This repo provide vanilla community files and language-agnostic git files to serve as starting point for other repositories.

Community files are "metacontent" that provide help to users on how to use the project, where to find help, how to contribute and how to report issues.

Repository services such as Github and Gitlab also make use of specific files as templates like issue and pull request templates.

Cuz they give you autonomy to get start by yourself without needing of another human to guide you. Since every project has potential to become worldwide at anytime, the core maintainers couldn't be available to help you due to business-times or different timezones. Also, if a small project become famous, the sole single maintainer wouldn't be able to answer all the people questions, including the repeated ones.

Here comes files like README, that explains the project purposes and give you directions about how to go further. CONTRIBUTING, containing coding-standards, pull-request policies, how to run the tests and all the other development cool stuff. LICENSE, that explains what you can and - even more important - can't do with the code and the software that it produces. SUPPORT files provide information about the community channels where you can get (and offer) help.

Github team started a project called OpenSource Guide with tips about how to build welcoming communities, leadership and governance, code of conduct and legal stuff for maintainers among other things and how to contribute for people looking for existent projects that need some help.

Mainly: .gitignore and .gitattributes

.gitignore provides a list of files that shouldn't be versioned through the repository. Sample of these files are build artifacts and temporary-intermediary files like cache or tempfiles and IDE/editors settings.

.gitattributes tells git how to behave with versioned files, like how to parse them, show its diffs, if it should apply any filter/algorithm and also helps handling linebreaks between different operational systems.