Contributing to the Theme Ontology Community

June 13, 2021 · View on GitHub

This is a community effort, and there is no shortage of ways for you to contribute to the project. You do not have to be listed on the repository homepage to be a contributor. The project welcomes contributions from story lovers of all kinds.

This document is a loose guideline showing ways for to contribute to the project.

Table of Contents

Git

If you are unfamiliar with git, the web is filled with with a wealth of excellent resources. Use whatever you need to become comfortable, these are only some suggestions to get you started. As an absolute first step, any contribution requires you to join GitHub by creating your own account.

Tutorial

GitHub provides an excellent interactive tutorial to get you ramped up on the basics: Set up Git

Pull Requests

Pull requests are the canonical way of contributing to projects on GitHub. If you have never created a pull request, or want to make sure that you are going about contributing the right way, check out this step-by-step guide.

Commit Messages

Commit messages are a central element of contributing to git projects. They provide a history of your work, and well written commit messages are a central resource of well curated git projects. This blog post summarizes what is generally considered good practice for formulating great commit messages.

Contributing Workflow

Here’s the recommended way to go about contributing to the project:

  1. Fork this repository to your account.
  2. Create a branch for the contribution you intend to make.
  3. Make your changes to your fork.
  4. Send a pull request from your fork’s branch to the master branch.

Using the web-based interface to make changes is fine too, and will help you by automatically forking the project and prompting to send a pull request too.

Propose to Revise an Existing Theme

Themes are always to be considered works in progress. Submit a propose to revise an existing theme issue to make a suggestion for how to improve on a theme.

Propose a New Theme

The project is no doubt missing all sorts of terrific themes. Submit a request a theme issue to suggest adding one.

Update the Thematic Annotations of an Existing Story

There are lots of ways to help to improve on the thematically annotated stories that are currently stored in the repository, including

  • Adding missing story metadata (e.g. year of release, author, references, etc.)
  • Improving on story descriptions. A good description consists of a little blurb of what the story is about.
  • Improving on thematic annotation motivations.
  • Adding themes.
  • Challenging invalid thematic annotations.

Submit a Thematically Annotated Story that does not already Exist in the Repository

The main way to contribute is by familiarizing yourself with the nuts and blots of how to thematically annotate stories, as described in this wiki, and then have fun theming what ever stories you please. It's always a good idea to thematically annotate stories in collaboration with others, if you can.

Becoming a Member

All theme-ontology/theming repository is public, so you can contribute to any repository through pull requests. The repository has a team associated which will drive the project, merge pull requests, and manage releases. If you want to become a project contributor of the repository, open an issue within that repository and express your wish. To ensure the quality of the project, you may have to fulfill one of the following requirements:

  • You have proven your skills by contributing high quality pull requests within the repository in the past
  • You are endorsed by an existing project contributor to join
  • You have proven your skills in another open source project and you agree with the project vision of the existing members

Improving the Repository Documentation

If you have suggestions on how to improve the documentation on this repository, open an issue or create a pull request!