Dieuwertje Bloemen (Jul 16 2025 at 10:11): Dieuwertje Bloemen (Jul 16 2025 at 10:11):A first draft of a quickstart guide as discussed in the last doc meeting. We'll discuss on Friday. Maybe adding mor visuals could help? Or make it more of a flowchart style? For now I just tried to capture the necessary text as short as possible.
Oliver Bertuch (Jul 16 2025 at 10:28):Idea: it's fairly easy to create SVGs with clickable elements. If we need a "map" to guide people through things, that's entirely possible.
Oliver Bertuch (Jul 16 2025 at 10:35):Here's a site with some simple examples: https://flourish.studio/blog/interactive-svg-template/ Just one tiny change: don't use Illustrator or Figma, but Inkscape :wink:
Philip Durbin π (Jul 16 2025 at 11:01):Mmm, Inkscape :yum:
Philip Durbin π (Jul 16 2025 at 11:05):@Dieuwertje Bloemen I love the draft (thanks for working on it!) but my mind already races to "What about THIS? What about THAT?" :sweat_smile:
Philip Durbin π (Jul 16 2025 at 11:06):In particular, do we want depositors to think about which collection they are depositing into? :thinking:
Philip Durbin π (Jul 16 2025 at 15:55):I just added a suggestion to the draft doc: "Navigate to a collection where you can create dataset"
Omer M Fahim (Jul 16 2025 at 18:03):also created a quickstart guide folder https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QXZxeLiBeWnjn11ZaG0AuUpv4xlRMIQd
Vaida PlankytΔ π¨ (Jul 18 2025 at 11:24):@Oliver Bertuch i've been looking to try https://graphite.rs/ as an alternative to Illustrator, though it seems Inkscape is looking a lot slicker UI-wise since last time I tried... :D
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Jul 18 2025 at 13:53):Philip Durbin π said:
Dieuwertje Bloemen I love the draft (thanks for working on it!) but my mind already races to "What about THIS? What about THAT?" :sweat_smile:
I think for the 'what about' stuff, we should just link to the relevant more detailed pages. I agree that the collection step should be added, but as an optional one at the start.
Philip Durbin π (Jul 18 2025 at 15:00):I just created a pull request: #11653
A new Quickstart Guide! Woo! :tada:
You can preview the "publish a dataset" page here: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish.html https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.html
Philip Durbin π (Jul 18 2025 at 15:02):Thanks again to @Dieuwertje Bloemen for the initial content!
Philip Durbin π (Jul 18 2025 at 15:04):On the Google Group, should we ask people to check it out and give feedback?
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Jul 18 2025 at 15:05):yeah, getting some community feedback might be nice
Philip Durbin π (Jul 18 2025 at 15:06):@Dieuwertje Bloemen do you want to do the honors? Maybe next week, when people are fresh? :smile:
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Jul 18 2025 at 15:06):yeah, sure I'll put it on my to do list for next week :wink:
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Jul 22 2025 at 12:37):It's now in the google group: https://groups.google.com/g/dataverse-community/c/TXOEFv9-0kY
Philip Durbin π (Jul 22 2025 at 13:07):Looks great! Thanks!
Philip Durbin π (Jul 22 2025 at 14:14):Also, I should mention that people can watch the video of our discussion of this quickstart guide, if they like. Or just skim the notes. Or join the next call (#docs > doc group meeting or the docs wg website) !
Oliver Bertuch (Jul 22 2025 at 14:15):Or all of the above :smile_cat:
Philip Durbin π (Jul 22 2025 at 14:15):Ha, yes :smile:
Philip Durbin π (Jul 25 2025 at 18:40):On little thing about introducing a new guide BEFORE the User Guide is that we have a good amount of logic baked into Dataverse that directs users to the User Guide.
For example, the welcome notification says, "Check out the User Guide" (with a link).
Same with the navbar of Dataverse. To the left of the "Support" link there's a link to the User Guide.
We can probably address this by advertising the Quickstart Guide at the top of the index page for the User Guide, in case people don't notice from the sidebar that there's a Quickstart Guide.
Philip Durbin π (Jul 31 2025 at 13:33):Our PR came up during sprint planning yesterday:
add Quickstart Guide and first section: Publish a Dataset #11653
We have sprint planning every two weeks. We go through items on our project board (https://github.com/orgs/IQSS/projects/34) and resize them as necessary. That is, if we feel like more or less effort is required for the upcoming sprint, we change the "size" label.
For this pull request, we decided to leave it alone until the docs group has had a chance to meet again.
Alternatively, we could decide what to do with it here. Merge it? Keep iterating on it? What do YOU think? :smile:
As a reminder, you can preview the new quickstart here: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.html
Philip Durbin π (Aug 01 2025 at 15:24):I just sent out the community news and reminded the community that we'd love some feedback on the "publish a dataset" quickstart.
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Aug 04 2025 at 13:57):I would wait to merge until I've added in the link, and maybe see what other quickstart guides to add on initial 'launch' of the quickstart guides. I'll see how quickly I can whip up a 'Create a collection' quickstart guide, as it'll likely be quite similar in structure. Hopefully I'll get around to adding the links and creating the collection guide somewhere before the next meeting :face_with_monocle:
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Aug 04 2025 at 13:58):Philip Durbin π said:
On little thing about introducing a new guide BEFORE the User Guide is that we have a good amount of logic baked into Dataverse that directs users to the User Guide.
For example, the welcome notification says, "Check out the User Guide" (with a link).
Same with the navbar of Dataverse. To the left of the "Support" link there's a link to the User Guide.
We can probably address this by advertising the Quickstart Guide at the top of the index page for the User Guide, in case people don't notice from the sidebar that there's a Quickstart Guide.
I don't see a problem with them maybe not being the first item in the menu, if they're findable via big buttons in the user guide, which is the first item... (mock-up coming soon of the buttons idea)
Philip Durbin π (Aug 04 2025 at 14:01):Right, the big buttons will help a lot!
Philip Durbin π (Aug 05 2025 at 14:54):Shoot! I clicked the wrong link during the community call! Here's the right one: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.html
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Aug 13 2025 at 09:08):I added in the links to related/relevant pages in the google doc (I tried to figure out how to add it in GitHub in the pull request, but couldn't get it to work, so I did it like this. I'll also make a mock-up for the buttons we talked about adding at the top of the user guide because the user guide will remain the landing page for most users. It's in a new google doc. Not sure if those are the quickstart guides to have there. But they seemed logical to me. I'll start on a first draft of the other two this week.
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Aug 13 2025 at 09:41):First draft for a quickstart guide to publish a collection in its own google doc.
Philip Durbin π (Aug 13 2025 at 11:40):Great stuff! Thanks, @Dieuwertje Bloemen! 
Philip Durbin π (Aug 15 2025 at 20:04):I just flipped #11653 to draft and updated the description to say it'll stay that way until we finish the stuff we talked about today.
Omer M Fahim (Aug 18 2025 at 13:30):meeting recording has been added to the rolling docs (8/15): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dX8ktajVsRDk-MDF-yHWV0f4vIe8U3DWrSzIerVGlF8/edit?tab=t.0
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Aug 20 2025 at 14:30):As promised, I've turned the buttons of the mockup into pngs/svgs. They're in the assets folder under the quickstart guides folder.
Philip Durbin π (Aug 20 2025 at 15:00):Looks great! Thanks! Now we just need to figure out how to make them clickable buttons!
Philip Durbin π (Aug 20 2025 at 15:05):/me looks at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63152969/use-image-in-sphinx-as-clickable-link
Philip Durbin π (Aug 20 2025 at 15:32):@Dieuwertje Bloemen I added the SVG version in https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/6f2dba35fc932a68fb39214100cc8228fecd2c07
What do you think? https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/user/index.html
Screenshot 2025-08-20 at 11.31.16β―AM.png
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Aug 20 2025 at 15:46):I would maybe add a tiny bit of whitespace at the top and bottom of it. And make the button slightly smaller (not much). It all looks a bit cramped right now, I think.
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Aug 20 2025 at 15:48):It could also be that I got the proportions of the symbol slightly off. But maybe someone else has a better eye for that kinda thing. @Vaida PlankytΔ π¨ ?
Philip Durbin π (Aug 20 2025 at 15:53):Hmm, should we edit the SVG to add more of a margin?
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Aug 20 2025 at 16:08):I just made a new one with a bit of extra space at the top and bottom (just a wild guess how much though).
Vaida PlankytΔ π¨ (Aug 21 2025 at 19:14):oh, this is looking awesome! :smile:i can have a look to see if i can think of any improvements once the new version is up! :sunglasses:
Philip Durbin π (Sep 18 2025 at 15:53):@Omer M Fahim I can't remember, did you volunteer to add the links from the doc to the .md file?
I did the first one (the "Log In" link) here: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/0458921f1ea1843d699ea420fa2fa0606e38afbc
Omer M Fahim (Sep 19 2025 at 14:10):yup, let me update that PR
Philip Durbin π (Sep 19 2025 at 14:11):Great! Please let me know if you have any questions.
Philip Durbin π (Sep 19 2025 at 14:11):I had to add a ref for the "Log In" link.
Omer M Fahim (Sep 19 2025 at 15:44):i updated the PR, please let me know if it looks ok: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/files
Philip Durbin π (Sep 19 2025 at 15:52):The build seems to be failing:
Screenshot 2025-09-19 at 11.51.57β―AM.png
Philip Durbin π (Sep 19 2025 at 15:53):If you click it and then click "raw log" you'll see this:
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:21: WARNING: undefined label: 'upload-files'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:33: WARNING: undefined label: 'dataset-terms'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:40: WARNING: undefined label: 'dataset-metadata'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:48: WARNING: undefined label: 'publish-dataset'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:48: WARNING: undefined label: 'submit-for-review'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:58: WARNING: undefined label: 'dataset-versioning'
Does that make sense? You'll have to add the refs, like .. _account-log-in-options: in https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/0458921f1ea1843d699ea420fa2fa0606e38afbc
Omer M Fahim (Sep 19 2025 at 16:29):ah i get it
Philip Durbin π (Sep 26 2025 at 14:59):@Omer M Fahim nice editing of the quickstart guide today. Do you want to keep going? Keep adding those refs?
Omer M Fahim (Sep 26 2025 at 14:59):yeah, im having some fun with it so I'll keep going
Philip Durbin π (Sep 26 2025 at 15:01):Awesome. If you want help installing Sphinx locally, please let me know. Running it in Docker seems to take about 30 seconds per build.
Philip Durbin π (Sep 26 2025 at 15:04):Actually, if you want to install Sphinx locally, let's talk about it over at #docs > building docs locally.
Omer M Fahim (Sep 26 2025 at 16:23):@Philip Durbin π https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/e8c336dc42c035ee822973368d5642c692d39b4b
Updated the quickstart guide pr to sync with google doc, @Philip Durbin π could you kindly review when you get a chance. Thanks!
Omer M Fahim (Sep 26 2025 at 16:24):heres what the updated guide looks like: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.html
Philip Durbin π (Sep 26 2025 at 17:36):From a quick look, links are working! Good job. 
Philip Durbin π (Sep 26 2025 at 17:37):The next step is to add the "publish a collection" page, right? Based on @Dieuwertje Bloemen's doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JtBJyWN2sOpSowyUWYU_77mQhKP1m35ZlUMB_0RXoKc/edit?usp=sharing
Do you want to take that on?
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 11:16):I'm getting lost in creating a PR for it :melting_face: . So, for now I've added the what-is-dataverse.md and publish-a-collection.md files in the docs google folder. The publish-a-collection.md file is finished (just needs to be added to table of contents etc.). For the what-is-dataverse.md, I think @Julian Gautier or someone should review it content-wise (I took some inspiration from the flyer he shared in the list of features item), and at the end the link to the new features list still need to be added.
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 11:17):I basically copied what Omer did for the 'publish-a-dataset' page, structure-wise
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:11):@Dieuwertje Bloemen you don't mind if I add them to my existing PR do you? This one:
add Quickstart GuideΒ #11653
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 13:31):That would be great!
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:31):I just pushed! Hold on, the preview is almost ready.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:32):I made a couple tweaks I want to point out.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:33):First, I changed
# Quickstart Guide: What is Dataverse?
to just this:
# What is Dataverse?
... which is our normal convention for page titles.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:33):The preview is ready: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/what-is-dataverse.html
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:34):Over at https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-collection.html I capitalized "collection" in the page title. And I fixed the "navigate to a collection" link.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:35):I think that's it. Just those two tweaks. However, there are other tweaks I was considering. :smile:
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:36):Overall, this look really good! Thanks!
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:38):Instead of...
"The Dataverse project is an open source web application..."
...my preference would be...
"Dataverse is an open source web application..."
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:40):(I'm really feeling the need for a glossary: #4274.)
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 13:45):Yeah, I had that at first actually. But wasn't sure about what we can or cannot say with the Dataverse name. So, if possible, I also think it's better.
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 13:46):I was just checking the preview and noticed that we also need to add the images as buttons in doc/sphinx-guides/source/user/index.rst (I've just created a svg for the what-is-dataverse one as well in the google assets folder)
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 13:47):Wait, I'll also update the svg's to have capital letters on the nouns in the naming as well.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:52):I went ahead and changed it: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/5a96b2bbed5d6a312050f91a4ea921693c323fd6
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:52):The PR is still in draft. Plenty of time for feedback before we merge it.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:53):Oh, right, the image we added to the top of https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/user/index.html
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 13:55):New svg versions are in the google drive. They're not the ones with the extra padding at the top and bottom.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:56):Wow, lots of SVGs. Great!
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:56):I have a meeting in a few minutes but I'll circle back to this. I might have questions! Thanks!
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 13:58):you can ignore the access svg (we never ended up making that page, I think)
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:58):Oh, for downloading. Right.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 13:58):Future work.
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 14:36):Ok, back. @Dieuwertje Bloemen do you want to do a quick zoom?
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Nov 25 2025 at 14:37):sure, my wifi is not very stable though. But I'll try
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 14:37):https://harvard.zoom.us/my/pdurbin?pwd=em1WNUZGbnY2YjhxNEdSbjJJMXNSUT09
Philip Durbin π (Nov 25 2025 at 15:56):@Dieuwertje Bloemen I also asked the community for a review: https://groups.google.com/g/dataverse-community/c/TXOEFv9-0kY/m/e0NhBmtFCQAJ
Philip Durbin π (Dec 03 2025 at 15:04):Merged! By @Steven Winship. Thanks! We can now see the Quickstart Guide at https://preview.guides.gdcc.io :tada:
Philip Durbin π (Dec 09 2025 at 14:17):I added this to the upcoming release notes for 6.9 (#11879):
A new Quickstart Guide has been added to help researchers understand what Dataverse is, how to publish datasets and collections, and how to find data. Buttons have been added to the top of the User Guide to direct people to these pages. Feedback on this new guide is welcome, such as through Google Groups, Zulip, or the Documentation Working Group. Special thanks to Dieuwertje Bloemen for writing most of the guide and to Vaida PlankytΔ for contributing. See https://guides.dataverse.org/en/6.9/quickstart and #11653.
Philip Durbin π (Dec 09 2025 at 14:18):@Dieuwertje Bloemen @Vaida PlankytΔ π¨ I gave you a shout out :point_of_information:
Thanks for working so hard on the Quickstart Guide!
Vaida PlankytΔ π¨ (Dec 09 2025 at 14:34):ohhh this is all Dieuwertje's doing in tackling the hard work :sunglasses: thanks for helping a bunch yourself, you deserve a shoutout too!!
Philip Durbin π (Dec 09 2025 at 14:34):meh, it's my day job :smile:
Philip Durbin π (Dec 09 2025 at 14:34):I tried to get across that @Dieuwertje Bloemen is first author! :smile:
Last updated: Jan 09 2026 at 14:18 UTC