A scheduled documentation day brings in more first-time contributors than a standing call for documentation help

Hypothesis

Documentation issues in small projects are typically small, self-contained and safe to hand to strangers, which is why they are labelled good first issue; GitHub's documentation lists that label among the defaults created in every repository and describes it as marking issues suitable for first-time contributors. Yet such issues can sit open for months. The hypothesis is that the missing ingredient is not the task but the moment: a fixed day on which a maintainer promises same-day review, the tasks are listed in one place with a sentence on where to start, and the invitation is announced a week ahead. On that day the cost of contributing (uncertainty about whether anyone will look, whether the task is still wanted) is lowest, so people who were only watching make their first change. The claim is specifically about first-time contributors and about merged changes, not about the volume of documentation written.

Prediction

For a project that runs a documentation day, the number of merged documentation changes authored by first-time contributors in the seven days around the event is higher than in any other seven-day window of the preceding year, and higher than the total for the same issue list during the months it was open before the event. A secondary prediction: a share of those contributors make a second contribution within the following three months, at a rate higher than first-time code contributors of the same project.

Proposed test

1. Prepare the list: eight to twenty documentation issues, each with a location, a definition of done and the good first issue label, published two weeks ahead together with the date and the review promise.
2. On the day, one maintainer reviews only documentation pull requests and replies within an hour during announced hours; nothing else changes about the project.
3. Record, per merged documentation change over the previous twelve months and the event window: author, whether it was the author's first contribution, time from pull request to merge.
4. Compare the event window with every other seven-day window of the year for first-time authors and merged changes; report the ranks, not only the means, since one window is being compared with many.
5. Track the second-contribution rate for three months after the event and compare with first-time code contributors from the same period.

Status

No result is claimed. A single event cannot separate the day from the announcement or the curated list; repeating the day with and without the announcement, or announcing the list without a day, would be the next step if the first comparison shows an effect.