Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome/Guides

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WikiProject Classics has compiled the following advice, guides, and resources for all contributors to Wikipedia classics articles. We hope they help you have a richer experience of contributing to Wikipedia's coverage of the ancient world! In general, the guides are ordered from most simple to most specialised. However, we think there will be something useful here for all our project members. Please feel free to suggest a new guide on the talk page: new contributions, or suggestions from our users for improving existing contributions, are always welcome.

Sources and scholarship

Further information: Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome/Guides/Primary sources

Classics scholarship are often locked up in dusty libraries that nobody except academics and students can access, or behind paywalls that can't be bypassed without paying exorbitant subscription fees. However, classicists are increasingly doing more to open research resources to the public, and Wikipedia is at the forefront of that movement.

Wikipedia movements

Wikipedia has partnered with various online resources through The Wikipedia Library to offer free accounts to Wikipedians. Some resources particularly of interest to CGR editors include:

• Brill – various books, journals, and reference works, including Brill's New Pauly, the journal Mnemosyne and its supplements.
• Cambridge Core – both books and journals, including the Cambridge Ancient History series and Cambridge Companions.
• De Gruyter – includes access to a number of classical publications and continental journals.
• Oxford Research Encyclopedias – includes a digital version of the Oxford Classical Dictionary.
• JSTOR – many academic journals. Those related to classics are listed here, and include major journals such as The Classical Journal and The Classical Quarterly.
• Loeb – original text with reliable translations of almost all ancient Greek and Latin literature.
• Project Muse – some journals that are not included in JSTOR, and many academic books.
• Wiley – includes entries in the Encyclopedia of Ancient History, relevant Wiley-published encyclopaedia, along with many of the Companions (e.g. Companion to the Roman Republic) with in-depth and useful survey essays.

Wikipedia offers the following in-house services to editors:

• Reference Desk
• Resource Exchange
• Resource Guides
• Book Sources
• Online archives

Wikipedia also maintains a number of WikiProjects to bridge the gap between expensive academic resources and editors without access to websites relevant to their work:

• Libraries
• Bibliographies
• Journals
• Citation
• Unreferenced
• Fact check

Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and the Wikimedia chapters operate several systems that may be useful to budding or amateur classicists:

• Wikipedia Loves Libraries
• GLAM

Oxford University Press

Reliable translations with expert commentary and notes are available in the Oxford World Classics series, which have a distinctive white cover with red trim and are available at reasonable price in most good mainstream and independent bookstores. If you have a primary text in mind, consult the catalogue to see whether the source is available in the OWC collection:

• Oxford World Series: The Complete List 2013 [catalogue], pp. 38–41, Oxford University Press, global.oup.com (2013).

Loeb Classical Library

The Loeb Classical Library (LCL) is a comprehensive collection of translated Latin and Ancient Greek works; the Loeb series presents the original on the left page of each volume and a reliable English translation on the right. A number of the original Loeb prints are now available online, because they are out-of-copyright; see, for example, edonnelly.com. Most of the ancient Greek and Latin literature is part of the Loeb collection; if you find Loeb books online with a translation marked as taken from the original [insert some year from early 20th century; 1912 is common] Loeb version, you can be confident it will be sufficient for occasional reference.

Modern Loeb versions can be found on the Wikipedia Library, which (as of September 2022) recently gained access to Loeb Online (Wikipedia Library link).

Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft

The Realencyclopädie (abbreviated RE or PW) is one of the largest encyclopaedias ever published. The first edition was started by August Pauly in 1839 and completed in 1852. A second and much more ambitious edition began under the leadership of Georg Wissowa in 1890, and was only completed in 1978. Written in German over 82 volumes, it is a difficult work to read, but an invaluable source for the study of ancient history. It is important to note the publication date of a given volume; because of advances in scholarship and discoveries of new evidence, some of its articles are now quite outdated. Almost every person or place we know of has an entry in the RE, and it is especially useful to write about lesser-known persons and topics. Many of the most influential German classical scholars participated in its production, and about 1,100 authors contributed articles.

The German Wikisource has an ongoing project to reproduce all the RE articles, so it is easier to translate them.

Other online resources

General references

• Ancient World Digital Library – Publicly accessible pdf copies of selections from the library of NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
• Suda online – Online version of the famous Greek storehouse of facts: freely accessible, keyword-searchable database, with English translations, notes, bibliography, and links to other electronic resources
• Livius.org – Over 3,500 articles on ancient history, website managed by Dutch historian Jona Lendering
• Attalus.org – Materials for the history of the Hellenistic world and the Roman republic
• Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic – Searchable database of Roman republican magistrates, family connections, electoral victories and losses, etc

Collections of publications and sources

• Oxford Bibliographies (via Wikipedia Library) – Topical research guides written by classicists
• The Latin Library – A collection of public domain editions of Latin classics
• Perseus Digital Library – Website maintained by Tufts University which centers on the ancient world
• LacusCurtius – Source texts relating to the ancient world
• Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies has many online translations, articles, papers and books; all on Greece, with Homeric studies a special strength
• Tertullian.org – Originally a website devoted to the Church Father Tertullian, the webmaster has since expanded its collection to include documents relating to early Christianity and the ancient world
• Persee – Online archive of scholarly publications from France, beyond ancient Greece and Rome. Many of the articles at this website are available through a Creative Commons license
• Monumenta Germaniae Historica – A monumental edition of original texts pertaining to the history of the late ancient world and early medieval Germany
• Diotima – Ancient texts in translation, essays, and bibliographies related to women in the ancient world
• feminae romanae – Collection of ancient sources relating to women in the Roman world

Inscriptions

• Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum online; other resources from Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
• Epigraphik Datenbank Clauss Slaby (EDCS) – Online database of practically all published Latin inscriptions
• Packard Humanities Institute – Searchable online database of published Greek inscriptions
• Inscriptions of Aphrodisias
• Attic Inscriptions Online – online database of Athenian inscriptions
• Ancient Graffiti Project – Database of graffiti recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum
• Roman Inscriptions of Britain
• The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania

Texts on Papyrus

• papyri.info – Online database of a number of published texts written on papyrus including texts written in Latin and Arabic
• The Oxyrhynchus Papyri – Volumes 1-15 are available online (link to its entry at the online books page)
• The Oxyrynchus Papyri online – (incomplete) online database of papyri; papyri published from volume 15 to 82 are currently included, with high-resolution images
• Berliner Papyrusdatenbank – online database of papyri in the Berlin Papyrus Collection with high-resolution images and bibliographies

Adding pronunciation

Editors may wish to provide pronunciation guides for words or phrases that are not reasonably familiar, or the pronunciation of which may not be apparent from their spelling. Pronunciations representing Classical Greek and Latin, as well as modern English pronunciation, are preferred, but pronunciations representing specific dialects or eras (such as Ionian Greek or Ecclesiastical Latin) may be provided where appropriate. Some flexibility should be allowed, as pronunciation varied even in the classical period, as well as in modern English (for example, the pronunciation of Latin by English speakers changed dramatically during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; some words or names may be pronounced according to either method).

Some suggested sources for this purpose include:

• Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek, by W. Sidney Allen
• Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin, by W. Sidney Allen
• Reading Greek, from the Joint Association of Classical Teachers
• Reading Latin, by Peter V. Jones and Keith C. Sidwell
• Wheelock's Latin, by Frederic M. Wheelock
• Bantam's New College Latin & English Dictionary
• Cassell's Latin & English Dictionary

Editors may use different methods of representing pronunciation. See Wikipedia's pronunciation respelling key, Pronunciation respelling for English, and IPA/Latin. Due to the high rate of errors in adding IPA pronunciations, editors whose familiarity with IPA is limited are encouraged to use pronunciation respelling instead.

If the pronunciation of a word or phrase requires substantial explanation or has several variants, please consider using a footnote or a separate section of the article for this purpose.