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I can only really answer the first part of the question -- how help topics get initially:

From a software development position, it doesn't really matter what happens to the articles in the docs repo. What matters for deployment is having the help articles added to the seeds.

To do so, you need to do the following:

1. You need to **get a HTML version** of the article. If you've previously written it in markdown, you need to convert it. I'm mostly doing it manually, but there are countless websites and tools for it, for example https://markdowntohtml.com.

2. You need to **find an URL slug** for the article. This is, what will be in the URL as `/help/[slug]`. This should be mostly alpha-numeric, plus _ and -.

3. You need to **create a file for the body** of the article. This file must be placed under `db/seeds/posts/[slug].html`. Write the HTML version of the article into that file.

4. You need to **add a seeds entry** for the article. This one needs to be appended to `db/seeds/posts.yml`. What you need to add follows the following template:

       - post_type_id: <%= HelpDoc.post_type_id %>
         title: [post title]
         body_markdown: $FILE posts/[slug].html
         body: $FILE posts/[slug].html
         doc_slug: [slug]
         help_category: [category]

    In this template, replace [post title] with the title you want the help article to have, [slug] with the aforementioned slug and [category] with the name of the [help category](/help) (posts with the exact same category name will be grouped into one category).

    This template creates a classical *help post*. These can be edited by community moderators. If you want to have a *policy document*, which can only be edited by administrators, replace `HelpDoc` with `PolicyDoc` in the first line.

This should be all you need to create a help topic. To make sure, I recommend to run `db:seed` locally before you push the commit to production, because modifying seeded posts is a bit harder... :D