Volunteer
Building SikhWiki.
Lede
Most of the work that keeps an encyclopedia alive is not writing. It is building the platform, sourcing the manuscripts, verifying the citations, and tending the people who do the writing. These are the roles that do that work.
15
Open roles
5
Departments
All
Volunteer
All
Public, signed
No. 01
Beyond the editorial desk.
Editors review every change before it goes live. But the encyclopedia depends on a wider set of work — engineering the platform, translating between Punjabi and English, sourcing primary manuscripts, verifying citations, sustaining communications, keeping the organization running.
These roles are skill-based. Where editors are evaluated on their evidence and their neutrality, volunteers in these roles are evaluated on craft. We do not filter applicants by credential. We do look for people who can do the work rigorously, in public, and over time.
Every role is volunteer. Every contribution is signed. Every decision — engineering, design, partnership, or operational — is recorded in the same public record as the editorial work. The encyclopedia's standards apply to the people building the platform as much as to the people writing the entries.
No. 02
Build.
3 roles
The platform itself — every page, every input, every keystroke.
Build
Engineer
4–8 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Ship features, fix bugs, and own the long-term technical health of the encyclopedia.
What the work involves
- Build new article surfaces, editor tools, and reading interfaces in Next.js and TypeScript.
- Design and evolve the Postgres schema as new article types and relationships are added.
- Own one or more areas — search infrastructure, the editing pipeline, or the reading experience.
Who this suits
Engineers who like building tools for serious readers, write tests, and care about long-lived code.
Build
Designer
3–6 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Hold the design system. Make every new surface — articles, talk pages, contributor tools — feel like the same publication.
What the work involves
- Design new article templates, sidebars, navigation, and reading affordances.
- Maintain typography, color, spacing, and accessibility standards across the site.
- Partner with the engineer and editor teams when new editorial features need a visual home.
Who this suits
Designers with editorial taste who care more about reading systems than illustration.
Build
Quality assurance
2–4 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Cross-browser, cross-device, accessibility-audit work. The unglamorous role that makes the encyclopedia trustworthy on a five-year-old Android.
What the work involves
- Test new releases on iOS Safari, Chrome, Firefox, low-bandwidth networks, and older devices.
- Run periodic accessibility audits with screen readers and keyboard-only navigation.
- File and triage bug reports with reproductions and clear scope.
Who this suits
People who notice the off-by-one and the screen-reader skip.
No. 03
Language.
2 roles
Punjabi, Gurmukhi, and the bilingual register the encyclopedia is written in.
Language
Translator (Punjabi ↔ English)
2–5 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Translate scripture references, key article excerpts, navigation, and editor communications between Punjabi and English.
What the work involves
- Translate quotations from Guru Granth Sahib and other primary texts with attention to register and meaning.
- Render technical and scholarly English into Punjabi for navigation, system messages, and entries.
- Help establish the bilingual style guide and consistency standards.
Who this suits
Native or near-native speakers in both languages with a feel for scriptural register.
Language
Gurmukhi typography & rendering
Project-based · Periodic
Set the standard for how Gurmukhi appears on SikhWiki — fonts, ligatures, transliteration, line breaks, and on-screen rendering.
What the work involves
- Evaluate and recommend Gurmukhi fonts for screen reading, citation, and print export.
- Build and maintain transliteration tables (ISO 15919 or similar) for use across the encyclopedia.
- Audit articles and templates for typography correctness as the catalogue grows.
Who this suits
Type designers, linguists, or developers with experience in Indic-script display.
No. 04
Sourcing.
3 roles
Primary materials — manuscripts, citations, images, and the apparatus that ties them to articles.
Sourcing
Manuscript & archive coordinator
2–4 hrs/week · Remote, occasional travel · Ongoing
Liaison to the world's Sikh manuscript archives. Helps editors get to primary documents.
What the work involves
- Maintain working relationships with the Punjab Digital Library, SOAS, Punjabi University Patiala, GNDU, and other institutions.
- Track manuscripts cited in editor requests; help editors obtain scans, citations, and permissions.
- Document the location, condition, and accessibility of key manuscripts in a public registry.
Who this suits
People with research-library experience or contacts in Sikh studies institutions.
Sourcing
Citation librarian
2–4 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Maintain SikhWiki's canonical reference list and bibliographic apparatus.
What the work involves
- Build and maintain the canonical bibliography — every named work cited across the encyclopedia, in standardized form.
- Audit citations for completeness, accuracy, and dead links.
- Support editors with citation lookup, format consistency, and reference style enforcement.
Who this suits
Reference librarians, archivists, or graduate students with citation discipline.
Sourcing
Image & rights coordinator
2–3 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Source images — photographs, paintings, manuscript folios — and track their licensing and attribution.
What the work involves
- Source images for new articles from museums, archives, and contributor uploads.
- Verify provenance, licensing, and reuse permissions before publication.
- Maintain an image registry with attribution data, license terms, and source URLs.
Who this suits
People with rights-clearance experience or museum / archival background.
No. 05
Communications.
4 roles
How the encyclopedia reaches the readers, scholars, and institutions it exists to serve.
Communications
Outreach & partnerships
3–5 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Build relationships with the institutions, scholars, and communities the encyclopedia depends on.
What the work involves
- Reach out to universities, research libraries, gurdwaras, and scholarly organizations to introduce the project and invite contribution.
- Manage press inquiries and external communications.
- Develop and maintain a partnerships pipeline with documented relationships.
Who this suits
People with academic, nonprofit, or institutional outreach experience.
Communications
SEO & discoverability
3–5 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Make sure scholars, students, and curious readers find the encyclopedia when they search.
What the work involves
- Implement structured data, schema.org markup, and semantic HTML across article surfaces.
- Maintain sitemaps, canonical URLs, and search-engine submission processes.
- Monitor query performance and surface gaps where the encyclopedia is invisible to readers it should serve.
Who this suits
SEO practitioners with respect for editorial work and no instinct to optimize against it.
Communications
Newsletter editor
4–6 hrs/quarter · Remote · Quarterly
Compile and edit the quarterly digest — what was published, what was revised, what changed in the editorial standards.
What the work involves
- Survey the past quarter's published articles, major revisions, and editorial discussions.
- Write a short editorial introduction and curate the issue's contents.
- Coordinate with editors to surface noteworthy work and decisions.
Who this suits
Editors and writers who can summarize a publication's quarter in 800 words.
Communications
Social presence
1–2 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
A restrained, scholarly social presence — announcements, entry highlights, no shouting.
What the work involves
- Post new entries, major revisions, and quarterly digests to the project's social channels.
- Respond to substantive questions; route everything else back to the article talk pages.
- Resist the pressure to be loud, fast, or trend-chasing — that is not what we are.
Who this suits
People with restraint and editorial judgment who do not need to be liked online.
No. 06
Operations.
3 roles
The infrastructure of the project — people, processes, documentation, and money.
Operations
Volunteer coordinator
3–5 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Onboard new contributors, match skills to open work, and keep the volunteer pipeline alive.
What the work involves
- Run welcome calls with new contributors and editors.
- Maintain the public list of open work and match volunteers to it.
- Track time commitment, follow up on inactive volunteers, and graduate active ones into expanded roles.
Who this suits
People who like systems for human attention and follow-through.
Operations
Documentation maintainer
2–3 hrs/week · Remote · Ongoing
Keep the contributor handbook, style guide, and internal runbooks current and findable.
What the work involves
- Maintain the public contributor and editor handbooks.
- Document internal processes — review workflow, dispute resolution, escalation, governance.
- Keep style and citation guides in sync with editorial decisions.
Who this suits
Technical writers, editors of internal tooling, or anyone who likes documentation that someone actually reads.
Operations
Fundraising & stewardship
Project-based · Recurring
Help make the encyclopedia financially sustainable — grants, donations, financial reporting.
What the work involves
- Identify and apply to grants from foundations, academic institutions, and cultural organizations.
- Build and maintain donor relationships with appropriate disclosure and accountability.
- Maintain the public financial record — what was raised, where it went, what is planned.
Who this suits
People with grant-writing or nonprofit-finance experience and a tolerance for paperwork.
No. 07
How we work.
Four conditions every volunteer agrees to before work begins. They are not negotiable.
- 01
Volunteer.
Every role on this page is unpaid. We do not pay engineers, designers, translators, librarians, or coordinators. The encyclopedia is built by people who choose to spend a few hours a week on it.
- 02
Public.
Every commit, every design decision, every outreach record, every bibliographic entry is in the open record. Closed-door work is not how this encyclopedia is built.
- 03
Signed.
Every contribution is attributed to a named person with a public profile. Anonymous building, like anonymous editing, is not permitted on SikhWiki.
- 04
Onboarded.
New volunteers are paired with an existing one for the first month. Expectations, scope, and time commitment are agreed in writing before work begins.
No. 08
How to apply.
The same process for every role. No résumés filtered by algorithm. No credential check.
- 01Create a SikhWiki account. Read the editorial guidelines and the role description above.
- 02Submit a sample of work. Engineers send code (a PR or repo); designers send a portfolio; translators send a sample translation; coordinators send a writing sample.
- 03Have a short call with the volunteer coordinator and one existing volunteer in the role's department. If the work is a fit, you start.
Editorial board membership is by invitation, not application. The board oversees the project's charter, hears disputes, and approves changes to the editorial standards. Members are drawn from the existing editor team and from outside scholars.