The project includes a basic documentation

🇬🇧 Remember that the documentation must be in english (see #41 ) !

## **Basic** documentation

The project must, from the very beginning, includes a documentation with **basic** information:
- a **name** (eg: "pydox")
- a **title** (eg: "A Python library dedicated to Argo Oxygen data Calibration and Adjustment")
- and a **description** (eg: "Pydox is designed to compute oxygen calibration for Argo floats during Delayed-Mode Quality Control (DMQC). It helps users: Calculate gain, drift, and other calibration parameters with several methodology (in-air, climatology and reference CTD measurements), Determine if adjustments are needed (via plots and metrics), Apply calibrations to raw float data, Save adjusted data as DAC-ready Argo NetCDF files (BD files).")

The description must be very clear about the **link with the Argo dataset** (e.g. read index file, calibrate salinity, plot trajectory, assess BGC variables,...), see this guideline for more details: #66

If the software is not yet available on standard distribution platforms (eg: pypi, CRAN), a basic **installation** procedure and environment **requirements** should be indicated.

You can also mention **sponsors** and supporting projects if any.

The basic documentation must be located in a **README.md** file at the root level of the repository.

## Complementing the documentation

_As the project will gain in maturity_, here is a non-exhaustive list of other information that will be included in the **README.md** file:
- list of contributors,
- see: #10
- software unique identifiers,
- see: #49
- and: #28
- continuous integration badges,
- see: #52
- software distribution services and last released versions,
- see: #53
- list of supported systems and environment,
- see: #44
- and: #46

## Help

#### Writing README and documentation

Further guideline on writing a good README at:
https://github.com/hackergrrl/art-of-readme#key-elements

More software documentation guidelines at:
https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/better-research-software/07-software-documentation.html

#### Where to put your documentation ?

Short answer: your repository must have a **README.md** file at the root level. So this is where to put basic information.

For a more technical documentation, in the early stage of a project, it also possible to place more documentation:
- as a markdown cell in a notebook,
- in the commented header of a single module/function project.

As the project will gain in maturity, a full documentation system will be adopted (eg: readthedocs.com, mkdocs, ...). check guidelines #48 .
If you don't know when to start a full documentation system, just check at the length of your README file, when it requires too much scrolling, then it's time !