word usage - Does "collaborated by" make sense?


I recently came across a description of a GitHub project that had a sentence similar to the following at the end:



Project collaborated by James Smith and Olivia Jones.



Does "collaborated by" make sense in the above sentence?
Does "collaborated on by" make more sense?
What word can be added or replaced to improve this sentence, while still sounding sophisticated?



Answer



It isn't idiomatic. Whether or not it makes sense depends on what you mean by sense. I suspect most people can probably make sense of it, but likely won't have heard it before.



collaborate


work jointly on an activity, especially to produce or create something (NOAD)


to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor (MW)



Collaborate is an intransitive verb that describes how people work together, not any process performed on an object.


It then doesn't make sense, according to how collaborate is generally used, to say a project was collaborated: collaborate doesn't take an object. The sentence, though, clearly means that people collaborated on the project; it just reads as tech- or headline-speak.


Google Ngrams shows that usage is increasing


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but this is trivial compared with collaborated on.


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This WordReference post reminds us that this uptick might be from confusion with corroborated by.


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