Contributing guidelines (CONTRIBUTING.{rst,md})

[aucampia]

Currently we have nothing in place that GitHub recognizes as contributing guidelines. In addition to this we don't exactly have any guidelines describing how someone can contribute, specifically these guidelines should include things like:

• Review pending pull requests marked with review wanted
• Add additional tests for untested code
• Modernize test files
• Fixed expected test failures (i.e. known issues)
• Add/fix docstrings
• Add more expected failure tests for issues that are not yet fixed

These two problems are not entirely the same, but they are closely related.

Some options to consider:

1. Refashion our developer guide into contributing guidelines and add the additional points on how to contribute, and also do what is needed to make GitHub recognize it.
2. Write a new contribution guidelines document and link from that to our developers guide.

I'm very split on which to do, I am slightly leaning towards 1. but I would like to hear more feedback before moving forward with it.

CC: @RDFLib/core

[aucampia]

Some more things to add:

• Update wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFLib
• Update wikidata entries https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7276224
• Help out on stackoverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rdflib
• Help out on gitter https://gitter.im/RDFLib/rdflib
• Help out in discussions https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib/discussions

[aucampia]

I have thought about this some more, I tihnk I'm going to go with the second option as a start, I will try make a PR for this before the start of 2022W21.

[aucampia]

I made a PR for this:

• docs: Add a contributing guide #2082

[ghost]

I need a bit more time before I can substantively comment on/contribute to this. I believe there's quite a lot to be addressed here and I want to take a pass through the closed PRs to get a sense of to what degree they relate to specific items in the developer guide.

I'm currently absorbing the findings reported in:

1. “Report on the 2020 FOSS Contributor Survey” - informative overview
2. “Understanding Contributor Behavior within Large Free/Open Source Software Projects: A Socialization Perspective” - useful characterisation
3. “The Signals that Potential Contributors Look for When Choosing Open-source Projects” - rather relevant

[ghost]

And I thought this issue template might be a reasonable starting point, although IMO, it needs “informalizing”:

<!-- This issue tracker is only for technical issues related to RDFLib.

General RDFLib questions and/or support requests are best directed to Stackoverflow with the [rdflib] tag.

-->

<!-- Describe the issue -->
<!--- What behaviour did you expect? -->

<!--- What was the actual behaviour? -->

<!--- How reliably can you reproduce the issue and what are the steps to do so? -->

<!-- What version of RDFLib are you using? -->

<!-- What version of Python are you using? -->

<!-- What type of machine are you observing the error on (OS/CPU and disk type)? -->

<!-- Any extra information that might be useful in the debugging process. -->
<!--- Raw text or a link to a pastebin type site are preferred. -->