Helping with documentation¶
Python is known for having well-written documentation. Maintaining the documentation’s accuracy and keeping a high level of quality takes a lot of effort. Community members, like you, help with writing, editing, and updating content, and these contributions are appreciated and welcomed.
This high-level Helping with Documentation section provides:
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an overview of Python’s documentation
how to help with documentation issues
information on proofreading
You will find extensive and detailed information on how to write documentation and submit changes on the Documenting Python page.
Python documentation¶
The Documenting Python section covers the details of how Python’s documentation works. It includes information about the markup language used, specific formats, and style recommendations. Looking at pre-existing documentation source files can be very helpful when getting started. How to build the documentation walks you through the steps to create a draft build which lets you see how your changes will look and validates that your new markup is correct.
You can view the documentation built from in-development and maintenance branches at https://docs.python.org/dev/. The in-development and recent maintenance branches are rebuilt once per day.
If you would like to be more involved with documentation, consider subscribing to the Documentation category on the Python Discourse and the [email protected] mailing list where user issues are raised and documentation toolchain, projects, and standards are discussed.
Helping with documentation issues¶
If you look at documentation issues on the issue tracker, you will find various documentation problems that may need work. Issues vary from typos to unclear documentation and items lacking documentation.
If you see a documentation issue that you would like to tackle, you can:
check to see if there is pull request icon to the right of the issue’s title, or an open pull request listed under Linked PRs in the issue body. If there is, then someone has already created a pull request for the issue.
leave a comment on the issue saying you are going to try and create a pull request and roughly how long you think you will take to do so (this allows others to take on the issue if you happen to forget or lose interest).
submit a pull request for the issue.
By following the steps in the Quick Guide to Pull Requests, you will learn the workflow for documentation pull requests.
Proofreading¶
While an issue filed on the issue tracker means there is a known issue somewhere, that does not mean there are not other issues lurking about in the documentation. Proofreading a part of the documentation, such as a “How to” or OS specific document, can often uncover problems (for example, documentation that needs updating for Python 3).
If you decide to proofread, read a section of the documentation from start to finish, filing issues in the issue tracker for each major type of problem you find. Simple typos don’t require issues of their own, but, instead, submit a pull request directly. It’s best to avoid filing a single issue for an entire section containing multiple problems; instead, file several issues so that it is easier to break the work up for multiple people and more efficient review.
For help with the finer points of English technical writing, mention the @python/proofreaders team in your issue or pull request in any @python repo. If you’d like to join the team, open a core-workflow issue similar to python/core-workflow#461.