title: What is the origin and purpose of AUTHORS.md?
body: <p>While <strong>Humans.txt</strong> has a very well set up and informative <a href="http://humanstxt.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">website</a> explaining its purposes, highlighting its uses and even showcasing some of them, I can not find any similar details on <strong>AUTHORS.md</strong>.</p>
  <p>I spotted a <a href="https://twitter.com/ekrubnivek/status/366598629164720128" rel="nofollow noreferrer">tweet</a> pointing to a GitHub repo, &quot;Hulk&quot; and specifically one feature of it - <a href="https://github.com/kevinburke/hulk/blob/master/Makefile#L7" rel="nofollow noreferrer">generating an AUTHORS.md</a>. This was the source of my curiosity, so I asked the author about it. Not even he was sure about <a href="https://twitter.com/ekrubnivek/status/366988644579414016" rel="nofollow noreferrer">its exact purpose vs. that of <em>humans.txt</em></a>.</p>
  <p>A <a href="https://encrypted.google.com/search?num=20&amp;hl=en&amp;biw=1680&amp;bih=933&amp;q=AUTHORS.md+vs+humans.txt&amp;oq=AUTHORS.md+vs+humans.txt&amp;gs_l=serp.3...15527.16195.0.17863.4.4.0.0.0.0.314.778.1j1j1j1.4.0....0...1c.1.24.serp..4.0.0.R-ubYByjhVA" rel="nofollow noreferrer">search on Google</a> yielded only one developer related result, a GitHub repo named <a href="https://github.com/zakharovvi/ZakharovviHumansTxtBundle" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ZakharovviHumansTxtBundle</a>. All the other results were related to medical issues.
  Similarly, searching for &quot;authors.md&quot; on both <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=authors+md">StackOverflow</a> and <a href="https://stackexchange.com/search?q=authors+md">StackExchange</a> yielded <strong>no</strong> results. Not one. Conversely, the query <a href="https://stackexchange.com/search?q=humans.txt">&quot;humans.txt&quot;</a> yields many.</p>