If you click through to https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.hist.html#matplotlib.axes.Axes.hist there is a list of many examples that include hist at the bottom of the page. This to me is the right place to have the list. I suppose it is conceivable that this info could be replicated at the bottom of each of those examples - I'm not sure if there are performance penalties this could incur, and I'm not sure any such capability exists in sphinx gallery.

That list is indeed nice, that said I've rarely, if ever, scrolled down to it, and that's pretty difficult to end up at directly from an example. A nice improvement could even be to directly link to that list from the examples where it seems relevant.

An issue with that list though it that the examples included in are not included in the meta-topic Learning basic histogram techniques I think I was envisioning. For example all of these:

are great examples, and I think stand on their own, but aren't really related examples to a basic histogram example. More generally here are their any guidelines for what should be included in the references section of the example? Should every example reference plt.subplots? or is their some strategy for being parsimonious with referencing oft used functions?

Related examples could be nice.

We sometimes link other examples from the description, see e.g.

• https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/gallery/lines_bars_and_markers/liestyles.html
• https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/gallery/color/named_colors.html

The references section is currently only intended for function/class references. It's main purpose is to add code that will add the example to the mini-gallery under the referenced function/class. But we might change that; see #19232.

I have some concerns that a broad introduction of cross-links won't work because curating these is a lot of additional manual work. We don't even get close to having the function/class references documented properly. And there's some redundancy in the examples which would be good to get cleaned out. So there is already a lot of open work in that area. OTOH it may be useful to specify a pattern for cross-linking examples (possibly as part of the References sectio, xref #19232). And if we have such links it may help cleaning redundancy later.

I have some concerns that a broad introduction of cross-links won't work because curating these is a lot of additional manual work. We don't even get close to having the function/class references documented properly.

OTOH it may be useful to specify a pattern for cross-linking examples

It seems to me that even a sparse cross linking of examples would purely be an improvement. Having a pattern to specify this (especially one that embeds the thumbnail as well) would be great.

And there's some redundancy in the examples which would be good to get cleaned out

As I've been perusing the examples more carefully I've also been thinking this. But was hesitant to suggest since removal of resources does not seem ideal. Though I suppose clutter can make it more confusing.

I try and cross link new examples and try to ask new examples do so. Someone could go through and add more such cross links, but I'm skeptical about automagically adding a whole bunch.

As always the issue with removing and reorganizing examples is redirecting old locations. Someone noted that there may be a new Sphinx extension to set up redirects.

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I guess this could be addressed by @esibinga's tagging work?

@rcomer that is the plan, but I'd suggest keeping this open in case we need extra features to group examples later.