine achievement verification timelines with page-level last-reviewed dates and explicit history gaps.
• A contributor research hub containing eight bounded research tasks and three good-first research opportunities.
• A structured research issue form requiring methods, dated results, limitations, and privacy declarations.
• Static API endpoints for evidence records, timelines, and the contributor research queue.

Changed

• The authoritative repository audit now executes 17 controls instead of 12.
• Public API discovery now identifies evidence, timeline, and research-queue endpoints.
• GitHub Actions references were upgraded where applicable and pinned to immutable commit SHAs.
• Repository navigation and the flagship documentation expose the complete research lifecycle.

Verification

The release candidate must pass:

1. Repository-wide Markdown validation.
2. Achievement catalogue consistency.
3. Achievement data contract.
4. Verification-date freshness.
5. Public evidence-register alignment and generated-output drift.
6. Achievement verification-timeline chronology and coverage.
7. Contributor research-queue references and acceptance criteria.
8. Official GitHub documentation baseline integrity.
9. Full repository link validation.
10. External-source resilience inventory generation.
11. Public API discovery and endpoint drift validation.
12. Repository health generation.
13. Site metadata and accessibility contract.
14. Semantic-version release-policy compliance.
15. Production GitHub Pages build.
16. Browser search behaviour.
17. Desktop and mobile visual regression.

Release publication occurs only after the merged main commit passes the formal release workflow. The v1.2.0 tag must resolve to that exact merge commit.

Known limitations

• GitHub still does not publish complete rules or tier thresholds for every achievement.
• Several research tasks remain open because independent reproduction has not yet met the target evidence level.
• Official-document fingerprints detect textual change but require human interpretation before guide claims are modified.
• The evidence register begins with one baseline record per achievement; it does not yet represent every historical observation.
• Year-only historical timeline entries deliberately avoid asserting unsupported exact dates.

Included programme

• Phase 34 — dependency and CI hardening.
• Phase 35 — public evidence register.
• Phase 36 — official GitHub documentation monitor.
• Phase 37 — achievement verification timelines.
• Phase 38 — contributor research hub.
• Phase 39 — expanded audit, API discovery, and formal release.