We examine several issues around the formats, practices, and challenges around documentation in these largely volunteer-based projects. This article is a collaboration between CSCW researchers and contributors to data analytics OSS libraries, based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews. Yet documentation for open source software libraries is widely considered low-quality. Software documentation for these libraries is crucial in helping programmers/analysts know what libraries are available and how to use them. Computational research and data analytics increasingly relies on complex ecosystems of open source software (OSS) “libraries” – curated collections of reusable code that programmers import to perform a specific task.
