I have same thought as Nyall. In the past documentation team stated that all they need is a detailed commit messages and corresponding tickets in the documentation repo. And their preference was to write docs by themselves instead of rewriting/adopting texts provided by devs. If I remember correctly, main reason was that documentation from devs is not user-friendly (too technical) and does not follow documentation sctructure/style/etc and as result adopting it requires more time than writting from scratch.

I agree in principle but I'd suggest to change the proposal to "we should mandate that any new features being added to QGIS be accompanied by all the information that is needed to produce the user documentation (snapshots, code snippets, workflows etc.).". The rationale (in addition to what already stated by Alex and Mathieu) is doublefold: first the documentation is on a different git repo and it would be difficult (slower) to get a double approval before merging a new feture, second documentation team has its own set of rules and guidelines RST-trickeries that are not always easy to follow for an occasional documentation writer. But I agree that the documentation team should have all the information they need at hand and ready to be integrated.

Well said.

Yes that is a very good modification to the original proposal...

@nyalldawson I didn't mean to make screenshots mandatory, but a screenshot or a short video can be occasionally helpful for documentation writers to quickly understand what a new feature brings or what changes to the GUI are to be expected and documented (vector node editing is a good example). I usually find them very useful in some PRs.

Tim, can you launch a new alternative proposal based on the above? The one of the two proposals with a better Yes/No-Vote ratio shall be accepted, if both get more no votes, nothing will be done.

For the alternative one, I'd like to take the screenshot comment also into consideration, screenshots/screencases are very helpful but should act as orientation, and not necessarily as material for the final documentation (at the documentation team discretion).

Agreed on screenshots for all of the above mentioned reasons. We should really encourage devs to attach shots and casts, it makes it easier to understand the goal (s) of a given feature and helps review relevant UI/UX bits too.

Will do - and in the larger context I think it is not so important for RST either - rather just having a proper description of the new functionality in plain text that the documentors can embellish instead of figuring out new functionality themselves would be a good solution.