[SciPy-dev] Question about editing docs

[Bruce Southey]

Skipper Seabold wrote:
> I've been going through scipy.stats.mstats and the tests to get a
> better feel for masked arrays and how they are handled for statistical
> functions.  I noticed what I believed to be an error in the examples
> of the docstring for mstats_basic.count_tied_groups, which I corrected
> here: <http://docs.scipy.org/scipy/docs/scipy.stats.mstats_basic.count_tied_groups/>.
>
> My question is (as you can see) I had to also correct some formatting
> (and there is still some to be done), but I don't think I should be
> doing this kind of thing incrementally.  Or should I?  Is there
> another way I can edit multiple docstrings to get them to conform to
> the numpy standard and rst when I notice something or is this best
> left to someone else?  I see that mstats_basic "Needs Editing."  Sorry
> if I'm missing something obvious.  This wouldn't be the first
> time...today.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Skipper
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>   
Hi,
My understanding is that virtually none of the stats functions have been 
edited as part of the SciPy documentation marathon. This means that 
nobody has edited the original docstring.  Any effort to make the 
docstrings conform to the standards is welcome.

Based on the Numpy documentation marathon, in my view you really need to 
do each function separately. You can cut and paste followed any 
necessary editing especially between scipy.stats and scipy.mstats 
because the former use 'standard' numpy arrays and the latter uses 
masked arrays. Ideally there should be a single version and the 
associated docstring where possible (so far I have only managed to 
supply patches for gmean and hmean).

Some of the functions are or should be depreciated but this information 
is not in the docstring. For example the mean and std in stats are 
depreciated because these duplicate the Numpy functions and I created 
some tickets for others that should also be depreciated. So I would 
recommend against documenting the depreciated functions.

Regards
Bruce