New Entries: All it takes to get started as a contributor to the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (which entitles you to an unlimited access password) is a 350+ word entry (or a few entries that amount to a total of 350+ words) on a text, person, school, temple, ritual practice, work of art, concept, etc.—drawn from your own research, or sufficiently developed from a present reference work. This will give you a full two years of usage (and longer, if you offer a longer entry) of the DDB and CJKV-E reference works. For general guidelines on style, please see our DDB/CJKV-E style sheet.
Please note: The DDB is intended primarily as a resource for scholarly research and translation, and thus its contents need to exhibit a clear standard of scholarly rigor (unlike, for instance, Wikipedia), including sharp criticality, proper usage and citation of sources and so forth. We therefore require contributors to have completed a graduate degree to at least the equivalent of the M.A. level in graduate school program at a fully accredited university, where one has received direct formal training in the reading of classical East Asian Buddhist texts.
Updating/Enhancing Existent Entries: You can also work to sharpen or develop any entries already contained in the dictionary, since there are few entries that we can claim to be perfectly complete. In this case, please go to the entry in question, click on the link that says "XML Source" at the top of the page, copy it to your local system, edit it, and send it back to us by e-mail.
Or, perhaps you are a scholar who has developed a glossary of terms covering a special area of Buddhist research. This kind of information, as long as it is reasonably well-developed, can also be considered. What we are not looking for is computer-generated lists of terms of the style of Edict or CEDict. These are marvelous compilations, but are a bit different in purpose from what we are trying to develop in the DDB.
We can accept contributions in standard word processor files, such as MS-Word or OpenOffice. For those who happen to have some experience with XML, we would be delighted if your material could be enframed with some kind of minimal XML markup (we can provide templates and basic instructions for this), but we certainly don't expect this. For any other questions, please write to Charles Muller at Charles Muller.
The same general principles apply to contributing to the CJKV-English Dictionary, except that on the average, the length of individual entries is shorter. Nonetheless, again, as distinguished from compilations like EDict and CEDict, we are not looking for mere word lists that have no authoritative referencing. Also, while we do not exclude modern terminology, we are looking more for terms that have a premodern reference in literature, philosophy, history, and so forth. Thus, it is desirable to have a locus classicus wherever possible, along with a complete range of senses of the given term. There are presently no Area Editors established for the CJKV-E dictionary, so for now, you may write directly to Charles Muller with inquiries.