If the docstring for a method has example code that uses 'self',
the 'self' will not appear in the HTML generated by pydoc.writedoc

Example:
#---------------------------------
def getAnswer(self):
    """
    Return the answer.
    Example of use:
        answer = self.getAnswer()
    """
    return 42
#---------------------------------

The generated HTML will have:

getAnswer(self)
    Return the answer.
    Example of use:
        answer = getAnswer()

where the final "getAnswer" is an HTML link.
--------------------------------------------

I believe the problem arises on line 553 of the Python 2.7 version of pydoc.py which is as follows:
    results.append(self.namelink(name, methods, funcs, classes))
The appended text is the same whether or not the method call in the docstring was prefaced with 'self' or not. The 'self' has been eaten up by the regex and is in the 'selfdot' variable which is ignored by the above line.