GitHub READMEs are an excellent compromise. Doing more detailed docs are quite a lot of effort (that is better spent coding), especially to projects that are at an early stage.
Projects which are an early stage (like most of my projects) should mostly try to attract potential contributors, not just consumers/end-users so it's not unreasonable to require would-be users/contributors to walk the extra mile and actually read (at least parts of) the source. I do that even for projects that are well established with docs if I intend to depend on them.
If there actually were libs that are well documented and do the same thing, I wouldn't have started the projects I did but contribute to the existing projects instead. This may not be true for all kinds of projects.
There's a double standard here. You want developers to contribute to your project despite the lack of documentation but you require that libraries you contribute to are well documented.
> ...but you require that libraries you contribute to are well documented.
You misread me. I almost never read the docs because they suck more often than not. I start from example and test source code and almost always end up reading parts or most of the source code.
Even very early alpha code can find its way into production systems. I'm familiar with a case involving a three-letter household name company a few years back using early releases of cassandra, as well as nginx (not entirely beta at that point, but with much of the documentation still in Russian).
Engineering making it work was a long way from operations making it reliable and understood.
Projects which are an early stage (like most of my projects) should mostly try to attract potential contributors, not just consumers/end-users so it's not unreasonable to require would-be users/contributors to walk the extra mile and actually read (at least parts of) the source. I do that even for projects that are well established with docs if I intend to depend on them.
If there actually were libs that are well documented and do the same thing, I wouldn't have started the projects I did but contribute to the existing projects instead. This may not be true for all kinds of projects.