Contributing guidelines

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.[1]

The existence of the file in a package should increase the chance of a project receiving crowdsourced contributions.[2] But in many cases, the received contributions do not follow the instructions in the file.[3]

Having a contributions file greatly contributes to the success of projects which depend on user contributions.[4]

References

1. Barnes, Kevin R. (17 September 2012). "Contributing Guidelines". The GitHub Blog. GitHub.
2. Kobayakawa, Naoki; Yoshida, Kenichi (2017). "How GitHub Contributing.md Contributes to Contributors". 2017 IEEE 41st Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC). pp. 694–696. doi:10.1109/COMPSAC.2017.139. ISBN 978-1-5386-0367-3. S2CID 156171.
3. Elazhary, Omar; Storey, Margaret-Anne; Ernst, Neil; Zaidman, Andy (6 August 2019). "Do as I Do, Not as I Say: Do Contribution Guidelines Match the GitHub Contribution Process?". arXiv:1908.02320 [cs.SE].
4. Coelho, Jailton; Valente, Marco Tulio (2017). "Why modern open source projects fail". Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering - ESEC/FSE 2017. pp. 186–196. arXiv:1707.02327. doi:10.1145/3106237.3106246. ISBN 9781450351058. S2CID 12302770.

External links

• Setting guidelines for repository contributors, GitHub
• Wrangling Web Contributions: How to Build a CONTRIBUTING.md, Mozilla