It’s just over a year since issue gh-101100 was opened, when we had 8,212 Sphinx reference warnings in the docs.
Since then, we’ve made a concerted effort to fix them: 118 PRs plus 196 backport PRs (linked to gh-101100) have fixed over half of them (52%), and we’re down to 3,951! 
Looking just in the Doc/ directory, 56% are fixed. 
We also now check for Sphinx warnings on the CI (thanks to @encukou for the proof-of-concept in this thread), and don’t allow “cleaned” files to introduce new warnings, through an entry in a file called .nitignore (shout out to @CAM-Gerlach for the inspired name!).
When we created .nitignore, it listed 299 files with warnings. We’ve fixed 64% and are down to 108. 
Raw numbers
| Tag | Date | All warnings | % fixed | Doc/ | % fixed | .nitignore entries | % fixed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| main/gh-101100 | 2023-01-17 | 8,212 | 0.00% | 7,129 | 0.00% | n/a | n/a |
| 3.12.0a5 | 2023-02-07 | 8,187 | 0.30% | 7,445 | -4.43% | n/a | n/a |
| 3.12.0a6 | 2023-03-07 | 8,096 | 1.41% | 7,450 | -4.50% | n/a | n/a |
| 3.12.0a7 | 2023-04-04 | 8,428 | -2.63% | 7,492 | -5.09% | 299 | 0.00% |
| 3.12.0b1 | 2023-05-22 | 7,754 | 5.58% | 6,651 | 6.71% | 294 | 1.67% |
| 3.12.0b2 | 2023-06-06 | 7,749 | 5.64% | 6,638 | 6.89% | 293 | 2.01% |
| 3.12.0b3 | 2023-06-19 | 7,722 | 5.97% | 6,607 | 7.32% | 293 | 2.01% |
| 3.12.0b4 | 2023-07-11 | 7,638 | 6.99% | 6,520 | 8.54% | 293 | 2.01% |
| (3.12.0rc1) main | 2023-08-06 | 6,331 | 22.91% | 5,212 | 26.89% | 239 | 20.07% |
| (3.12.0rc2) main | 2023-09-06 | 5,615 | 31.62% | 4,587 | 35.66% | 177 | 40.80% |
| (3.12.0rc3) main | 2023-09-19 | 5,597 | 31.84% | 4,573 | 35.85% | 176 | 41.14% |
| (3.12.0) main | 2023-10-02 | 5,499 | 33.04% | 4,475 | 37.23% | 166 | 44.48% |
| 3.13.0a1 | 2023-10-13 | 5,483 | 33.23% | 4,454 | 37.52% | 165 | 44.82% |
| 3.13.0a2 | 2023-11-22 | 5,325 | 35.16% | 4,288 | 39.85% | 155 | 48.16% |
| (3.12.1) main | 2023-12-07 | 5,094 | 37.97% | 4,058 | 43.08% | 143 | 52.17% |
| 3.13.0a3 | 2024-01-17 | 4,015 | 51.11% | 3,237 | 54.59% | 117 | 60.87% |
| main | 2024-01-26 | 3,939 | 52.03% | 3,162 | 55.65% | 108 | 63.88% |
Thanks to everyone for helping out, and keep up the good work!