Glottopedia:How to contribute

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Thank you for your interest in Glottopedia! Contributing to this free encyclopedia of linguistics is easy. Please take the following steps:

Getting started

Before you can modify or write an article, you have to log in, and if you don't have an account yet, you need to have an account created. Please write an e-mail to glottopedia [at] uni-trier.de with a preferred user name (your real name, or an abbreviation of it, not a pseudonym please), your e-mail address, your affiliation, and your real name. Once the account is created, an e-mail will be sent to you to tell you your password and to verify your e-mail address. After confirming it, you can start editing.

Please do not forget to write your real name and your affiliation (or former affiliation, if you don't have a current academic affiliation) on your user page.

Working on articles

Modify an article

The first thing to note is that you should not be afraid to make mistakes. Even if you are a novice and you are not familiar with the way the software works, you can hardly do any damage. Even if you accidentally delete a passage that should be kept, this can easily be restored again.

In all Glottopedia articles (except for project pages like this one or the main page), you find an "Edit" tab at the top margin of the article. If you are logged in, you can edit and save the article after clicking this tab. After editing, you can also see a preview of the article (click on "Show preview"). Once you save the article (by clicking on "Save page"), the system creates a backup of the earlier version in the archive, and your new version is the version that is visible to the readers.

In the field "Summary" you should describe briefly what you changed and why before saving the article. If you only made a minor edit (such as correcting a typo, adding a link, etc.), check the field "This is a minor edit" and leave the "Summary" field empty.

While editing an article, you see at the bottom right a link Editing help. This will lead you to a page that helps you with explanations of the main features of the software for editing, formatting, adding links, etc. And of course you should observe the Guidelines (you also find these in the sidebar under "Guidelines").

Create a new article

The following page explains how to create a new page in a Mediawiki wiki:

Suppose in an existing article you see a word that is not linked and that seems worth an article of its own.

  • Edit this article
  • Select the word and click on Internal Link in the editing toolbar.
  • Save the article
  • Click on the word with the newly created link (it should still be red)
  • A new window opens, in which you can write the new article

This is only an example. It could be that you notice a red link (i.e. there is no article for this word yet), for which you would like to create an article, or maybe you would merely like to correct or add information in an existing article. There are many different ways in which you can help Glottopedia.

The structure of Glottopedia articles

There are four different types of articles in Glottopedia:

For each kind of article, there are well-defined standards which specify its structure. To ensure consistency, all authors should strictly stick to these standards.

Copyright Issues

Glottopedia exclusively aims at facilitating scientific exchange and has no commercial interests. If you notice any copyright violation in the articles, please alert us immediately by Email so that we can act right away. Do not copy entire passages, images or other copyrighted material into a Glottopedia article. If information is taken from copyrighted works, an indication of the source in the article is required. Please be aware that a violation of these rules can put the entire project in danger.

Other things you can do

Check the Community Forum and the "To Do List" for further ideas on what you can contribute to this project.


Other languages

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