My First Open Source Contribution: Fixing Docs for WSO2 API Manager

Chenthan — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:04:18 +0000

Today I made my first contribution to an open source project — a small documentation fix for WSO2 API Manager.

I found the "Updating WSO2 API Manager" page in their docs and noticed a few issues: a grammatically incorrect sentence ("conflicts that can be occurred" instead of "conflicts that may occur"), a missing space that broke a markdown heading, and a small inconsistency in hyphenation. Nothing huge, but real issues that affected how the page read and rendered.

I forked the wso2/docs-apim repository on GitHub, made the edits directly in their browser-based file editor, and opened a pull request against their master branch. WSO2 uses the standard open source flow: fork, edit, commit, PR, and then a maintainer reviews before merging.

A few things I learned along the way:

Documentation contributions are one of the most approachable ways to start contributing to open source, since they don't require deep product knowledge, just careful reading.
GitHub's in-browser file editor makes it possible to contribute without installing Git locally.
Contributions to WSO2 projects require signing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before a PR can be merged, which is a one-time step for new contributors.

My PR is currently awaiting review from WSO2's documentation team. Even before it's merged, going through the full process taught me more about how real-world open source collaboration works than any tutorial could.

If you're looking for a low-pressure way to start contributing to open source, documentation is a great place to begin.

DEV Community: Chenthan

My First Open Source Contribution: Fixing Docs for WSO2 API Manager