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Documentation health

concept
1 min readUpdated

2061 symbols have a reference page in this documentation. This page says how each of them came to be described, because "documented" covers four situations a reader should not have to treat alike.

Where the descriptions come from

SymbolsWhat it means for a reader
Written by the author199 of 2061A doc comment in the source. Nothing generated improves on this.
Generated, with citations107 of 2061Points at specific file:line ranges you can open and check.
Generated, without citations504 of 2061Often right, but nothing anchors it. Treat as a starting point.
Not described1251 of 2061The page shows structure only — signature, members, references.

306 of 2061 descriptions can be checked against source — 199 because the author wrote them next to the code, 107 because the generator cited the lines it read. The rest are shown, and marked, for what they are.

Why there is no coverage percentage

A percentage counts whether a comment exists, so the cheapest way to raise it is to add empty ones. SonarQube withdrew its comment-density metric over this; studies of "covered" API documentation classify 43–51% of it as carrying no information; and a missing-comment warning has been measured producing 1,774 junk comments in a single codebase. The counts above cannot be moved that way — a doc comment that only restates the symbol name is not counted as one.

Where the gaps are

Undescribed symbols, by the part of the system they sit in.

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