Guidelines for writers
Please read these guidelines carefully before submitting an article to us.
Contents
Why do this? Whats the purpose?
As you may be well aware, more and more people in India have started living in cities. 30% of our population lives in cities and the proportion is rising fast! Families in India, which traditionally were joint families, are slowly disintegrating, especially in the cities. The so-called "nuclear families" consist of the mother, the father and and their kids. Grandparents frequently live separately. Due to all these factors (and more), knowledge about our biodiversity - which was traditionally handed orally or practically from generation to generation - is being rapidly lost. If this trend continues, we would be losing a large part of the rich legacy of India.
What kind of knowledge is being lost? Medicinal uses of different plants, knowledge of the concoctions prepared, cultural associations of different plants and animals to name a few. For example, our grandmothers told us stories of gods and goddesses and their favorite animals and birds and plants. However, how many of these stories do WE know to pass on to our future generations? Also, such stories dont just serve as historic nostalgia, but can be important contributors to conservation. For example, if we ask someone to save Platanista gangetica, that person would go "Huh? What?", but if you ask someone to conserve the Gangetic Dolphin - the vehicle of Goddess Ganga and inform them how these intelligent creatures are dying due to industrial effluents, they may be more likely to start thinking about conservation. This is not just true of Hindu gods and goddesses, but a large array of religions and beliefs. For example, the fig tree has an important place in Christianity and lions are considered symbols of courage in Sikhism. See the list below for more such examples.
This particular section aims to collect mythological stories from different parts of India and host them at one place. For example, if you know some stories and cultural associations of some species, you could write a paragraph on it on the Biodiversity of India website. Slowly but steadily, we hope to compile all stories from all parts of India and try to use them as important tools for conservation.
Most important
- You need to be registered to make any changes to the website. You can register by requesting an accout using the login/create account button on top right corner of this page.
- You can either write the article directly on this wiki site or send us an MS-WORD document containing the article. A quick tutorial on editing the wiki is here.
- You can contact us at (admin at projectbrahma dot org). Please introduce yourself with relevant information and your interests. We'd love to know you better!
General guidelines
What do you want to write?
- You can write short Biodiversity notes or longer form Articles. Notes are generally specific to one topic while in Articles you want to talk about multiple different issues.
- There is no word limit for longer articles. No specific limit for shorter articles either, just that they should not be long :)
References
- For both types of articles, we strongly encourage you to provide references for statements.
- We recommend providing more than one reference from trustworthy sources (see Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources)
- However we understand that for most cultural and mythological stories of India, there might not be enough quality references on the internet. If thats the case, we can certainly make exceptions. However, this exception should not serve as an excuse for not providing/searching for references.
- If you are submitting an MS-WORD document, please provide inline references, with the bibliography listed at the very end of the article.
- Books may also be cited with relevant page numbers for the included information.
- If you are providing websites as references, please provide URL and date on which the page was accessed for that information.
Media
- All media should be listed in a separate Relevant media section at the bottom of the article, right before the bibliography.
- We can only use images uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. So, if you are writing an article and want to include images, please search for an appropriate image on Commons and note down its image name in the section.
- We can also incorporate videos from most online video sites (YouTube, Vimeo, Google Videos etc.). Please note the links in the Media section.
Editing
- Please be aware that the editors associated with the project will edit the article in the following ways:
- Wikifying different words in the article.
- Deciding on best placement of images and media in the article.
- Correcting any grammar, factual errors
- Vetting the references
- This article will then be posted online and a link will be sent to you.
- Your authorship will be prominently attributed in the article.
- If you are a registered user of the website, you can edit the article, add and delete stuff, images etc. any time you want.
Publicizing
- Articles written on this website are released under CC-BY-SA license.
- You can publicize/republish the article on your blog any time you want as long as you release it under CC-BY-SA.
- We may publicize the article on our Facebook/Twitter pages and through other media.
Current list of articles
Currently, there is a total of 65 articles in our database. For the complete list, click on further results on the bottom right corner of the table below.
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