Latin videos at Wikipedia top 2 million views
Videos from Youtube struggle to get hits. Many creators are placing great work on Youtube, in the hope that their work will be noticed. These videos are struggling to get seen; yet the same content on Wikipedia is getting thousands to hundreds of thousands of video views. A few caveats: Wikipedia statisitics don’t tell us…
Latin videos reach 750,000 views at Wikimedia
Views of Latin language videos at Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites have now topped 750,000, after just two years of adding new content. In 2019, we started adding new Latin videos to Wikipedia, from Youtubers that were amenable to licencing their readings and works using a Creative Commons licence. Our initial idea was that readings…
First Latin redubs
This week we published our first Latin redubs of the ZDF videos we have been talking about for a long time. We have a further six or so in the pipeline, and a team of five volunteers working on new translations and audio, building on work already done by translators at Vicipaedia. We hope to…
Is Wikimedia’s ban on new Wikis for Sanskrit and Classical Chinese discriminatory?
Nota bene: I am a big fan of Wikimedia and Wikipedia. I contribute regulary to many of their projects and wish them every success. This issue is easily resolved, but it appears only if some attention from Wikimedia’s Board is applied. Sanskrit and Classical Chinese both have Wikipedias; I cannot read them, and cannot vouch…
Why was Erasmus wasting his time writing Latin?
Over the last few months, debate has raged on a Wikimedia “Request for Commenț” concerning the eligibility of Ancient Languages to create in-language projects. Wikimedia currently do not allow this, blocking any new projects for Latin, Sanskrit and Classical Chinese; and stopping Ancient Greek entirely, excepting Wikisource archives. The policy comes from the Language Committee…
Massively multilingual short stories
This week, I started work on a series of short texts in English, that can be translated and reused in any language. These are really just a test and a benchmark to see if the idea can work, following a discussion on Reddit about another similar project. And so far, so good. The idea is…
Making Latin Documentary Clips
On our Youtube channel we have posted three short Ancient History documentary clips, that are currently in German. These are available as Creative Commons downloads, so our plan is to translate and dub them into Latin. There are close to 200 clips in the full Creative Commons series by ZDF, which include science and climate…
Teaching tools for Spoken Latin from 1913
The Direct Method, the Natural Method: Latin teachers have been trying to move away from grammar-based teaching for a very long time. Hans Ørberg and contemporaries like the Polis Institute had many antecedents. One of these was the group of teachers inspired by WHD Rouse, who taught spoken Latin and Greek at the Perse School…
All we are saying is Give Greek a chance
For many years now, the Ancient Greek Wikipedia has languished as a Wikimedia project in the “incubator”, where it appears it is doomed to stay forever, according to current Wikimedia policy. Unlike the Latin Vicipaedia, or the Sanskrit Wikipedia, the project did not launch before the Wikimedia Language Committee imposed an absolute ban on what…
Why Latin books are still disappearing
I was fascinated to read Daniel Petterson’s story behind the repopularisation of the out of print novel Ad Alpēs, which he digitised and brought into print in 2017. The author, Herbert Chester Nutting, died in 1934. The book has gained a lot of interest, and is now freely available on Wikisource as a downloadable ebook;…
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