Dan Hatton dan.hatton@btinternet.com wrote: [...]
examples of their contributions like writing formal documentation, and well-crafted bug reports. [...]
Well, yes, I'm sure that if people are doing useful things like good bug reports (or helping sort out some of the messes that get entered into reports that the developers can understand) and writing docs, then even James wouldn't accuse them of taking a "free ride". This is the new world and you can pay for your ticket with barter.
Some of the best documentation Google can find is the informal [...]
It would help me more if people actually built their web sites to link useful things instead of expecting the world to use search engines, but I'm probably at least as bad. I do try to copy things out of my bookmarks onto my web site regularly, though... time to go do that again.