Python has a lot of known and unknown bugs that need to be fixed, many missing features needing to be implemented, and a lot of room for improvement in its documentation.  That’s why we welcome people who want to help.

You’re not the first one to propose a trivial typographic patch that is rejected.  I’m writing this long-ish message to serve as a reference for future rejections.

Maybe you thought it would be a risk-free way to become a contributor, but as it turns out, this kind of patches is not helpful.  All Python developers are volunteers, and we review bugs and patches on our limited free time.  It is worthwhile to fix clear errors, ambiguities, outdated facts and wrong advice in the documentation; it is not worthwhile to add or remove a few commas and hyphens just for consistency’s sake.  (Moreover, hyphens in English don’t have rules as clear as we commonly think, like poq pointed.)

There is no “some places title-case, other places sentence-case” philosophy; different people wrote various parts of the documentation, and we just live with it.  We fix bugs, improve code, add examples, think about missing features, read specifications, reply to email, improve wordings; we just don’t have the time to care about questionable changes that don’t add any value for us or our users.  Consistency is a design principle; it does not mean obsessive polishing.  There are also other principles that are equally valid, and also pure pragmatic constraints.

John and Matthew, you are more than welcome to report bugs you find, or to work on fixing a bug, from the long list of bugs that really would improve people’s life when fixed.  If you are unsure about the process or about your patch, please join http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/core-mentorship mailing list to ask any question you might have: we will help you.

Hope this clarifies things without hurting anyone’s feelings.