Contributing guidelines

Article summary

Contributing guidelines, also called Contribution guidelines, the CONTRIBUTING.md file, or software contribution guidelines, is a text file which project managers include in free and open-source software packages or other open media packages for the purpose of describing how others may contribute user-generated content to the project. The file explains how anyone can engage in activities such as formatting code for submission or submitting patches. The existence of the file in a package should increase the chance of a project receiving crowdsourced contributions. But in many cases, the received contributions do not follow the instructions in the file. Having a contributions file greatly contributes to the success of projects which depend on user contributions.

Key claims

No claims recorded.

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

No sources recorded.