Discrepency between sidebar and url episode number

[Leigh]

There is a discrepancy between the number displayed on the sidebar under "Episodes", and the URL episode number from episodes/*.md.

"Before we start" is numbered 1 in the sidebar, whilst has the url "00-before-we-start.html"
This repeats for every numbered episode in the sidebar, eg "2. Short Introduction..." is "01-short-introduction-..." etc.

This may get a little confusing when an episode is selected, as the number is hidden.
e.g. the second episode with url ending in "01-short-introduction-to-Python.html" has a sidebar that looks like this:

This is a pretty benign issue, but I thought it worth pointing out as it could create some minor confusion.

Potential solutions:

• Rename sidebar episode numbers to align with file names as they exist currently
• Rework filenames to align with sidebar episode numbers as they exist

[Sarah Pohl]

Hey @catchSheep, thank you for pointing that out! I think this might not be a problem specific to this lesson, but rather to all transitioned lessons, so I'd like to call @zkamvar in on this.

[Leigh]

I initially thought it was due to the transferal to workbench, but looking in the web archive, this goes back to at least 2021: https://web.archive.org/web/20210303055646/https://datacarpentry.org/python-ecology-lesson/index.html
You can see that in the archived page above the url's for each numbered episode are all one lower than what they're listed as

[Sarah Pohl]

Great, thank you for checking. It appears that some Data Carpentry workshops start numbering their URLs at 01, while others start at 00. In the Software Carpentry lessons it seems to always start with 01, so I believe that would be the way to go here as well.

@tobyhodges What do you think, should we do this as kind of a joined effort for all lessons that have 00 URLs? For DC, those are:

• spreadsheets-socialsci
• r-socialsci
• genomics-r-intro
• spreadsheet-ecology-lesson
• sql-ecology-lesson
• R-ecology-lesson
• python-ecology-lesson
• python-ecology-lesson-es

[Toby Hodges]

I agree that the discrepancy is confusing.

There are a couple of ways it could be addressed:

1. by renumbering the episode files
2. by removing the episode numbers and defining the order of episodes in the repository's config.yaml instead.

Option 1 is simpler, option 2 has the advantage that episodes would not need to be renamed if another is added or removed in the future.

Regarding the possibility of coordinating effort across all these repositories, for the sake of expediency I would suggest taking care of it here first. Then someone (@LilithElina, I, or another community member) can propose it to the DC Governance Committee as a solution to be applied across the whole lesson program.

[Benjamin Tovar]

@tobyhodges, I'd suggest to keep the episode numbers as a safeguard in the order specified in config.yaml. Without numbers, it would be easier to put an episode out of order in config.yaml.

[Zhian N. Kamvar]

Thank you @catchSheep for opening this issue. The transition preserved the history of the lesson, so you can see that the last time the episode names were changed was in 2018 36bd123 (this was 8cec912 in the pre-transitioned lesson). In 2014, this lesson was initialized with an episode that started with 00: cd1254e.

Thank you @LilithElina for finding the patterns across the lessons! It's definitely a good idea to make things consistent across our infrastructure. My own personal opinion on the solution: I think it's better to remove the numbers. Name changes like this are not that common, but they are disruptive and there will be broken links outside of this lesson. The episode numbers were initially added in to enforce episode order without engineering a separate ordering mechanism, but it was brittle because lessons do undergo structural changes from time to time as the lesson gets more feedback (some examples are in carpentries/lesson-transition#77 and carpentries/lesson-transition#22 where some episodes were shuffled around and internal links needed to be updated). Considering that the Advisory Committies are releatively new entities, it's reasonable to expect that changes to the lesson structure will happen.