> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.
> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.
There's a subtle naming difference between profile README repos for users and orgs that was the root cause of this. The user typed the repo name in however because it matched the same format for the previous profile README repo, it didn't register that this was not in fact the profile README repo they were looking for.
> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.
> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.
There's a subtle naming difference between profile README repos for users and orgs that was the root cause of this. The user typed the repo name in however because it matched the same format for the previous profile README repo, it didn't register that this was not in fact the profile README repo they were looking for.