The web-interface of Prabook allows people to contribute, by providing information on a person, whose profile already exists in the database, or by creating an entirely new profile.
As you create a profile in Prabook, note that it will not be publicly available until you press the PUBLISH button! Therefore, even after you click the SAVE button, the article will only be available in the MY PRABOOK section, not displayed to anyone else. Only after you press the PUBLISH button will the profile be available for viewing by anyone online and on search engines.
As the Book of Works, Prabook is the place where you can record important deeds, as well as upload books, articles, paintings, photographs, or pictures of what you have designed or developed... In other words, it is created to present everything that has been accomplished in one's life.
Prabook is an English language portal. However, we encourage people from different nations and ethnic backgrounds to contribute to Prabook. The idea is not to limit people to their language community but, instead, to share one's national biography, using a common language, with the entire world.
Prabook is a place where you can find information about people of the past and present as well as add your own articles about people you admire, be it a scholar, local activist or your relative.
Q: How did my profile appear on Prabook?
A: As our mission puts it, Prabook is meant to preserve information about any person who ever lived. For this purpose we extract information about people, using numerous international and national Who's Who publications, biographical dictionaries, and encyclopedias. This information may be incomplete or contain undesirable parts that you would like to modify or remove.
Given the collaborative nature of our project you can always register on Prabook and edit your profile, adding for instance your political beliefs or removing birthdate information. This process is free and simple, it would not require any sensitive information from your side.
You can then prevent others from editing your profile by leaving 'Available for editing' checkbox empty. In any case you can also adress any issue to our administration team at [email protected] and together we will find the right solutions to any situation.
Q: What is the difference between a user's account and a profile on Prabook?
A: Biographical information on Prabook exists in the form of profiles. Anyone can go to the site, open profile and get full access to its information. However in order to edit this information, you need to register on the site. Note that registration only means creating a user's account which gives an ability but not an obligation to edit Prabook profiles. It is not required to provide any personal information to register a user's account, and creation of own Prabook's profiles for our users is not mandatory.
Q: What is 'taken' profile?
A: When you start editing a profile on Prabook, the status of such profile becomes 'Taken'. It means that the profile is in progress, and no other user can touch it until you finish your version by clicking on orange 'Publish' button.
Note that only after publishing a profile, your changes will become visible to everyone else.
Furthermore by leaving 'Available for editing' checkbox empty, you can prevent other users from editing your profile even after publishing it.
In case you believe that someone has unjustifiably claimed your profile, or blocked a public profile on celebrity from being editable, there is a 'Complain' button which will correspond the issue to administrator who will seek for a fair solution.
Q: I am a patent lawyer and I have several publications in World Patent magazine. Can I create a profile about myself with Prabook?
A: If you are a lawyer, doctor or scholar, if you publish articles in Autism or Dentistry magazine or with any other professional publisher, you can definitely create a profile about yourself. In a paragraph "Works" you can provide links to Amazon, or any other commercial sources that could help to increase the sales of your books or articles or provide a link to any non-commercial resource.
Q: I am an Italian architect and my professional works are published in Domus Magazine, that does not have an English version. Can I leave links to Italian sources of information?
A: Definitely. You can provide a link in Italian or in any other national language to "Works" paragraph. Within a short period of time it would become possible to automatically translate any professional text from any language into English and vice versa. However, your main biographic profile should be in English.
By the way, if you are an architect your buildings can speak on behalf of yourself much more than any of your theoretical publications. Download the images of the buildings you designed and put the address of them, and users could see how your works look and know the locations.
Q: My former professor, whom I still admire, already passed away. Is it possible to create a profile on him?
A: You can definitely create a profile on any scholar, your teacher or anybody you venerate, or even whom you worked together with. If the person is known to general public, there are should be some literature on them; in this case you can use Bibliography chapter, where you can put links to books or articles devoted to this person.
Q: I am a fan of Lionel Messi. Can I post on a page with his bio on a regular basis?
A: It's enough to start a page/profile on your hero. When you press Save, the system will ask you if you want to continue writing on his page exclusively or allow others to update the page with new facts of his sport career.
Q: What do I do if a profile of a person I want to write about already exists in the system?
A: First, check if you are allowed to update the information on the existing page. It's up to a previous author to give you this opportunity. If you don't have this option, then choose another person (as a rule we have more than one hero in life:).
Q: What if I don't want users to see that I am the author of the profile (article/page)? In other words, if I want to stay anonymous?
A: There is an option for Prabook contributors to stay anonymous. At the stage of saving the article, you will be offered this option. But this doesn't mean that you are given the right to post obscene content or profanities. Otherwise, you will be deprived of the right to be the author/editor.
