Pauli Virtanen and myself have finally finished transfering the numpy documentation editor to http://docs.scipy.org. The documentation editor is a project that has been mainly championed by Pauli. It allows you to edit in a wiki-like fashion the documentation for numpy, including the docstring. The changes are reviewed by editors, and eventually merged in the numpy svn. As a result, they are shipped with numpy and end up on everybody’s install of numpy.
the documentation editor has been deployed during the summer on my girlfriend’s hosted server, but we where afraid it wouldn’t scale there (and beside using my girlfriend’s server was not ideal). The contributions made throught the web portal have already helped improve the numpy documentation tremendously. It is a pleasure to look at the docstring of a function and find it actually helpful. Now that it is hosted on the main scipy servers, we are no longer afraid of making as much publicity as possible around it. So please, go straight to http://docs.scipy.org and start improving the docs. More seriously, when you think a feature is poorly documented, when you have faught for a few hours to understand how a function works, improve the docs, it is very easy, and if everybody does this, you’ll save time too.
In the long run we would like to get scipy itself under the same mechanism, and I would love to open the service to other major Python scientific computing librairies that form the scipy ecosystem.
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