Greg Dunlap (heyrocker)

I have been involved in several documentation efforts this year, and there is one thing that inevitably came out of these efforts - I found bugs in code and they got fixed. You see, when you write documentation, you are forced to take a bit of code and really understand it. You pre through it, make sure it does what you're saying it does, and test it. Guess what happens when you dig into code that deeply? You find bugs! Usually they are small or subtle. A misnamed variable, a branch that can never actually get reached, an improperly written test, an unclear or difficult to read statement. However the more bugs of this type that are found, the less user frustration later in the release cycle, and the less support that has to happen after Drupal 7 finally gets out the door. I would say that the ratio of my docs patches to bug fixes resulting from docs patches is on the order of 1:1.5.

If you are interested in getting involved in core, working the docs queue is the single best way to do it. You find bugs other people miss, the patches are generally easy to get committed, you get used to the issue queue and creating patches, and best of all the patches are enormously valuable. Get to it!