Contribution guidelines

What belongs here

Material with a connection to Paite life: the landscape around Lamka and the wider hills, textile and craft work, festivals and ceremony, music and instruments, oral literature, cuisine, village life, historical documents, language and script.

Age is not a filter. A photograph taken this morning and one taken in 1962 are both archive material. What matters is that somebody can say what it is.

Describe it while you still can

The description is the part that survives. A photograph with no account of what it shows becomes unusable within a generation, and the people who could have explained it are exactly the people the archive is racing.

Say what you can:

• What is happening, and where
• Who is in it, if they are content to be named
• When, even approximately — "late 1970s" is worth more than nothing
• Who took it or made it, and who told you

If you are unsure, record the uncertainty rather than smoothing it over. "My mother thought this was Bualtang, but was not certain" is good archive practice. Where two accounts differ, both are worth keeping, both attributed.

Photographs of people

Ask the people in a photograph, or their family, before you upload it. This matters most for funerals, illness, and children.

If you have a photograph you believe belongs in the archive but cannot get consent for, mark it members-only rather than public, and say in the description that consent was not obtained. That is a decision the community can revisit; an unmarked upload is not.

Things that are not yours to give

Do not upload material you did not make or were not given, including scans from published books, photographs from someone else's collection, or recordings made by other people, unless you have their agreement. Credit the source in the credit field.

Rating

Rate what you think is worth keeping and worth seeing, not what you personally like. You cannot rate your own contributions. Ratings decide what the front page shows, so they are a way of speaking for the archive rather than about yourself.

When something is wrong

Use the report control on any item or comment. A report goes to the moderators with your reason attached. Anything hidden or removed requires a written reason from the moderator, recorded against their name in the audit log — moderation here is accountable, not silent.

If the problem is that material should not be public at all — a photograph of a funeral, a genealogy a family does not want shared — say so in the report. That is treated as the most serious kind.