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Vicipaedia:De orthographia/en

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This is the English translation of the parent page (as per revision 3663496[diff]). You can find general information about editing Wikipedia in the page Vicipaedia:De recensendo.

Editing and Style Guide

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Salvete usores!

Writing articles for Wikipedia is very simple. Follow a link in your language for general info on editing and style.

After that come back and have a look at something a bit more specific:

The Latin Vicipaedia Way

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The following is a list of guidelines intended to give Latin Wikipedia a common face.

Spelling[1]

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Do not use the letters J and j!

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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.

Surnames of people are an exception. One may use the letter J in surnames, like Johnson for example.

Use the letters U, u and V, v!

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Rationale: Although the letters U and u are not classical either, they are usually distinguished on Latin Wikipedia. This is because this is the common usage in the editions of ancient authors and other books used in our schools such as Wheelock's Latin or The Cambridge Latin Course. 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.

Avoid using ligatures like Æ and æ or Œ and œ

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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.

Style Guide

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Use of numbers

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  • 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 Arabic numbers if the Latin equivalent (either Roman numerals or in words) gets too unwieldy, e. g. 20000.
  • Time:
    • Year only before Christ:
    • Year only after Christ:
    • Complete date before Christ:
    • Complete date after Christ:
    • Range of years with both pre/post-Christ-dates:
      • 63 a.C.n.–14 p.C.n.
      • [[63 a.C.n.]]–[[14|14 p.C.n.]]
      • Nota bene: never use post-Christian dates like [[14 p.C.n.]]
      • Nota bene: use the en-dash "–" (&ndash;) between the elements of a range instead of a simple hyphen "-"!
    • Range of years (only pre-Christ dates):
    • Range of years (only post-Christ dates):
    • Century before Christ:
    • Century after Christ:
    • 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
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 ",".

Notae

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  1. ↑ Quaeso respicias Disputatio Vicipaediae:Commendationes paginarum recte scribendarum
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