Writing Documentation

Thank you for your interest in contributing documentation to Dataverse! Good documentation is absolutely critical to the success of software.

Overview

The Dataverse guides are written using Sphinx.

The source files are stored under doc/sphinx-guides in the main “dataverse” repo on GitHub.

Historically, guides have been written in the default Sphinx format, reStructuredText (.rst), but newer guides such as the Contributor Guide are written in Markdown (.md).

Below we’ll present a technique for making quick edits to the guides using GitHub’s web editor (“quick fix”). We’ll also describe how to install Sphinx locally for more significant edits.

Finally, we’ll provide some guidelines on writing content.

We could use some help on writing this very page and helping newcomers get started. Please don’t be shy about suggesting improvements! You can open an issue at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues, post to https://chat.dataverse.org, write to the mailing list, or suggest a change with a pull request.

Quick Fix

If you find a typo or a small error in the documentation you can fix it using GitHub’s online web editor. Generally speaking, we will be following GitHub’s guidance on editing files in another user’s repository.

  • Navigate to https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/tree/develop/doc/sphinx-guides/source where you will see folders for each of the guides: admin, api, container, etc.

  • Find the file you want to edit under one of the folders above.

  • Click the pencil icon in the upper-right corner. If this is your first contribution to Dataverse, the hover text over the pencil icon will say “Fork this project and edit this file”.

  • Make changes to the file and preview them.

  • In the Commit changes box, enter a description of the changes you have made and click Propose file change.

  • Under the Write tab, delete the long welcome message and write a few words about what you fixed.

  • Click Create Pull Request.

That’s it! Thank you for your contribution! Your pull request will be added manually to the main Dataverse project board at https://github.com/orgs/IQSS/projects/34 and will go through code review and QA before it is merged into the “develop” branch. Along the way, developers might suggest changes or make them on your behalf. Once your pull request has been merged you will be listed as a contributor at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/graphs/contributors! 🎉

Please see https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/5857 for an example of a quick fix that was merged (the “Files changed” tab shows how a typo was fixed).

Preview your documentation changes which will be built automatically as part of your pull request in Github. It will show up as a check entitled: docs/readthedocs.org:dataverse-guide — Read the Docs build succeeded!. For example, this PR built to https://dataverse-guide–9249.org.readthedocs.build/en/9249/.

If you would like to read more about the Dataverse’s use of GitHub, please see the Version Control section of the Developer Guide. For bug fixes and features we request that you create an issue before making a pull request but this is not at all necessary for quick fixes to the documentation.

Building the Guides with Sphinx

While the “quick fix” technique shown above should work fine for minor changes, in many cases, you’re going to want to preview changes locally before committing them.

Before we worry about pushing changes to the code, let’s make sure we can build the guides.

Go to https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse and click “Code” and then follow the instructions to clone the code locally.

Docker

Install Docker Desktop.

From a terminal, switch to the “dataverse” directory you just cloned. This is the root of the git repo.

cd dataverse

Then try running this command:

docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/docs sphinxdoc/sphinx:7.2.6 bash -c "cd doc/sphinx-guides && pip3 install -r requirements.txt && make html"

If all goes well, you should be able to open doc/sphinx-guides/build/html/index.html to see the guides you just built.

Docker with a Makefile

Once you’ve confirmed you have Docker working, if you have make installed, you can try the following commands:

make docs-html

make docs-pdf

make docs-epub

make docs-all

Sphinx Installed Locally

First, run python --version or python3 --version to determine the version of Python you have. If you don’t have Python 3.10 or higher, you must upgrade.

Next, change to the doc/sphinx-guides directory.

cd doc/sphinx-guides

Create a Python virtual environment, activate it, then install dependencies:

python3 -m venv venv

source venv/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

Next, install GraphViz because building the guides requires having the dot executable from GraphViz either on the path or passed as an argument.

On a Mac we recommend installing GraphViz through Homebrew. Once you have Homebrew installed and configured to work with your shell, you can type brew install graphviz.

Finally, you can try building the guides with the following command.

make html

If all goes well, you should be able to open doc/sphinx-guides/build/html/index.html to see the guides you just built.

Editing, Building, and Previewing the Guides

To edit the existing documentation:

  • Create a branch (see How to Make a Pull Request).

  • In doc/sphinx-guides/source you will find the .rst or .md files that correspond to https://guides.dataverse.org.

  • Using your preferred text editor, open and edit the necessary files, or create new ones.

Once you are done, you can preview the changes by building the guides using one of the options above.

After Sphinx is done processing the files you should notice that the html folder in doc/sphinx-guides/build directory has been updated. You can click on the files in the html folder to preview the changes.

Making a Pull Request

Now you can make a commit with the changes to your own fork in GitHub and submit a pull request. See How to Make a Pull Request.

Writing Guidelines

Writing Style Guidelines

Please observe the following when writing documentation:

  • Use American English spelling.

  • Use examples when possible.

  • Break up longer paragraphs.

  • Use Title Case in Headings.

  • Use “double quotes” instead of ‘single quotes’.

  • Favor “and” (data and code) over slashes (data/code).

Table of Contents

Every non-index page should use the following code to display a table of contents of internal sub-headings. This code should be placed below any introductory text and directly above the first subheading, much like a Wikipedia page.

If the page is written in reStructuredText (.rst), use this form:

.. contents:: |toctitle|
    :local:

If the page is written in Markdown (.md), use this form:

```{contents} Contents:
:local:
:depth: 3
```

Images

A good documentation is just like a website enhanced and upgraded by adding high quality and self-explanatory images. Often images depict a lot of written text in a simple manner. Within our Sphinx docs, you can add them in two ways: a) add a PNG image directly and include or b) use inline description languages like GraphViz (current only option).

While PNGs in the git repo can be linked directly via URL, Sphinx-generated images do not need a manual step and might provide higher visual quality. Especially in terms of quality of content, generated images can be extendend and improved by a textbased and reviewable commit, without needing raw data or source files and no diff around.

Cross References

When adding ReStructured Text (.rst) cross references, use the hyphen character (-) as the word separator for the cross reference label. For example, my-reference-label would be the preferred label for a cross reference as opposed to, for example, my_reference_label.

PDF Version of the Guides

The HTML version of the guides is the official one. Any other formats are maintained on a best effort basis.

If you would like to build a PDF version of the guides and have Docker installed, please try the command below from the root of the git repo:

docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/docs sphinxdoc/sphinx-latexpdf:7.2.6 bash -c "cd doc/sphinx-guides && pip3 install -r requirements.txt && make latexpdf LATEXMKOPTS=\"-interaction=nonstopmode\"; cd ../.. && ls -1 doc/sphinx-guides/build/latex/Dataverse.pdf"

A few notes about the command above:

  • Hopefully the PDF was created at doc/sphinx-guides/build/latex/Dataverse.pdf.

  • For now, we are using “nonstopmode” but this masks some errors.

  • See requirements.txt for a note regarding the version of Sphinx we are using.

Also, as of this writing we have enabled PDF builds from the “develop” branch. You download the PDF from http://preview.guides.gdcc.io/_/downloads/en/develop/pdf/

If you would like to help improve the PDF version of the guides, please get in touch! Please see Getting Help for ways to contact the developer community.

Hosting Your Own Version of the Guides

Some installations of Dataverse maintain their own versions of the guides and use settings like :NavbarGuidesUrl or :GuidesBaseUrl to point their users to them.

Having Google Index the Latest Version

As each version of the Dataverse software is released, there is an updated version of the guides released with it. Google and other search engines index all versions, which may confuse users who discover your guides in the search results as to which version they should be looking at. When learning about your installation from the search results, it is best to be viewing the latest version.

In order to make it clear to the crawlers that we only want the latest version discoverable in their search results, we suggest adding this to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Allow: /en/latest/
Disallow: /en/