If you find a typo or a small error in the documentation you can easily fix it using GitHub.
The documentation for Dataverse was written using Sphinx (http://sphinx-doc.org/). If you are interested in suggesting changes or updates we recommend that you create the html files using Sphinx locally and the submit a pull request through GitHub. Here are the instructions on how to proceed:
On a Mac:
Download the sphinx zip file from http://sphinx-doc.org/install.html
Unzip it somewhere. In the unzipped directory, do the following as root, (sudo -i):
python setup.py build python setup.py install
Alternative option (Mac/Unix/Windows):
Unless you already have it, install pip (https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/installing.html)
run pip install sphinx in a terminal
This is all you need. You should now be able to build HTML/pdf documentation from git sources locally.
First, you will need to make a fork of the dataverse repository in GitHub. Then, you will need to make a clone of your fork so you can manipulate the files outside GitHub.
To edit the existing documentation go to ~/dataverse/doc/sphinx-guides/source directory inside your clone. There, you will find the .rst files that correspond to the guides in the dataverse page (http://guides.dataverse.org/en/latest/user/index.html). Now, using your preferred text editor, open and edit these files, or create new .rst files and edit the others accordingly.
Once you are done, open a terminal and change directories to ~/dataverse/doc/sphinx-guides . Then, run the following commands:
After sphinx is done processing the files you should notice that the html folder in ~/dataverse/doc/sphinx-guides/build directory has been updated. You can click on the files in the html folder to preview the changes.
Now you can make a commit with the changes to your own fork in GitHub and submit a pull request to the dataverse repository.