Pull Requests are a great solution for contributing to repositories to which you don't have write access. Adding other people as collaborators to a remote repository is a good idea but sometimes (or even most of the time) you want to make sure that their contributions will provide more benefits that the potential mistakes they may introduce.
In large projects, primarily Open Source ones, in which the community of contributors can be very big, keeping the source code safe but at the same allow people to make contributions without making them "pass" tests for their skills and trustworthiness may be one of the keys to success.
Leveraging the power of Git, GitHub provides a functionality called Pull Requests. Esentially it's "requesting the owner of the repository to pull in your contributions". The owner may or may not accept them. But for you as a contributor, it was really easy to make the contribution.
Let's look at the workflow and try to repeat it:
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Fork this repository.
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Clone the repository from YOUR GitHub account. When you run
git remote -vyou should get something like this:origin https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/manchester-papers.git (fetch) origin https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/manchester-papers.git(push) -
Make changes you want to contribute. Commit and push them back to your repository. You won't be able to push back to the repository you forked from because you are not added as a contributor!
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Go to your GitHub account and to in the forked repository find a green button for creating Pull Requests. Click it and follow the instructions.
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The owner of the original repository gets a notification that someone created a pull request - the request can be reviewed, commented and merged in (or not) via GitHub.
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