What's the best place to post tutorials?

Right after composing an answer to a forum question, I searched around a bit more and found a great tutorial on this topic by @gregcaporaso himself. I did not find it initially because it was posted to the Qiime 2 Community Tutorials, but not to the official documentation. I’m not sure how the user searched for solutions, but they did not find it either.

I’m wondering what’s the best place to post tutorials or additional documentation. There are tutorials on the official docs and in the forums, but Google (and this user) were not able to find them.

Matt @thermokarst mentioned using the Qiime 2 forums to curate excellent answers, which would help new users. But isn’t that the goal of official tutorials and official documentation?

Both the forum and the official documentation strive to support new and expert users alike. How can we navigate and disentangle the overlap between them?

Colin

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Hi @colinbrislawn,
The role of the Community Tutorials forum category is generally to serve as a place where we can quickly publish documentation that for one reason or another isn’t ready to go to docs.qiime2.org yet. Some of those reasons could be: because a document is lacking some important pieces (like descriptions of commands), but it may still help some users; because we didn’t have time to write it before a release went out, but it covers some new functionality in that release; we’re not certain where it fits in the documentation yet; or it was contributed by a community member who might not have the technical skills or experience to get a tutorial into the official documents, and we haven’t had time to integrate it ourselves yet. The goal though, as I see it, is that these community tutorials transition to the official documentation within a release cycle or two. (I know, some of my community tutorials have been there for longer than that right now… we’re hoping to transition a lot of those in this release cycle.)

A good way to navigate this is, if you know some piece of functionality is relatively new (e.g., like q2-cutadapt in 2017.12) and you don’t see documentation at docs.qiime2.org, then it’s a good idea to check the community tutorials as well. One thing that might make sense to do for our users would be put a link to the Community Tutorials forum category on the docs.qiime2.org Tutorials page, maybe with a note that says something like: If you’re looking for a tutorial and don’t see it here, you might check out our Community Tutorials on the QIIME 2 Forum, which contains tutorials that are in development. Do you think that would help?

Thanks for bringing this discussion point up!

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