The Open Source Survey asked a broad array of questions. One that caught my eye was about problems people encounter when working with, or contributing to, open source projects. An incredible 93 percent of people reported being frustrated with “incomplete or confusing documentation”.
That’s hardly a surprise. There are a lot of projects on Github with the sparsest of descriptions, and scant instruction on how to use them. If you aren’t clever enough to figure it out for yourself, tough.
[...] According to the Github Open Source Survey, 60 percent of contributors rarely or never contribute to documentation. And that’s fine.
Documenting software is extremely difficult. People go to university to learn to become technical writers, spending thousands of dollars, and several years of their life. It’s not really reasonable to expect every developer to know how to do it, and do it well.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:14PM
Surprised no-one seems to have mentioned this, but I suspect a major reason for bad documentation of FOSS is boredom.
To be sure, plenty of FOSS is written by paid developers, but lots of it is written 'for fun', and writing documentation isn't something many programmers enjoy doing.
I don't see any reason to jump to the conclusion that FOSS developers can't write documentation.