How do I add an author?

What authors can I add?insert_link

To be of interest, an author must meet the following criteria:

1. Existence. You must be able to provide an external link that credibly demonstrates the author's existence.
2. Official quality. Dignitas only deals with the statements of public figures. To record the affiliation of these officials, we also define as authors the political parties and the state hierarchy (ministries, town halls, etc.).

Author profiles that do not meet these criteria will likely be flagged and closed. See also our criteria for accepting statements (we assume that you are adding an author in order to add a statement to Dignitas).

We emphasize that the author's notoriety is not a necessary condition. On the contrary, at Dignitas we consider it important to record statements from all public figures at all administrative levels.

Also, make sure that the author does not already exist in Dignitas (search for it by name).

Steps for adding an authorinsert_link

You will need a Dignitas account. Log in, then navigate to the dashboard or to the main page. There you will see the link to the page add an author.

On this page you can fill in the fields:

• Name: Enter the name under which the author is best known.
• Long and short genitive: See the next section for the logic of these values.
• Alias: Optionally add other names by which the author is known: full name including middle name, nicknames, acronyms, etc. These will make the author easier to find via a search.
• Type: Choose one of the available types.
• Color: For political parties and alliances you can also choose a color. Look for one that is as close as possible to the official party color.
• Relationships: Add one or more relationships. You can currently note the following types of relationships:
  • a person's membership in a party;
  • a party's membership in an alliance;
  • a public office (mayor, minister, member of parliament, etc.);
  • a person's participation in a company;
  • close kinship between two persons (husband/wife, son/daughter, brother/sister, parent, brother/sister-in-law, mother/father-in-law, son/daughter-in-law);
  • distant kinship between two persons (cousins, grandchildren, etc.).
• Profile: A few sentences about the author. There is a 4,000 character limit for this field. Dignitas does not aim to replace Wikipedia.
• External links: One or more URLs attesting to the existence of this author. An author not confirmed by at least one source will most likely be flagged and closed as unverifiable.
• Image: Optionally, a profile picture of the author (a photo of the person or a party logo). Try adding an official image, such as their Facebook profile picture. Try adding a square image. For logos, we prefer vector images (in SVG format), because they scale better at low resolutions than other formats.

Then save the page. The author is now active, and you and other Dignitas users can start assigning statements to him.

After saving, you will land on the author's page. From here you can edit each relationship to add one or more credible sources that record the relationship. We encourage you to do this.

Long and short genitiveinsert_link

These values are optional, are less needed for English than for other languages, and apply only to institutions, not individuals. If you prefer, ignore these values, and a moderator will fill them in for you.

We want the information in Dignitas to be read by humans, not robots. Consider a party, for example Resounding Name Party and a member of it, John Smith. Then John Smith's page will include Member Resounding Name Party, which is grammatically incorrect. Here the form of the long genitive is useful: Member of the Resounding Name Party.

But the phrase is still not perfect: the link is now on the full text of the Resounding Name Party. It would be better to exclude of the from the underlining: Member of the Resounding Name Party . We can indicate which portion we want to contain the link using square brackets. Therefore, the recommended long genitive form is of the [Resounding Name Party].

Some institutions do not need the full genitive form. For example, if John Smith is mayor of Dreamtown, then the wording Mayor of Dreamtown City Hall is redundant. The City Hall of Dreamtown could take the short genitive form of [Dreamtown]. Then John Smith's page will include the much more natural wording mayor of Dreamtown.