Introducing GitHub, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Publishing Content

Providing good documentation for how to get started on a project,  troubleshoot certain problems, and share ideas, or just providing a better landing page for people to find out about your project, can be just as important as the code itself. It can help new developers or users learn how to fix common problems and how to contribute back to build a stronger ecosystem, or allow you to find new contributors for your project. In this chapter we’ll be taking a look at writing and maintaining higher-level documentation on GitHub so that you can encourage more people to contribute to your repository or more effectively use your code and applications.

Wikis

If you’re familiar with wikis, continuing to use them is a great way to have some additional long-form documentation. Though the workflow for using them and accepting changes to them is different from any other contribution workflow on GitHub (you can’t use pull requests), it’s a good way for your users to find out more about your project if you have not yet created a GitHub Pages site.

A wiki is a very simple content management system that makes it easy for a group of collaborators to build a set of interlinked pages. Typically, GitHub’s wikis are used for capturing end user documentation, developer documentation, or both so that all of the information relating to a project is accessible through the project’s GitHub page.

Getting Started with a Wiki

If your project doesn’t yet have a ...