# ECSTRA/Main Page
## Welcome to ELiX Wiki!

This wiki serves as a platform for larger projects of EuroLinguistiX (ELiX), coordinated by Joachim Grzega. Just like James Murray, who, as the responsible author and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary at the end of the 19th century, invited everybody to assist him in gathering data for his dictionary, we also invite everyone to make these Eurolinguistic projects here collaborative projects. Only with many people’s help Murray was able to compose the Oxford English Dictionary. And this is also the idea of ELiX Wiki.
Although ELiX understands Europe in an anthropological definition, as the part of Europe that uses the Latin alphabet and has developped from the western Christian church, everyone in Europe and in the world is warmly welcome as a contributor to the ELiX projects.
So far, there are four ELiX Projects (if you want to contribute, click on the respective link for further guidelines):
* EuroHiT (= European Historical Thesaurus): Here we want to find out how certain things are called in different periods of the European languages. We want to find out how and why expressions changed. We want to compare the various European languages with one another and see where there are similarities.
* ECSTRA (= European Communicative Strategies): Here we want to compare different communicative strategies in order to find out where different European nations are similar and where they differ; in a second step we also want to find out where Europe differs from other civilizations.
* EuroLex (= European Lexemes): Here we want to collect Europeanisms or European internationalisms, words that occur in the large majority of European languages and go back to Latin (and Greek), French, English, Arabic, Italian, and German (these are six most important source languages for internationalisms in Europe). The project also serves to find out how Europe differs from other civilizations.
* ProSE (= Proverbs and Sayings in Europe): Here we want to collect proverbs and sayings current in Europe and see how they are different from and similar to other civilizations.
General guidelines for contributing to ELiX Wiki:
* ELiX Wiki permits multilingualism. For reasons of communication, though, the languages that you should use in this Wiki are the five most wide-spread languages in Europe: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian.
* Everybody can read these pages. If you want to contribute to them, however, you are requested to register (otherwise we have to many spam problems). Feel free to start a User page which allows others to see who you are and where you are an expert in.
* Only add information to existing articles, don’t start new articles (except for the Project EuroLex). All articles have been deliberately chosen for the single projects. If you feel that an article should be added, please write an e-mail to the main coordinator first (joachim.grzega@ku-eichstaett.de).
* When you add information, please indicate your sources (if the information is your own personal observation indicate this by writing “PO”).
* If you doubt the correctness of data, please discuss this on the corresponding Talk page first before you make any changes.
* When you discuss something on the Talk page, always be friendly and be aware that different users have different expertise in different things.
* Sign your contributions on the Talk page, but don’t sign the ones on the Article pages.
* Try to formulate your comments as simply as possible that people with other mother tongues have a bigger chance to follow as well.
* Use jargon if you must, but explain it, if possible.
* Try to stick to the layout suggested—this will later facilitate working your information into books.
(Cf. also Start Page.)