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<section id="helping-with-documentation">
<span id="documentation"></span><h1>Helping with documentation<a class="headerlink" href="#helping-with-documentation" title="Permalink to this heading">#</a></h1>
<p><strong>A great way to contribute to the project is to improve
documentation.</strong></p>
<p>If you are an Arrow user and you found some docs to be
incomplete or inaccurate, share your hard-earned knowledge
with the rest of the community.</p>
<p>If you didn’t come across something to improve in the
documentation itself, you can search for an issue in GitHub.</p>
<div class="admonition note">
<p class="admonition-title">Note</p>
<p>When searching for an issue that deals with documentation,
navigate to <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/apache/arrow/labels">GitHub labels</a>
and select <strong>Component: Documentation</strong> or search for <strong>Documentation</strong>
in the “Search all labels” window.</p>
<p>See <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22Component%3A+Documentation%22+">Example search.</a></p>
</div>
<p>Documentation improvements are also a great way to gain some
experience with our submission and review process without
requiring a lot of local development environment setup.</p>
<div class="admonition note">
<p class="admonition-title">Note</p>
<p>Many documentation-only changes can be made directly in the
GitHub web interface by clicking the <strong>Edit this page</strong>
on the right top corner of the documentations page. This
will handle making a fork and a pull request for you.</p>
<figure class="align-default" id="id1">
<a class="reference internal image-reference" href="../../_images/edit_page.jpeg"><img alt="click on edit this page" src="../../_images/edit_page.jpeg" style="width: 589.0px; height: 332.20000000000005px;" /></a>
<figcaption>
<p><span class="caption-text">On the right corner of the file in GitHub click on pen icon.</span><a class="headerlink" href="#id1" title="Permalink to this image">#</a></p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-default" id="id2">
<a class="reference internal image-reference" href="../../_images/github_edit_page.jpeg"><img alt="edit file in GitHub." src="../../_images/github_edit_page.jpeg" style="width: 553.1999999999999px; height: 342.3px;" /></a>
<figcaption>
<p><span class="caption-text">Now you can edit the file in GitHub.</span><a class="headerlink" href="#id2" title="Permalink to this image">#</a></p>
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</figure>
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<p>You could also build the entire project, make the change locally on
your branch and make the PR this way. But it is by no means superior
to simply editing via GitHub.</p>
<p>If you wish to build the documentation locally, follow detailed instructions
on <a class="reference internal" href="../documentation.html#building-docs"><span class="std std-ref">Building the Documentation</span></a>.</p>
<section id="where-to-find-the-correct-file-to-change">
<h2>Where to find the correct file to change?<a class="headerlink" href="#where-to-find-the-correct-file-to-change" title="Permalink to this heading">#</a></h2>
<p>Most of the documentation is located in the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">docs/source</span></code> of the Arrow
library. Source folder includes:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>C++ documentation</strong> section: <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">docs/source/cpp</span></code>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Development</strong> section: <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">docs/source/developers</span></code>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Specifications and protocols</strong> section: <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">docs/source/format</span></code>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Language documentation</strong></p>
<p><strong>C (GLib), Java, JavaScript</strong> and <strong>Python</strong> documentation is located
in folders named by the language, for example: <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">docs/source/c_glib</span></code>.</p>
<p><strong>Reference documentation</strong></p>
<p>To edit <a class="reference external" href="https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/api.html">API reference documentation for Python</a>,
you will need to edit the docstrings of the functions and methods located in
the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">pyarrow</span></code> package itself. For example, to edit
<a class="reference external" href="https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/generated/pyarrow.Array.html#pyarrow.Array">pyarrow.Array</a>
you will need to edit <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">docstrings</span></code> in <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/bc223c688add2f4f06be0c3569192178f1ca1091/python/pyarrow/array.pxi#L790-L796">arrow/pyarrow/array.pxi</a>.</p>
<p>It is similar for C++.</p>
</li>
<li><p>The documentation for the <strong>arrow R package</strong> (which is published on
the pkgdown site at <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">arrow.apache.org/docs/r/)</span></code> is located within
the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">r/</span></code> subdirectory.</p>
<div class="admonition seealso">
<p class="admonition-title">See also</p>
<p>To read more about documentation in R please visit:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p><a class="reference external" href="https://r-pkgs.org/man.html">Object documentation from the R packages book</a></p></li>
<li><p><a class="reference external" href="https://roxygen2.r-lib.org/">roxygen2</a></p></li>
<li><p><a class="reference external" href="https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/">pkgdown</a></p></li>
</ul>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Cookbooks</strong> have their own repository <a class="github reference external" href="https://github.com/apache/arrow-cookbook">apache/arrow-cookbook</a>
and can be separately cloned and built.</p>
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