On 29/04 09:16, Elijah Newren wrote: 

Mostly looks good, but I can't help but nitpick several small items:
The first sentence alone seems to slightly undercut the answer, so
it'd be nice to make sure the first two sentences are just one.  Also,
it doesn't explain how people get into this state, which is probably
something users are curious about.  The "To ignore and untrack the
files" lists multiple end results, making it unclear which parts of
the end results the suggested steps are addressing.  There's also a
"staging are" typo (should be "staging area").

How about something like:

The purpose of gitignore files is to ensure that certain files not
tracked by Git remain untracked.  However, git allows people to
override the `gitignore` rules by using the --force option to `git
add`, and sometimes people started tracking a file unintentionally
before adding a pattern covering it to the gitignore rules.  If you
want to untrack a file, run `git rm --cached <file>` (and then
commit).  See linkgit:gitignore[5] for details.

This seems better, will improve. :)