Contributing guidelines

{{Short description|File inviting user contributions in open-source projects}}

{{Short description|File inviting user contributions}}

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.{{cite web |last1=Barnes |first1=Kevin R. |title=Contributing Guidelines |url=https://github.blog/2012-09-17-contributing-guidelines/ |website=The GitHub Blog |publisher=GitHub |date=17 September 2012}}

The existence of the file in a package should increase the chance of a project receiving crowdsourced contributions.{{cite book|last1=Kobayakawa|first1=Naoki|last2=Yoshida|first2=Kenichi|title=2017 IEEE 41st Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)|chapter=How GitHub Contributing.md Contributes to Contributors|year=2017|pages=694–696|doi=10.1109/COMPSAC.2017.139|isbn=978-1-5386-0367-3|s2cid=156171}} But in many cases, the received contributions do not follow the instructions in the file.{{cite arXiv |last1=Elazhary |first1=Omar |last2=Storey |first2=Margaret-Anne |last3=Ernst |first3=Neil |last4=Zaidman |first4=Andy |title=Do as I Do, Not as I Say: Do Contribution Guidelines Match the GitHub Contribution Process? |eprint=1908.02320 |date=6 August 2019|class=cs.SE }}

Having a contributions file greatly contributes to the success of projects which depend on user contributions.{{cite book|last1=Coelho|first1=Jailton|last2=Valente|first2=Marco Tulio|title=Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering - ESEC/FSE 2017|chapter=Why modern open source projects fail|year=2017|pages=186–196|doi=10.1145/3106237.3106246|arxiv=1707.02327|isbn=9781450351058|s2cid=12302770}}