FAQs

We attempt to gather together here some of the more frequently asked user questions relating to the site. You may find the answers in the introductory ‘guide’ page, or on the I.Sicily github wiki, but do please feel free to contact us with any queries, at isicily@inscriptiones.org, or via the feedback form.

Where do you get your data from?

I.Sicily is a combination of data from published sources, our own revisions based upon published information, and new data based upon a very extended programme of fieldwork, which has involved undertaking autopsy (the direct study of the inscription in situ) and photography on sites and in museums across the island. We try to be as explicit as possible about the source of key parts of the data - for instance, there should always be a note under the text indicating whether it is based upon autopsy or derived from a published edition. Please always try to credit the relevant people and sources if re-using data from I.Sicily.

Is I.Sicily complete?

No - this is a long-term project with no end-date and we continue to add new inscriptions and revise existing data all the time. For a summary of the current coverage, please visit the ‘current state of work’ page at the ISicily wordpress site.

Is I.Sicily still being updated?

Yes! We often make revisions and additions even daily. You can get a list of the latest changes by visiting our GitHub repository, specifically the ‘history’ for the inscriptions folder.

If I.Sicily keeps changing, how can I cite it?

For citation information, see the ‘how to cite’ page. This is primarily information on how to cite the website, and it is important to understand that the web version of any individual inscription may well change over time as we revise the data (although the URL will remain the same, as it is intended to be a stable URI). If you want to cite stable data for one or more inscriptions (i.e. a citation where you know that the form of the data will be same whether you visit it tomorrow or in a year, and not change with our next revision), then you can either cite the latest stable deposit of the complete I.Sicily dataset in Zenodo, or else we recommend that you download or otherwise copy (including simply printing the relevant page as a pdf) the data which you are using, and place that copy in a repository with a DOI where you can then cite it in stable form for your own purposes (one way to do this is through the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive). Please remember to include suitable reference to the source to the data and credit for those who created it, if you do so.

What does ‘draft’ status mean?

The majority of the inscriptions in I.Sicily are currently listed as ‘draft’ status. As a minimum, any inscription in draft will have some basic metadata and bibliography, and will have a usable text edition based upon a reliable published edition (which will be cited). However, many of the inscriptions in ‘draft’ are actually much more fully edited, include an image, and may be essentially complete. We are deliberately cautious in classifying things as ‘edited’, with an over-optimistic idea of what is ‘complete’.