Product Code Database
The Latin Wikipedia () is the Latin edition of Wikipedia, created in May 2002. As of , it has articles. While all primary content is in Latin, modern languages such as English language, italian language, French language, German language or Spanish language are often used in discussions, since many users find this easier.
Professional Latinists have observed a gradual improvement in the encyclopedia. According to Robert Gurval, chairman of the UCLA classics department, "the articles that are good are in fact very good," though some contributors do not write the language perfectly. The Latin Wikipedia was the first edition of Wikipedia written in a Extinct language; others such as the Old Church Slavonic Wikipedia came later.
The official policy of Vicipaedia is that neologisms and user coinings are not allowed ("Noli fingere!" Latin for "Don't coin/make up things").Vicipaedia:Noli fingere/en In order to deal with concepts that did not exist in classical Latin or Medieval Latin, terms from modern Latin sources are used, such as botanical Latin, scientific Latin, 18th- and 19th-century Latin language encyclopedias and books, the official Vatican City dictionary of modern Latin, as well as current Latin newspapers and radio shows, such as Ephemeris and Radio Bremen.
As in any language with a broad international character, often more than one correct term exists for a given concept (just as in English a certain car part is called a "bonnet" by British speakers but a "hood" by Americans). In Latin the existence of multiple synonyms is even more prevalent since the language has been in continuous use over a wide geographical area for over 2000 years. Sometimes the same concept is represented by different terms in classical, medieval, scientific and modern Latin. In general Vicipaedia adopts the oldest or classical term for the page name, with redirects from any others; major alternatives are listed in the article with footnote references. There is often lively debate among editors about shades of meaning. The practice of avoiding invented words and giving references for alternative terms agrees well with the general Wikipedia insistence on verifiability and the rule against original research.
Many universities and other institutionsFor example, the Royal Society, whose charter ([1]) is in Latin. have official Latin names. In fields where Latin is the current standard language, Vicipaedia normally adopts official names as pagenames, even if they belong to scientific or technical, rather than to classical Latin. This applies to:
The Latin Wikipedia logo reads "VICIPÆDIA", displaying the "Æ". However, in accordance with contemporary practice, Vicipaedia does not use ligatures in its articles for the diphthongs written ae ("Æ", "æ") and oe ("Œ", "œ"), even though in Latin a diphthong like the ae in aes is pronounced differently from an hiatus like the ae in aer, both in the classical and even more so in the Italianate pronunciation. The ligatures were adopted by the Ancient Rome to save space, and æ and œ in particular were later maintained by Latin typographers to distinguish the diphthong from the hiatus. Latin Wikipedia has chosen another convention, namely to write hiatus with the diaeresis: aë, oë. If Latin Wikipedia users prefer, however, they can activate a gadget under user preferences that automatically displays ae and oe without the diaeresis as ligatures on the pages.
Latin Wikipedia, in common with the majority of paper/parchment Latin media, does not require the marking of long vowels in words (in Latin textbooks this is usually done by adding a macron over a character, as for example, the e in stēlla.) Thus, both terr a and terr ā are written simply as terra, although the former is in the nominative case, while the latter in the Ablative case. The context usually makes clear which one is being used, though the use of macron or apex is allowed when the distinction is necessary.
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