Introduction

============

Python's documentation has long been considered to be good for a free

programming language.  There are a number of reasons for this, the most

important being the early commitment of Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, to

providing documentation on the language and its libraries, and the continuing

involvement of the user community in providing assistance for creating and

maintaining documentation.

The involvement of the community takes many forms, from authoring to bug reports

to just plain complaining when the documentation could be more complete or

easier to use.

This document is aimed at authors and potential authors of documentation for

Python.  More specifically, it is for people contributing to the standard

documentation and developing additional documents using the same tools as the

standard documents.  This guide will be less useful for authors using the Python

documentation tools for topics other than Python, and less useful still for

authors not using the tools at all.

If your interest is in contributing to the Python documentation, but you don't

have the time or inclination to learn reStructuredText and the markup structures

documented here, there's a welcoming place for you among the Python contributors

as well.  Any time you feel that you can clarify existing documentation or

provide documentation that's missing, the existing documentation team will

gladly work with you to integrate your text, dealing with the markup for you.

Please don't let the material in this document stand between the documentation

and your desire to help out!