Contributing to documentation

Contributing to documentation is an excellent way to support the Drupal project, even if you are a beginner. In fact, beginners have a distinct advantage over the experts, because they can more easily spot the places where documentation is lacking. Here is an interesting article that discusses the question Why Do People Write Free Documentation.

Whenever you seek help from the handbooks and get stuck, start taking notes. Write down every step that you take as you try to solve your problem. Don't do it later, because you'll forget the all-important details. After you find the solution, use your notes to make the handbook better. Once you develop this habit, it is a very easy way to help!

You don't have to be a member of the documentation team to contribute -- everyone's suggestions for updating and improving the documentation handbooks are welcome and encouraged. Here are four ways to improve the handbooks that are available to anyone who creates a drupal.org account:

• Submit an issue to the "documentation" project to suggest an update to a documentation page. This is the preferred method if you have a specific change to recommend. See if an issue already exists for your suggestion; if so, you should improve the existing issue. For more details, see Documentation issue reports.
• Comment on existing pages. You must be logged in (i.e. an authenticated user) to do this. Unlike issue submissions, comments are not rigorously reviewed by the documentation team.
• E-mail the documentation mailing list. If you have a general comment or proposal to make, you may choose to begin by presenting it to the documentation team. (If you have specific actions to suggest, it is better to submit an issue.)
• Add handbook pages. Presently, all authenticated users can add new pages. If you want your new page reviewed for location or content after adding it, submit an issue with status "code needs review." For "missing" pages you feel should be created to cover a particular subject, do not create a nearly-blank stub page; instead, submit an issue with category "feature request." Be sure to familiarize yourself with the Documentation writer's guide and the Style guide.

Join the documentation team if you would like to edit existing handbook pages -- to fix typos, to clarify confusing sentences, or to move pages around in the hierarchy -- or if you have many contributions to offer. Substantial changes, such as major re-writes and changing top-level page organization, should be discussed on the documentation mailing list first. The documentation handbooks are written in HTML and use the Drupal Book module, which provides easy wiki-like editing functionality, allows the content to be easily organized, and automatically generates a navigation block.

Restricted actions: The site maintainer role is required to delete handbook pages, to remove comments (once they have been incorporated into a handbook page), to unpublish and publish pages, to change the order of the pages, and to edit certain pages. Only a few members of the documentation team have this responsibility. Submit an issue to propose your actions.

Other kinds of documentation:

• The API documentation for Drupal developers is auto-generated from files in CVS. To update the description of a file or function, submit a doxygen patch against the core file in question.
• To update one of the "topics" pages, hooks documentation, or pages such as the Forms API reference, see Updating API documentation.
• Embedded documentation is included with every Drupal installation.