Have you ever noticed that the communities where you’re told the most frequently to RTFM - Read The F* Manual - are the same ones where that manual is likely to be awful? I believe that this is, in fact, not merely correlation, but also causation - that is, the attitude results in the poor docs.
There’s a few commonly held beliefs about documentation for software, and in particular open source software: 1) It’s awful, 2) Nobody ever wants to write it. 3) That’s just the way things are, and we can’t do much about it.
The reality, however, is that there are lot of people that want to write documentation, and we, the gatekeepers of open source projects, just make it too hard for them to do it. We put up artificial social barriers. (For example, the myth that documentation is a somehow less important contribution than “real” code.) We put up strange workflows. (Get a checkout. Make your changes. Make a diff. Subscribe to a mailing list. Sen