Vicipaedia:Auxilium pro editione (latine)/en
E Vicipaedia
- This is the English translation of the parent page. General information about editing a Wikipedia you'll find in page Vicipaedia:Auxilium pro editione.
Index |
[recensere] EDITING- AND STYLE GUIDE
Salvete utentes!
Writing articles for Wikipedia is very simple. Follow a link in your language for general info on editing and style.
- The Style and How-to Directory of the English Wikipedia.
- Das Wikipedia-Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia
- Les Wikipédia:FAQ de Wikipedia en français
After that come back and have a look at something a bit more specific:
[recensere] The Latin Wikipedia-Way
The following is a list of guidelines intended to give Latin Wikipedia a common face.
[recensere] Spelling
[recensere] Do not use the letters J and j!
Rationale: The modern letters J and j were not part of the Latin alphabet during the classical era of ancient Rome. Although they are widely used today, Latin Wikipedia doesn't. On the one hand, the likelihood of spelling errors is thus reduced. And on the other hand, a consistent use or "banishment" is important for article names because not using J and j greatly simplifies looking for articles. Otherwise one would have to create a redirecting article for every such article in order to cover the different variants of spelling: e.g. Ursa Major <-> Ursa Maior.
Names of people however, are an exception. One may use the letter J in names, like José for example.
[recensere] Use the letters U, u and V, v!
Rationale: Although the letters U and u are not classical either, Latin Wikipedia (and also Wheelock's Latin, one of the major Latin textbooks in use in the United States of America) does distinguish them from V and v in order to make articles easier to read. So write verbum instead of uerbum or verbvm. The only exception from this rule are words that consist entirely of capital letters, especially quotes, e.g. DIS DEABVSQVE.
[recensere] Avoid using ligatures like Æ and æ or Œ and œ
Rationale: Although ligatures appear extensively in Roman epigraphy (inscriptions) and palaeography (manuscripts), they make modern full text search much more difficult or even impossible; so our recommendation is to avoid them. A decent web browser will let you adjust the rendering of text to use ligatures if you would prefer.
[recensere] Style Guide
[recensere] Use of numbers
- Quantities:
- Small numbers: write them out, e.g. decem libri instead of 10 libri. Read the article Numerus for more information on Roman numbers.
- Large numbers: use Arab numbers if the Latin equivalent (either Roman numerals or in words) gets too unwieldy, e. g. 20000.
- Time:
- Year only before Christ:
- 44 a.C.n.
- [[44 a.C.n.]]
- Year only after Christ:
- 44
- [[44]]
- Complete date before Christ:
- 23 Septembris 63 a.C.n.
- [[23 Septembris]] [[63 a.C.n.]]
- Nota bene: use the genitive of the month!
- Complete date after Christ:
- Range of years with both pre/post-Christ-dates:
- Range of years (only pre-Christ dates):
- 149 a.C.n. – 146 a.C.n.
- [[149 a.C.n.]] – [[146 a.C.n.]]
- Range of years (only post-Christ dates):
- Century before Christ:
- saeculum 1 a.C.n.
- [[saeculum 1 a.C.n.]]
- Century after Christ:
- saeculum 1
- [[saeculum 1]]
- Traditionals years (if wanted):
- 234 ab urbe condita or 234 a.U.c.
- No hyperlink as we should use the above formats to link to the respective year-articles
- Year only before Christ:
-
- Rationale: Several ways of representing dates are possible. A truly Roman way of doing this is possible but both unwieldy and unsightly: Thursday 18 March 2004 would become DIES IOVIS A.D. XV KAL. APR. MMDCCLVII A.U.C. (Julian Calendar, numbering ab urbe condita). See this web-site for a great conversion tool for dates and numbers.
- Decimal fractions: use a "," as decimal point instead of ".".
[recensere] Recommendations for a good article
- Don't create stubs! Better no article than a one-sentence stub.
- Rationale: stubs that consist only of a sentence are a nuisance rather than a real contribution. Latin Wikipedia has far fewer users than the English Version for example, which is why our users have a correspondingly bigger responsibility for what they are contributing. Ask yourself: if not even you are interested enough to write an at least somewhat decent article about it, why should anyone else bother to do so?
- However, if you do create an overly short article, at least add the boilerplate text {{stipula}} so that others are pointed to it.
- Add links to versions of the same article in other Wikipedias, e.g. [[en:History]] adds a link to the article history of the English Wikipedia.
- Use quotes from original Latin works, but don't overdo it!
- Rationale: Quoting from the original works of authors writing in Latin can improve an article considerably. However, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it is not a repository for source material. That's what web-sites like Wikisource are for. If you know of a web-site hosting the complete source text, then add a section ==Nexus externi== with this link. Also you can add a link to Latin Wikiquote, a collection of Latin quotations.
- External links: if you include links to web-pages in languages other than Latin or English, then indicate what language the site is in (in parentheses after the listing).
-
- e.g. El País (hispanice)
- For more information about automatically generated messages see MediaWiki-messages.
