[Foundation-l] [Langcom-l] Ancient Greek reconstructed an analysis of a proposal for a new Wikipedia
Mark Williamson
node.ue at gmail.com
Fri Apr 18 10:03:05 UTC 2008
Stop saying Latin, we already have a Wikipedia in Latin. We are
discussing the denial of a Wikipedia for Ancient Greek.
Mark
On 17/04/2008, Pharos <pharosofalexandria at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)
> <pathoschild at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Further, I've painstakingly followed every thread in this discussion,
> > and I have not seen any strong argument for allowing languages nobody
> > uses natively. Wikimedia wikis exist to make the sum of human
> > knowledge available to everyone, not to practice or preserve
> > languages.
> >
> > I think the argument that they act as a common language for scholars
> > of the ancient language is not valid; we are not a forum for academic
> > exchange.
>
>
> You have to remember that "everyone" includes people who consider
> written-only languages a part of their intellectual sphere. If
> Wikimedia was around 500 years ago, would we deny Latin for purely
> ideological reasons, even though it was very widely used in
> literature? And though that use has declined greatly for Latin and
> similar classical languages, I do not think we can say that such a use
> is dead, nor can we at all predict the future course for such
> languages.
>
> And is it not true that certain topics are best researched in certain
> languages? If one were to collect writers from around the world to
> write an encyclopedia article on medieval ecclesiastical history,
> based on the most relevant and important sources, would not the
> optimal language for collaboration be Latin? And if one were to write
> an encyclopedia article on early 20th century artificial languages,
> would not the optimal language for collaboration be Esperanto?
>
> Surely such articles, written in one context but translated into many
> other languages, would be very valuable to all of our Wikipedia
> editions.
>
> Not that I agree with Gerard's specific proposal, but the case for
> Wikipedias in written-only languages is quite clear to me.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Pharos
>
>
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