Decorative Arch, Resafa, Syria. Copyright, Daniel Schwartz.

Instructions for Contributors to The Syriac Gazetteer

Thank you for your interest in improving The Syriac Gazetteer! The Syriac Gazetteer belongs to the community of users, and all users benefit from the additional information submitted by others. There are several ways to add data to The Syriac Gazetteer:

You can easily submit information using the web form below. Your submission will then be sent to an editor for review. Because Syriaca.org is committed to maintaining the highest scholarly standards, you will be asked to specify the sources for your contribution (these will be converted into footnotes). Complete information in your submission (including full citations of relevant sources and your contact information for any follow-up questions) will expedite the editorial process. Our editors work on a volunteer basis, so we cannot promise a fixed timeline for publication of submissions. If the editor approves a submission, it becomes part of the Gazetteer citing you as a contributor. In order to publish your contribution, we request that you license your work to us under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This license is used for all Syraica.org publications and allows you to retain copyright to your work while also allowing Syriaca.org to remain a free and open publication worldwide.

How to submit a contribution

The most important piece of information in your contribution is indicating to which entry your submission applies. We identify each entry by its unique identifier number or URI. These URIs take the form of "http://syriaca.org/place/78" (or another number). Please ensure that you accurately enter the URI for your submission so we can know which record you wish to augment, correct, etc.

We particularly invite the following contributions to The Syriac Gazetteer. Please follow the instructions for the relevant case:

Notify the editors of a mistake

Using the following link, please inform us which page URI the mistake is on, where on the page the mistake occurs, the content of the correction, and a citation for the correct information (except in the case of obvious corrections, such as misspelled words). Please also include your email address, so that we can follow up with you regarding anything which is unclear. We will publish your name, but not your contact information as the author of the correction. The form to notify us of an error is here.

Add data to an existing entry

The Syriac Gazetteer is an ever expanding resource created by and for users. The editors actively welcome additions to the gazetteer. If there is information which you would like to add to an existing place entry in The Syriac Gazetteer, please use the link below to inform us about the information, your (primary or scholarly) source(s) for the information, and your contact information so that we can credit you for the modification. For categories of information which The Syriac Gazetteer structure can support, please see the section headings on the entry for Edessa and specify in your submission which category or categories this new information falls into. At present this information should be entered into the email form here, although there is an additional delay in this process as the data needs to be encoded in the appropriate structured data format and assigned a URI. A structured form for submitting new entries is under development.

Create a new entry

If there is a place which is relevant to Syriac Studies but does not yet have an entry in The Syriac Gazetteer, please let us know. The first edition of the gazetteer only contains a portion of the places of interest to Syriac scholars. Please use the following link to inform us what you know about the place in question, including full citations to the source of the information. At a bare minimum, a place record can be created for a place based on a name (in English or Syriac), a source using that name (whether a primary source or a work of scholarship), and a place type. Your name is also necessary in order to credit you as the creator of the entry. Additional information would also be useful, such as additional names, location (in prose or coordinates), attestations in primary sources, known religious communities, links to other projects, etc. It is essential that every individual statement have a citation to a primary or scholarly source. At present this information should be entered into the email form here, although there is an additional delay in this process as the data needs to be encoded in the appropriate structured data format and assigned a URI. A structured form for submitting new entries is under development.

Contribute datasets pertaining to several records simultaneously

The editors welcome the contribution of datasets which might be relevant to multiple place entries or for the creation of new records. Examples of such datasets might include but are not limited to archaeological field notes, notes on manuscript collections, or notes from a primary source document. If you would like to contribute such a dataset, it is best to contact the general editors in order to discuss individually the format your data is currently in and how best to share that data with The Syriac Gazetteer.