diff --git a/docs/api/initializer.rst b/docs/api/initializer.rst
index 3f4126721542..94a60e4021b0 100644
--- a/docs/api/initializer.rst
+++ b/docs/api/initializer.rst
@@ -65,5 +65,24 @@ Built-in initializers
    The initializer documented in the paper [Bengio and Glorot 2010]: *Understanding
    the difficulty of training deep feedforward neuralnetworks*.
 
+   There are several different version of the XaiverInitializer used in the wild.
+   The general idea is that the variance of the initialization distribution is controlled
+   by the dimensionality of the input and output. As a distribution one can either choose
+   a normal distribution with μ = 0 and σ² or a uniform distribution from -σ to σ.
+
+   Several different ways of calculating the variance are given in the literature or are
+   used by various libraries.
+
+   - original [Bengio and Glorot 2010]: σ² = 2 / (in + out)
+   - msra [K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun 2015]: σ² = 2 / in
+   - caffe_avg: 6 / (in + out)
+   - caffe_in: 3 / in
+   - caffe_out: 3 / out
+   - mxnet: 3 / (in + out)
+
+   Distribution and variant can be chosen by enums (prefixed by ``xv_``).
+   As an example take ``mx.XaiverInitializer(distribution = mx.xv_normal, variant = mx.xv_mxnet)``,
+   which is currently the default.
+
 
 
diff --git a/src/initializer.jl b/src/initializer.jl
index 6a941610e1cd..2fac334448a5 100644
--- a/src/initializer.jl
+++ b/src/initializer.jl
@@ -112,7 +112,7 @@ end
 
    Several different ways of calculating the variance are given in the literature or are
    used by various libraries.
-  
+
    - original [Bengio and Glorot 2010]: σ² = 2 / (in + out)
    - msra [K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun 2015]: σ² = 2 / in
    - caffe_avg: 6 / (in + out)
@@ -120,8 +120,8 @@ end
    - caffe_out: 3 / out
    - mxnet: 3 / (in + out)
 
-   Distribution and variant can be chosen by enums (prefixed by xv_).
-   As an example take mx.XaiverInitializer(distribution = mx.xv_normal, variant = mx.xv_mxnet),
+   Distribution and variant can be chosen by enums (prefixed by ``xv_``).
+   As an example take ``mx.XaiverInitializer(distribution = mx.xv_normal, variant = mx.xv_mxnet)``,
    which is currently the default.
 =#