freeCodeCamp Guide almost a year later (It could be better…)
In June of last year, Quincy Larson, the creator of freeCodeCamp launched a documentation bundle for programming languages, ethics, developer consoles, and almost anything else called the freeCodeCamp Guide.
When it launched, activity was crazy! In July, there were thousands of PRs, and tons of community activity. Around GitHub’s Hacktoberfest, over 6072 PRs were counted for the contest, making it the highest pull request count for the whole contest!
Now, sitting at over 2,700 pull requests, contributors with write access can’t keep up with the load. The oldest pull requests are from last October, being open for a staggering 6 months! Some don’t even have any comments, or any activity at all!
Granted, some work is being done, but not enough. At the current pace, (10 PRs per week),it would take 304 weeks to bring down this week’s backlog. By then, even more PRs would be created to fill the gap. This needs to be fixed. How do we fix it? Right now the biggest bottleneck is the amount of volunteers with write access to the repository. Right now, there is no formal process to become a contributor with write access. This means that the few with write access are the only few that can accept a pull request. The problems I have mentioned so far can’t be blamed on these volunteers! They are doing awesome work! It’s just the amount of volunteers with this permission.
Live Copy Quality
Just browsing the guide for a few minutes, I already found a ton of errors:
These issues show the problems in quality control with some articles that are live. Of course giving more contributors write access would help the bottleneck get fixed, but we would need to uphold a certain level of quality that is still not present on the platform today.
I hope that with these critiques answered, the platform can get better, and more people can be helped by this useful tool. I want to extend a huge thank you to all of the volunteers who work unpaid, on their own time, to help with freeCodeCamp guides to make it better. I hope that we can spot more errors, and fix the problems that plague the tool’s usefulness.
If you want to contribute to freeCodeCamp guides, click here.
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