Information for Editors
Thanks for volunteering to contribute to the Scottish Gaelic Wiki! It's great to have you on board.
Contents
Goals and Intents
Before you get started let me fill you in on the intent, scope and eventual product of this wiki. This wiki is meant to be a comprehensive online grammar of Scottish Gaelic. There are two main threads of authorship in here.
- Information about Scottish Gaelic
- A backbone of information about linguistic and grammatical terminology.
You are welcome to contribute to either or both of these missions.
The wiki itself is a primary goal, but I see a couple of potential offshoots. You need to be aware of these possible usages before you begin editing. I'm actually hoping to have a version of this published as a traditional print grammar (see section on copyrights below). Other possible uses include exporting the structure of the wiki (technical definitions, the page structure etc) without the Gaelic content to other wikis. In particular, I have in mind setting up similar wikis for the other Celtic Languages. We could also give this basic structure to other people trying to write grammars for their languages.
Important note about your permission to publish and your copyright
Before you begin editing, please note the following. I (Andrew Carnie) retain full copyright on all the material in this wiki unless it is otherwise referenced or takes the reader off site via an external link. By editing here you grant me permission to use your contribution in any work (electronic, print or otherwise) as I see fit as long as you are appropriately credited. In this work, and any derivative work, you we be credited as a "contributing author". I (Andrew Carnie) will be credited as "Senior Editor and Contributer".
Note also that because this is a collaborative wiki, other people can edit/add to/delete etc. your contributions. I have overall say in approving such changes, but by consenting to edit here you are also consenting to other people mucking about with your prose and your contributions. If you disagree with someone about something they have written or changed in an article, there is a "discussion"/"talk" link attached to every page. Every person also has their own "talk page". Please be aware that everything on the discussion and talk pages is visible to the entire world!
Because this is a collaborative wiki, I cannot attribute authorship of particular pages to particular people, even if you have contributed more than other authors. I will acknowledge all contributors equally (at least for now -- this could change if serious disparities emerge).
To see your contributions: click on "my contributions" above.
Important note about references and plagiarism
Because this work may eventually be published and because it can be widely used, it is very very important that all contributions here be original and subject to the rigors of scholarly conduct. Please do NOT copy and paste from any online source (especially wikipedia) or print source. It is equally important that if a contribution uses sources that they be properly referenced. Include a reference list at the end of the article and please add the reference to the References page. The page does not need references only if it reports original discoveries or original research (including facts gleaned from our field work). Please ignore what it says about "copying from public domain or free source" at the bottom of edit pages. That does not apply here.
Getting Started
To edit an article
- You have to be logged in
- Find the relevant page (use the search box to the left) OR create a new page (click on a "red link" anywhere in the wiki or type a term in the "search box" to the left and choose "create this page" if it can't find it.
- Once you are on a page click on "edit" to start tip tap typing away.
This wiki uses the same formatting mark-up as wikipedia (it's based on wikipedia's public source mediawiki project. WIki mark-up is very easy once you learn the basics. Here's a link to help you with wikipedia mark up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page
Some useful starting points
This wiki is organized with Categories (in the little box at the bottom of the page). Some helpful starting categories are:
- Category: Technical Definitions (note capitalization and plural)
- Category: Morphology
- Category: Phonetics
- Category: Phonology
- Category: Syntax
- Category: Semantics
- Category: Other
Note that many of the pages created on this wiki have almost no content in them right now, so feel free to start filling it in. This is especially true of the pages in Category: Technical Definitions
If you create new articles that belong in Category: Technical Definitions, note that I have been using the convention of putting "(definition)" after the title (lower case d!) I've also been using the non-wikipedia convention of using Title capitalization in all article titles (Capitalizing all non-function words).
