Contribute

Would you like to contribute? Great! This page describes what we need and how we decide to include items.

How to contribute

I have a grammar I want to suggest for inclusion

We’re always happy to get suggestions. Here is how to maximise the chances that we’ll be able to use your suggestion:

  1. Make sure the grammar conforms to the inclusion guidelines below
  2. Send us a link to the repository hosting the item and its metadata.

I want to help curate the Grammar Watch library

Feel free to send an email to m.dingemanse@let.ru.nl to volunteer and we’ll see how we can set you up. Do note that you’ll need a (free) Zotero account and a basic understanding of Zotero in order to contribute to the group library

What we need

Online grammars are relatively easy to find nowadays, but we want to make sure to get the bibliographic metadata right. We want to credit authors and sources and promote good citation practices. We are especially happy to welcome contributors who can help out with one or more of the following tasks:

  • Adding new grammars with complete bibliographic metadata and stable URLs to the Zotero library (following the guidelines for inclusion below)
  • Ensuring the library has the highest quality bibliographic metadata
  • Categorizing items by macro-area and tag them by metalanguage
  • Also, do let us know if you’re handy with the Zotero API and/or with PHP/HTML/CSS and WordPress — there are all sorts of interesting ways to enrich the interface.

Our initial focus is simply to replace a static, hard to maintain list by a community-created resource. As the library grows, work may also include weeding out duplicates or replacing low-quality copies with higher quality ones. And perhaps we want to list grammars in slightly more interesting ways.

Guidelines for inclusion

There are many grammars available on the web in some form. We like to be inclusive, but we also try to separate chaff from wheat. We have the following guidelines for inclusion:

  • Grammars must be openly available and have clear bibliographic metadata.
  • We privilege recent work over older publications, because we want to boost the findability of new open access content.
  • We privilege diverse coverage (in terms of macro-areas, language families, and modalities) over more of the same.
  • We privilege revised versions over earlier versions (e.g., for a PhD thesis that is later revised and officially published in open access, we list the latter)
  • On the other hand, we privilege open versions over closed or paywalled versions (for instance, if an open access PhD thesis is subsequently reissued by a commercial publisher, we list the former)
  • We privilege durable URLs over ones that are likely to change or disappear (e.g., if a PDF is available on an author’s website but also archived in an institutional repository, we link to the latter)

As the primary goal is to help people find, read and cite openly available grammars, there are some things we don’t want. We do not want indiscriminate dumps of PDF files; we do not link to work that is not openly available (this includes content on walled gardens like Academia.edu); and we avoid items with incomplete metadata. Also, it is not our goal to be complete, or to replicate functionality offered by sites like Glottolog or other resources offering genetic affiliations or other language metadata.