Wikijunior:Languages/Contributing

Why contribute?
When working on this project, remember that it's aimed at children. It's more important to be understood than to be precisely accurate on every detail. (Still, try not to "dumb down" things to the point that they are unnecessarily in accurate.) Use technical vocabulary when you have to, but don't use big words where simpler ones would work just as well. Whenever you need to use a hard word, list it in the glossary of basic terms, and define it. If you don't think you can give a good definition, note on the glossary page that the term needs to be defined so someone else can try to do that for you. Giving definitions in the article itself when such words are used is generally a good idea as well. You can view the source of the Introduction for the wiki syntax necessary to do this.

This book is intended to be a basic survey of different languages, not an in-depth study worthy of a foreign language course. Still, feel free to expand or even add sections if you feel further detail is needed. Remember, Wikijunior and Wikibooks "are not paper" — we don't have artificial limitations on article size (although keep in mind that the target audience might be turned off by extremely long articles). Unique cultural traits and circumstances of the societies in which these languages are used should be explored beyond just the basic set of questions listed below.

If you can contribute to this book, please do so. Many sections are in need of cleanup and complete rewrites. You can work on almost anything including this page, but if you want to make some significant changes please bring them up on the discussion page. Adding new languages is encouraged, but please try to add some substantial content if you do create a new article (i.e., don't just stop at a single-sentence description).

Beginning your article
The best way to create a new page is to link to the title from an existing page. If you're a registered user, you might want to start your article as a subpage of your user page and copy it into the Wikijunior namespace only when you're ready. If so, edit your user page and add a link like
 *  / New_language

somewhere on the page (you can use the name of the language you want to work on instead of the "dummy title" New_language). Save the page and then follow the link to start editing the article.

If you prefer to start the article in the Wikijunior namespace itself, you can edit any page (for example, this one) and add a link like
 *  Wikijunior:Languages/ New_language

somewhere on the page. Using this procedure, you must substitute the name of the language you want to create an article for in place of the text "New_language". Do not save the page, just "preview" it. This gives you a link you can follow to start editing the article (confirm that you want to navigate away from the page you're editing, if asked).

Once you're editing the article, copy and paste the following text into the editing window.

Major questions
As you can see, the questions (with answers) that must appear in every article are:
 * What writing system(s) does this language use?
 * How many people speak this language?
 * Where is this language spoken?
 * What is the history of this language?
 * Who are some famous authors or poets in this language?
 * What are some basic words in this language that I can learn?
 * What is a simple song/poem/story that I can learn in this language? (include translation if possible)