Contributing
This book is written in the open, and anyone can improve it. You do not need to know git, and you do not need to be a physicist: many of the most useful contributions are a single error found by a careful reader.
What you can contribute
- An error: a typo, a broken link, or a wrong equation or number.
- A challenge: a claim you think is wrong, unsupported, or classified as the wrong kind. The book marks every claim as established, reported, an extrapolation, speculation or philosophy, and a wrong label is an error too.
- A reference: a paper or book that should be cited, or listed as further reading.
- New numbers for a Building Alan living review, with their unit, date and source.
- New text: a chapter, a section, an interlude, a living review or a paper, proposed before it is written.
- A translation, or a correction to one.
- An idea that is not a proposal yet (“what if Alan could…”).
Without git: a form on GitHub
You need only a free GitHub account. Each form asks for what a reviewer needs; write in English.
| Form | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Erratum | A typo, a broken link, or an error in an equation or a number |
| Scientific challenge | A claim that is wrong, unsupported, or classified as the wrong kind |
| Content proposal | A new chapter, section, interlude, living review or paper |
| Living review update | New or corrected numbers for a Building Alan living review |
| Reference suggestion | A paper or book that should be cited or listed as further reading |
| Translation | A wrong or missing translation, or an offer to translate |
Ideas and questions go to Discussions. The people who look after the part of the book you name are told about your issue, and they answer it there.
With a pull request
To change the text yourself:
- Open “Edit this page” at the foot of a page for a small fix in the browser, or fork the repository and work on your own copy.
- Make the change, keeping the book’s style guide.
- Open a pull request and fill in its template.
- A person who looks after those pages reviews it, and a maintainer merges it.
The title of the pull request, the sign-off every commit needs, the checks to run and the step-by-step setup are in CONTRIBUTING.md, which has the complete rules. Translators start from docs/translating.md.
Who looks after the book
Every part of the book has moderators, and pages can have curators who keep them accurate. They are listed in Appendix E — Moderators and Curators, with the maintainers of each translation. How to take one of these roles is in GOVERNANCE.md.