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Open-source software starts with developers, but there are other important contributors, too. Who exactly? Good question

chuBb.

Although i am biased being a developer, i would say a project lives and dies on its documentation. I have found that projects (everything from libraries to ui applications) which have exemplary documentation, also have the higher quality bug reports (they tend to be bugs and feature requests, not confusion over how to use the thing or triaged out of existence quickly with a link to the relevant doc/wiki/sample), a more active and invested community and generally a better time as a user/consumer of the code. There are some outliers namely audacity but thats more down to politics and doing silly things to annoy the community than anything else.

End of the day the better the docs, the quicker, easier and more predictable it is to use, the more its used the larger the "educated" userbase, the larger the educated userbase the greater the number of people able to authoritatively answer the "how do i" questions in the mailing list, stackexchange site, subreddit etc, which feed back into people using it. From good docs does all the other non code related roles spring

If your project lacks the info to explain the how, when and why you would use it, your probably missing out on a lot of people who would use and possibly contribute to it as your lacking the documentation for use.

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