Therefore you'll have to do some of your homework before asking people. RTFM springs to mind. Show them that you have tried, read the documentation, tried again, searched everywhere possible, and then tried again and a lot of people will go out of their way to help you out. Both parties grow because of the event, and work gets done quickly and efficiently. From what I've read and heard a lot of the philosophy of sharing information, code and ideas comes from the past, when access to the Internet was scarce, documentation was not hugely accessible, and people had to gather in groups to be able to get things done.
Nobody owns it, it's people who have agreed to connect each others networks.
I try to follow up on this philosophy. I try to document it as good as I can, and then let other people know about it. That way other people feel I am contributing to the community, and I get feedback from others about how I can make what I've done better. I have a couple of JavaScripts out, a tree menu and a remote control, and I get a lot of mail from visitors, both bug reports and general comments. Not one has yet to be anything but positive.