Standards

When providing credit for a development, the Method Library follows a set of attribution standards:

Substantial Contribution: Creation or proposal credit goes to the person or group who both had the idea and significantly contributed to its development. If the idea had already been proposed by others, but abandoned or not pursued, credit goes to the person or group who developed it.

Early Suggestion: If a person or group simply mentioned an idea and didn't follow it up with development effort, credit isn't given as a creator or proposer. However, these early suggestions are still provided as an interesting part of history.

There are some grey areas. Someone may have suggested the idea first and partially developed it. Or someone may have independently fully developed an idea without knowledge that the idea already existed and was fully developed. In these cases, a community consensus is followed.

One example is the ZZ method. The method has a complicated history. Essentially, the idea goes back to Gilles Roux and Adam Géhin, made its way to Ryan Heise, then Ron van Bruchem, and, finally, Zbignew Zborowski. Even though four people prior to Zborowski had experimented with the idea, and Zborowski seemingly got the idea of EOLine from Bruchem, credit for the proposal and creation is given to Zborowski. This is because Zborowski is the first to show confidence in the idea and to develop it, going as far as creating a detailed website and promoting it.

Method classification has been an evolving subject. When the cube was first introduced, the three primary methods were Corners First, Edges First, and Layer By Layer. Every small difference in the steps of each was cause for it to be a completely different method.  Now the community consensus is that the various ways of solving the edges in Corners First or the last layer in Layer By Layer are minor variants of those methods.

The Method Library follows a classification standard based on the modern development community opinion. Minor changes to a method most often result in a variant of that method. A major example is last slot methods. MGLS, ZB, and others used to be considered full methods of their own. However, in recent years, the development community opinion has shifted toward classifying such systems as last slot and last layer variants or steps. Simplified, they are referred to as LSLL methods. It makes sense to consider them variants or steps not only because they are minor alterations, but also because they can be used in other methods that end with a final corner and edge pair slot.