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Posted on behalf of M. Haspelmath and the editors of Glottopedia (original post: 2006, Repost 2011).
Dear linguists,
This is an invitation to contribute to a project of the linguistics departments of the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Trier. Our goal is to create a web-based comprehensive encyclopedia of linguistics using the Wikipedia principle of free editing. We are optimistic that this principle can also be effective in a more specialized field such as linguistics, so we created a linguistics counterpart to Wikipedia, called "Glottopedia".
See http://www.glottopedia.org
However, to get the project off the ground, we need some people who are willing to take a risk and make a scholarly contribution to a completely novel type of publication. It is not easy to get established colleagues to become enthusiastic about such a project, or at least to get them to contribute. (Also, many of them are still a bit scared of computers, or they may have enough money to buy printed dictionaries.)
So we decided to write to you all -- we know that you are enthusiastic about linguistics and languages, and we are sure that each of you can make some contribution to this. Even as (advanced) students, you all have some specialized knowledge that you can share with the rest of the linguistics world. (Actually, Wikipedia was probably mostly put together by students, so the same might happen with Glottopedia.)
Also, most of you also know some language other than English -- Glottopedia is intended to be multilingual, so go ahead and write (or edit) articles on linguistic terminology in French, Swedish, German, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Danish, or any other language that is commonly used to write about linguistics.
It's actually still quite easy to find missing, incomplete or uintranslated articles. Once we have about 1500-2000 articles or so we want to publicize Glottopedia on the LINGUIST List. But now is an early stage of the project, and you all can still have an impact on Glottopedia's structure and spirit.
Looking forward to seeing your contribution,
best wishes
from the Linguipedia initiators (predecessor project)
Martin Haspelmath, Jan Wohlgemuth, Thomas Goldammer, Sven Siegmund
and the Glottopedia editorial team
Sven Naumann, Jan Wohlgemuth
P.S. To edit Glottopedia articles, you need to register. Please use your real name as your user name, or at least identify your real name (and your affiliation) on your user page.
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Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath (at) eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
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