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This topic has been translated from a Chinese forum by GPT and might contain errors.Original topic: 2024 TiDB 文档挑战赛｜为什么文档如此重要，如何让它变得更好？
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username: TiDB社区小助手
Documentation is a key component of open-source software projects. Clear, accurate, and easy-to-understand documentation allows users to quickly get started with the product and solve most issues they encounter through self-help.
When evaluating a technical product or organization, many people often first look at how well their product documentation is done. High-quality documentation or other introductory resources can increase confidence in the product’s quality. Documentation also often reflects a company’s organizational culture: attention to detail, the level of community support, and the organization’s innovativeness.
In the past, the primary users of open-source software were developers. Today, more and more people in different roles, such as business analysts and data scientists, who are not professional developers, have become key users of open-source software. Therefore, having good documentation is more important than ever.
History of TiDB Community Contributions
Since the creation of the TiDB project, the source code and documentation source files of TiDB have adhered to the open-source principle, allowing all users to view the source code, provide suggestions, or submit modifications at any time. We particularly welcome community contributors to participate in the optimization of the product and its documentation (currently, the number of TiDB documentation contributors has exceeded 800 and continues to grow). The TiDB documentation website is also very popular among users, with over 300,000 users visiting the documentation pages in the past 12 months.
To provide high-quality documentation, we have continuously invested a lot of time and resources into improving the quality and experience of the documentation. However, we are also clearly aware that there is no perfect documentation, and no one is more suitable than our community users to help us improve. We need to further refine and optimize the existing documentation from the user’s perspective, as only users can provide real feedback on the product and documentation, thereby more effectively improving the quality and experience of the documentation. Therefore, we particularly need and hope to invite TiDB community users to provide valuable opinions and contribute to the improvement of our documentation.
Announcing the 2024 TiDB Documentation Challenge!
We are pleased to announce that the first TiDB Documentation Challenge (TiDB Docs Dash) will be held from January 9 to 12, 2024. Through this event, we hope to bring together TiDB community members to collectively improve the TiDB documentation and TiDB Cloud documentation, and enjoy the fun of collaboration.
You can participate in this event in any of the following ways:
- “Debug” the documentation: Follow the steps in the documentation (e.g., documentation for a new feature) to test whether it is complete and accurate.
- Improve the explanations and examples in existing documentation.
- Enhance the readability of the documentation.
- Identify spelling or grammatical errors in the documentation and provide suggestions for improvement.
- Translate documentation between Chinese and English.
The above are just some of the types of documentation contributions. We believe that the excellent TiDB community members will certainly provide even more surprising suggestions!
How will the TiDB Documentation Challenge be conducted?
Before the event
We will create a GitHub issue list where tasks can be claimed (each issue will be related to documentation that needs to be debugged, translated, or improved).
During the event
Community members can participate in documentation contributions by submitting Pull Requests (PRs), resolving issues, or commenting/suggesting on issues. Each time you submit a PR or provide useful suggestions for an issue on the GitHub issue list, you will earn corresponding points.
Different contributions to each PR or issue will earn different points (submitting a PR to resolve an issue will earn higher points compared to commenting or suggesting on an issue).
In addition to the issues listed on the GitHub issue list, we also welcome you to identify or resolve any other documentation issues, such as correcting spelling errors or improving readability. These contributions can also earn points by creating PRs or issues.
After the event
We will calculate the scores of each participant, provide customized electronic badges for all participants, community points for authors whose PRs are merged, and exquisite prizes for the top five participants. For detailed scoring rules, event gifts, and other important information, please stay tuned to the TiDB Documentation Challenge event introduction page.
In Conclusion
If you are interested in improving the TiDB or TiDB Cloud documentation and want to participate in a meaningful community event, join our TiDB Documentation Challenge from January 9 to 12, 2024!
We have also created #2024-tidb-docs-dash channels on Discord and Slack. Feel free to join these channels and follow the event announcements. We look forward to your questions and suggestions related to the event!
Meanwhile, we encourage everyone to share their real experiences using TiDB documentation. You can share your thoughts at any time in the comments of this post or in our Discord or Slack channels!
We look forward to collaborating with you in this event! 
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