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Contributing guidelines

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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.

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 .
  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.

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