User:CalRis25/RICH: Description: Difference between revisions

This page offers a description of the project RICH-2K, i. e. the Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon.

The project I envision is a classical glossary, which explains the meaning of Latin headwords, primarily those "representing visible objects connected with the arts, manufactures, and every-day life of the Greeks and Romans." The aim is to help understand what a Latin text is actually about, instead of merely translating it.

This is not a "might be"-project, because at its core is a complete transcription of the 1849-book Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon (for brevity's sake RICH-1849) by Anthony Rich (a digital version can be found at Archive.org (search for illustratedcompa00richuoft). The Wikiversity-project Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon, in contrast, will be called RICH-2K to make it easier to distinguish between this project and the text its initial content is based on (= RICH-1849).

RICH-2K is merely a technical term used for the sake of brevity. The project needs a) an official name for the project as such, and b) a name for the main page of the project defining its namespace. Names a) and b) can be the same but do not have to be. Originally I intended RICH-2K to be the name of the main page, mainly in order to keep it short. However, I was told that I should not do so. And that makes sense: a project's namespace should succinctly state what the project is about.

Possible names:

1. Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon: This is the name of the original book the project's initial content is based on. However, the title is, in my opinion, somewhat misleading because both the book and this project have a very clear focus on Latin. The Greek words in the Greek Index are mainly an addendum to make it easier to find the Latin article name for a specific Greek topic.
2. Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary: This is a shorter version of the above making the namespace-name more manageable. Both this and the first version have the benefit that search engines should provide this project as a hit when someone is searching for Anthony Rich's book.
3. Anthony Rich Dictionary Project or 21st-Century Anthony Rich Dictionary: Suggested by another user. However, I prefer not have the name of the original author in the project's name. The name should tell what the project is about.

Of these, I clearly prefer option 2: Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary. The next question is, whether to use title case or sentence case (see Wikiversity:Naming conventions). The decision is between:

1. Title Case: Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary
2. Sentence case: Illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary

DECISION: I prefer the title case-version, which gives us:

• Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary: Name of the main page.
• Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Abacus: Name of the article Abacus which resides (as a subpage) in the project's namespace.

The aforementioned Archive.org-scan was the basis of the transcription made by me (I really did all the work on my own. I did not use OCR, nor did I lift text from any source, online or other). I used my own set of tags to create a large single input file and added many internal links. Because of these added internal links, the articles in this wiki-version will not be isolated. Additionally, there will be a classed index (by topics) and an index based on Greek words.

Note: The 1849-edition was the first edition of the Illustrated Companion. In 1890 Anthony Rich published A dictionary of Roman and Greek antiquities, with nearly 2000 engravings on wood from ancient originals, illustrative of the industrial arts and social life in the Greeks and Romans (see Archive.org, search for dictionaryofroma00richuoft), which is the "Fifth Edition--Revised and Improved, 1884". However, this fifth edition contains a Preface to the Third Edition which dates from 1873, in which Rich says that is the final version of his work. It is reasonable to assume that no further changes to the text, images, indices were made in the fourth and fifth editions. When transcribing, this fifth edition was unknown to me, but I would not have used it anyway, because for the images I had access only to a print edition from 1849.

For the book itself, I created a data item at Wikidata: Q130084517.

Some numbers for RICH-1849:

• Number of articles: 3205
• Number of REDIRECT-articles: 304 (secondary lemmas listed after the headword of an article)
• Number of images: 1915
• Number of articles with a category in RICH-1849's Classed Index: 2129
• Number of articles without a category in RICH-1849's Classed Index: 1076
  • For these articles the relevant category needs to be added after the initial creation.
• Number of articles without links to other articles: 555 (mostly very short articles)
  • For these articles at least one link to another article of RICH-1849 should be added, especially if the article has not a category in the Classed Index either.

Why is this project hosted at Wikiversity instead of Wikisource or Wikibooks?

Let's imagine a full transcription of the original 1849-edition of the Illustrated Companion by Anthony Rich and call it RICH-1849. We shall call this project, for brevity sake, RICH-2K. And now, let's have a look at the article about the Roman toga (a piece of attire). In RICH-1849 we can can call it RICH-1849/Toga, and it contains exactly the content of the 1849-book. Now, let's look at the article RICH-2K/Toga. At the beginning its only content would be the article RICH-1849/Toga. Does that make RICH-2K/Toga and RICH-1849/Toga the same? Not at all, because in truth RICH-2K/Toga is a "container" which initially contains only the article RICH-1849/Toga but later on may include more stuff: images, external links, article text which builds on or extends RICH-1849/Toga and information from other sources of information (Wikipedia, specialized books). By the way, this added article information would not be a mere copy of the text at Wikipedia, because the information needs to be looked at through the eyes of someone reading the original Latin texts (more citations with direct links to these etc.).

The following was taken from the Preface of Anthony Rich's Illustrated Companion:

1. Define the true meaning of all the terms, technical or otherwise, expressive of any particular object, artificial production, manual operation, &c., which can be submitted to ocular inspection.
2. Impart a distinct notion of that meaning, by exhibiting a virtual representation of the thing itself, faithfully copied from some classic original, thus presenting the same forms as the ancients were accustomed to look upon, and suggestive of the same ideas as they themselves conceived.
3. Furnish a general knowledge of the social customs, and every-day life, of the Romans and Greeks, in the shape of a vocabulary, containing all the written terms which have reference to such matters
4. All of this illustrated by a series of pictures, after their [= Romans and Greeks] own designs, of the dress they wore, the houses they lived in, the utensils they used, or the pursuits they followed, by which we may be said to acquire a sort of personal acquaintance with the people themselves, and to see them, as it were, in a glass, under the genuine characters, and familiar aspects, which they presented to one another.

• It is not an image gallery.
  • It does, however, contain all the images of the book. These were scanned by me at 1200 dpi from an original 1849-copy of the book and uploaded to Mediawiki Commons. See Commons' category The illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary, and Greek lexicon.
    • Adding images, as long as they serve to improve the article, is possible and recommended, however.
• It is not a dictionary.
  • A good online-dictionary of Latin and Greek is Logeion (use your favourite search engine to find it).
• Its focus is on the "visible" world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, primarily of the latter, therefore:
  • It does not contain biographical articles.
  • It does not contain geographical articles.
  • It does not contain long extracts of original Latin (and Greek) texts.
    • The articles do contain many references, however. Later on, links to online editions (preferably at Perseus (search engine expression perseus tufts edu), should be added for these.

At the beginning, RICH-2K will contain only the content of the book (Preface, articles, Greek Index, Classed Index), including the images, which will have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. However, from the very beginning it is designed to be improved and expanded.

Some of the ways articles in RICH-2K can be improved:

• Not all articles of RICH-1849 (and therefore of the starting set of articles of RICH-2K) have a category assigned in the Classed Index of RICH-1849. For these the correct category (and only of these categories) should be found and added.
• Some articles of RICH-1849 have no links to other articles. Add at least one link to another RICH-2K-article.
• Find online editions of all texts referred to in the articles, both for Latin and Greek texts and for other material referenced in the Illustrated Companion.
  • The project will include a page, where the recommended references will be collected.
• Find online versions for the quotes in the articles and create links to the respective passages in the above mentioned recommended references.
  • Note: the Perseus Digital Library (search engine expression perseus tufts edu) is the recommended collection of Latin and Greek texts.
  • The list of quotes will be collected in a separate section of the respective article.
• Add images. However, see above: RICH-2K is 'not' an image gallery. Still, some image are useful...
  • Many articles use drawings based on bas-reliefs from Trajan's Column. Wikimedia Commons has its category for the different plates: Category:Trajan's Column - Reliefs.
  • A useful Wikimedia Common-category for looking for images from the Roman world is Category:Categories of ancient Rome.
  • A useful Wikimedia Common-category for looking for images from the Greek world is Category:Categories of ancient Greece.
• Head over to Wikimedia Commons and make the categories of the RICH-1849-images more specific.
• Identify the real objects the drawings are based on, if these are not explicitly stated.
• Compare the text of the 1849-edition, which is the core of RICH-2K, with the text of the 1890-edition (see Archive.org, search expression dictionaryofroma00richuoft) and note significant changes in a separate section of the article. Do not change the text of the 1849-edition given in the article.

• Add articles.
  • A good inspiration (especially for headwords, and here especially concerning about Greek topics) might be the Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines by Charles Daremberg and Edmond Saglio, an online-version of which is available at dagr.univ-tlse2.fr.