Define a practice around the documentation of our metrics

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Domain
documentation

Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Start by reviewing the proposed separation between function documentation and pkgdown articles, then clarify and agree on the metric documentation template; done means the project has an adopted practice for documenting what metrics do and why they matter.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

documentation

This is a summary of conversations that have happened in many places.

What I'm thinking there is:

  • All R package functions that "calculate" metrics must be clearly documented (obviously all functions should be documented)
  • At the level of the function, the documentation focuses exclusively on the WHAT. It is an unbiased description of what the function does, how it does this, what the parameters do and how you can use them. No description of the WHY should exist here.
  • At the level of the pkgdown article: this is where we document the WHY. I'm thinking we could even have a "metric template" that we use to ensure each one is specifically defined. This may look something like:
Metric Documentation Template

Audience: Who do we expect to take action using this metric?
Use-Case: What action can they take? How does the metric help them take this action? (Do we expect them to take the action using this alone, or in tandem with other metrics)
Metric Proposal: In words, what does the metric do.
Metric formulation: In math, what does the metric do.
Example: A plot, or table, or something similar.
Assumptions, considerations, notes etc.

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