Align and mature reference guides

[MarcSkovMadsen]

Looking at the reference guides of HoloViews it looks to me as they are far from the structure and usefulness I'm used to from Pandas and Panel.

They don't systematically

• explain the available arguments
• provide different examples and basic use cases.
• explain in text what is happening and why it works

Instead they seem to rely on and "outsource" to the user guide and hv.help. But as a user I was investing time on navigating to the reference not to spend time on reading a guide. I go there because a web page is better to read than hv.help and can include images, videos, plots widgets etc.

I've created a couple of example issues in https://github.com/holoviz/holoviews/issues/5372 and https://github.com/holoviz/holoviews/issues/5371

But I believe the issue is general and it would be needed for more adoption of HoloViews to provide better reference documentation.

Personally I would like contribute links from the docstring of a Feature to corresponding reference. This (for me) has been a game changer in efficiency when working with Panel. But I need the reference guides to be similarly useful to create the same value.

[mycrickets]

I would like to assist with this ticket, if possible. thanks.

[philippjfr]

Hi @CMRicketts, I see you're volunteering on lots of issues which is super exciting for us! So you and we both can figure out how to get the most out of your contributions I just wanted to check what would excite you most and how much time you envision spending on this (we are of course grateful for any contributions you can make). We'll be starting a larger effort around improving and overhauling our docs and the best starting point might be for you to join our bi-weekly team meeting next Friday. If you're interested I'll send over an invite.

[mycrickets]

@philippjfr I'd be happy to help out with the reference guides/documentation over the docstrings. I'm in a similar position to @MarcSkovMadsen -- I use Holoviews a fair bit, and I feel like the current sites' documentation could be matured.

I would be happy to join the team meeting, assuming I am free during that time. Feel free to reach out to me directly at [email protected]

[droumis]

Proposal for Panel's reference gallery (aka component gallery, aka reference guides). As we are hoping to use enhancements to Panel's docs to improve the rest of HoloViz docs, it would be good to align efforts