arXiv · 2610.21316
When CONTRIBUTING Files Fall Short: Revising OSS Contribution Guidelines with Repository Evidence
Abstract
Contribution guidelines help newcomers participate in open-source software projects, yet often contain incomplete or outdated information. Existing studies characterize newcomers' information needs and documentation gaps, but revising these guidelines requires recovering and validating project-specific knowledge from scattered sources. We present ContribAlign, a framework for automatically revising CONTRIBUTING files through category-guided evidence integration. A qualitative analysis yields a taxonomy of 30 fine-grained guidance types across six contribution categories. ContribAlign uses a classifier to diagnose coverage of the six categories in the original guidance, then uses the taxonomy to collect and organize project-specific evidence. It filters detected conflicts and uses a large language model to generate category-level revisions. The classifier achieves a weighted F1 score of 0.764, improving on the existing classifier by 0.156, while the verifier detects factual conflicts with 97.3% precision and 91.5% estimated recall. Human evaluation shows that ContribAlign achieves the highest overall quality among the original guidelines and three baselines, with significant improvements in usefulness, beginner-friendliness, and completeness. These results suggest that ContribAlign can help maintain more accurate and useful contribution guidelines.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Kai Zheng, XinGuo Zhou, Xin Tan. 2026-10-15. When CONTRIBUTING Files Fall Short: Revising OSS Contribution Guidelines with Repository Evidence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21316
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.