Requests for new languages/Wikiquote Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek Wikiquote

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Request for a new language edition: Wikiquote Ancient Greek

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submitted

verification

final decision

This language has been verified as eligible. The language is eligible for a project, which means that the subdomain can be created once there is an active community and a localized interface, as described in the language proposal policy. You can discuss the creation of this language project on this page. Once the criteria are met, the language committee can proceed with the approval and will verify the test project content with a reliable neutral source, such as a professor or expert. If you think the criteria are met, but the project is still waiting for approval, feel free to notify the committee and ask them to consider its approval. A committee member provided the following comment: Eligible with the condition that the default interface has to be in English. As this project doesn't require interface translation, please make Incubator project alive and project creation will be approved. --Millosh 17:15, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

• The community needs to develop an active test project; it must remain active until approval (automated statistics, recent changes). It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months.
• The community needs to complete required MediaWiki interface translations in that language (about localization, translatewiki, check completion).
• The community needs to discuss and complete the settings table below:

What	Value	Example / Explanation

Proposal
Language code	grc (SIL, Glottolog)	A valid ISO 639-1 or 639-3 language code, like "fr", "de", "nso", ...
Language name	Ancient Greek	Language name in English
Language name	Ἀρχαία ἑλληνικὴ γλῶττα	Language name in your language. This will appear in the language list on Special:Preferences, in the interwiki sidebar on other wikis, ...
Language Wikidata item	Q35497 - item has currently the following values: English label: Ancient Greek native label (P1705): Ἀρχαία Ἑλληνική instance of (P31)/subclass of (P279): language, historical language / Hellenic Wikimedia language code (P424): grc writing system (P282): Greek alphabet, Linear B number of speakers, writers, or signers (P1098):	Item about the language at Wikidata. It would normally include the Wikimedia language code, name of the language, etc. Please complete at Wikidata if needed.
Directionality	LTR	Is the language written from left to right (LTR) or from right to left (RTL)?
Links	JACT, Perseus Project, Sacred Texts Archive	Links to previous requests, or references to external websites or documents.
Site URL	grc.wikiquote.org	langcode.wikiproject.org

Settings
Project name		"Wikiquote" in your language
Project namespace		usually the same as the project name
Project talk namespace		"Wikiquote talk" (the discussion namespace of the project namespace)
Enable uploads	no	Default is "no". Preferably, files should be uploaded to Commons. If you want, you can enable local file uploading, either by any user ("yes") or by administrators only ("admin"). Notes: (1) This setting can be changed afterwards. The setting can only be "yes" or "admin" at approval if the test creates an Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP) first. (2) Files on Commons can be used on all Wikis. (3) Uploading fair-use images is not allowed on Commons (more info). (4) Localisation to your language may be insufficient on Commons.
Optional settings
Project logo		This needs to be an SVG image (instructions for logo creation).
Default project timezone	Continent/City	"Continent/City", e.g. "Europe/Brussels" or "America/Mexico City" (see list of valid timezones)
Additional namespaces		For example, a Wikisource would need "Page", "Page talk", "Index", "Index talk", "Author", "Author talk".
Additional settings		Anything else that should be set
Once settings are finalized, a committee member will submit a Phabricator task requesting creation of the wiki. (This will include everything automatically, except the additional namespaces/settings.) After the task is created, it should be linked to in a comment under "final decision" above.

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Proposal

This will be the first Wikimedia project in this culturally important language (Ancient Greek).

The reasons for having a Wikiquote project in Ancient Greek is quite evident; a huge number of literary works (both ancient and medieval) justify its existence.

Discussion

Arguments in favour

• Strong support Ancient Greek has a written tradition spanning many centuries: 9th c. BCE - 6th c. BCE, if we are to exclude ecclesiastical Greek (4th century CE - today). This tradition includes poetic (Homer, Sappho), rhetoric (Xenophon), romantic (Lucian, Longus, Pseudo-Callisthenes) and mathematical/scientific/philosophical works which have been very influential to the Western Civilization. Innumerable quotes can be gathered from this huge corpus. With all the above having been said and considering that there is a small but willing editing community to contribute to the test project, I honestly see no reason for this request to be ignored or rejected. --Omnipaedista 02:16, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

• Strong support Ancient Greek is a very important language for humanity. It is still being taught in many universities globally and in Greek schools (gymnasium and high school). So it would be very nice to have the first project in Ancient Greek. Also the project itself with a collection of quotes from ancient greek philosophers, ancient greek literature, and other famous ancient greeks would be very nice and useful.--ZaDiak 02:19, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

• Strong support Ancient Greek is a very important language for today's culture. It is still being taught and should have a project. Also a Wikiquote would be very beneficial since there are a lot of famous quotes from ancient greek philosophers. --Makedonier 11:54, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

• Strong support No surprise. As i said several times at wikimedia projects and foundation list, Ancient Greek has a important role in world culture, in the past, even now (i believe that it is one of the few ancient languages able to express modern issues), and in the future. Crazymadlover

• Strong support XAIPETE! It seems to me a MINIMUM to have a wikiquote in ancient Greek language. And I strongly disagree with the decision of not allowing an Ancient Greek Wikipedia, just because Ancient Greek would be a "dead language". I suggest to those in power of deciding what languages can or cannot be accepted in wikipedia to ask the opinion of experts; they could look for example at Lucio Russo's book "the Forgotten Revolution". I do not agree with all of his extrapolations, but he gives a lot of interesting arguments about the fundamental importance of the Hellenistic scientific revolution -and of the Greek language which expressed the new concepts-: he also describes why this scientific revolution is so ignored today. When we believe that the universe is rational and can be described in a mathematical way, we are all Greeks. Euclid's Elements are the book with the largest diffusion (apart from the Bible). In Ancient Greek you can explain everything (by the way, the translation in Ancient Greek of the first volume of Harry Potter is a nice example of the vitality of this language). --Aristarchos

• Strong support If any language has delivered us a huge amount of quotes, then it would be Ancient Greek. Collecting all important quotes by Homer, Aristotle, Plato... would make an extensive Wikisource. Wikibelgiaan 20:28, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong support It's the main source of common quotes. --Kafkasmurat (talk) 12:01, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
• Strong support for the reasons given above. (but without the bizarre use of "BCE" to endorse a Christian dating system!)-MacRusgail (talk) 23:05, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

• Strong support Ancient Greek is a language of science. Cosmopolitanist (talk) 09:09, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support So many great quotes in this language. Alextejthompson (Ping me or leave a message on my talk page) 13:12, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support The best Greek quotes are the ancient ones. Wheatley2 (talk) 7:33, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Other discussion

The language policy as it is, does not allow for a Wikiquote in non living languages. However as there is room for a Wikisource and both are about expressing what is already there, an argument can be made to accept a Wikiquote as well. The argument in the policy states that the modern language originating from the language has preference for the user interface. However as Ancient Greek is also studied in other languages this is not necessarily the best option. My prefered option would be one where annotation can be in any language and where the default is based on the language specified in the user preferences. This is however not functionality that is currently supported by MediaWiki.

I have blogged about this and, I have asked the other members of the language committee for an opinion. Thanks, 23:58, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

I have discussed about the policy with GerardM. I am totally in favour of adding wikiquote along with wikisource in the projects allowed in dead languages (as a proposer in this request). After consideration of what Gerard proposes I thought that we could do something like this. We could have our default interface in English and the annotations by default in english. This on the incubation stage. After the wiki will be created I could ask in the Beta Wikiversity (now or then this does not make any difference) what technical changes were made and what templates does the wiki use in order to implement the multilingual system (as it is in Beta).--ZaDiak 00:12, 20 August 2009 (UTC)