What would people say to a wikipedia in ancient Greek? It has an ISO (grc), it's a pretty important language historically, and it's studied by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Most every classics department offers a course in Greek prose composition; so, there would be plenty of nerdy people wanting to write articles. Having a wikipedia in the language would help to encourage students to take composition seriously, and it would strengthen students' grasp of grammar tremendously. The first western encyclopedias (like Suidas) were written in Greek; so, there are plenty of public domain entries to get the ball rolling. There is a modern Greek wikipedia, but Ancient Greek is really different from Modern demotic Greek in all its most interesting qualities, like particles, prepositions, and its huge vocabulary. Greeks can more or less understand ancient Greek, but students of ancient Greek have little or no knowledge of Modern Greek. I'm a doctoral candidate in ancient Greek letters, and I'd be willing to get the ball rolling. Let me know what you think.
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I agree, but I don't know if now is a good time to ask.
This list is just cooling down from some minor conflicts regarding other ancient languages (Gothic, Anglo-Saxon), and I think the best idea would be to send an e-mail to Tim Starling saying that you promise not to ask for interface customisations, and that you won't bug any devs for dev work after the creation of the Ancient Greek wikipedia. He has said before that under such circumstances he is willing to create a new Wikipedia; I think rather than ask on the ML it'd be better to request it of him specifically so it's not as much of an issue (if you already have some content by the time a debate begins, you have shown that you are committed to working on it which is often one of the arguments used against new Wikipedias, especially in ancient or constructed languages).
--node
On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 17:13:45 -0700 (PDT), Alex Alderman alexalderman@yahoo.com wrote:
What would people say to a wikipedia in ancient Greek? It has an ISO (grc), it's a pretty important language historically, and it's studied by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Most every classics department offers a course in Greek prose composition; so, there would be plenty of nerdy people wanting to write articles. Having a wikipedia in the language would help to encourage students to take composition seriously, and it would strengthen students' grasp of grammar tremendously. The first western encyclopedias (like Suidas) were written in Greek; so, there are plenty of public domain entries to get the ball rolling. There is a modern Greek wikipedia, but Ancient Greek is really different from Modern demotic Greek in all its most interesting qualities, like particles, prepositions, and its huge vocabulary. Greeks can more or less understand ancient Greek, but students of ancient Greek have little or no knowledge of Modern Greek. I'm a doctoral candidate in ancient Greek letters, and I'd be willing to get the ball rolling. Let me know what you think.
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