Reference Group / Encyclopedia of NZ / Contributors' Zone / Guidelines
Last updated: 2 May 2003 [pdf version of this document ].
I am delighted that you have agreed to contribute to Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. I believe this is a hugely important project that will make a long-term contribution to the culture of New Zealand. The vision for Te Ara is as follows:
Te Ara will be a taonga for all New Zealanders and for other peoples who are interested in this country.
Te Ara will be a reference work, the first place people come — children and old people, pupils and scholars, Māori and Pākehā — to find out facts about this land. They will return again and again because they know that Te Ara is like a trusty friend — it can be relied upon to tell truths.
Te Ara will be a place of fascination and wonderment, a gallery of images, a library of stories, a jukebox of sounds, a gathering of peoples. People will come back to explore and be intrigued, they will come back to laugh and to be amazed at the uniqueness of this land.
Te Ara will be the first of its kind in the world. All other national encyclopedias have begun as works of print. This encyclopedia will be conceived from the beginning as a web experience, and it will be a brilliant example of the creative possibilities of this medium.
Te Ara will call on the enthusiasm and imagination of many New Zealanders; and once begun it will grow and become richer as knowledge about this country and its peoples evolves.
We are at the beginning of a very exciting journey.
To achieve these ambitious goals, we need the help and creativity of contributors such as yourself. I hope you will read the following Guide for Contributors closely. Although you should follow its detailed instructions, we hope that as you work on your entry you will also keep in mind the larger vision. We are depending on you to help make it a reality.
Jock Phillips
General Editor
Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand
This will be the second encyclopedia produced by the New Zealand government. The first, edited by A H McLintock, was published in 1966. Since then significant discoveries have been made, new questions have been asked, and new perspectives on such matters as the environment, gender, and ethnicity have emerged. Te Ara sets out to make these discoveries and interpretations easily accessible.
The Te Ara entry is designed to take users to the frontiers of received knowledge about a subject. Entries should take account of recent research and discoveries and different perspectives. Conclusions should be presented simply, clearly and in an engaging style.
Although Te Ara will give a sense of the wide range of peoples and cultures who have made New Zealand home, special effort will be made to ensure a full coverage of Māori experience and perspectives. All the entries will be available both in te reo Māori and in English. You will need to think about whether your subject has a distinctive Māori dimension and how this can be included in the entry.
Te Ara will be published progressively on the world wide web. Once all the entries are completed, a printed version may be published, but the primary form of Te Ara is the internet version. This will allow users to move from words to images, films, sounds or other documents. It is important to think of your entry in this multimedia way and to tell your story using all the visual and aural resources at your disposal. We want other media to add real intellectual, as opposed to merely decorative, value. We urge you to think about the relationship between words and graphics, and provide us with suggestions for various media to be used in conjunction with the text.
Te Ara will be of value to a wide range of people: from primary school children, to overseas web-surfers with little background knowledge of New Zealand, to scholars wanting a summary of recent research. The web will allow us to layer the material for these diverse audiences. Each entry will have a 'home' page with a simple summary (which we will prepare). The main entry (which you will prepare) needs to be accessible to students in senior secondary schools. We hope the references, some of the primary resource material and the suggestions for further reading will take scholars to the frontier. As you put together your entry please think about these different audiences.
Te Ara is not a general reference work, but focuses exclusively on New Zealand. It will therefore explore aspects of this country that make it different from other places. Entries should give a sense of the wider natural and human experience of this land: they should explore its change over time and its particular local and regional riches. Please look at your subject with this broad sense of historical time and geographical space, and do not neglect any bicultural aspects of the topic.
Te Ara will be used for checking facts. Its credibility depends on a high level of accuracy. Please ensure that the entry you supply is as accurate as possible. Your name will appear at the foot of your entry.
While ensuring accuracy and balance, entries should not be bland. Please approach your subject with verve and imagination, and include coverage of debate and different points of view that may have arisen. Te Ara should evoke a sense of an intellectual tradition with ongoing dialogue and debate, and will in turn contribute to that tradition.
Te Ara will be organised under four major themes:
Each of these will have a number of sub-themes. Themes and sub-themes will be undertaken consecutively, and entries will be published on the Internet in batches. We expect that Te Ara will be complete by mid 2011. Because the project is so large and wide-ranging, schedules and deadlines will be of the utmost importance.
It is essential that we receive your entry by the agreed deadline. Our editorial processes will take some time, and we will be dealing with a large number of entries, which compounds any delays. If circumstances beyond your control make it impossible for you to meet your deadline, you should contact the Managing Editor, Nancy Swarbrick, as soon as possible so that it can be renegotiated. She can be reached by phone on (04) 496 6350 or by e-mail on nancy.swarbrick@mch.govt.nz.
There are several reasons why it is important you stay close to the commissioned length for your entry:
If, after starting work on your entry, you consider the word allocation should be revised, please discuss this in the first instance with the Managing Editor, Nancy Swarbrick.
The overall responsibility for the comprehensiveness, readability and originality of entries rests with the contributor. Entries that do not meet Te Ara standards may be returned for amendment. While we reserve the right to change entries, editing and checking by Te Ara staff will be limited. Please ensure that your entry is carefully drafted and proofed, and that it is fully referenced (see especially sections 4–8 of this paper). The edited entry, with an indication of its design and related resources, will be returned to you for your comments before publication.
Because Te Ara must appeal to a wide range of audiences, you should write your entry in a straightforward style that can be easily understood by a senior high school student. You are encouraged to engage the interest and imagination of the reader and allow your personality to come through in the writing. Please note:
Each Te Ara entry has three main components: the main essay, topic boxes that appear alongside the essay, and resources (such as photographs, graphics, sound clips, biographies etc) that enhance and add to the essay. Writers are asked to supply us with the main essay and topic boxes, and to advise us on possible resources that could be used.
The average Te Ara entry will be 2,000 words long. As large blocks of text do not work well on the web, we will present entries in separate sections of no more than 500 words and no less than 300 words each, with headings. These sections function as sub-entries. You will need to structure your subject according to these smaller units. Headings for each should be short and descriptive of the contents.
Please do not make references to other parts of your entry or to other Te Ara entries in the essay — we will add cross-references as part of our in-house editorial procedure.
Topic boxes are designed to convey small pieces of key information in a lively and engaging way. It is up to you to decide what boxes to include, but there should be at least one for every 1,000 words of main text. Each box should contain no more than 100 words. The following types of topic box will be used:
Note that the word allocation for the entry does not include information supplied in topic boxes.
A wide range of resources, including photographs, paintings and drawings, cartoons, sound clips, moving images, biographies from the online Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and documents of various kinds will accompany the essay. Their purpose is not just illustrative — they must have information value and add to what has been written. In many cases they will eliminate the need for detailed descriptions and explanations in the text.
There will be a small team of Te Ara staff responsible for locating resources, assessing their suitability, ordering them and dealing with technical and copyright issues. It is not necessary for you to do any of this work: you do not, for instance, have to provide copies or originals of photographs. We do, however, want you to give us guidance on what resources should accompany your essay. These resources may already exist (for example, old photographs), or they may need to be specially created (for example, new maps or tables).
Each 1000 words of text will almost always be accompanied by the following resources:
Depending on their importance and availability, some of the following resources may be included:
The attached form contains more information — please complete it and return it with your essay.
Biographies of over 3,000 New Zealanders who made their mark between 1769 and 1960 can be found in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, now online at www.dnzb.govt.nz. By searching birthplaces or iwi (under 'Advanced Search') or relevant topics (under 'Word Search') you may be able to get useful research leads and identify biographies of people relevant to your entry. Please list these on the resources form. If there are many possible choices, it is preferable that you opt for biographies that already have an accompanying image (but if an important biography is not yet illustrated, we will give priority to the search for an image).
You may know of other people, living or dead, whose biographies are extremely relevant to the entry. If so, please complete the nomination form attached. The biographies you suggest will be considered for inclusion either in the DNZB site (if the person has died) or in the Te Ara site (if they are still alive).
For some types of entries, specific instructions on what to include in the entry and what to exclude will be provided. Generally speaking, however, you should bear in mind the following points:
Te Ara aims to be interdisciplinary in flavour, so it is very important that writers are not blinkered by their particular specialties. Think laterally about the topic! It is essential that you take into account the following issues when writing your entry:
You may not be able to cover all these aspects in your essay, but please consider their possible relevance and interest.
Where there has been scholarly debate about your topic or diverse interpretations of it, you should indicate this, even if only briefly. If it is difficult to convey the range or complexity of debate in the essay, you may wish to suggest the inclusion of digitised papers or articles of significance as resources. Obviously you will need to exercise judgement about the balance between fact and interpretation in your essay, bearing in mind the allocated length.
McLintock's Encyclopaedia will also be online as part of Te Ara, and we will link to it where appropriate, as many entries are still relevant and useful. It may be that your entry will cover similar ground as the McLintock entry, but in many cases it will have additional detail where there have been new developments and perspectives. It is important that your entry can stand alone without need for reference to the McLintock entry, as eventually Te Ara may be published in a print volume, which will not include the McLintock entries.
We will inform you of any entries related to yours. A list of entries will also be published on Te Ara's project pages (http://www.mch.govt.nz/ref/enz/). If you have queries about these, contact the Managing Editor, Nancy Swarbrick.
You should provide footnotes for quotations, facts, assertions and major arguments in your essay and topic boxes. Some of these will be published with the entry, and they will also help us in our editorial work.
A full bibliography of sources used in preparing the entry must be supplied. Please indicate with an asterisk (*) all sources that make a significant contribution to the topic, so that these can be included in the 'select bibliography' published as part of the entry. These should ideally be recent secondary sources, directly relevant to the topic of the essay. The purpose of the select bibliography is to assist readers who want to explore the topic in more depth.
Please include full details, as follows:
As for Journal articles. Please provide as much of the same information as possible.
Give the fullest possible citation.
Please send in any photocopies of items from inaccessible sources, such as manuscripts or newspapers not held in Wellington, or notes you have taken during your research.
Please provide a copy of your entry both in hard copy and by email as a Word document.
Before you send in your entry, please check the following things:
Thank you for participating in the Te Ara project!