Thanks so much for opening an issue! I'll get this triaged for the right team to take a look ⚡

Hi @ScriptAutomate thanks for raising this issue. It's an interesting area and you're right to highlight the ambiguities in the information we currently have. I'll see if I can find the missing information, then we can create content design with your suggestions above and the additional information.

Once the content design is complete, the issue will be ready for a help wanted label.

Notes

It might also be worth mentioning in About default labels that adding a good first issue label to an issue adds it to the contribute page.

Contributing file precedence:

• .github is preferred over root-level and docs
• root-level is preferred over docs

All file extensions are supported. If there is a rich-text view available for the contributing file this is used, otherwise the raw text is displayed. For more information, see "Rendering differences in prose documents."

Content design plan

Proposed content design plan to address this issue.

Topics to update:

• Setting guidelines for repository contributors
  • At the start of the topic, add a new H3 title: "About contributing guidelines"
  • Expand the first paragraph to explain that:
    • A link to the contributing guidelines is also shown on the repository's contribute page, for example: https://github.com/github/docs/contribute.
  • Revise step 3 of the Adding a CONTRIBUTING file procedure to explain that the file will be rendered using a rich text format if it's in a supported format and add the link: For more information, see "[Rendering differences in prose documents](https://docs.github.com/en/github/managing-files-in-a-repository/rendering-differences-in-prose-documents)."
  • At the end of the Adding a CONTRIBUTING file procedure, add a short sentence that explains that if a repository contains more than one CONTRIBUTING file, then the file shown in links is chosen from .github, the top-level directory, then the docs directory.
• Managing labels topic, section About default labels
  • Add a sentence after the table explaining that issues with the good first issue label are used to populate the repository's contribute page, for example: https://github.com/github/docs/contribute.

Anyone is welcome to pick this up, following @felicitymay's Content design plan above ☝️

I would like to attempt this if possible @janiceilene

@Devilishhh You're welcome to open a PR!

@janiceilene brilliant thank you kindly