Contribute

Entries here are edited by one person from a library of several hundred texts. Some figures deserve an author who has spent years with them. This page says how that works: who may write, what an entry must carry, what the site will not take, and what you grant by publishing here.

The model

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy put a named author on a named entry, under an editor, with the author’s reading of the field signed and dated. That is the model. A contributed entry carries its author’s name in the provenance block and on the Cite this line, beside the editor’s. The editor keeps the house rules; the author keeps the argument.

Who may write

Anyone with published work on the figure or the concept: a monograph, a chapter, a peer-reviewed article, a translation, a catalogue. Credentials in analysis are welcome but not required, and a practice alone is not enough. What qualifies you is that your claims can be checked against texts you have already put your name to.

What an entry must carry

The same three registers as every other entry, in the fixed order the loader enforces. First, the history of the idea: what was written, when, by whom, in which text, with Collected Works volume and paragraph numbers or page numbers for everything else. Second, the debate as it stands in the peer-reviewed literature, innatist, emergent and imaginal readings set out as a live disagreement. Third, one caveated line on empirical status, which for almost every figure reads none. Appearances in myth, literature and film come with a source each. Every source must resolve: a DOI, an ISBN, or a holding institution’s stable page. Quotations run to eighty words at most and end with the author, the work, the year and the reference. See the methodology for the tiers and the registers in full.

What the site will not take

A new archetype, under any name: the proposed tier is reserved and stays empty. Any list presented as the archetypes. An instrument presented as validated. Marketing for a framework, or a framework’s own text where its licence does not allow reuse. An entry built on memory rather than on texts the reader can open.

What you grant

You keep your copyright. By publishing here you licence the prose under CC BY 4.0, which lets anyone reuse it with attribution to you and to the site, and the structured data under CC0. Quotations you mark as such stay outside the grant, as they do on every page. Every version of your entry is a git commit, so the text a reader cites is the text you signed.

How to begin

Write to hello@archetype.guide with the figure or concept, the texts you would build from, and a line on what the current entry misses or what no entry yet says. Corrections to existing entries go the same way, with the entry and the source. There is no form and no queue; the editor replies in person.