If you are into novelty metrics, you might find the following interesting:

http://imgur.com/a/xhxtm

It shows how actively the gitignore files are modified.

"Novelty Metrics" -- I kind of want to put that on my resume just to see what happens with it. Or, I could imagine an entertaining blog existing solely based on that premise.

You might really enjoy the Strange Maps[1] section of bigthink.com. There are some real wonderful ones in the past entries. I have this in my feed, but look at it far too infrequently for how interesting it looks.

1: http://bigthink.com/articles?blog=strange-maps

Making people think is my favorite part of my job. :)

Many of these categories are not 'languages' making it hard to make any conclusions beside 'people working with Joomla or VS seem to have some gigantic .gitignore template'.

too much code generators?

Typically you'd check in generated code; you'd exclude packages, compiled code, certain kinds of configuration and logs, etc.

Do you typically check in generated code? I think it depends on a lot of things. My understanding is the general rule of thumb is NOT to, except for certain cases (generation takes a long time, for instance)

Well, in the VS world generated code is typically generated once and open to modification post-generation, so yes.