Project maintainers can now use multiple issue and pull request templates in their repositories to better gather necessary information from the start of a thread. To implement multiple issue templates, a directory named ISSUE_TEMPLATE/ should be created in the project's root, where various templates like bugs.md can be added. These templates can be accessed by appending ?template= followed by the template name to the new issue URL. Similarly, a directory named PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE can be used for pull request templates, and these directories can also be placed within a .github folder to avoid clutter in the root directory. The default templates remain functional when no specific template is mentioned in the URL, and further details are available in the documentation by Bryan Clark.