Contributor guidelines
How to contribute, and how you are credited
HistoryTrack shows places, people and events on one map, and every value carries its source. Where sources disagree or run out, we list the question here and ask people who know the material.
What counts as evidence
- Primary sources and editions: inscriptions, papyri, tablets, chronicles, charters, excavation reports, with the edition you read them in.
- Peer-reviewed scholarship and standard reference works: journal articles, monographs, corpora, prosopographies, gazetteers such as Pleiades.
- Scientific dating: radiocarbon (give the lab code and whether the date is calibrated), dendrochronology, stratigraphy.
- Page numbers matter. Cite the pages that support the claim, and add a DOI when there is one: the form fills the rest from Crossref.
- Encyclopedias and Wikipedia are useful for checking, but cannot be the recorded source. Cite the work they cite.
- Uncertainty is information. If the honest answer is "circa" or "one of two chronologies", say so and choose the matching precision.
The four verdicts
- Confirm: the record is right. A citation makes the confirmation count toward the record's quality score.
- Correct: propose a better value, with its precision and at least one citation.
- Dispute: the value is contested or wrong, and there is no single better value yet.
- Add information: context, literature or finds that help the next reader.
What happens after you submit
- Submitted. We email you a receipt. Nothing on the record changes.
- Tarly check. Tarly, our fact-checker, checks that citations resolve, DOIs are well formed, years are in range and the record still exists.
- Verified. An editor confirms that the cited source supports the contribution.
- Published. The contribution appears on the record as a specialist review with your credit. A correction changes the value only when the editor applies it.
You can follow each step in My contributions, and we email you when the status changes.
Credit and licence
Published contributions are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Anyone may reuse them with attribution to you. Your name, affiliation and ORCID iD appear on the record and on a public contributor page, unless you choose not to be named, in which case the credit reads "a specialist contributor". Every published contribution has a permalink, and you can export your contributions as BibTeX to cite them in your own work.
Identity and conflicts of interest
An ORCID iD links your credit to your scholarly record; we check its format and check digit. Declare any conflict of interest, for example when you directed the excavation you cite or have a publication under review on the question. A declared interest does not disqualify a contribution; it is shown to the editor.
Files
You may attach up to five PDFs or images (20 MB each), such as a plan, a photograph of an inscription or an offprint you are allowed to share. Files are stored privately and are opened only by editors. Nothing you upload is made public without review, and we never publish material you do not have the right to share.
Discussion
Each question has a discussion thread. Comments are moderated before they appear. Please keep them to the evidence.