# Contribution guidelines

Thank you for considering contributing to the GNOME user documentation!

These guidelines are meant for new contributors, regardless of their level
of proficiency; following them allows the GNOME documentation team to more
effectively evaluate your contribution, and provide prompt feedback to you.
Additionally, by following these guidelines you clearly communicate that you
respect the time and effort that the people writing documentation put into
managing the project.

Please, do not use the project's issue tracker for support questions. If you
have questions on the user documentation, you can use:

 - the [Docs room on Matrix](https://matrix.to/#/#docs:gnome.org)
 - the [`documentation` tag on GNOME's Discourse](https://discourse.gnome.org/tags/documentation)

The issue tracker is meant to be used for actionable issues only.

## Prerequisites

In order to contribute to the GNOME user documentation project, you should
follow the same rules as with every other GNOME project, as presented on
the [GNOME Handbook](https://handbook.gnome.org):

- [Code of Conduct](https://conduct.gnome.org/)
- [Issue tracking](https://handbook.gnome.org/issues.html)
- [Development](https://handbook.gnome.org/development.html)

The user documentation is written using the
[Mallard](https://web.archive.org/web/20250117135803/http://projectmallard.org/) format.

## Directory Structure

Please respect the directory structure:

- `gnome-user-docs/<docname>/<locale>/<docname>.xml`
- `gnome-user-docs/<docname>/<locale>/figures/`

In some cases, it may make sense to nest things one level deeper. However,
do not nest things less deep.
