Kasutaja:Ehitaja/State of Estonian Wikiquote (August 4, 2024)

This is a short introduction to the Estonian Wikiquote project for non-Estonian readers.

As of August 4, 2024, Estonian Wikiquote includes 13 272 content pages. With that, we're 5th by size among the WQ language versions, after English, Italian, Polish, and Russian.

We have 3010 biographies, which includes 1613 women (53,59%) and 1397 men (46,41%).

Our pages are illustrated with art by 1807 women artists.

Every day, we display on our frontpage a daily quote which is most often by a woman and usually a new author.

First content pages for Estonian Wikiquote were created in 2006 but after some tentative activity, the project fell into disrepair for years. In 2020, it was picked up again by two users, Pseudacorus and Ehitaja. We reached 1000 content pages on March 6th, 2020; our 1000th page was Greta Thunberg. On May 19, 2024, our 13,000th page was Annie Ernaux. Most of the work has been done by the initial two users, with some less active users making smaller additions. (A short history of the project is available here.)

We have based our work on a few strategic principles. We started by expanding the quantity, developing intensively our category system, tools, and habits. Now, we have also set the sights on improving the quality and we know what exactly we intend to do in that phase. We have made some decisions on policies, not always making the same choices as made in our sister projects. We have put our focus on non-male authors to compensate the overcanonization common in the Internet. We also try to pay special attention to sources from diverse countries and languages, especially our neighbours like Finland and Latvia.

We try to be exact and diligent in referencing (somewhat close to the French WQ style). As both our main workers are experts on copyright, some of our choices concerning copyright have been different than in other Wikiquotes. E.g., we have decided to put more stress on the legal duty to preserving the whole intent of the work and author, as opposed to reducing the quotes to minimum, sacrificing their meaning, context, and comprehensibility. We also try to be exact in quoting, and avoid summarizing widespread in secondary sources. That's why we usually don't accept quote collections as sources and try to replace secondary sources with primary sources if possible.

We try to illustrate our project, if possible, with quality art by notable women artists. We do not use generic illustrations weakly connected to the content and accompanied by Polonius-level witticisms.

Our definitions aren't always in the same encyclopedic style used in Wikipedia because Wikiquote is not an encyclopedia. This is reflected in many aspects of the project, in its content and sources as well as in style.

We use a lot of original translations which we try to mark clearly so there would be no confusion about the translations' source nor its copyright status. It is quite useful to have a professional translator as one of the main contributors.

We do not demand that a quote used here should be first quoted somewhere else by someone else. It would make our work unreasonably complicated.

Our main tools are: the calendar of (potential) authors by birthdays, which enables our daily quote system (and the supporting quote pages); the weekly calendar for weekly themes, pages, and illustrations; and our private corpus of digitized literature to which we constantly add by bulk, allowing us to find relevant quotes both author- and theme-wise. Several minor tools include the list of women artists and the articles containing their work; a set of categories marking the articles which need further development; a page for keeping track on the WQ language versions by their size; many lists of potentially relevant authors, sources, and subjects; and several more.

Currently we try to transfer our focus from quantity to quality but the change is not easy to make.