Contribute

How to contribute

The ways of adding to this site, with the time each one takes, the account it needs, and what happens after you submit.

  • 10 ways
  • 8 are a form
  • 2 needs no account at all
  • Reviewed before publishing
Be listed as a member 3 minutes Share something that happened 1 minute Add a paper, model or dataset we missed 2 minutes Fix a mistake 1 minute Register a lab, project or student group 5 minutes Announce a talk, workshop or seminar 3 minutes Offer to supervise students 10 minutes Post a thesis topic 20 minutes Add a photograph 2 minutes Change how the site works an afternoon

Forms and pull requests

Which applies depends on what you are adding, not on how technical you are.

Through a form

You fill in a few fields. A workflow turns your answers into a proposed change to the site, and a maintainer merges it.

Many of them are GitHub issue forms, which need a free account.

Through a pull request

If Git is something you already use, edit the files directly. It is faster for changes the forms do not cover, and it is required for changes to the code itself.

The contributor guide has the local setup: two commands, and the site runs on your machine with live reload.

In both cases a maintainer reviews the change before it is published.

Ways to contribute

No account needed
A web form. Works on a phone.
Free GitHub account
The form turns into a proposed change; no code editing is involved.
Git, or ask us
A file in the repository. If that is not something you do, send it to the mailing list and a maintainer will add it for you.

Share something that happened

A defence, a paper accepted, an award, a dataset released, a workshop run. Two sentences and a link is enough; a maintainer will tidy the wording.

Takes
1 minute
Needs
No account needed

Share news The long version

Add a paper, model or dataset we missed

Much work is collected automatically. Use this when something was skipped, usually because it carries no Ethiopian language tag.

Takes
2 minutes
Needs
Free GitHub account

Open the resource form The long version

Fix a mistake

A wrong affiliation, a dead link, a typo, a figure that looks off. Every page has an edit link at the bottom that opens the right file.

Takes
1 minute
Needs
Free GitHub account

Report or fix it The long version

Register a lab, project or student group

Your team's GitHub organisation and Hugging Face account are then read on the same schedule as everyone else's, so the whole group's output lands here.

Takes
5 minutes
Needs
Free GitHub account

Open the team form The long version

Announce a talk, workshop or seminar

Speakers are welcome. A thesis chapter, a dataset you are annotating or a model that is not working yet are all suitable seminar topics.

Takes
3 minutes
Needs
Free GitHub account

Propose a talk The long version

Offer to supervise students

Mentors do not have to be senior. Someone who has finished a thesis in this area can usually help a student starting one.

Takes
10 minutes
Needs
Git, or ask us

How to become a mentor The long version

Post a thesis topic

A good topic says what the gap is, what a student would actually do, and what a finished result looks like.

Takes
20 minutes
Needs
No account needed

Post a topic The long version

Change how the site works

Jekyll, Sass and a little vanilla JavaScript, with Python scripts for the data. It runs locally in two commands.

Takes
an afternoon
Needs
Git, or ask us

Read the developer guide The long version

What happens after you submit

The same four steps for every form.

  1. Your answers become a proposed change

    A workflow reads the form and writes the file it describes, then opens it as a pull request against this site. This is automatic and usually takes under a minute.

  2. A maintainer reads it

    Usually within a few days. Questions come back in the same thread.

  3. It is merged and the site rebuilds

    Publishing is automatic on merge, so the change is live a few minutes after a maintainer merges it.

  4. From then on it is updated automatically

    If you gave a Hugging Face, GitHub, Scholar or ORCID identifier, a nightly sync picks up the work you publish afterwards.

Common obstacles

Unsure whether it is worth adding

94 of the 100 catalogue entries have no model or dataset, so a few thousand sentences in one of them add a resource that does not yet exist. Negative results and approaches that did not work are also in scope. Submit it and a maintainer decides.

Early in your career

Many of the ways listed here do not depend on seniority. Fixing a wrong affiliation, adding a paper the sync missed, or writing a caption for a photograph all improve the site, and mentoring is open to those a step ahead of the person asking.

What we ask

Only add people who have agreed to it. Being in an organisation is not consent to appearing on a public website. Anyone imported automatically is held unpublished until they confirm, and the same standard applies to anything you submit: name a person only if they are happy to be named. That covers photograph captions too.

Link to the thing, do not attach it. Publish a dataset or a model where it belongs, on Hugging Face, Zenodo or a repository, and give us the identifier. It then stays findable if this site is withdrawn, and the nightly sync keeps its record current without manual editing.

Say where a figure came from. Every number on this site is meant to be traceable to a source. If you add one, add where it is from, and prefer an upstream fix, in Glottolog or Wikidata, over a correction that only helps this page.

Write plainly. Describe what a thing is and what it contains, rather than why it matters. Everything on this site is licensed CC BY 4.0, so what you add is reusable by anyone.

Getting help

Ask on the mailing list or open an issue. A half-formed question is fine.