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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:

  • an overview of Python's documentation
  • how to help with documentation issues
  • information on proofreading
  • guidance on contributing to this Developer's Guide

The next chapter, :ref:`Documenting Python <documenting>`, gives extensive, detailed information on how to write documentation and submit changes.

Python Documentation

The :ref:`Documenting Python <documenting>` 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. :ref:`How to build the documentation <building-doc>` 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 :ref:`in-development <indevbranch>` and :ref:`maintenance <maintbranch>` branches at https://docs.python.org/dev/. The in-development and most recent 3.x (as well as 2.x) maintenance branches are rebuilt once per day.

If you would like to be more involved with documentation, consider subscribing to the [email protected] mailing list. The issue tracker sends new documentation issues to this mailing list, and, less frequently, the list receives some directly mailed bug reports. The [email protected] mailing list discusses the documentation toolchain, projects, and standards.

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 a paperclip or octocat icon at the end of the issue's title column. 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 :doc:`pull request <pullrequest>` for the issue.

By following the steps in the :ref:`Quick Guide to Pull Requests <pullrequest-quickguide>`, 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 (e.g., 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.

Helping with the Developer's Guide

The Developer's Guide (what you're reading now) uses the same process as the main Python documentation, except for some small differences. The source lives in a separate repository and bug reports should be submitted to the devguide GitHub tracker.

Our devguide workflow uses continuous integration and deployment so changes to the devguide are normally published when the pull request is merged. Changes to CPython documentation follow the workflow of a CPython release and are published in the release.

Developer's Guide workflow

To submit a :doc:`pull request <pullrequest>`, you can fork the devguide repo to your GitHub account and clone it using:

$ git clone https://github.com/<your_username>/devguide

For your PR to be accepted, you will also need to sign the :ref:`contributor agreement <cla>`.

To build the devguide, some additional dependencies are required (most importantly, Sphinx), and the standard way to install dependencies in Python projects is to create a virtualenv, and then install dependencies from a requirements.txt file. For your convenience, this is all automated for you. To build the devguide on a Unix-like system use:

$ make html

in the checkout directory. On Windows use:

> .\make html

You will find the generated files in _build/html. Note that make check runs automatically when you submit a :doc:`pull request <pullrequest>`. You may wish to run make check and make linkcheck to make sure that it runs without errors.