Many folks ask for help (via IRC or filing GitHub issues) without
sufficient detail and/or without first determining if the answers to
their questions might be better sourced elsewhere. These
documentation changes encourage users to follow certain guidelines
when reaching out for help.
GitHub recently added a feature that looks for a CONTRIBUTING file in
repo root and displays it whenever a user creates an issue or submits a
pull request. I took this opportunity to put some contribution
submission guidelines into that file, including it dynamically inside
our existing docs/contribute.rst file to eliminate unnecessary
redundancy.