It’s important to understand volunteer motivation to encourage further altruistic and mutually beneficial behavior. O’Reilly Editor Andy Oram has created a short survey for people to contribute to community documentation:
“Do you answer questions on mailing lists about how to use a software tool or language? Do you write documentation, put up web pages, or contribute to wikis about software? If so, please take the following survey to help O’Reilly do research that will help us understand why people contribute to documentation (versus software projects themselves.) The results will be published on the O’Reilly web site, and may help software projects and communities get more such contributions. We’re only interested in hearing from people who do this for non-monetary reasons.
I document wisdom which costed me hours to get on my webserver searchable by public. This works pretty good because this is also my own source of knowledge when I am somewhere in the world. A local stored documentation did not suffice because I cannot get access from somewhere in the world.
Aside from putting to print knowledge that would otherwise be available to someone else only through trial and error, I claim "part ownership" of the open source community when I contribute. The old standby "It is what you make of it" is only partly true, because it doesn't describe the nature of ownership: An owner of a property would do things actively to upkeep the place, repair any damage, and be a generally good steward. So it is with the open source community. When we contribute we claim ownership by doing what an owner would do to ensure that it is a well-tuned source of knowledge and expertise, and that future contributors and users can benefit from the fruits of our labor.
Thanks for your comments, Richard and Simon. I've contributed for both of those reasons myself.
My contributions have been copy edit suggestions to existing documents; typos, spelling etc. I can code, but don't feel nearly enough competent to contribute in that way.
I want to assist in raising editing standards of open source documents about open source projects to be equal to or better than the "professional" standard.
I add when and where I can, I benefited from someones else information, so I dont see why i cant help someone else. Everyone loves to take but so few give.