An Improbable Revival: the Old Church Slavonic Wikipedia
An Improbable Revival: the Old Church Slavonic Wikipedia

Summary/Abstract: This article contains an examination of the Old Church Slavonic (OCS) Wikipedia, concentrating on three aspects: the content, the language and the place of OCS in the language politics of the Wikipedia project. It is noted that a surprisingly small proportion of the 740 entries relate to the world of OCS and that instead attention is mainly focused on modern and/or secular topics. This has consequences for the language used: if the orthography and morphology largely follow existing or reconstructed OCS patterns, the syntax and especially the vocabulary have largely been invented for this project. The conclusion reached is that there is simply too little surviving OCS to provide the basis for his type of encyclopedia and that the OCS Wikipedia, a beneficiary of inconsistencies in Wikipedia’s language policy, is likely to be judged more a curiosity than a serious attempt at producing a usable and helpful resource.

• Details
• Contents