What if the owner of some repository on github has stopped working on some project but I want to contribute to it?

I recently liked a repository on Github. I raised some pull requests but the owner of the repository has stopped working on that repository. My pull requests remain open. The last commit by him was over two years ago. What should I do in this situation? I don't want that I do a lot of changes and new additions and still it shows in my repo only. Should I create a new repository of mine?

Solution

This is my workflow:

Keep maintaining your fork.
Ping the owner a few times (using @owner-username). Maybe (s)he just missed your pull request, for some reason.
If after some time you don't get any feedback, I would recommend converting your fork into a source repository by deleting your fork repository (this will not close/delete the pull request) and pushing your fork repository there:
```
cd your-fork
git remote set-url origin http://github.com/your-username/repo
git push --all
```
I prefer sources over forks because forks have some limitations (e.g. you cannot search code in forks).
Finally, it's good to add a note that your repository is a continuation of the unmaintained repository.