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How to contribute

How to contribute

To contribute to the FGE website you will need the following:

  • A GitHub account (click here to sign up)
  • A knowledge of Markdown for creating the documents (see this page for a simple guide)

All documents hosted on this website are held in the docs repository as part of the British Ecological Society's Quantitative Ecology Special Interest Group (BES-QSIG) GitHub organisation. In order to edit or add documents you must first fork this repository and then send a pull request with your changes.

If you are not familiar with GitHub, then please follow our step-by-step walkthrough for making contributions online -- Contributing online.

What should a guide contain?

Guides can be technical introductions to programming languages, walkthroughs on performing specific tasks, general explanations of quantitative methods, tidbits of useful computational information, comparisons between alternative methods, "What I did" historical accounts of methods used in recent analyses, nifty tricks for efficient research, descriptions of things you like about R, descriptions of things you hate about R .... etc.

In short, anything you feel might be useful.

Suggesting changes

If you spot an error, wish to suggest a topic or make any sort of comment then please use the GitHub issues page for the docs repository found here. There, you can create new issues or make comments on existing issues. All users who are watching the repository will be informed. You will need a GitHub account if you do not already have one.

Document format

All documents provided must be in Markdown script. Please save your documents with the .md extension e.g. [name_file].md. At the top of every document please provide 'front matter'. Front matter tells the website how to interpret the document, there are two metadata tags that must be provided:

  • status: e.g. complete, incomplete, in progress (free text)
  • title: Introduction to ..., How to .... (free text)

These tags must be put at the top of the page and be separated above and below by ---. For example, at the top of this page the front matter is:

---
status: complete
title: How to contribute
---

Please note, the space between the colon and the free text.

Index

If you have created a new document please also update the index.yml. This tells the website where to index the new document. It groups related documents under different themes. For example, at the top of the index is:

- title: FGE
  docs:
    - introduction_to_markdown
    - how_to_contribute
    - developing_this_website

This places introduction_to_markdown, how_to_contribute and developing_this_website into the theme titled FGE. Please add new titles following the syntax above if a new document does not fit into any existing themes.

Source attribution

If you are creating a document that is based on a page that exists elsewhere on the internet (e.g. a personal blog page), you can highlight the original source by adapting the front matter.

---
status: [status of doc]
title: [title of doc]
source: [source page URL]
source_author: [name of source author]
---

Licensing

Please note all guides produced are under a creative commons license (CC BY 4.0). This means any contributions made to the docs repository can be used by other parties so long as they are properly attributed.

Quick style suggestions

Everyone will have their own style of writing, and that's good. A diversity of writers will mean a diversity of readers. But here we would like to outline some general writing suggestions:

  • Write to the audience the guide is aimed at (beginners, novices, experts)
  • Keep language and sentences simple
  • Avoid using phrases like: 'Just do this ...', 'Simply run ...', 'You can then easily ...' (These will often lead to an annoyed reader)
  • Make examples authentic (i.e. explaining a for loop with real ecological data rather than counting 1 to 10)
  • Justification is just as important as explanation, thoroughly provide the reasons why your reader should follow your guide

Doc-Keepers

To edit files on the repo without the need for forking or pull requests you will need to join the doc-keepers' team in the BES-QSIG GitHub organisation. If you would like to join, please email: [email protected]