[SciPy-Dev] SciPy docs: volunteers needed now!

[Emmanuelle Gouillart]

Hi all,

On Fri, Jul 02, 2010 at 02:40:01PM -0400, Matthew Brett wrote:

[need for volunteers]

> I wonder whether there is any other approach that we can explore to
> help generate more volunteer work?    Do you think it is mainly the
> difference between scipy and numpy that explains the drop-off?   Or
> something else?    To the extent that it is the technical differences
> - do you think there would be any point in trying to establish
> something like nominated experts or want-to-find-out type experts who
> will offer to advise on particular parts of scipy - even if they don't
> themselves write the docstrings?   Or anything else that might help?

I'm pretty sure that the observed lack of momentum is due to the
increased technicity of Scipy, as compared to Numpy. 

I myself feel that there is only a small fraction of Scipy docstrings I
could contribute to (that is, of course, docstrings of the functions that
I use). This is not quite true, because it's always possible to add
examples to a docstring even if one is not familiar with the function,
but we can't expect people to work on stuff they never use...

Therefore I think the paid coordinator has a very important "Public
Relation" task, which consists in identifying who uses which parts of
Scipy and building a network of contributors. I would advocate writing
personally to people posting on the mailing-list, asking if they could
contribute to previously-identified functions, or if a student of them
could, etc. Of course, this is a quite laborious work, but documenting
Scipy won't be a mass effort like Numpy's documentation.

I could try to do some more work on the documentation of
ndimage.morphology (on which I have worked a lot in the Spring) and
ndimage.measurements, but this may happen only in ten days: we're busy
organizing Euroscipy at the moment!

Cheers,

Emmanuelle