Arya et al 2024: "The Software Documentor Mindset" https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09422 Explores why people voluntarily create documentation for open source software projects, how they pick topics, and other related factors; none of the findings are particularly surprising in retrospect, but that's not the same as saying I could have predicted them. #nwit
@gvwilson I'd love to see "what holds you back when writing docs". Social things will be obvious (yet super important), but I have lots of mental blocks like checked cross-references, testing of all code in docs, and lints, etc. This also makes it feel like it would be inappropriate to ask for doc help in a project that's doesn't meet such standards, though doing so is difficult in mixed language projects.
@jedbrown the authors' email addresses are in the preprint and I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from you.