> Projects need contributions from everyone of all skills and levels of expertise.
I disagree. I find that politely rejecting or rewriting contributions from people with little experience or clue is a serious time drain for a maintainer (as well as a trial of patience). This goes even for documentation, which, when written by people without a clear view of the software, tends to be confused and misleading.
I try to handle such contributions gracefully anyway, with the idea that some of these people will use the feedback to grow into better programmers, but even that is unlikely to benefit the project -- the time span it takes to go from clueless to good is probably longer than the period in which the person is involved in my project.
Rejecting code and docs is a fine strategy for the short term. In the long term, people and enthusiasm are the scarce resources. Taking the time to cultivate them as members of the community pays off down the road.
I don't agree with your assumption that "the time span it takes to go from clueless to good is probably longer than the period in which the person is involved in [the] project." If I can spend some time shepherding the new person, who is probably more naive than unqualified, it will pay off in spades later.
The problem with all this stuff is always the same: it's incredibly, utterly, mind-numbingly boring, which is why even rockstar developers (who are the ones who will get all the credit for the project anyway, and who have the famous sky-high productivity that Spolsky measures in multipliers) can't be bothered to do it.
And I say that after having done some of it here and there.
Similar to 'Improve the website' is to contribute to the project wiki. Many open source projects use wikis as a major part of their community documentation and are only useful when updated. Most wiki engines, such as MediaWiki even provide functions to list 'wanted pages' or similar.
I disagree. I find that politely rejecting or rewriting contributions from people with little experience or clue is a serious time drain for a maintainer (as well as a trial of patience). This goes even for documentation, which, when written by people without a clear view of the software, tends to be confused and misleading.
I try to handle such contributions gracefully anyway, with the idea that some of these people will use the feedback to grow into better programmers, but even that is unlikely to benefit the project -- the time span it takes to go from clueless to good is probably longer than the period in which the person is involved in my project.