Please Contribute Python Documentation!

[Tony Meyer]

> I'm changing the subject so that hopefully people who have 
> long ago tuned out the "Python evolution: Unease" subject 
> will read this note.

Worked for me :)  Two other pages that are probably of use to people
interested in this are:

<http://www.python.org/moin/ModulesThatNeedDocs>
<http://www.python.org/moin/MissingFromDocumentation>

These document the current (well, current when the wiki page was last
updated) state of various document patches, and list things that people have
noticed need work.  There's also a place for volunteers to put their name if
they are willing to provide module documentation, so that work isn't
duplicated.

(I don't know how up-to-date the latter one is.  I think the former is
reasonably so).

> You do not (repeat, *do not*) 
> need to install any tools to contribute content to the 
> documentation.  Just whip out your favorite text editor and 
> type plain old text.  There are plenty of us around who know 
> enough LaTeX to markup anything you contribute.  Don't let 
> lack of a specific set of tools be a barrier to contribution!

I don't think I've seen such a statement before - the stuff I've seen all
indicates that one should be submitting proper LaTeX docs/patches.  If
plain-text contributions are welcome, could this be added to the doc about
contributing to the docs?  (I suppose I could submit a patch, but that seems
overkill <wink>).

> In either case, select "Documentation" as the category. There is 
> no need to assign it to anyone.  It will get seen shortly.  
> The correctness of a documentation fix is generally easier to 
> verify than that for a code fix, so they tend to get applied 
> pretty quickly.

Is it a mistake to attach a patch to a bug report?  Should it be a new patch
tracker instead?  I ask because I (ages ago) submitted documentation for
zipimport (it's linked from the ModulesThatNeedDocs page above) and although
it's been included on that wiki page and in discussion on python-dev about
missing documentation, it's never been looked at, AFAIK.  (If there are
problems, I'm happy to amend the patch, as the comment says).  This is
somewhat at odds with the "shortly" and "pretty quickly" <0.5 wink>.

=Tony.Meyer