DRY way to write Javadoc on overload methods

Javadoc (and, in the Microsoft word, XMLDoc) annotations are not comments, they are documentation.

Comments can be as sparse as you want them to be; assuming your code is halfway readable, then ordinary comments are merely signposts to aid future developers in understanding/maintaining the code that they've already been staring at for two hours.

The documentation represents a contract between a unit of code and its callers. It is part of the public API. Always assume that Javadoc/XMLdoc will end up either in a help file or in an autocomplete/intellisense/code-completion popup, and be observed by people who are not examining the internals of your code but merely wish to use it for some purpose of their own.

Argument/parameter names are never self-explanatory. You always think they are when you've spent the past day working on the code, but try coming back to it after a 2-week vacation and you'll see just how unhelpful they really are.

Don't misunderstand me - it's important to choose meaningful names for variables and arguments. But that is a code concern, not a documentation concern. Don't take the phrase "self-documenting" too literally; that is meant in the context of internal documentation (comments), not external documentation (contracts).

In any writing, you write for your audience. Your audience is the maintenance developer, which may be you after 3 years after you have forgotten the details of how it all works.

Single use throw away code, probably can be commented less. APIs to be consumed by other developers needs to be documented more.

In no case does anyone need javadoc that only repeats the method signature (e.g. "This is a method with a return value of void and a name of HelloWorld and is invoked with no paramters")