How Can I Start Contributing?
A step-by-step guide on how to contribute to the India Investments Wiki
If you're reading this, we can't thank you enough 😃
It's our pleasure to have someone as interested as you going through this. It's ok, it might seem overwhelming at first, but everyone has something to offer.
This section is for contributors who plan on taking part, in creating and maintaining our wiki & FAQ content. You can write content, review content created by others, or check for spelling or grammatical errors. No contribution is small. Every drop matters, that go on to form oceans.
If you wish to work on technical side of things (Discord / GitHub automation and other cool stuff), then this document is probably not for you.
Yes yes, you're thinking well, duh, if I'm here I know who you are!, but we do need to address the elephant in the room and set clear ground-rules.
We're a bunch of anonymous internet surfers who decided it's time retail investors have access to decent guide on all things investing. That's all.
Why anonymous? Because we (well, some of us) value our privacy, and don't have any plans of creating a cult of persona around ourselves.
We aren't registered with any regulatory body, like SEBI, or even AMFI. We don't represent any financial institution. In fact, you should assume, unless explicitly stated otherwise, none of us have any formal financial background.
If these all seem vague details, keep in mind that our hands aren't tied by business interests. This project is being built as a non-profit open-source project, because we feel that most for-profit businesses would intentionally omit information that could be important for making financial decisions.
Banks and insurance companies haven't exactly done a great job at educating the retailers in this process, and that's quite an understatement. Studies show that Indian households have collectively lost $28 billion (archive.org link | archive.is link) simply by falling victim to financial mis-selling.
Think of this project as a way to bridge this information asymmetry.
There might be other documentations and guides out there for some financial guidance; but to the best of our knowledge, nothing exists with such lofty goals!
This is how a Beginner label looks on our Trello board.
Alternatively, find a column that has
Lift off in its name. It's all the content that's been undergoing review right now.
Lift-off column
If you've decided on how to contribute - reviewing existing content, or adding new content; head over to next section.
A card represents a unit of task. One of our core-team members would be tagged on that card, with display name / profile pic visible on it. This is the contact person for that card or the underlying task. If the card doesn't have any owner yet, no worries!
The kb-discussions channel is the one you need!
Someone there will guide you on what's required to complete that task, what has already been done etc. Once you've full context of all relevant work that has been done, or needs to be done, you'd be in a better position to contribute.
If you plan on writing content, you can use any of the following tools for composing content:
If you're comfortable with Markdown and can handle more tech oriented tools, you can use
Use any of the above tools, as per your convenience, to create and share an early draft with us. Use the Discord channel mentioned above for sharing this. The owner of the card / task would take care of entering it into our repository, and you'd receive public credit for this work.
It would help if you can create an account on GitHub and share your GitHub profile name with us (we highly recommend creating one, although it's not mandatory), so that we can give you recognition for your contributions to our wiki.
Your first few contributions would have to be merged to our wiki following this process. When your content is being reviewed, you'd receive comments with suggestions for improvements, if any. If your contributions meet the bar, and you seem engaged enough, we'll send you an invite to join our team and work with us directly on writing the wiki.
This section is not for every contributor. It's only for those whom we've invited to join our team.
Once you get invited to join our team, it's expected that you'd put in some effort to understand how to use GitBook, what to do in it, and more importantly, what not to do!
GitBook has fantastic documentation, that you can refer to, if you have any specific query along the lines of how to do X in GitBook.
We've made a small video that you can watch, to get a glimpse on how you can create and view content on our wiki, using GitBook.
You'll have to know how to use:
- Markdown markdown is probably the most widespread markup language used for writing documentation on the Internet and it's easy to learn
- Git & GitHub you don't need to be proficient at using Git and GitHub, but it's appreciated if you know how to use them and do basic things like forking repositories and raising pull requests
Contributing to build a knowledge-base can be rewarding, often in unexpected ways. If nothing else, you get more clarity around your own understanding of some aspect of investing.