Landrace.Wiki:Contributing
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This page describes the main ways to contribute to Landrace.Wiki and the norms that guide all contributions.
If you are completely new to the wiki, read Landrace.Wiki:About first for an overview of the project, then come back here.
Overview
Landrace.Wiki depends on contributions from people with direct knowledge of landrace cannabis: field researchers, growers, preservationists, historians, and members of traditional farming communities. No single team can document global cannabis diversity alone.
There are several ways to contribute, ranging from quick edits to substantial field documentation. Pick whichever fits your knowledge and experience.
1. Document accessions
This is the most valuable type of contribution. If you have real field data, seeds, or long-term observations of a landrace population, you can add it to the database using the accession form.
See Help:Documenting Accessions for a full walkthrough: what data to gather before you start, the tier system, the accession ID format, GPS safety rules, and step-by-step instructions for using the form.
See Help:Accessions to understand what accession pages contain and how to read them.
2. Create geographic pages
Accessions sit within a geographic hierarchy: country, growing region, growing area, appellation, and field. If the geographic pages for your area do not exist yet, you can create them.
See Help:Geographic pages for an overview of the hierarchy and links to help pages for each page type.
3. Submit grow and smoke reports
If you have grown a landrace variety or can describe its characteristics from direct experience:
- Grow reports document cultivation experience: growing conditions, flowering time, plant structure, yield, any notable traits or difficulties.
- Smoke reports document the characteristics and effects of landrace varieties you have encountered.
These reports are community contributions, not formal documentation. They appear on accession pages alongside the verified field data, clearly labelled as community content. Use the submission forms linked from the respective pages.
4. Improve existing pages
You do not need field data to contribute. Many pages need:
- Copyediting – fixing typos, improving clarity, cleaning up formatting.
- References – adding citations for claims that currently lack sources, or replacing weak sources with stronger ones.
- Context – expanding thin sections with historical, cultural, or botanical information you can source.
- Links – connecting related pages that should cross-reference each other (accessions to fields, fields to growing areas, country pages to relevant accessions).
To edit a page, click the Edit tab at the top or the edit link next to a section heading. Write a short edit summary explaining what you changed, then click Save. If you are unfamiliar with wiki markup, see Help:Editing basics.
You can practice safely in Help:Sandbox or in your own personal sandbox at Special:MyPage/sandbox.
5. Add translations and local names
Traditional cannabis varieties have names in dozens of languages, many of them undocumented in English-language sources. If you know local names, traditional nomenclature, or regional terminology:
- Add them to the relevant accession, appellation, or region pages.
- Include the original script where possible, with romanisation.
- Note the source (published reference, oral tradition, personal knowledge).
6. Report threats
If you are aware of eradication campaigns, habitat destruction, genetic contamination, or other threats to landrace populations:
- Submit a news item through the news form for the Current Events feed.
- Include a source link (news article, government announcement, social media post) if one exists.
- Provide as much geographic detail as is safe to share.
7. Technical contributions
If you are comfortable with MediaWiki, Semantic MediaWiki, Lua, CSS, or data modelling:
- Template development and maintenance
- Semantic property and query work
- Module development (Scribunto/Lua)
- CSS and design improvements
- Bot scripting for data import or maintenance
See Landrace.Wiki:MediaWiki for an overview of the technical stack. Get in touch through the Zomia Collective if you want to help with infrastructure.
Norms and expectations
All contributions are subject to norms on scope, tone, evidence standards, safety, and editorial review. Before contributing, read Norms and expectations in full. The key points:
- Stay within scope: traditional landrace varieties and their documentation. No commercial hybrids, medical advice, or product promotion.
- Write factually. Distinguish between direct observation, oral history, and published sources. Reference concrete claims.
- Protect people. Use aliases for farmers, round GPS coordinates by ±500m in prohibition countries, strip EXIF metadata from sensitive photographs.
- Respect other contributors. Discuss significant changes on the talk page before making them.
See also
- Landrace.Wiki:About – Project overview
- Landrace.Wiki:Norms – Full norms and expectations
- Landrace.Wiki:Mission-Statement – Conservation mission and commitments
- Landrace.Wiki:MediaWiki – Technical platform
- Help:Contents – Help directory
- Help:Editing basics – Wiki markup fundamentals
- Help:Sourcing – Citation formatting