Members' Information

Guidelines for Contributors at AotW

As a member at AotW you are not required to do anything, actually, but we hope you'll find time to add to the site or contribute in other ways as your interest and talents lead you. That's why we offer memberships!

The following is further information to help ensure this community works smoothly for everyone.

Getting Started
When you first sign up, you are automatically registered as a Contributing Editor, which means you can submit information for consideration. To do this, first login to the site using the login name and password you chose when you signed up, and then select the 'submit info' link to begin the process. That will put you on the 'Contributor's Information Entry Tools' page - with some instructions about how to proceed.

Copyrights, Content Guidelines
Any material you write is, of course, your own. By submitting to AotW you do not lose or waive that ownership. We do not presently have a means to automatically identify any work you provide as yours on the public site. If you'd like to receive credit within the site, please let us know, and we can work out a labeling scheme that will accomplish that.

This also means your work is anonymous and your name and email are not visible to the public, unless you specifically direct us to show it somewhere.

That said ... the site owner is ultimately responsible for all material on the site, so he might ask you to edit your submissions if he or a Managing Editor see significant problems. We ernestly believe that a wide range of views and a variety of historical interpretations are beneficial, so we'd expect only to have issues with matters of factual reliability. However, any material taking a hateful, personally judgmental, or overly combative point of view will be rejected.

Submission Quality
We're looking for material to add to AotW which is factually supported, well documented, and well written. This is not as scary as it may sound, however! It does mean that your points need to be clearly stated, and you need to cite references to back up your facts.

We're looking for references which are as close to authoritive as possible. The best sources you can use are: (1) Primary: documents written by participants and other immediate witnesses - usually close in time to events; (2) Standard References: works compiled by reputable authors directly from Primary materials; and (3) Secondary sources: materials produced from (1) or (2) by authors who are knowledgeable, respected by their peers, and who document their respective sources.

Be conservative - if a "fact" is not well supported by (usually) more than one source, or conflicts with other information which is more widely credited , consider not using it. This is not to say an alternate viewpoint may not be closer to the truth ... just that it might be harder to back-up.

Also, be aware that first person accounts are naturally tilted by the bias or point of view of the author. Sometimes there are hidden agandas at work! These don't make the source less genuine, just more human. History is by nature inprecise.

Doing more Later
We need Managing Editors as well as Contributing Editors here at AotW. If you'd like to be one, after submitting materials for some reasonable time as a contributor, please send me an email, and we can discuss how that might work for you.

Having Problems on AotW?
Although we've tested and tweaked as best we know how, we're still pretty new at this cooperative effort on the web, so if you see anything at AotW that doesn't work quite right, or not as you think it should, please let us know, and we'll see what we can do to fix it. We're not some faceless corporate site, so you're dealing with dedicated folks here :)

If you ever need help logging in, just send us an email and we'll send you back your password hint. If that doesn't help, we can reset your password to something temporary, which you can then update online yourself.

Privacy, Security
We don't ask for much personal information about you - that's intentional. We only want enough to keep track of who's doing what on the site. We do not, and will never, share anything you tell us with any other person or organization without first getting your express permission.

We can't think of a reason we'd ever do that, either.

Also, we don't know your password, though we can look-up your password hint. Your password is stored encrypted - and it's a one-way encryption process - so we never see it 'in the clear'.

You can update your membership information, including password, at any time by following the 'update personal info' link while logged-on to aotw.org. You'll need to re-enter your password in the form each time you use that function.

Although we may set up something in the future, none of the traffic between your browser and the AotW site is encrypted, so be aware that it is not really secure. Anyone could be 'listening'. This is not likely to be a problem however, because we don't expect you'll be communicating anything secret or private. Please let us know if you have any issues in this area.