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LPedia:Getting Started as a Contributor: Difference between revisions
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LPedia:Getting Started as a Contributor (view source)
Revision as of 19:26, 21 June 2018
, 21 June 2018add section about newsletters, add a couple of examples to other sections
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* [[Ed Clark]] | * [[Ed Clark]] | ||
* [[Lee Wrights]] | * [[Lee Wrights]] | ||
* [[Eric Mulder]] | |||
==Articles About Organizations== | ==Articles About Organizations== | ||
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* [[Libertarian Party of New York]] | * [[Libertarian Party of New York]] | ||
* [[Libertarian Party of Santa Clara County]] | * [[Libertarian Party of Santa Clara County]] | ||
* [[Libertarian Party of Texas]] | |||
==Newsletters== | |||
Newsletters published by state and local LP groups are a very important part of the Libertarian Party's history. Not only are they interesting in their own right, showing how these groups communicated with their members and/or the general public, but they are often the most convenient source of information about other functions of the party -- campaigns for public office, who served as officers, how money was being raised, what happened at conventions, and so on. | |||
Newsletters were typically mailed to hundreds or even thousands of people, but most of those people sooner or later threw them out. If you kept your copies, you can help by contributing them to our online collection. This can be a big job, much bigger than creating a single article on a topic -- but having this material online will be a very big help for future researchers, so it's well worth the effort. | |||
And you don't need to do it all at once -- the important thing is to get started. | |||
===First step: what is already online?=== | |||
Check the article (if one exists, see above) for the state or local organization that published the newsletter. See if there is mention of this newsletter. Also try just entering the name of the newsletter into the search bar. You may find no mention of this newsletter at all. You might find that somebody else has already contributed a complete set. But most likely you will find something in between -- a mention of the newsletter but not the actual content, or in some cases somebody may have already uploaded some issues but not all. | |||
Compare what you find with what you've got. If there are some issues online, do you have different ones? | |||
===Next step: creating an article for the newsletter as a whole=== | |||
If there isn't already one, create a new article that describes the newsletter itself. The name of the article should be same as the name of the newsletter. If it's a common name, or the same as the name of an unrelated publication, you can add the name of the local area to distinguish it, e.g., "Freedom News (Chicago)". | |||
This article should contain information like: | |||
* the organization that published it | |||
* when it was published (typically a range of years) | |||
* how frequently it was published (e.g, monthly, quarterly) | |||
* the format (page size, typical number of pages) | |||
* circulation (how many copies, members vs. general public) | |||
* the people who served as editor or did other important jobs | |||
You may not have all of this information. That's OK -- include whatever you have. | |||
If you have a good-sized collection of actual issues, you can start by creating a list of them, identified by date and/or volume/issue number. (Only list issues for which you have a copy or for which you have other evidence that they were actually published. Just creating a list of possible dates, e.g., a list of all the months between 1982 and 1997, isn't providing any useful information.) This list can be part of the same article, following the general information. You can create this list even if you aren't ready to upload the content. | |||
===The Newsletters Themselves=== | |||
There are a number of ways that the actual content of the newsletter can be made part of LPedia. For a general discussion of digitizing and uploading hardcopy documents, see [[Contributing Historical Documents]]. | |||
But before you do that, check to see if some or all of the articles are already online somewhere else. Some LP groups already make a practice of posting PDFs of their newsletters on their own site. This is more likely to be the case for recent issues, but it's worth checking before doing a lot of extra work. If the content is already online, you can either create links to each issue there or download it from there and then post a copy to LPedia. | |||
Note: Many LP groups replace their web sites from time to time, and information that might have been available online in the past is no longer available on their current site. If you have reason to believe this is the case for the newsletter you are working on, you may want to check the [http://www.archive.org Internet Archive]] to see if there are copies available there. | |||
===Examples=== | |||
Here are some articles documenting state and local newsletters that you can look at for ideas: | |||
* [[Santa Clara Libertarian]] | |||
* [[Colorado CLiPboard]] | |||