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Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 101

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Quote clarification required

The MoS states:

A long quote (more than four lines

What exactly does this mean? Four lines on an iPhone, or four lines on my 30" monitor? I believe it might mean "sentences", but I am not so sure. Clarity is needed, as well as some guidelines for flexibility in use. For instance, there are times where a single-line quotation should be blocked, if it is of importance.

Maury (talk) 17:14, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Last discussion was WT:Manual_of_Style/Archive_100#Blockquote for emphasis. Does that help? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:01, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I noticed that some articles have an image gallery at the bottom while others put images inline with the text. I find that inline with the text improves readability and the gallery often lacks captions. Is there or should there be a guideline about this? Gallery example   Inline example   Thanks, Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 18:55, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Layout#Images has all the information you need. One tip, however: when you make such comparisons, it is best to use diffs for both parts; the archive will make no sense if the gallery is removed from the article at a later time. For a diff of the current version, click on "Permanent link" in the toolbox (sidebar on the left). Waltham, The Duke of 00:07, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Linking bolded words

Something bugs me about the policy of not linking initial bolded words. Articles say things like

The Battle of Bettendorf was a battle fought in the year 2691.

instead of

The Battle of Bettendorf was fought in the year 2691.

or

Xmith's theorem is a theorem first proved by John Xmith in 1792.

instead of

Xmith's theorem was first proved by John Xmith in 1792.

The policy necessitates redundant words, and those sometimes appear stupid. If the battle of Bettendorf was actually a public debate about whether miniskirts should be worn on Sundays, so that the word "battle" is merely a metaphor, then that needs to be stated, but to say that a battle is a battle and and theorem is a theorem seems like needless extra words that convey no information and sometimes insult the reader. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:15, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

On the other hand, the vivid difference in color may overwhelm the signal of the bold text. This will differ from system to system, and from reader to reader; but it is better avoided. I'm not sure that battle and theorem should be linked in these cases; does the link add much? If it doesn't, take out the repetition and the link together. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Agreed with Sept. Editors often find clever ways around the redundancy, and it's important not to lose the "signal", as Sept says. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 21:19, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Agree with Anderson entirely. Don't link dictionary terms, please. Tony (talk) 00:34, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
"Theorem" has a very specific meaning in mathematics, which is often not appreciated by non-mathematicians. I would have linked it in this context. Hesperian 00:38, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
I think there is a certain flexibility to linking at first instance; a link can be placed at a slightly later point, especially if it matches with the context there. Waltham, The Duke of 23:32, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Kodster

User:Kodster is using AWB to remove html code and insert diacritics. Not sure how I feel about this in every case, but I reverted the edit he just made to WP:MoS, and left this message on his talk page:

We prefer the html code to the diacritic or typographer's symbol for a number of symbols. I'm not positive that the diacritic ring that you inserted is one of them, but it probably is. The reasons are that html is likely to be preserved when the text is copied outside Wikipedia, and the diacritic is not; also, it is nearly impossible to look at those little circles and figure out what they are without the html code. I'll revert, but feel free to come talk about it on our talk page.

- Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:28, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

(copied from my talk page) Oh sure, I just used Auto Wiki Browser, and it did that automatically. Guess I didn't notice! Thanks for pointing that out and reverting it. I'll try to be a little more careful next time. :) Cheers, Kodster (You talkin' to me?) (Stuff I messed up) 01:29, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot being made, to convert " &emdash; " to "&emdash;"

I've requested approval for a task for my bot, which would convert " &emdash; " to "&emdash;", in article mainspace. It would use AWB, and I would do it by looking through "What transcludes page" - Template:Cite journal, then all the other cite templates, followed by Template:Unreferenced. It may not get every single article, but a large majority of them. What are the thoughts of others here? The request is here. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 10:15, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I fully support this, as I've grown tired of doing it manually. · AndonicO Engage. 10:36, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Why do people key it in fully like this? Why not convert all to the symbol? — Tony (talk) 10:46, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
To make a point obvious to most of us: because some people prefer the full form, to be sure what they are getting; in some systems it becomes habitual to do so. Changing style by bots is disruptive; please stop suggesting it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:39, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
No, please do suggest it, more and more. We need to tighten up the use of these signs. MOS now expresses pretty well the way they should be used, and we need only follow it. Proper usage of these items, like so much proper usage, makes for a smoother, clearer reading experience, even if a reader happens to be only subliminally aware of their function.
In some cases an mdash might be used as a minus sign, and then what this bot does would be a mistake. (In that case the &emdash; should be changed to &minus ; and the spaces before and after left intact, except that when the minus sign indicates a negative number rather than subtraction of one thing from another, then there should be no space after it.) Michael Hardy (talk) 23:02, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
No no, never an em dash: an eN dash may be used in place of a minus sign, but mathematicians much favour the minus sign, which lies between en dash and hyphen in length. A hyphen is not acceptable to signify the minus. Tony (talk) 02:17, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
It should be done as a series of manual AWB runs. If it is in some cases being used as a minus, this is wrong, not to mention rare if it is actually ocurring at all, and it not looking right any longer is a signal to editors to fix it. But I agree with Hardy that if it can be actually corrected in the AWB run it should be. Also (in answer to Tony), it should be entered as a character entity code like that because in many fonts the hyphens, en dashes and em dashes (and minuses) are completely or nearly indistinguishable, and the only way for many editors (myself included) to be certain that the correct character is being used is to use the entity code instead of the raw Unicode character. I make the conversion manually any time I encounter a Unicode en or em dash while editing, actually. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:36, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
...And I do the opposite. (I also substitute double spacing after full stops with single; I know it's irrelevant, but the double spacing is completely, utterly useless.) The long name is too intrusive in the edit window; if you want to see if you have a hyphen or an en dash, I suggest using preview. Em dashes can be told apart.
In any event, I'd like to note another erroneous usage of em dashes: in lists. En dashes should be used there, but dash usage is not given much attention by most editors. For Unicorn's sake, even in the Good Articles list there are em dashes... Whose idea that was, I wonder. Waltham, The Duke of 01:56, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
Yes, agree with His Grace. I know Sandy has raised this matter at least once. On the en-dash article-title matter, when the ridiculous proscription against en dashes in those titles was expunged last year (about time, too), a few hardy souls ran the line that it would cause technical difficulties in search, etc; this was roundly scotched by several experts who convinced us with their up-to-date knowledge. It's in the MOSNUM talk archives somewhere. Tony (talk) 02:17, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Such confidence! I disagree.

First, if you want the HTML mnemonic entity this is not "&emdash;" but "—".

Secondly, I loathe no-space em dashes in the browser window. The web, as you may recall, is not paper. The ways in which it isn't include: (i) most browsers don't know that you can wrap immediately in front of or immediately after an unspaced em dash, and their ignorance results in immensely jagged right edges where a spaced dash would allow wrapping. (ii) Browsers don't know that apparently unspaced em dashes need a judicious application of thin spaces if they're not (at least in certain widely-used fonts) going to attach themselves to those characters that have wide midriffs.

Hooray for spaced em dashes! I shall continue to use them. -- Hoary (talk) 09:27, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Hoary, what's wrong, then, with a spaced en dash? That's what MOS prescribes if you want to space it. Tony (talk) 11:00, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Nothing wrong with them that I can see. If you fire volleys of them at me, I'll say that they don't appeal to me all that much – but they don't bother me either. -- Hoary (talk) 11:11, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Since the Manual of Style is a guideline, you are perfectly free to use spaced em dashes in the articles you write. It would be bad etiquette, however, to change unspaced em dashes to spaced ones, considering that it is the former option that the Manual supports, and for good reason. Jagged edges or not, it is better for a word to wrap with the following em dash, because the alternative is to have lines beginning with stray dashes. That is not good style by anyone's standards. Besides, it makes for an easier reading experience to allow readers to see interruption in a sentence before the visual break of a line change. Don't mess with flow, please. :-) Waltham, The Duke of 00:19, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
You say that to have lines beginning with stray dashes [...] is not good style by anyone's standards. It's perfectly fine style by my own (which may of course be debased). Chicago 13th ed (the one I happen to possess here) doesn't seem to say anything on the matter. Which typographers' or (more pertinently) web designer's style guide does say this? -- Hoary (talk) 09:06, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, I guess I was carried away there. But it seemed perfectly obvious to me that most people would object to having a line start with a dash. Apart from that, I think my other points are still valid. As far as dash usage in general is concerned, I believe that most manuals are not very consistent on the matter... At least so I hear. Wikipedia has to make its conventions. Waltham, The Duke of 14:15, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Funny, it had never occurred to me that they might object to it. Time permitting, I'll try to locate my copy of Hart's Rules and see what that says.
My own underinformed guess is that bizarre rules are invented arbitrarily. A few years ago, every word processor manual wittered away about how to avoid, or how to set the degree of enthusiasm for avoidance of, "widows" and "orphans". (Perhaps they still do but I no longer bother to look.) Yes, the WP page sternly says "Widows are considered sloppy typography and should be avoided." Where the hell did that notion come from? I've always suspected that some harmless drone working on WordStar or similar dreamt it up, and that it was then unthinkingly copied to WordPerfect, etc. I note that that article cites something called The Elements of Typographic Style; if that work (which I don't know) is inspired by those old fools Strunk and White I'd expect it to contain any amount of horse manure. -- Hoary (talk) 14:33, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
You might look at Strunk and White again; they do much less twittering about punctuation than (for instance) we do. I do not recall their mentioning widows or orphans; they are guidelines for effective prose, to which this page is largely irrelevant.
Widows and orphans are nineteenth-century shibboleths; partly marks of conspicuous consumption, being easier to avoid with a variable-spacing machine and lots of pages to absorb white space than for a country editor. The justification was that a couple words isolated by a column break were easier to misplace, and harder for the reader to follow, than an extract of more than a line. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:07, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Style ruling needed: "British Isles" / "Britain and Ireland"

Hi, all. Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes.
I see that there's an ongoing dispute about correct usage.

"The dispute appears to be over whether "British Isles" or "Britain and Ireland" should be used."
- from a post by Neıl 8 May 2008 at the second of the two references following.

There appear to be two editors who are very interested in this issue, but several others have also posted about it.
Previous discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Blind_reversion_of_edits.2C_despite_earlier_warnings and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive414#Wikistalking

I've looked for a definite and consistent guideline on this but haven't found one. I'd like to see discussion, resulting in a definite guideline being added to the appropriate page in the WP:MOS, and (probably) in the pages of relevant Wikiprojects.
Disclaimer: I have not been involved in this dispute in any way, and have no interest whatsoever in however it may shake out -- I'm just trying to attain Wiki-peace and consistency.
-- Writtenonsand (talk) 14:33, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

My experience is not sufficient, but there's a general point I want to mention. This might be an issue that looks hard but turns out to be easy. See the lead section of British Isles naming dispute, and in particular the last paragraph, that gives a Google search showing that "British Isles" is widely used nowadays in both senses, either including or excluding the Republic of Ireland. If that's true, then the approach that modern style guides take is: when one of the phrases used to describe something is likely to be misunderstood half the time (regardless of the reasons or trends), don't pick that phrase. Choose a phrase everyone understands (such as "Britain and Ireland" or "British Islands and Ireland"), at least until a clear winner emerges in the battle for ownership of the disputed phrase. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:46, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
The British Isles encompasses more than just Britian and Ireland. The Isle of Mann, for example, is neither part of Britian nor Ireland. JIMp talk·cont 01:58, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Agreed, "British Islands and Ireland" is probably a safe alternative for what "British Isles" meant before 1922 (and some would say still does). - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:32, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I disagree - though it is used in legislation with a specific legal meaning it is completely unfamiliar to most British people and will just confuse readers. Johnbod (talk) 04:02, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I have to admit I am not uninvolved, because I have personally had an edit criticized for using "British Isles" (including Ireland). With that disclaimer, I would like to register my disapproval of any ban of "British Isles". I believe the sense excluding Ireland is marginal. The one including Ireland is unlikely to lead to confusion, at least for North Americans. Before I read about it on Wikipedia, the phrase "British Islands" was unknown to me, and my suspicion is most North Americans, on seeing it, will assume it is a mistake for "British Isles". Joeldl (talk) 04:25, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
So will most British people. Johnbod (talk) 04:30, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

British Isles is a geographic term not a political one. The Islands of Britain, Ireland, and all of the thousand or so smaller islands in the archipelago are the "British isles." it has nothing to do with which states occupy any of the islands. "Britain" is the island that contains England, Scotland and Wales, but strictly none of the lesser islands. "Great Britain" is the political union of England, Wales and Scotland, and therefore includes outlying islands of Britain, but not Ireland. The "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the political entity (formerly United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) which changed in 1922. Xandar (talk) 16:01, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

My apologies, I looked quickly and saw that "British Islands" got 412K Google hits and seemed to have a consistent definition, but consensus here seems to be that it's not a useful phrase. I'll know better than to say anything about BrEng again :) Anyway...my point was that there might be a quick, style-based solution here: never use British Isles, since the Google search I referred to above shows that that phrase is widely used both to include and to exclude the Republic of Ireland, and as a general policy, we don't deliberately choose to use phrases which are likely to be misunderstood when there are alternatives. If this is a POV issue rather than a style issue, and I have a feeling it is, then you'll get faster results by taking it to a page like The NPOV Noticeboard. Btw, when you go there, be sure to repeat the phrase "lesser island" as applied above (apparently) to Ireland, and then count the seconds til someone refers to the "lesser island" of Britain :) - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:05, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't agree with that - "British Isles" is a geographic term, which does include Ireland, but which some Irish object to and don't use. I don't know who uses it to exclude Ireland? The problem is there is no alternative with wide acceptance - Atlantic Archipelago has certainly not caught on. This is very well trampled ground here - see the proposed guideling Wikipedia:British Isles. It doesn't really matter what you use anyway, as eventually someone like Bardcom will come along and change it. Johnbod (talk) 17:17, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

"well trampled ground"...Right, and if someone comes along here to start an NPOV war, I feel somewhat optimistic that we'll be able to show them the door (which may mean that WT:MOS is the place to discuss certain NPOV issues, because you can never get rid of these battles on policy pages...hm, I hadn't thought of that, I'll cogitate on this). My very small point is that British Isles says:

Encyclopædia Britannica, the Oxford University Press - publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary - and the UK Hydrographic Office (publisher of Admiralty charts) have all occasionally used the term "British Isles and Ireland" (with Britannica and Oxford contradicting their own definitions of the "British Isles")

and the phrase "British Isles and Ireland" gets over 50K Google hits, so there is clearly confusion in the air. If the confusion all by itself is a reason to avoid the phrase, then we nicely avoid a trip to some place like WP:POVN.

"British Isles" alone gets 22.5 million, the great majority of which will include Ireland. But the real problem is the lack of a satisfactory alternative. Actually I only get 24,300 for "British Isles and Ireland". Johnbod (talk) 01:38, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

And now for something completely different. I undented there because the formatting that {{quote}} uses doesn't look right if the main text is indented. I reached to type my usual "←" to acknowledge the undent, and then decided that this has officially become silly, unless people really are using indentation in the same way that messageboards use it. That is, if a single indent (for instance) in the middle of a long thread still means to people around here "I'm replying to the last person who posted without any indentation, not to the message right above me", then warning people about undenting makes sense. But I never see that, or I'm not aware that that's going on; when Wikipedians want to be very clear that they're responding to a specific post and not to the whole thread, they generally insert their response immediately under that post. Does anyone around here use "messageboard indentation" style in their indents? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:44, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Current guidelines state that discussion is threaded. The exact quotation is "Use indentation to clearly indicate who you are replying to, as with usual threaded discussions." In my opinion, what you did is fine if there is really only one main thread of discussion (a few diversions along the way are fine). If the discussion is more complex, though, with multiple branching threads throughout, it's imperative that the threading remain clear. Powers T 15:28, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I wasn't aware that people do this often in article or style discussions, although it might be more common in policy discussions. I'll keep an eye out and keep asking. IMO, if few people do something, then it doesn't matter that it would be easier to follow the discussion if they did, and if the guidelines say something different, they should be changed. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:28, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
So you support letting people be confusing if they want to be confusing? Sometimes our guidelines are proscriptive rather than descriptive, especially in cases where setting them based on current practice is untenable. Powers T 17:56, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
If 60% don't do it and 40% do, then we should remind people from time to time what "messageboard indentation" is, and hope that that helps. If 95% of people don't do it, then we should save everyone some time and give up on trying to force it. Life's too short. Clearly, the reason that most people don't, on Wikipedia, is that they don't think they have to; they can simply insert their reply directly under the message they want to reply to. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:41, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I've found standard threading to be fairly common; I'm not sure what you mean by "most people don't". Powers T 23:30, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Translating terms

I've noticed that the usual wikipedia style seems to be only translating the subject of an article in its first line, for example, Shaposhnikov Yevgeniy Ivanovich (Russian: Шапошников Евгений Иванович) would only appear in the article on Yevgeniy Shaposhnikov, not, for example, in the article on the Soviet Air Forces. Is this a currently applicable guideline or merely common, but uncodified, practice? Buckshot06 (talk) 11:20, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

No merely about it. Guidelines exist to record Wikipedia common practice; guidelines not supported by the broad consensus of practice are cruft. (Common practice, codified or not, can be altered by discussion on individual pages, of course; that's what {{guideline}} is phrased for.
As for this instance, I would not include the Cyrillic for every Russian name in Soviet Air Forces; so there would have to be some special reason to include it for Shaposhnikov. (Those marshals, unlike Shaposhnikov, who have no article, have at least a colorable reason, although you may find some articles if you adjust surname last and make links.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:49, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Journalistic vs academic values

Well, three times in 24 hours the question has come up whether to favor academic or journalistic values. This might be another case where I'm weighing in on a question where my experience (especially with article reviewing) is not sufficient to say anything useful; we'll see. I have no idea what the outcome of this discussion will be; people seem to be all over the place on this one. I could be wrong, but I believe this could be the core of an issue that Sept and Gimmetrow have recently raised at Talk:Roman Catholic Church.

At WT:Manual_of_Style_(capital_letters)#Gabriel, we'd like to know if there's anything wrong with this text, which has been there for a while, I think:

The personal name of individual mythical creatures is capitalized (the angel Gabriel). [fixed quote 00:38, 14 May 2008 (UTC)]

It's claimed that there is nothing wrong with referring to an important figure to some Christians, Jews and Muslims as "mythical" because of this disclaimer (yes, it's a disclaimer in article-space, or the closest thing I've seen on WP) in the article Christian mythology: {{myth box Christianity}}.

"mythical" has special problems, but leaving that aside, the words "myth" and "mythology" really are used differently in different contexts. Some academics assert (I don't really believe it, but that's not the point) that "myth" does not carry any judgment about whether something is true or not, and those sources were consulted in this article. Journalists use the word "mythology" differently; I know that because AP Stylebook gives "Capitalize the proper names of pagan and mythological gods and goddesses: Neptune, Thor, Venus, etc", and the first definition in Websters Online is "an allegorical narrative". That's one huge advantage of looking at words from a journalistic rather than an academic viewpoint; in American English at least, you can often get a quick answer, because Chicago and AP Stylebook are both the result of a long-time process of consensus-gathering among, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of writers. (I can't say anything about BrEng.) There's no such thing as a "consensus of all authors", although if you subjectively (and perhaps arbitrarily) narrow your focus, you can sometimes drill down to find consensus among a specific set of academics.

But we can't throw academic values overboard just because academic research is hard, because Wikipedia is based on academic values every bit as much as journalistic ones; it's a question of figuring out which values take precedence when there is conflict. So, in the current question, should we favor academic values or journalistic values, and why? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:47, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

P.S. Someone changed the text at WP:Manual_of_Style_(capital_letters) today, but it could easily change back, so the question is still valid. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:16, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
The text you quoted is not the text that has been there for the past few months. Anyway:
"Journalists use the word "mythology" differently; I know that because AP Stylebook gives "Capitalize the proper names of pagan and mythological gods and goddesses: Neptune, Thor, Venus, etc", and the first definition in Websters Online is "an allegorical narrative"". How do either of those things support your conclusion? Ilkali (talk) 22:12, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
"Allegorical" means "symbolic", not real. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 00:38, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Some myths may be argued to be allegories, especially in some renderings, but as a definition Websters' is terrible. The AP examples can all be described as both pagan and mythological; there might be some that could be said to be one but not the other. Johnbod (talk) 20:54, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
It's claimed that there is nothing wrong with referring to an important figure to some Christians, Jews and Muslims as "mythical" because of this disclaimer (yes, it's a disclaimer in article-space, or the closest thing I've seen on WP) in the article
But it did not refer to the angel Gabriel is "mythical", but rather it says he is among
mythical creatures or supernatural beings
Michael Hardy (talk) 00:13, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Quite right guys, I copied one of the newer versions by mistake. I just replaced the quote with the one that has actually been there for months, the one that called Gabriel "mythical". - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 00:38, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

On the general point, I would oppose making journalese our standard. It currently has a different set of flaws that the pretentious nonsense of Fowler's day; but it's not clear that it's any better than it was. (And applying CMOS to the particular case of Church may be a WP:ENGVAR violation, as some have suggested; it is certainly applying a generalization to a particular, very knotty, instance.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:23, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, I don't have anything to say that always applies, Tony, but this may be a helpful way to frame the question. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:01, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
A significant minority of Wikipedia's editors who follow Commonwealth English often reject the notion that they are anywhere near reaching consensus on language issues. The same was true of a signficant minority of American writers in the 60s and 70s. I don't know if the reason is the same, but maybe it is. American style guidelines from the 60s read as if they were written by priggish schoolmarms. There was a big rebellion, and today, Chicago and AP Stylebook don't represent anything I would call either "elitism" or "journalese"; they are the product of long and wide consensus-building processes. Chicago is more complicated because it tries to represent consensus among groups that haven't reached any consensus among themselves (academicians, journalists, etc), so occasionally its guidance comes across as arbitrary. Still, they rely on an enormous bank of professional copyeditors, and that process has been going on for a while, and most American writers think that Chicago generally gets things right. AP Stylebook focuses on what has worked well in newspapers, magazines and (nowadays) blogs, and its guidance usually does represent consensus, but of a smaller group than Chicago tries to represent.
Whether the Brits are on a similar journey that will eventually lead to similar conclusions, I don't know. Written American English will never be as easy and universally understood (among native speakers) as French or German, because they (especially the French) have taken this approach for centuries while Americans are working on decades, and their dictionaries are much smaller, and they don't have the whole world trying to co-opt their language. Still, I think American writers have more or less arrived at mindsets that seem to me to be closer to the French and Germans than the British; for instance, American writers who hope to have a broad readership prefer to follow one set of orthography rules. Even American writers who have never heard of Chicago or AP Stylebook tend to comply, or try to, because they see the footprint these guides leave behind.
This doesn't apply, of course, to many academics and professionals, if they tend to read and write within just one specialty or profession, but that's another conversation. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 22:54, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

PBS's edit

I did a quick copyedit on PBS's excellent recent addition. My only two goals were to make it say the same thing in fewer words, and to change "as you would find it in other reliable verifiable English sources" to "in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias". From reading PBS's discussion above, I think he definitely didn't want people to be able to pick names out of any source, he wants them to follow proper usage, and I completely agree. I didn't change "If the foreign phrase or word does not appear often in English, then avoid using it (see Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms)." WP:Avoid neologisms doesn't talk about translation issues, so that might not be the right link. How about this? "If a descriptive foreign phrase or word does not appear often in English, then translate it." - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 20:00, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Why was it an "excellent" addition if you had to copy-edit it? Tony (talk) 01:27, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm glad you asked, because it was excellent in several different ways. First, this was a change that PBS has wanted to make for a while, and he was very patient, because several people asked for that. For myself, I wanted him to go slow because non-English orthography in Wikipedia is never going to be a settled issue; it's always going to be a contest between people who speak different languages, so I wanted to give everyone time to weigh in. Second, he was careful to match the language to the results of the debates at WP:NAME and WP:UE, rather than trying to slide in his personal preferences. And third, he left the language on the talk page for over a week so that we could copyedit it if we wanted to. There wasn't anything terribly wrong with it, I just decided at the last minute that there were a few phrases that could be deleted without changing the meaning. I could be wrong, of course. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:53, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Orthography ... spelling? I hope it's in AmEng, which is the established variety for MoS. Tony (talk) 10:42, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
The subject of the addition is spelling in article space. Remember that? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:51, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Avoid neologisms -- I was thinking of words that are commonly used in a foreign language but not often in English (with or without anglicization) to describe something, for example négationnisme/negationism.[1] --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 22:03, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

WP:NEO is kind of dense reading, and I'm not sure that people would be any closer to knowing what you want after they had read it. If you want to leave people free to make their own interpretation, what you wrote works fine. If you want to give them more guidance, you have mentioned WP:NCGN#Widely_accepted_name; that would work too. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:22, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
OK, What I will do is add something to WP:NEO about translations of foreign phrases, (because some people who contribute to this encyclopedia in English who's mother tongue is some other language can easily do this in good faith without knowing that they are creating a neologism as for words like négationnisme) and when it is bedded in I'll come back to this section. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 08:33, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
That works too, and then I'd prefer that the section in WP:MOS link directly to the new section you're creating, rather than inviting people to wander around in WP:NEO. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:07, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Multiple columns in {{reflist}} deemed bad

"Howzat for a provocative headline, eh?" — superlusertc

There have been some discussion on Template talk:Reflist about whether to remove multicolumn support from {{reflist}}. The simple solution would be to remove support for it in the reflist template, however, some users suggested it might be better to have a policy change? (I'm guessing they where referring to MoS?). So if you have any thoughts about that please consider taking part in the discussion.
— Apis (talk) 21:42, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Logical quotation

Arthur said that "the situation is deplorable." – in this sentence, does the period belong in or outside the quotes if the period was part of the quoted text? WP:MOS#Quotation marks seems contradictary as it states that the period should be inside when it "is part of the quoted text" and outside when "a sentence fragment is quoted". Epbr123 (talk) 00:07, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

If it's stated or implied that Arthur put a period after deplorable, or would have if he had written down what he said, then the period comes first; otherwise not. I dredged the WT:MoS archives on this recently, so if you're unconvinced, see WT:How_to_copy-edit#Logical_quotation. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 00:13, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Nothing about implied. If the dot is there in the original and the quote starts a WP sentence, yes, inside. If the quote starts within a WP sentence, outside. If the quote ends without punctuation in the original —in the middle of the quoted sentence—ellipsis dots are required. Tony (talk) 01:26, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
The distinction between starting a WP sentence or not isn't so clear cut in my reading of the guidelines. For example, isn't this example OK? Trevor said, "I hate it when goats come into my yard." — Dulcem (talk) 01:36, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
No. Tony (talk) 01:38, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
If Arthur was speaking rather than writing, then an "implied" period is the only kind of period Arthur could give us. But the way Tony is framing it is right. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:05, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
OK, what about, Arthur said, "I hate it when goats come into my yard. They are so smelly." Here we've got two sentences quoted. Does it make a difference? — Dulcem (talk) 02:12, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Tony knows quite a lot about Wikipedian usage, and I do remember seeing that in FAs, although that's not what I'm used to seeing. For instance, the Guardian's online style guide says:

quotation marks

Use double quotes at the start and end of a quoted section, with single quotes for quoted words within that section. Place full points and commas inside the quotes for a complete quoted sentence; otherwise the point comes outside:

"Anna said, 'Your style guide needs updating,' and I said, 'I agree.' "

- Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:18, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

That seems much more logical than the "logical" style we have now. — Dulcem (talk) 04:54, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I strongly disagree. There is no reason to inject a comma into quotespace when it can just as easily sit outside. Ilkali (talk) 06:37, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't mind the preceding comma—said,—but it's fine without, isn't it? The thing about the final period is that if you want to highlight that "smelly" isn't the end of the quoted sentence, do this:

Otherwise, the default is the assumption that it is the end of a sentence, or it simply doesn't matter in the context. Tony (talk) 10:40, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Is the example at WP:MOS#Quotation marks wrong? – Arthur said, "The situation is deplorable." Epbr123 (talk) 11:43, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Agreed that different people seem to do different things, but I have to sit this one out, because I suck at Commonwealth English. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:12, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
What is this "Commonwealth English" that you claim people "follow" (supernatural religion?)? Canada is a Commonwealth country: do Canadians use CE? India is, too. Tony (talk) 14:15, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, am I saying something offensive? What term do you use for what is sometimes abbreviated "AmEng" and "BrEng" around here? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:40, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
No Dank, there's not a molecule of you that could be offensive (leave that up to me). Sorry if my comment came over as brusque. CE has been bandied about as a blanket term for all varieties of English that are not North American or British. I know it's convenient, but I question its meaning. Tony (talk) 14:47, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Last time this term came up, somebody (as I recall, Tony) had objected to BrEng as a slight to the independent Englishes of the Dominions; Commonwealth was preferred as covering all of them and English English too. I don't mind being politically correct on this point, but it would be nice if there were consensus on what correctitude would be. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:05, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Both of you are right, I think; there's no such thing as Commonwealth English or BrEng, and I just hadn't caught on yet. Both American English and North American English (AmEng seems to mean the latter around here, but I generally avoid it as ambiguous) do mean something, and not because we're dealing with just one or two countries, but because writers over here have largely decided that they want it to mean something, that is, the forces that congeal consensus on the kinds of things that show up in Chicago and AP Stylebook have been winning over the forces of individualism for several decades now. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:12, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Those who value external Manuals of Style may wish to consider CMOS §6.10:

According to what is sometimes called the British style (set forth in The Oxford Guide to Style [the successor to Hart’s Rules; see bibliog. 1.1]), a style also followed in other English-speaking countries, only those punctuation points that appeared in the original material should be included within the quotation marks; all others follow the closing quotation marks. This system, which requires extreme authorial precision and occasional decisions by the editor or typesetter, works best with single quotation marks. (The British tend to use double quotation marks only for quotations within quotations.)

This is no evidence for the refinement presently under discussion; is there a source for it? (And the general advice is sound; WP editors are not known for "extreme authorial precision". We also recomend double quotation marks.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:17, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Names as names

What is the proper way to render a pen name, stage name, or nickname of an individual in a situation such as this?

In a sense, this seems to be an instance of a word being discussed as a word, and that it should thus be italicized. But I'm not sure; maybe names are names and don't require any sort of punctuation even in "words-as-words" usages. Is there any difference in the example above and these versions?

Thanks for any help! — Dulcem (talk) 01:00, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Although people can come up with all kinds of clear and easy-to-follow rules, there is no chance that all good editors will agree on this one, so my vote is that either is fine. I go with quotes whenever it is stated or implied that someone is saying something, as in the "dubbed" example. When you see a single skilled editor switching back and forth, the difference tends to be that the quotes have more of a sense of "so he says" or "let's call it this". WP:PUNC (in WP:MOS) and scare quotes may be helpful - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 04:14, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Although there might be disagreement about whether quotation marks or italics should be used, not using either is not an option. Personally, I prefer to restrict usage of quotation marks to as few uses as possible except for quotations, and since italics are used for words as words anyway, I should definitely suggest italics for the first case. It is about the second one that I am unsure; this seems to fall under Dan's description of "whenever it is stated or implied that someone is saying something", therefore quotation marks look perfectly acceptable. Waltham, The Duke of 23:27, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Regarding "not using either is not an option", agreed, in the examples given. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 23:37, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
In your opinions, would the same distinction hold in the following three cases?
  • In 1979, Sarkisian changed her name to Cher.
  • In 1979, Sarkisian took the name Cher.
  • In 1979, Sarkisian started calling herself "Cher".
I'm uncomfortable adding any sort of emphasis to the first example, as you wouldn't write "The bank robber's name was 'Jesse James.'" You'd leave James's name unmarked. This is what is making me look slightly askance at any sort of distinguishing punctuation or style at all, as names are names and perhaps don't need to be marked out in a special way. Thanks again for the responses thus far. — Dulcem (talk) 23:44, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Cher doesn't need italics since the link is a clue that you're referring to the word rather than what the word means. (This used to be in WP:MOS but isn't there now; not sure where it went.) - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 00:59, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
That opens another can of worms over whether wikiliking something counts as some form of marking it. I'd rather know what the answer would be in all cases, not just if the name is wikilinked. So, ignoring the wikilinks, what form is preferred? — Dulcem (talk) 01:18, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I doubt that wikilinking marks as a word. We want to wikilink "Sonny Bono was married to Cher." I agree with Dank that it is an arguable matter, depending on context, which is preferred; I think I would use quotes in the first example under Boz and italicize the second. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:25, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Agreed with Sept that wikilinking doesn't definitively mark a word-as-word, but it suggests that there is something special about the word, which I feel is good enough to keep "Sarkisian changed her name to Cher" from sounding odd without italics or quotation marks, and WP:MoS used to say this. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:13, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
If that were the case, are people marking ordinary dates as somehow special by autoformatting, i.e., linking, them? (We still can't seem to get WikiMedia to decouple the two functions.) Tony (talk) 09:53, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I still do not believe that Cher should be left unmarked. Your example about Jesse James, Dulcem, has the distinction that it was his real name, and not an alias or nickname; this is a distinction that had escaped me so far, but which I believe is a meaningful one. We never mark real names, but pseudonames are... Well, they are fake. Waltham, The Duke of 14:43, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Point taken about James. But if Sarkisian is changing her name legally to Cher, doesn't that count as a non-fake name? — Dulcem (talk) 00:56, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Did we reach any consensus here on whether there are times that a wikilink makes italics or quotes unnecessary? I didn't get why this was taken out of WP:MOS; was it too precise, or not precise enough? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:21, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

As I see it, Wiki-links should not influence in the least the quality of the prose and of the formatting thereof. They are just navigational tools, not formatting options. Printed pages, for one thing, do not display links at all, so their usage would make no difference there anyway. Waltham, The Duke of 09:02, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Images

We have several desirable features for images (that they alternate left right and left; that they begin with a right; and so on.) It would be nice if all of them could be implemented for every article, but sometimes they can't be.

I don't see any reason, however, to have the requirement to face inward trump all the others; I can think of at least one image (the Cambridge statue of Newton "voyaging through the strange seas of Thought, alone") which should face outwards. But since people want to stress it, I've put it first. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:22, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

You're displaying more good sense than are the rulemongers.
I'd draw your attention to this nugget:
Since faces are not perfectly symmetrical, it is generally inadvisable to use photo-editing software to reverse a right-facing portrait image; however, some editors employ this controversial technique when it does not alter obvious non-symmetrical features, such as Mikhail Gorbachev's birthmark, or make text in the image unreadable.
which I suppose I could summarize as There's no rule against falsification but you shouldn't do it where it will easily be noticed by even the moderately observant.
"It is generally inadvisable" my orifice. If an image is worth inclusion, presumably that's because it would be informative. Assuming that WP wants to purvey information rather than misinformation, the particular image shouldn't be faked. (And the feebleness of the motive for this fakery makes the fakery ridiculous as well as wrong.) -- Hoary (talk) 09:22, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Agreed with Hoary. What page is that on? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:00, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
On the very page we're discussing right here. -- Hoary (talk) 14:13, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I have always skipped past discussions of images, but I agree, I can't see any reason for the WP:MoS to take a stand in favor of falsification of any kind. I follow that this was one of those "we can't be any better than the world" arguments; newspapers routinely flip photos (or used to; are they better-behaved these days?) But a flipped photo is a lie for editorial convenience; we can at least be better than that. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:45, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Looks like this does not represent consensus. (Since someone wrote this, there may not be consensus to condemn flipping either.) I will remove. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:57, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Looking at it again, it may have been intended as a statement of fact {"Some editors do this"), or even a weak condemnation, not a favoring. But I still see no reason to keep something so bland. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:00, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
You may well be right here. But context is (expectations are) important here. By delivering such a mild tut-tut, it seems to indicate that this is OK behavior. Well ... let's just zap it. (Although there may be rare contexts for the clearly announced, reasoned, flipping of images.) -- Hoary (talk) 15:35, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Indeed; this could apply in articles on art, especially discussing the reversal of images in copies in prints and so on. But as it is, the text should go, and be replaced with a ban, unless there is a good reason for the reversal, and it is clearly mentioned in the caption. Johnbod (talk) 16:14, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I can think of many cases (probably most even) when flipping images would be perfectly acceptable. So don't put in any general rule against it at least.
— Apis (talk) 11:38, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
For example? Johnbod (talk) 13:57, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
  • I'm also curious. Note that the present text would permit substantial photo-shopping, including flipping, if it is acknowledged, and is of service to the reader; but I don't see why flipping would be. (Flipping the picture of a symmetrical object, like undecorated pottery, would be largely harmless; but, by the same token, why bother?) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:42, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Alright, here are some examples:
I guess there could be situations where you'd prefer not to flip the car, but as long as it's clear it's been flipped I can't see any problem with it. If that isn't enough, I don't think a photographer would think twice about flipping, cropping or photoshopping an image before releasing it, so we usually don't have any control or way to verify this anyway. =/ (And yes, I don't have anything against the current text)
— Apis (talk) 18:50, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Are these examples of images that could be flipped? The car hasn't been. I suppose animals are mostly pretty symetrical, at least to a human view, but I don't personally approve of flipping landscapes at all. As the policy says, if there is a reason & it is in the caption, you can still do it. Johnbod (talk) 19:38, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Yes, non of them are flipped as far as I know, but I wouldn't mind if someone did it for some reason. Why not flip the tea plantation picture, it's a generic tea plantation? :)
— Apis (talk) 19:47, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
I mean, I have never done it and I don't know if it's being done, but if the tiger had been facing the other way for example, then it would have been hard to use in the info box for the tiger article, and I would have considered flipping it for that. Is that bad for some reason? I think there are valid reasons for doing it (and for not doing it in other cases) so it shouldn't be any specific rule against it, thats all. :)
— Apis (talk) 21:38, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
It depends whether you think authenticity and accuracy are more important than layout in WP. Suppose you actually lived on the tea plantation? Once you start that, you'll be flipping buildings and people, and Chinese writing because no-one can read it anyway. The Sphinx is not symmetrical (any longer anyway) and the detector and dominar are fair-use, which I imagine is another issue. No doubt we have many pre-flipped pics on WP, but where we can we should discourage it, imho. Johnbod (talk) 21:44, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Darye, flipping this image would probably be really bad (e.g. positioning of objects and people are likely to be of ceremonial importance)
I definitely agree that there are many cases when flipping would be bad! (added a tea ceremony example) I just think it is OK in many instances as well. Photographs isn't particularly authentic to begin with: the photographer begins distorting what a human observer would see the moment he takes the picture. Hes excluding anything outside the photo, changes lighting and color, distorts proportions and can use many other effects. He might even have arranged the picture, and the image might convey an entirely different message when taken out of it's real context. As long as it is clear that the image has been flipped (etc) I don't think there would be much harm in many cases, but it should always be done carefully. (I probably wouldn't mind even if I lived at that plantation, but I might be a bad example. I don't know anything about Florida copyright law, but I wouldn't have thought that was a problem).
— Apis (talk) 22:19, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
The colors of the helicopter aren't symmetrical either, I guess it depends on the circumstances whether the colorpattern is important?
— Apis (talk) 22:26, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Minus

Regarding today's edit in WP:DASH: is a fourth dash necessary? (hyphens, en-dashes, em-dashes, minus signs). Here's a minus sign: −, and here's an en-dash: –. Other than the minus being higher by just a hair, I see no difference at all in Firefox or IE. Yes, I see what WP:MOSNUM says, but WP:DASH came first. What's the rationale for making rules that concern nearly invisible differences? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:29, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Please, in the name of all that's holy, don't let this turn into a long WT:MOSNUM debate...I just want to nail down the general principle, to see if there are or aren't valid reasons for making style rules concerning things which are invisible or nearly invisible to the reader. I'll ask over at WP:MATHEMATICS as well. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:39, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Well logic would dictate that people use minus signs when they mean a minus sign. You don't mean x raised to the power of en dash 2, but x raised to the power of minus 2, so why write the former? As for practical reasons, when you use templates (who usually go with minus signs since that is what is meant), the minus and the en dash are vertically unaligned. See 2.234×10−4m2kg–4 vs. 2.234×10−4m2kg−4. Also, you can see that the en dash overlaps with some characters at certain zoom levels (compare the 4s and you'll see that the dashes overlaps while the minus doesn't (I use firefox in 1280x800 )). Headbomb (ταλκ · κοντριβς) 01:53, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

You're right, I can see the difference in the exponents...good point. I withdraw the objection. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:59, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

More practical to tell us how to key it in. I think I know, but since on Safari in WP's default font, both seem exactly the same—even when zoomed in hugely—it's hard to confirm. Tony (talk) 02:08, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

See this picture. This is the largest zoom level where there is still overlap between the 4 and the en dash. You can also clearly see that the minus and the dash are unaligned. Headbomb (ταλκ · κοντριβς) 02:16, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

OK. Tony (talk) 15:36, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Ordinals

Is there any particular reason why it is written that ordinals should not be written in superscript? It is the correct, traditional way to write 2nd - not 2nd. Who decided this? It is open to discussion? EuroSong talk 18:49, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

The short answer, in American English, that Chicago says so, in section 9.8. This is a sufficient answer for some pages and not for others.
The longer answer is a lot more interesting...why have style guidelines at all? They can be useful when orthography (at the level of "encyclopedic writing", whatever that is) has changed over the last 20 years, because many of the sources our editors read will be 20 years old, and many of them (us!) went to school 20 years ago. 2nd might be an example; I used to see that a lot more often than I do now.
Describing modern, professional English usage Making a recommendation can also be useful when we see confusion over some issue that isn't all that important to us but is important to some editors, because their experience has led them to believe that one way is right and everything else is wrong. (This may apply to 2nd, too.) I think Sept disagrees with me on this, but personally, it doesn't bother me if an editor (not Sept) thinks my judgment sucks and I'm being arrogant to offer a guideline. Well, it does bother me, but it bothers me less than if two editors who have to work together a lot have a falling out over language issues, which happens more than you'd think, because language issues are very hard, and often cause misunderstandings. When we notice particular points that tend to be divisive, we might be able to save a few relationships and help the encyclopedia by giving specific guidance. even though that pretty much guarantees that people will call us bad names.
Making a recommendation can do readers a favor by giving writers fewer options. Most prolific writers on Wikipedia are actually really talented, at writing in a particular style that matches what they're used to. On the other hand, they don't know what readers from all over the world, or from different educational backgrounds, are expecting. Style guidelines help to democratize the encyclopedia.

:One thing that style guidelines are not good at: they don't appeal to people who don't do much writing. Without that context, people will probably think we have no idea what we're talking about, and there's not a lot we can do about that.

- Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 20:43, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
We have lots of issues where some editors think their way is right and everything else is wrong. In some cases, the editors agree with the consensus of the English-speaking world and therefore are right; but I don't think most of the cases Dank is thinking of come under this.
Lots of cases arise where writers of good English differ, but some of our editors still insist that their way is the only correct one. The most common of these are Anglo-American differences in spelling and grammar (colour, gotten), and we had a long plague of them on both sides of the AD/BC vs. CE/BCE; on both our guidance is to leave an established style alone. The others should be treated in the same spirit. We are, in fact, written by many people; we have agreed to leave signs of this (the use of Harvard referencing in some, but not all, articles is more visible than anything MOS discusses); we should be willing to do so.
Ordinal superscripts come under this; they may be falling out of use, but they may also have been eclipsed by the inability of most typewriters to do them. If they are becoming obsolete, in time Wikipedia will stop using them without any superscript police; we can be patient. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 13:48, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

We can stay on this particular point (ordinals) for the sake of specificity if you like, Sept, or we can move to a larger discussion. My position is that both of you have things to say that are not only valid, but necessary to the future health of Wikipedia, but the signal gets lost in the noise when you feud. Tony, could you sit this one out for a sec? Sept, let's develop this theme fully and see where it goes. You have seen things happen at FAC that you don't like. You feel that our style guidelines are too extensive by an order of magnitude, that they lure us to put on paper hats and tell people how to write? You believe that this wastes a lot of people-hours at the level of FAC, and suppresses new contributions? Do I have this right? What do you think of my points above?

And, if I could ask a favor, let's restrict this discussion just to American usage, since we're lucky enough to have our "rebellious" phase largely behind us, and since that's all I'm competent to talk about. What's wrong with Chicago, in your view? There is still work to do around the edges, but basic language and orthography rules for professional American English are largely settled. If following Chicago is going to help people get a job or get a paper published, how in the heck are we hurting them by letting them know what it says, and even better, by letting them know when and why Chicago differs from what's needed on Wikipedia? I agree that there is occasional friction on Wikipedia with particular style editors and with particular guidance, but in the WP:GAU survey, 31 out of 31 editors wanted more language and style input in general from reviewers. Everything I see suggests that American Wikipedians generally want our input, and they're very happy that we're doing what we're doing. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 19:35, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm headed out for supper, but a quick correction: it was 35 out of 35 articles, but 31 out of 31 editors. Certainly your opinion counts, Sept, but no, you weren't in the WP:GAU survey, unless I made a mistake; I just searched for "Anderson" and "Sept" at WP:GAU. The point of the survey was to take every article from the lower half of the GAN list at a particular time, which was the approach I took to aim for randomness. I was quite surprised by that result, and then I realized that the people who show up complaining on style guidelines pages (including myself, of course) might not be representative of editors as whole. That in no way means that the people who complain don't have important things to say; only that the problem of disaffection may not be as widespread as I thought before I did the survey. It is of course possible that people were just being nice for no reason, as people sometimes are, or that they were being nice because they wanted to pass their WP:GAN, but many of the articles got their thumbs up or thumbs down before the review was over, and there were a lot of thumbs-downs, so I don't think we can discount all the answers, certainly. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 22:26, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I need to focus on my review of Cold fusion for a few days, but I'll come back to this. Just to clear up a few points:

I am with Septentrionalis, if an article has developed with superscripts then leave them alone. We need clear guidelines when different styles could cause confusion (for example single quotes inside double quotes), but for things like "2nd or 2nd" as there is no confusion, I say go with whatever the local consensus is, and failing that stick with the first contributor to the article, so that each article is internally consistent (and there is a simple rule to stop edit warring) -- just as we do for national varieties of English. At a practical issue though, one has to consider the limitations placed on dates by the Autoformatting and linking of dates, which its self seems to be a mechanism to reduce conflict between editors that is of little practical use for most readers, as they are unlikely to have Wikipedia accounts let alone bother to set their account preferences. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 06:26, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Comparing matters of pure formatting with the (mostly linguistic in nature) national varieties is rather unfortunate, in my opinion. This is an issue of formatting, and therefore we ought to treat it as such. What do ordinal superscripts manage? To make letters smaller and harder to read, and to increase the gap between their line and the one above, creating inelegant inconsistencies within paragraphs. If you have in mind any advantages which would counter-balance these problems, I should certainly be delighted to hear and discuss them. But I rather doubt it. Waltham, The Duke of 06:53, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree entirely with His Grace. Dank, CMOS varies from crap to excellent, and in many places contravenes its own guidelines; I don't know why you'd want to set it up on an altar and pray to it. Here, where the text can be displayed quite small, it's usually inappropriate, and always unnecessary. It's also harder work in the edit box. They should not be permitted. Tony (talk) 09:25, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

What Wikipedians do better than academicians, journalists, professionals and even bloggers is to lower the barriers to collaborative writing. (Our advantage over bloggers is providing the guaranteed readers; that lowers the barrier to getting your stuff actually read.) I will support everything that lowers barriers and respects what our writers actually want, and oppose everything that raises barriers.

Philip, you're with WP:MILHIST, one of Wikipedia's most successful wikiprojects. If you're saying that in WP:MILHIST articles, the way that respected military historians write is always acceptable in WP:MILHIST articles, I support that. Wikipedia is at its most powerful and most charming when articles about military history read like articles written by military historians. When I read an article about Agatha Christie novels, I want to smell the English country gardens. When I read a math article, I want to see the kind of blunt elegance I remember from my math days. So, I'm with you there.

But here's the problem: who's going to tell us how military historians write? Just coming up with an approximate description of professional American usage, which is what Chicago tries to do, is hard enough. The problem is that most of the time, people who want to run off and do things their own way are just embarrassing themselves. (Not in front of me, I don't care, but in front of their peers.) Let's take "2nd": the first 30 Google hits I get on "military 2nd" (which I believe would pick up 2nd) are 30-0 in favor of not superscripting. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I should be looking at 1000 hits, or looking more closely at military history sources to answer this question. But if it's true that "2nd" is much more common these days, then my position is that we don't do anyone any favors by telling them that 2nd is just fine; that's shirking our responsibility to help people become better writers, make a living, write papers that get accepted, impress their peers, or whatever other reasons people like to write in Wikipedia. It's also just a flat-out lie to tell someone that some kind of rare usage is not a problem, because we have no power or authority to make it not a problem. Editors get reverted all the time, and if most of the likely contributors to their articles think that "2nd" looks better than "2nd", then they're probably going to lose the battle to keep "2nd", and we're not doing them any favors if we tell them they won't.

Tony, you don't need to worry that I'll worship Chigago. One of the joys of writing for Wikipedia is that we don't have to try to sell something as consensus that couldn't possibly be consensus; Chicago is a business, and they have to pretend to professors and students and New Yorker writers and novelists that one of set of guidelines will work for all of them, which couldn't possibly be true. See the current discussion at WT:MOSCAPS; some of Chicago's capitalization guidelines are just silly. But this is fantastic: while Chicago is stuck trying to defend the status quo, we can run circles around them, and come off as much more practical and modern than they are. Who knows...we might get wider acceptance among people who write online for our style guidelines than Chicago, if we work hard and we document how we differ and why we think we're superior. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 19:07, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

One possible solution would be to use the Wikipeida recommended house style as laid out in the MOS unless the majority of cited sources in an article use a different style in which case seek a local consensus over which style to use. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk)
I'm happy with the idea of being influenced by the sources, that's a very good idea: we need to read before we speak. But surely some sources will be 100 years old, some won't be in English, some will be written atrociously but should be sources because they have useful information, and some will be written over or under the heads of our readership, or be written for a specialized readership. Before we carve something into stone, could you pick an example where you like what the sources say more than you like what our style guidelines say, and let's try to work out the principles from the examples? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:25, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Should article titles conform to naming conventions?

There are many pages in the "naming conventions" category. It seems to me that if there's a page that concerns article titles that is optional, then it shouldn't be in the cat. I changed WP:MOS to say that article titles should conform to the cat; Kotniski changed it back to the single page WP:Naming conventions. Thoughts? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:56, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I changed it because when I clicked that link looking for information (see above), it took me to the wrong place (an encyclopedia category). Maybe it should point to Category:Wikipedia naming conventions if you want a category there?--Kotniski (talk) 17:13, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
Oops! - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:29, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Re: Images

At WP:MOS#Images, it states Do not place left-aligned images directly below second-level (===) headings, as this disconnects the heading from the text it precedes. Instead, either right-align the image, remove it, or move it to another relevant location. Would this also apply to headers lower than second-level?--十八 00:11, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes. The point is that only first-level (==) headings have a horizontal bar to link the heading to the text; all other section levels depend crucially on the text being directly under its heading. Strad (talk) 01:41, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Very quick question about times

Do I need to put a.m. in front of every time in the article? Or can I assume the reader knows from a one-time deal? "Bleh happened at 8:15 a.m. Blah happened at 8:17. Blargh happened at 8:23." -- VegitaU (talk) 20:43, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I think once is enough in a case like this. Just use common sense.--Kotniski (talk) 10:24, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
Or else just use 24H notation and totally avoid ambiguity. 08:15 means 8:15am, 20:15 means 8:15pm Roger (talk) 12:16, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, that's what I decided to do. Thanks. -- VegitaU (talk) 12:44, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Subheadings instead of DLs

There are a lot of definition lists in the guideline, formatted with wikitext semicolons and colons. While this does provide a clear format, the HTML document structure tends to be broken:

  1. Wikitext definition lists get interrupted by line spaces in the the wikitext, so they don't maintain correct structure.

Replacing these with subheadings formatted with more equals signs (=) would:

  1. Provide consistent structure.
  2. Allow finer-grained linking when we want to be pedantic about some point of style.
  3. Allow finer-grained editing of the guideline.
  4. Probably make the wikitext clearer and easier to edit with paragraphs, instead of tightly-stacked DD list items.

Any objections to converting most of the guideline from DLs to subheadings? —Michael Z. 2008-05-26 19:43 z

Which section would you like to change? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 19:52, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
I was looking at Quotation marks in WP:PUNC#Punctuation, and specifically thinking of how many discussions I would have liked to have linked to "Other matters", but I see that much of the guideline may be able to benefit in the same way. —Michael Z. 2008-05-26 20:37 z
The only reason I can see not to do that is that we could wind up with 50 subheadings and headings, and each of them would have to be a distinct phrase to avoid confusion when linking. The text size is nearly the same at the "====" level. But it seems worth the extra bookkeeping, to me, to allow people to link to specific guidelines; any objections? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:07, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
There are anchors one can place so that one can directly link to a point in a page, without it necessarily being marked as a heading. I think you write <span id=Name/> and you use that name as a section heading when linking (like this: [[Page#Name]]). Waltham, The Duke of 05:10, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

That's right. Purists prefer a space before the slash, and Name should be in quotes. I wish people used those tags in archives more often for easy linking. But on a non-archived page, my preference would be to keep things visible; it limits the effectiveness of something that lets you link if you can't tell just by looking at the page that you can link to it. The leading semicolon looks like this:

leading semicolon

and the subheadings that can be linked to look like this:

subheading with 4 equals signs

subheading with 5 equals signs

So 5 equals signs makes a nice substitution for the semicolon if we want to preserve font size. If we want to follow the guideline to always nest subheadings "correctly" (but hey, we don't need to follow no stinkin' guidelines in WP-space), then we want 4 equals signs to follow a subheading of 3 equals signs. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:28, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

"Don't follow style guidelines on project space" should be extremely relative, in my opinion, but I think in this case you are right; the table of contents will not know the difference, the font will remain the same, and there will be no confusion amongst editors, because this is not one of the pages supposed to be edited much anyway. Waltham, The Duke of 17:37, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
I like your logic, and I wouldn't mind writing that down somewhere as a guideline about style guidelines: feel free to use subheadings with four or five equals signs, depending on what font size you want, as a useful way of allowing people to link to particular sections of the style guidelines. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:31, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Superiors scientific even for endnotes

I just noticed that Wikipedia superiors used to indicate endnotes are set in a scientific style. If I wanted to square x, I would type x2. But if I wanted to cite a source for x, I should write x.² The latter aligns with the ascender line and is set 50% smaller than x. Unfortunately, the former adds leading to some lines, but not others. See this PDF for more information.—Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 06:15, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

"But if I wanted to cite a source for x, I should write x.²". Shouldn't you use <ref> tags? And incidentally, the superscripted numbers yielded by said tags are in <sup> tags, like your first example.
What are you suggesting be changed? Ilkali (talk) 08:25, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
If I used a <ref> tag, it would be x,[1] which presents the same problem as using <sup> tags. If we used a smaller superscript number that wasn't placed so high on the line, it wouldn't ruin the line spacing (leading). I think those brackets should probably go, too.—Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 14:41, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
Well, it'd be a matter of changing the CSS, and I'm not sure that's something that can be done lightly. I see there's already a 'line-height: 1em' property, which seems to make everything look fine on my browser. Making the superscripts smaller might bring legibility problems. Ilkali (talk) 15:06, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
I just browsed an entry in Firefox, and I see that the extra leading must be an issue with Internet Explorer. I think I'm looking at the CSS right now. It says that the body text size is 11 pt. I think we should increase it to 12 pt. and then shrink the superiors. I notice that a line of text here is about 116 characters without spaces with a screen resolution of 1024 by 768. With an infobox, it's about 77 characters. The ideal length for a line is about 40 characters. Anything over 75 is really hard to read. The most legible sites either use a larger font size or narrow the text block by placing columns to the side of the text. We should also use a serif typeface for body text. San-serif type styles like Arial are hard to read.—Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 18:42, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
This isn't really the kind of thing the MoS is supposed to deal with - it's more focused on article content. Anyway, font sizes and such are properties of skins. I'm not sure how you'd go about petitioning to have the properties of any given skin changed, but an acceptable alternative might be to define your own user style customisations. Ilkali (talk) 19:19, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
OK. I just posted my concerns at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive62#Typographical Problems with Wikipedia.—Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 23:35, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Using graphics to display text

{{{post}}}

Does the manual of style have anything to say about the use of graphics to display textual information? If not, should it? I would have thought this was an extreme no-no, for both accessibility and stylistic reasons. Hesperian 01:12, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

It is a no-no in almost all situations, though I don't know if the Manual of Style explicitly addresses it. —Remember the dot (talk) 01:20, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree, the example is a no-no. Use css markup if it has to look fancy.
— Apis (talk) 02:00, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
I hate it. Unfortunately, there's a shrill infobox lobby we have to put up with. Infoboxes and such graphics typically repeat what is (or should be) in the main text, and standardise and typically oversimplify information. Tony (talk) 07:26, 28 May 2008 (UTC) PS A good example of the latter is the "Governor appoints premier" statement. Um ... that has to be taken in context, as does the fact that the premier appoints the governor. Many of our readers will justifiably interpret that text in a way that is in fact highly distorted. Tony (talk) 07:27, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
Yes, we're off-topic, but yes, I agree. You should read the Utgard Loki quote at User:Future Perfect at Sunrise. Hesperian 12:39, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

As often, Tony has let his own prejudices run away with him; the question here is not infoboxes, but whether images should be used to display texts, in infoboxes or out of them. There is one argument against it, which we should make: it is unlikely to be read as text by devices for the visually impaired, and therefore deprives some of them of information without necessity. It would take a truly extraordinary visual effect, and this example isn't one, to make up for that, if it can be done at all. All we need do is state the reason not to. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 13:43, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I can think of numerous reasons why not to do it, but the one you mention is probably the most important one. It goes against the very idea of the html format, makes the page take much longer time to load, is not handled like other text by the browser (e.g. can't change text size), is not only inaccessible to those visually impaired but any device that do not render images (e.g. text-only browsers), not indexed by search engines, bla bla bla...
I guess it could be used to illustrate an old manuscript (although then the actual text, if intended to be read, should be entered as text in the article as well. It could also be useful to illustrate a visual effect of some sort (e.g. italics or subpixel rendering).
—Apis (talk) 06:40, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
As you can see, I think "not indexed" is more important, and have edited accordingly, although it will only apply if the info is not repeated elsewhere in the article. I think we should explain the problems, and leave it at that.
We do have MS images. If the precise text is important, it should be quoted in the caption anyway; we are written for general readers, not for palaeographers. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:15, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
I would think, since Wikipedias goal is to make knowledge available to everyone, that not making the articles unnecessarily inaccessible would be a priority. Although I have no problem with the order of mention in the text (to me it does not signify which is more important).
—Apis (talk) 03:45, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

As you can see from the example on the right, I have reverted to a version that uses textual headers. We'll have to wait and see if it sticks. The question now is, should the MOS have anything to say on this point? Hesperian 06:52, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

This discussion is based on a misleading premise: the graphics being discussed here are not textual headers; the infobox has a textual header completely apart from the graphics. The graphics are organisational tools colour coded to differentiate between ministers (silver), viceroys (light purple), and monarchs (purple), as well as between the federal (red) and provincial (blue) jurisdictions. There is a word on each, but it's merely as a graphic, not meant to impart any real information beyond what the colour code already does. See Monarchy of Canada, Governor General of Canada, Prime Minister of Canada, Monarchy in Ontario, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, and Premier of Ontario for examples of each use. I'm sure everyone will note that there are clear textual headers in each case. --G2bambino (talk) 14:20, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
You heard it here first, folks; it is a header, and it has text, but it is ain't a textual header. Hesperian 01:55, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
My, my; you don't take getting called out on your bullshit very well at all, do you. --G2bambino (talk) 12:00, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
I find this very reasonable. The graphics serve more as colour-coding with stylish lettering rather than as real text. Personally, I like the system; it combines aesthetics with informativeness and organisation–standardisation. Waltham, The Duke of 16:58, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Your Grace surprises me with your lack of charity towards those poor unfortunates with less sharp eyesight, lower bandwidth, or lower resolution devices than your good self. Those who require large print can easily increase the font size, but cannot increase the size of this image. Those with no eyesight at all must use a screen-reader, which cannot know that this image is intended to be parsed as text. Those with low bandwidth are forced to download 1,829 bytes where 30 bytes would suffice. Those with low resolution devices set their image thumb size defaults to something very small like 120px, only to be served up a redundant image that is locked to 253px. Must "stylish lettering" trump such key accessibility issues? Hesperian 03:07, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
So much harshness, Hesperian... :-) I did not consider eyesight much of a problem, having focused mostly on the colours and not so much upon the text; it is not as common for one to be unable to see both the text and the colour as it is for one to have problems with one of these two elements, is it? In any case, my basic point was that it is not crucial information which needs to be read, but a helpful addition. Furthermore, the images were rather small; how much could they possibly delay the loading of a page? There were problems, true, but perhaps their full extent escaped me.
All that said, the solution now applied to the boxes seems to have improved the situation, although the aesthetic aspect has been perceptibly compromised. If the visual effect could be closer to the original, that would certainly be preferable; the purpose of the intervention was to improve the lacking parts of the feature, not to be forced to remove it altogether.
PS: Although I believe it needs more work, I must say that Apis's solution is a significant improvement over the previous attempt. Sorry Hesperian. (evil grin) Waltham, The Duke of 15:11, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I'm strongly against this, there is no reason for using an image here? Just make templates using CSS markup to make them display identically to the images (kind of as it was a while ago, but you could make it almost identical to the images if you fiddle a bit with it), that would be a superior technical solution, and it's more accessible. I can see no disadvantage to using a text version here (except perhaps some work updating infoboxes)? And I would have thought accessibility would be a priority anyway.
—Apis (talk) 03:19, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
If the CSS text were encoded directly in the page, it'd be much more time-consuming to revise the style later (compared to simply replacing some image files). Presumably we could use templates for this, though. Ilkali (talk) 06:14, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
I changed the infobox to use text and CSS again, although tried to better match the previous images. It is much easier to change now than when it was an image. Now you only have to edit the template (e.g. change a color, add a new bar, change the text of the bar and so on).
—Apis (talk) 07:07, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
This is fine: it works with the original intent of the colour-coded bars, and looks much more professional than Hesperian's, er.. attempt. The other three templates need updated to match, however; I can try, but I'd prefer if someone who has more expertese with X11 color names could at least look over my shoulder. --G2bambino (talk) 12:00, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Well, my version is based on Hesperian's, I just changed font and colors to match the images better :) I will take a look at the other templates later if no one beats me to it.
—Apis (talk) 13:48, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I see that it uses the same basic technique, but you gave more consideration to the look and spirit of the system. --G2bambino (talk) 15:07, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
For the reasons given, I would agree that the use of graphics for text should be generally discouraged; guidelines on the subject would be useful. Any such guidelines should perhaps brifely discuss typical exceptions, as in articles like Sans-serif and International phonetic alphabet.--Boson (talk) 06:35, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Full stops

Notice that in our subsection that was titled "Periods and spaces" two days ago, the name was recently changed to "Periods/full stops and spaces", and I just swapped in parens for the slash. The first sentence includes full stop and period, and even though the "official" language for WP:MOS is American English, I'm fine with the pre-existing first sentence if there are a fair number of non-Americans who will be looking for guidance on "full stops" in the MOS...and I think there are. Given that first sentence, I'm fine with the change to the subheading (or what will become the subheading if/when we ditch the leading semicolons). Does anyone want a change from the current version? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:58, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

It's fine. I was the one who originally changed it. Although this article is written in American English and it should be written that way throughout, there are some words, which need to be used in British English too. For example British Wikipedians understand color as colour; that's a spelling difference. The problem arises when this article uses entirely different words, especially when they're not recognised in the United Kingdom. Period is an example of this and in this case we should adhere to both the American word and British word. Meaty♠Weenies (talk) 14:03, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Of course, there are more than two dialects in the language but, from an Australian perspective, no, period is not a well recognised name for a full stop down under either. JIMp talk·cont 16:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Caps controversy in the following series

{{tl:MedInst}}

These are lists of articles used in special branches of medicine. Thus they have been named, in general, as "Instruments used in Field". The F needs to be capitalised as it is a name of a subject. Any bureaucrats coming to mediate??sarindam7 (talk) 22:09, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

No. This is a job for administrators (although any editor could mediate, unless the situation has spiralled out of control to the extent that blocks are necessary). Waltham, The Duke of 00:30, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Since when do we capitalise the names of subjects? Read botany, biology, physics, whatever. They all refer to their topic in lower case unless at the beginning of a sentence. Sarindam is wrong; there is no reason to capitalise the names of fields, and these should all be moved (or moved back) to the lower case title. P.S. don't go looking for the discussion; it was on Sarindam's talk page, but is now archived. This will need to be discussed here. Hesperian 01:53, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Ok....understood. Just thought that subject name needed to be capitalised. Applying MOS discussion and correcting namessarindam7 (talk) 09:56, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Can we have wp:mosnum back?

The wp:mosnum policy page cannot be used for reference because it contains non-policy. Anyone that reads it could be mislead into thinking that non-policy is policy. This is acceptable to the people that are controlling wp:mosnum now. Anyone that tries to remove non-policy is just reverted.

The wp:mosnum talk page used to be active with discussions on a variety of topics. It is now dominated by the binary prefix war and its collateral damage. The binary prefix war was moved to a page called Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (binary prefixes) but that lasted just a shortwhile before the page and the warfighting was moved back. It is a place for sockpuppets, puppetmasters and anonymous editors. They keep saying that the war will soon be over and then normal service will be resumed ...

The policy page and its talk page used to be worthwhile places. It had contributions on a variety of topics from many editors. Sadly, the policy page is not reliable and the talk page is scary. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how we can have a policy page and talk page where things other than binary prefixes matter? Lightmouse (talk) 15:47, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

My solution is less than ideal, but what I did was to leave it out of Category:General style guidelines, and I ignore the page. As I said on that talk page last month, not every policy and guidelines page needs more input from relevant sources, but that page does, to shed some light on how those matters are dealt with in professional English. What I aim for in Good Articles is something that wouldn't be out of place in Scientific American and other publications that popularize science for interested and literate readers. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 16:28, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Lightmouse that MOSNUM has become an unpleasant place of doubtful authority since its takeover by an aggressive cabal, including members who quite clearly have created or countenance the creation of sockpuppets to get their way (a forensic analysis of the language of one of those socks indicates to me the owner). MOSNUM used to be a worthy page that attracted expertise such as that of Jimp and SMcCandlish, among quite a few. Now, I can't bear to have it on my watchlist.
At least we have the most important parts of MOSNUM duplicated here at MOS. Tony (talk) 17:13, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
I know that we want to limit sprawl in the Manual of Style, but there are other factors to consider as well... This is a serious situation that we facing here. I have done some thinking, and the idea occurred naturally to me. Perhaps it would be better to split MOSNUM.
The "dates" and "numbers" sections seem distinct enough, and could easily go their separate ways; there is even a difference in that the "dates" part is of significantly wider application. The only element holding this dipole together seems to be the part about hard spaces, and that is almost a duplicate of its counterpart in the main page, so removing it would actually save us some redundancy. I realise that the page does not suffer from a length problem, but I find that the density of debatable guidelines is too great, clogging the talk page with constant disagreements about unavoidably minor issues (in terms of overall impact). Splitting the page would separate the guidelines—removing at least some ownership problems—but most importantly, it would spread the relevant discussions and thus make the associated talk page(s) less hostile, and the resolution of the various issues easier. I know it is not a perfect solution, but given the lack of central co-ordination in the Manual, there seem to be few alternatives if we want an effective management of MOSNUM. Isolating it in any way or ignoring the problem will only make things worse. Waltham, The Duke of 19:21, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

All of these pages are non-policy. That's why they're called guidelines. MOSNUM may have more statements of some editor's opinion than most, but nor by much, and it would be hard to prove. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:12, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

I assume that Lightmouse merely uses "policy" and "guideline" interchangeably; many people use the generic term policy (uncountable) when referring to community-approved guidance as opposed to statements promoted by a handful of editors. Even unofficial practices may be referred to as "policy" in some cases, although rarely in Wikipedia. I request that we should eschew unnecessary repetition of the familiar arguments about the importance of the Manual of Style. Waltham, The Duke of 00:12, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
Fine; most of these pages vontain a lot of stuff that isn't community-approved guidance, or community-approved anything; downgrade my comment accordingly. MOSNUM may be the worst, but I wouldn't bet on it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:11, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

SIZE guidelines

Please see the proposal at Wikipedia talk:Article size to update the article size guidelines, in particular to use industry standard word count instead of character count. Oakwillow (talk) 18:31, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Word count correlates to readable prose size, we already have Dr pda's prose size script that measures readable prose, so I see no need to reinvent the wheel. (And I'm not sure what's up with Oakwillow, since these proposals have garnered no support at size.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:33, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
See discussion there. The wheel is broken, and non-standard. Oakwillow (talk) 18:53, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Update Units of measurements

Could someone update the units of measurements section to reflect the update of MOSNUM? I'd do it myself, but I don't have a lot of time for that this week. Headbomb (ταλκ · κοντριβς) 10:28, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Curly or straight?

Should one ever use “curly” inverted commas - or only ever use "straight" ones?
The MoS says that curly ones are dangerous because they're difficult to type and can affect search results (imagine wondering why you can't find Jane's Addiction because the article has been titled Jane’s Addiction) and "recommends" that only straight are used. On the other hand on the first line of insertable characters beneath the edit window we see

– — … ‘ “ ’ ” ° ″ ′ ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → · §

Are they there just to tease us? Or are there some circumstances when they're appropriate?
For example the Philip Larkin entry currently has a section entitled

1969 – 1985: “Beyond the light stand failure and remorse”

which to my mind looks good and is non-confusing almost-instinct 10:15, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

The same question has come up, without any good answer, at WT:WikiProject Hawaii/Manual_of_Style#It looks_like_you_guys_are_working_on_this_style_guideline:

"When the okina is used, which form to use. For instance: Keaweikekahiali`iokamoku uses what appears as %60 in the url;

Kiwala‘o uses what appears as %E2%80%98 in the url; Kame'eiamoku uses what appears as %27 in the url;

ʻIolani Palace uses what appears as %CA%BB in the url. [punctuation added]. Some of which don't always show up in all browsers. I don't know which should be preferred (if any at all). Mahalo. --Ali'i 14:32, 2 June 2008 (UTC)"

We also haven't resolved when to use a breath mark ("okina") at all; help would be appreciated. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 12:02, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Compelling reasons not to use curly quotes were put when this came up about six months ago; perhaps we need to dig up that debate. Yes, I noticed only the other day that the curlies are there below the edit box; they should be removed. Tony (talk) 12:32, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

In that case I agree that they should be removed asap: currently they're far too pretty to be resisted. Should also the "recommended" in the MoS be changed to something stronger? almost-instinct 12:39, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

On the separate topic of deleting some of the characters on the panel, I think that a check should be made of where they are used before deleting them. Are the curly brackets needed for any foreign language words, pronunciation syntax, complex mathematical notation, or somewhere else? They may not be found on some keyboards. Is is useful to have a full set of characters to use when a particular language keyboard does not have the required keys? I often use the panel of characters (although not the curly brackets) and it may look odd with some missing. Perhaps, there should be a link at the bottom of the panel to a page on the suggested use of special characters, and for example; the use of straight brackets in preference to curly brackets could be easily found and explained. This may help to stop editors using the panel inappropriately, and make it easy to quote from. Snowman (talk) 12:48, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

I think the debate referred to in Tony's comment “this came up about six months ago” is section three of Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 94 — though maybe the conversation continued on a later page? Certainly both sides put forward powerful arguments, but the discussion, as given here, frustratingly fell short of declaring a consensus. Is there another part of the archive we should be looking? almost-instinct 23:35, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
I couldn't find it on my first attempt. Noetica was a key proponent of straight-quotes-only. He's not around at the moment. Tony (talk) 13:34, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
While we await further installments of past discussions, may I ask a purely theoretical question, hoping upon hope that I'm not restarting the debate: would we be able to ask the developers to change the WP search engines so that “ and ” and " are treated as one and the same? almost-instinct 18:51, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
That is a good question. Waltham, The Duke of 22:25, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Comma usage

I'm unsure whether there should be a comma before "as well" in the following:

The election will coincide with the 2008 Senate elections in thirty-three states, House of Representatives elections in all states, and gubernatorial elections in eleven states, as well as various state referendums and local elections.

Theshibboleth (talk) 08:18, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

For me the comma makes it that little bit clearer. --Kotniski (talk) 08:53, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, I think it is clearer. My understanding of grammar though is that since it isn't a clause it wouldn't take a comma. But I know the serial comma may complicate things. Theshibboleth (talk) 09:45, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
I've never heard of that rule. Use a comma if it makes things clearer is my view on the matter.--Kotniski (talk) 13:41, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
The comma is better. A comma is virtually mandatory in some locations, and should not be used in others; but there is wide scope for the use or non-use of what might be called "optional" commas. Optional commas are more likely to be used in formal registers (such as an encyclopedic one) and longer sentences. Here, it's a question of whether a comma is required as a boundary between the last and second-last items in a list. The list is sufficiently elaborate for a comma to be helpful, IMO. Tony (talk) 14:02, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
And the construction changes. Formally, the list ends with the gubernatorial elections, as the and shows; the as well as phrase is a parenthesis, which needs punctuation. We could change that, replacing as well as with and and taking out the other and, but that would change the emphasis of the sentence, probably not to its benefit. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:00, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
And there is also the more amateurish way to make a decision: do you pause before as well? I think most people would. Waltham, The Duke of 22:21, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
In English, commas are grammatical as well as phonological. Tony (talk) 02:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
And in this case, as usual, they are both. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:49, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
Certainly. I am only maintaining that if one is unaware of the specific grammatical rules, one could trust the phonetic aspect of commas in order to avoid a construct which would look awkward; this applies particularly on native speakers. Waltham, The Duke of 17:14, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

image question

How much do you love the image on Geometric Tortoise? If you don't know what I'm talking about, stare at it for ten seconds. Does the MOS need to address this? Hesperian 06:03, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

No, unless somebody is going to claim it induces epilepsy. Having the two images separately might be preferable in a non-stub, but that would be crowded here. For a more substantive instance of shifting images, see Macedonia (terminology). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:41, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Interesting way to deal with the lack of space. I have certainly seen worse strategies aiming at the inclusion of more images. Waltham, The Duke of 08:38, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Please can I have permission to write 'there is a 9 mm gap' and 'there is a 9 millimetre gap'

Please can I have permission to write 'there is a 9 mm gap' and 'there is a 9 millimetre gap'. Currently the former is permitted but the latter is forbidden. Both are identical except that one is symbolic. Both are unambiguous. Lightmouse (talk) 12:34, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

In this respect, ISO has identical requirements with those of our MOS, I believe. How sage of them to take us as the standard. Tony (talk) 12:38, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

NIST's Special Publication 811 (page 16) takes the same position described by Tony1. They say it is because "the value of a quantity should be expressed in a way that is as independent of language as possible". On pages 17 and 18 the same guide says that "key elements of a scientific or technical paper, particularly the results of measurements and the values of quantities that influence the measurements, should be presented in a way that is as independent of language as possible" and that using symbols rather than spelled-out units promotes language independence. They go on to say

Occasionally, a value is used in a descriptive or literary manner and it is fitting to use the spelled-out name of the unit rather than its symbol. Thus, this Guide considers acceptable statements such as “the reading lamp was designed to take two 60-watt light bulbs,” or “the rocket journeyed uneventfully across 380 000 kilometers of space,” or “they bought a roll of 35-millimeter film for their camera.”

Even though the MOS suggests more extensive use of spelled-out units than NIST does, I think that a person with limited ability to read English is more apt to pay attention to the parts of an article that does uses symbols (such as tables), so when using symbols, we should follow NIST's lead and try to be as language-independent as possible.

I am not familiar with the customs of other languages as far as whether or not numerals used as adjectives are separated from the noun with a hyphen. Since I don't know any better, I will suppose NIST knows what they are talking about and that it does indeed vary from language to language. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 13:21, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Consider the following statements:
  • "they bought a roll of 35 mm film for their camera"
  • "they bought a roll of 35-mm film for their camera"
  • "they bought a roll of 35-millimetre film for their camera"
  • "they bought a roll of 35 millimetre film for their camera"
  • "they bought a roll of 35-millimeter film for their camera"
  • "they bought a roll of 35 millimeter film for their camera"
  • as above but with thirty five, thirty-five, thirty-five-mm, thirty-five-millimetre, thirty-five-millimeter
The first one is language independent and compliant with international standards. So I that is a *good thing* and the international nature of Wikipedia would imply that it should be more positive about such a version than regionally biased publications. All are unambiguous in English. I like the fact that I am permitted to write 'of 35 mm film' but I do not like the fact that if the unambiguous '35 mm' is expanded to the unambiguous '35 millimeter', it is forbidden without a hyphen. Lightmouse (talk) 13:58, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Your example might be the most unambiguous of the lot; there are many cases much more confusing. Compare, for example:

The sentence must make sense as a person reads it; omitting the hyphen from the second sentence will cause a person to read it as the first, only realising their mistake (or, rather, the writer's) when reaching periods. I'd give you a better example—preferably one with millimetres—but I am not inspired enough at the moment. You get the point, though. Waltham, The Duke of 00:28, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

His Grace is right: good writing eliminates the need for readers to reverse-disambiguate, even if it would take only a fraction of a second. Here, the preceding "a" does make it clear, but try the plural: "9 millimetre gaps [should be avoided]". Not nine gaps of a millimetre each, so "9-millimetre gaps [should be avoided]". Easiest for readers, then, if it's consistently applied whether or not there's preceding deictic ("a", "the", "these"). The appearance of a symbol rather than a name for the units is enough to signal that single millimetre gaps are not intended: you can't refer to mm (meaning "a single millimetre") using a symbol. Tony (talk) 04:01, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I take the point about mm adding a useful layer of context.
On the point about amibiguity, I agree that it is possible for ambiguous phrases to exist. That is my entire point. The hyphen is a very useful tool to disambiguate values. I will argue strongly for them in values with ambiguity, and against them in values where there is no ambiguity. Many editors use hyphens for disambiguation and not otherwise, yet this mandatory rule for mandatory use of hyphens in all cases turns such writing into a crime without a victim. Quotes about hyphens include "If you take the hyphen seriously, you will surely go mad" and Churchill's "One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided as far as possible". Please think carefully about what I am suggesting: I am lobbying for an end to the mandatory use of hyphens where values and units are unambiguous. If you interpret that as lobbying for a ban on hyphens, then you misunderstand my point. Lightmouse (talk) 10:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

To quote the English major sitting next to me: "Why do we care"? Language independence is a spurious issue; we are in English. Accessibility in multiple languages. which is what MIT means, is handled by having multiple Wikipedias. On hyphenation, we should follow usage, which has always been less hyphenated in American; therefore this is an ENGVAR issue. Delaying the reader by an unexpected huphen is as bad as causing him to hesitate over the absence of an expected one. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:44, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

"Many editors use hyphens for disambiguation and not otherwise, yet this mandatory rule for mandatory use of hyphens in all cases turns such writing into a crime without a victim." No, Anderson: you're the victim. Tony (talk) 03:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Lightmouse and I have been discussing this issue elsewhere. As I noted there, I've always taken the hyphenation of adjective phrases to be standard grammar. I feel it would be simpler to just follow that rule than to have to judge whether the hyphen is needed for disambiguation. Allow unhyphenated adjectives when they aren't needed for disambiguation and you're likely to find the same when they are needed, simply through editors' mistakenly following the examples they see.

As for its being an ENGVAR issue, less hyphenation in general in some dialect group does not equal less hyphenation of adjectives in that dialect group. The argument is making a slight logical jump.

Regarding language independance; if others use this argument to base their standards on, good for them; but I agree with Anderson, this is the English WP. That said though, hyphens still should not be used with abbreviations/symbols, since it's just not done that way in English (whatever the reason be).

JIMp talk·cont 04:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Jimp does correctly see a logical jump; but part of the American disuse of the hyphen is indeed its disuse in compound adjectives unless necessary for clarity. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

I have no statistics but my belief is that ambiguous unit values are rare. I cannot think of a single instance where I have come across a need to disambiguate a unit value with a hyphen. There are cases where I use hyphens as part of grammar but this is not one of them. I frequently read adjectival unit values freely written on Wikipedia and elsewhere that do not have hyphens. It makes no difference to the readability and unlike many grammar issues, it does not look odd. I would not be making such a fuss if it were not hard-coded into the widely used convert template. It is not opt-in, it is not opt-out, it is enforced. Anyway, it seems that I am the only one speaking out against this and I hate to disagree with some of the respected editors here. I have stated my opinion and I have not convinced you. Lightmouse (talk) 19:12, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

I will support this; but then I respect some editors less than you do. The solution is not to use the template where its results are strange. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Unflagged quotes

I have been informed that the article Edmonton municipal election, 1963 contains a quote. Now that I know it is a quote, I can see it. However, I have mistaken it more than once for ordinary text and converted a unit in the text. This has unintentionally annoyed the most frequent editor (User:Sarcasticidealist). I think that there is something unusual about unflagged quotes. There must be some way in which that article can flag quote text to the uninitiated user. Can anyone suggest what needs to be done? Lightmouse (talk) 11:05, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

If it's a direct quote, the editors inserting it should make that clear. Personally, I either use regular double-quotes "like this," or the {{cquote}} tag (though that tag can get distracting for large numbers of quotes). — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 12:03, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
I hope you don't do it like that: MOS clearly states that the comma needs to be after the closing quotation, no matter how Anderson would like it to be. Tony (talk) 03:34, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Yes, Tony, we all know you've continually pressed for this provincialism, in an effort at language reform. "A little learning is a dangerous thing." Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:18, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

The tag would make it easier for a bot to avoid. I am in the bad books of the principle editor, having failed to see the unflagged quote on three occasions. Can you take a look at the article? Lightmouse (talk) 12:34, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I took a look. I can see why the editor doesn't want the quoted material converted. And quoting could interfere with the flow of the article (most of the text outside the tables would be quotes). However, as you point out, it causes confusion for other editors, who don't realize it's direct quotes.
I suggest bringing this up on the article's talk page for discussion. See if Sarcasticidealist would be willing to place quotes himself, or allow you to place quotes. My personal suggestion would be to quote the actual ballot questions themselves, individually, and leave the result numbers unquoted. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 12:59, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
We should not write for the convenience of bots. !!!!—Preceding unsigned comment added by Pmanderson (talk • contribs) 22:59, June 15, 2008

Has anyone ever created a bot that successfully avoids quotes? That would be quite suprising, considering the may ways quote marks are used. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:13, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

A bot could avoid an entire page containing the string 'quote'. If the option exists, some bot tasks would make use of it. Lightmouse (talk) 21:52, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
Edmonton municipal election, 1963 doesn't contain it. A comment could be added, but that's a one-time solution. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:59, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
An article might not contain the <blockquote> tag, it might only have quotation marks. These are tough for a bot to keep track of, since they are also used for other purposes, such as a symbol for arcseconds. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 05:03, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

This is why commenting on the talk page is a good idea. Bots can do that; they can even be programmed to avoid doing a page twice. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:56, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

What is wrong with double quotes around the referendum texts? Tony (talk) 03:37, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Double quotes would be fine too. I don't care how it is done. Something needs to be done to that article. Lightmouse (talk) 04:46, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

I have no problem with one time solutions; the one I would propose here is an "avoided articles" list for the bot, such that after one (reported) false positive, the bot is told to avoid that page. I have no problem with occasional false positives, since these are the price you pay for having bots, and I think the price is well worth it. My concern in this case was that this was a four-time false positive, and I was beginning to become irritated (though you're not in my "bad books", Lightmouse, and I'm sorry if my message was too harsh). If you could just add the article to an avoid list for your bot, and agree to do the same with any future false positives reported to you, I'd be quite satisfied. Failing that, I don't object to having quotes put in the article, but, as I'm no MOS-guru, I'll leave it to somebody else to determine the appropriate way of doing so. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 04:52, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm no kind of guru either but I've had a go at the article. I put the excerpts in blockquotes, hope that this sorts things out nicely for all concerned. With respect to conversions to metric, perhaps some could be provided as footnotes. JIMp talk·cont 05:04, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Your work looks good to me (including the footnote). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 06:25, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and added the footnote. JIMp talk·cont 07:30, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. That should make it easier to avoid in future. I hope!
I do go to great lengths to avoid false positives. By their nature, false positives are visible and frustrating to the victims. They damage the reputation of the bot.
PS to Sarcasticidealist, your message was not harsh, in fact I think you have been very reasonable. I hope we have got a good solution. Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 19:26, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Fractions

Some mention should be made (if there is a preference) of how to write fractions. Use the characters like ¾ or do it manually like 3/4? I believe there are only characters for the 4 or 5 most common fractions. Or should fractions be done away with altogether and only decimals used? Miken32 (talk) 03:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

It is neither possible nor desirable to do away with fractions altogether. The less common fractions can be constructed using the {{frac}} template. e.g. {{frac|22|7}} gives 22⁄7. Hesperian 03:34, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
They should definitely not be done away with. I'd go with the prefabricated characters where possible and ⁄ otherwise. Also there is the <math> tag which will also give fractions. JIMp talk·cont 04:22, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

misleading (deceptive?) edit summaries

Anderson marked his recent edit of the "Ellipses" section as "ce", but it was no mere copy-edit. Among about a dozen changes were:

I am reverting this change pending Anderson's raising of these issues here; that is the way things are done for all but non-substantive changes. At the very least, I must ask Anderson not to conceal substantive changes to MOS under edit summaries that indicate otherwise. I'm retaining his one worthwhile, uncontentious change, from "reliable" to "predictable".

Does anyone claim that those exact prescriptions are either rational, or commended by any external style guide? if not, they should be cleaned up. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:06, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

In addition, I ask Anderson to take note of His Grace's edit summaries concerning Anderson's removal of the guideline WRT em-dash spacing. This is yet another instance in which Anderson's unilateral changes have had to be fixed. Tony (talk) 04:02, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

It has never been consensus to forbid the spaced emdash, which is the house usage of several respectable publishers. Our last poll on the matter showed a majority, but not consensus, to deprecate it; of those, several resisted deprecating it so far. This is the sort of nonsense that brings MOS into disrepute. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:06, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
You mention consensus, but I am not certain that you fully understand its meaning: it is in both the numbers and the arguments. Although in this case we've had a support percentage of over 70–75%, which is often interpreted as consensus on its own, personally, I always take arguments into consideration. Apart from "I like it" and "it is used in some style guides", I cannot recall any meaningful arguments specifically in favour of spaced em dashes; there was a rather out-of-place one about ASCII, which was easily refuted, and some concerns about a proposed conversion scheme that's never actually left the drawer. On the other hand, there are arguments about wrapping, intrusiveness, and consistency that do tip the balance towards unspaced em dashes—arguments which were not satisfactorily countered.
All in all, the decision was legitimately taken by the community, after a discussion and a subsequent poll confirming the result. Consensus was then applied... And you were left to argue the case on your own.
And, I must say, rather badly, too. Even if you were right, acting as you do would only serve to weaken your position. Waltham, The Duke of 22:31, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
  1. I think we expected an admission and apology for misleading us in your edit summary, even if it had been inadvertent. But nothing ... silence ... as though you think such deception is acceptable behaviour. Why do I still bother to carefully delineate substantive and non-substantive changes in my edit summaries, I wonder?
  2. I understand your wish to put a contrary view, but your three examples above contain mistakes and are not entirely clear.
  3. In any case, cogent reasons in terms of our readers are required, not the implication that the endorsement of dead-tree style-guides is central to what we allow online. On the last example, why would we want to explain how to do something we only grudgingly accept? The three, wide, put-your-finger-between-them dots are unnecessarily disruptive to the visual appearance and reading experience of our text. Game over.
  4. I place tight limits on my time budget for fighting your contrarian pet-peeves, so I'm not interested in a drawn-out battle on this one. Tony (talk) 04:30, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Three threads

I see three threads here.

  1. Whether Sept is disruptive or not is a question for Sept (and I have emailed him personally) and for WP:ANI or Arbcom, not for any of us. I have my opinion, which I would be happy to share with WP:ANI or Arbcom, but it's above my pay-grade to offer it here.
  2. Although I don't see a credible threat to Wikipedia at this time, Wikipedia will founder at some point in the future if we don't find a way to generate high-quality articles at a faster rate, especially by integrating the efforts of people who don't currently see themselves as Wikipedians. Encyclopedias used to be boring, but now that Wikipedia is at the top of most Google searches and is the staging area for so many content fights, encyclopedias are sexy as hell, and everyone wants to get in on the act. And Google and Encyclopedia Britannica actually pay people to write articles, so if we don't get our act together, one of these days we're going to get our asses handed to us. Content experts simply have no interest in writing articles in an environment where the rules for how to write seem arcane, not well explained, and transitory from day to day. That's an impression that many have, but contrary to Sept's position that Featured Articles are crap, we really have nothing to be ashamed of; we've all tried to balance competing concerns without being authoritarian. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes not, but we have nothing to be ashamed of. Which segues into...
  3. It's always possible to argue that we got it wrong, and the wiki way is to be just as patient, transparent and flexible as possible. There are an endless number of judgment calls available on balancing the needs of editors vs readers, less-experienced vs more-experienced writers, academicians vs journalists vs bloggers, Wikipedians vs "itinerant" content-experts, usual journalistic practice vs what would be ideal for the visually impaired (see WP:ACCESSIBILITY), North American vs other flavors of English, and on American English pages, guidance from MLA (for academicians) vs Chicago (for authors) vs AP Stylebook and The NYT Manual of Style and Usage (for journalists). We could fill the page with the available tradeoffs that can never quite be settled. The hardest tradeoff is what is (in the minds of Wikipedians, as reflected by page content) vs what should be, or could be if we're lucky. The point (and I do have one) is that Wikipedia is not helped by obsessively wringing our hands and bemoaning our lack of certainty several times a day on multiple style guidelines pages. Writers are not served by continually shifting the goalposts in a pseudo-random way, and even if we thought this approach were a good thing, it would seal our eventual defeat at the hands of Google or EB or any other company that doesn't require writers to put up with this kind of crap. Let's do something really big, the bigger the better...involving Arbcom would be fine with me. Let's ask all of our more prolific writers, and journalists and academics not closely affiliated with Wikipedia as well, to spend some time looking over and talking about the style guidelines, do the best job we can to make sure everyone is heard and that all possible tradeoffs are respected as tradeoffs (rather than just labeling unpopular opinions as "wrong")...and then stop. Just stop. Stop inviting editors to make changes to style guidelines and then slapping them down when they do (which happens on a daily basis), stop inviting accusations that we're not educated or broad-minded enough in our recommendations (we make the invitation by not justifying and pointing to the consensus-generating discussions), stop the daily warfare over doubtlessly fascinating fine points of English usage that we don't have time to obsess over any more. Wikipedia's coverage of a number of subject areas is atrocious, and many people are expecting a printed encyclopedia next year. Anyone who knows Wikipedia well enough to be arguing about style guidelines would be much more useful writing and reviewing articles. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 16:53, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
Hm, no replies, and Tony tells me it won't work; I trust his judgment, but that makes me sad. To clarify, I think my suggestion would probably require Arbcom, or possibly Arbcom rubber-stamping something done at MEDCAB, saying "the following long list of issues is settled for now"; none of us here has the authority to say that. The big issue here is the chilling effect on bringing more good writers in to Wikipedia; they're chilled because we don't make the effort to make the connection between Wikipedia's writing rules and culture and what they already know, and Wikipedians are chilled because we feel fragile (needlessly) and don't want strangers changing things from what we know. If I'm not being persuasive, perhaps all this will make more sense if we can recruit more good writers to Wikipedia, and watch what happens. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 12:02, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
I may have, once again, made the issue too complicated. The "crap" I'm referring to isn't any particular bad advice in the style guidelines...otherwise I would have changed it...it's dumping the unpleasant back-and-forth process of making these difficult judgment calls on the heads of random editors as a way of avoiding taking a stand ourselves. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:03, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Question on "acting" titles

From the MOS, it would be "Governor Smith" or "Smith was the governor of someplace". How does it work with "Acting Governor Smith"? "Acting-Governor Smith"? "acting-Governor Smith"? "acting Governor Smith"? I'm trying to finish up Uriel Sebree and it was pointed out in the FA process how horribly inconsistent I was being.JRP (talk) 22:56, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

I can't see any reason to hyphenate. As for capitalisation of acting, it would have to be capitalised if it is part of a title, even if the title Acting Governor isn't formalised in the sense that Governor is. A good example is when parliamentarians address the Speaker of the House. When addressing the holder of that office, they say "Mister Speaker" (or "Madam Speaker"); when addressing the deputy, they say "Mister Deputy Speaker"; when addressing a ring-in, it's "Mister Acting Deputy Speaker". To write it as "Mister acting Deputy Speaker" would be hideous. Hesperian 01:51, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

English language variations

How did other variations of the English language get introduced into Wikipedia if it was founded in the United States? Wouldn't the American origin have confined it to American English? Emperor001 (talk) 01:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

They put it on the Internet. We have the Internet outside the USA. JIMp talk·cont 01:34, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
Do you seriously find it hard to understand why articles such as Marmite and Farnley, West Yorkshire are not written in American English?
By the way, as another American with a strong interest in European nobility, fiction and the number combination 00, would you happen to be related to User:Emperor00? --Hans Adler (talk) 02:09, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm not saying it's hard to believe that British topics are in British English. It's just that when something originates in a country, it usually sticks to that country's version of English. For example, most books I'ver read by British authors but published in the U.S. were still British English. I very seldom see someone take the time to change the spelling. On the second comment. I have no clue who Emperor00 is. For all I know, someone ripped off my Username or maybe I coincidently chose a name similiar to his/hers. I just checked, that User is blocked. Emperor001 (talk) 02:59, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
A Wikipedia article doesn't originate from the US in the same way that a book does. The articles in the English language Wikipedia are originated and edited all over the world by editors of various backgrounds, very much unlike a book, which is usually written in one specific version of English. Wikipedia's founders could have mandated that all articles conform to American English, perhaps, but that would have been at odds with the intended culture of the project, I think. —Kevin Myers 03:41, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

It's not so much where Wikipedia originates from as who a particular article originates from. JIMp talk·cont 03:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. That's all I needed to know. Emperor001 (talk) 04:05, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Perhaps the source of the doubt is that Wikipedia originates in the United States, and that country speaks English, but think about the other versions: should the German Wikipedia be restricted to Germany and exclude Austrian German? Should the Greek Wikipedia leave Cyprus out? Here we deal with languages, not countries.
PS: The Harry Potter books certainly haven't stuck to their native language. Even books can be adapted for other variants of the same language. Waltham, The Duke of 04:10, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
It's like standing around looking at a motor-vehicle accident: some Americans don't seem to realise that they're not sole owners of the language. Tony (talk) 04:19, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
Outrageous, especially since everybody knows the sole owners of the language are self-appointed Australians. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

I appologize if I've offended anyone. I was just asking a question. Emperor001 (talk) 02:05, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Desperately unimportant question

Speaking of opening cans of worms, could someone please point out where in MoS &c. one might find a citeable guideline on whether we should be calling England "England" or "England, UK". Am I just being blind? Ta. almost-instinct 10:29, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

I could find it anywhere but I'd go with "England" since it's well known. JIMp talk·cont 14:39, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
I believe the most relevant project is [[WP:UKGEO]. They have a guideline WP:UKTOWNS, and in WP:UKTOWNS#Lead* and examples they only describe the location up to the constituent country of the UK, but without mentioning the UK itself. To me this suggests not to use "England, UK" in other situations either. This would also apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; for these it could be more problematic because some people will think that Northern Ireland is the northern part of the Republic of Ireland. On the other hand, if it's wikilinked it shouldn't be a big problem. --Hans Adler (talk) 15:10, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

MoS and citation template conformance

The Template:Cite journal produces markup that appears not to follow the manual of style - for instance adding a title produces "title". and if the journal article itself ends in a question mark it produces "title?". The MLA style which seems to be the only major format that uses quotations places the quotes after the punctuation. One would expect to obtain formatting that conforms to the MoS by filling in citation templates. Shyamal (talk) 13:09, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Dispute tags

Someone—Anderson, I suspect, although I can't be bothered at this stage to investigate—has been littering MOS with dispute tags. He's just put another on the ellipsis section. Now, most of these tags refer to the talk page, but the relevant talk is stale and has been archived. We need to remove these dispute tags unless there's an ongoing dispute on the talk page. Tony (talk) 04:46, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

I see that Tony has forgotten the point of the tag: That this, like the other reference to MOSNUM, should either say what MOSNUM says (it doesn't) or - preferably - be a single paragraph in summary style and a link to the relevant section on MOSNUM: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Numbers_as_figures_or_words. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:07, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
MOSNUM? Are we still referring to it thus? I thought it had been renamed to The MOS Page Which Must Not Be Named. :-D
Seriously, though, I've heard that the situation there is quite bad, and since my idea about splitting the page has not even been commented on before its archiving, we might want to try something else, less drastic but equally effective. The situation must be tolerated no longer. Waltham, The Duke of 05:08, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

date autoformatting is optional

I'd like to remind users that for some time now, the autoformatting of dates has not been required.

There are four advantages in not linking dates:

  1. Inconsistent raw formatting within an article is obvious to editors and thus less likely to escape our attention. (The autoformatting mechanism conceals the inconsistencies from us, the very people who are most likely to enforce consistency, but the raw formats are displayed in bright blue to almost all readers, who are not registered and logged in. The rules for the choice of format in an article are in MOSNUM, here); they are easily summarised as (a) be consistent within an article; (b) take account of national ties to a topic; and (c) retain the existing format unless there's a good reason not to.
  2. There are fewer bright-blue splotches in the text, which makes it slightly easier to read and improves its appearance.
  3. The following issues concerning the dysfunctional aspects of the autoformatting mechanism do not arise:
    • piped links to date elements ([[20 June|20]], [[20 June]] [[1997 in South African sport|1997]]) (several forms of piped links break the date formatting function);
    • links to date ranges in the same calendar month e.g. December 13–17 or the night of 30/31 May – the autoformatting mechanism will damage such dates (30/May 31);
    • links to date elements on disambiguation pages;
    • links to date elements in article and section headings; and
    • links to date elements in quotations (unless the original text was wikilinked).
  4. As a minor advantage, edit windows are slightly easier to read and edit.

It may be that WikiMedia can be persuaded to invest resources in revamping the mechanism to avoid or mitigate these problems, but this is unlikely to occur in the short to medium terms. Tony (talk) 14:00, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree with all the points, and would have no problem seeing the auto-formatting go, but I am not very optimistic about the outcome of any new discussion on the subject, given the results (or lack thereof) of the previous ones, held not long ago and in equally, if not more, public places. Anyway, one thing should be as clear as the optionality of date links: consistency within articles. Either use auto-formatting on all dates, or use it on none, and the more popular solution under the status quo would seem to be the former, knowing how deeply ingrained the practice is in Wikipedians' minds. Unless the system changes, I cannot easily see any change of mentality. Waltham, The Duke of 16:49, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I agree on both points; if we had said to begin with that there are various means of presenting dates and different editors will use different ones, we would never have had autoformatting in the first place. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:53, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

__FORCETOC

I didn't see anything about __FORCETOC__ in the article. I think it should be included because almost all Articles use FORCETOC —Preceding unsigned comment added by Condalence (talk • contribs)

I wouldn't call 401 out of 2.4 million "almost all". If you use the "Random article" link, you can easily verify that more than half of our articles don't have a table of contents. --Hans Adler (talk) 10:56, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
On the other hand, if we documented the possibility, it might be used more often. Whether this would serve any great purpose, since FORCETOC should only be used when the position provided by the software is unacceptable, is another question. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 12:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, the reason I said "almost all" was because most articles I see have FORCETOC. Could I request it to be added? FORCETOC really does serve a great purpose for long articles. That way instead of scrolling someone can just simply click to a paragraph. I do that a lot. Thanks. --Condalence] 22:35, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

As far as I know, whether an article has a table of contents or not depends on the number of sections. When it has only one section, for example, a table of content would be useless and look ridiculous. If you want one anyway, you can use FORCETOC. See Template:H:TOC variables. Many larger articles have TOC, which forces that the table of contents is in a certain position. This sometimes becomes necessary as a result of complicated layouts with many funny templates. But the vast majority of articles don't need any of the three templates (the third is NOTOC, which enforces that there is no table of contents.) Currently less than 1% of our articles use one of them, and the one that is used most frequently is NOTOC. If you have added FORCETOC to a lot of articles you should probably remove it. --Hans Adler (talk) 22:47, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Proposal relating to Leading off first sentences with qualifiers

PROPOSAL: - OK, this has been bothering me. Lately I've been seeing a lot of scientific articles beginning with the format "In xxx, xxxxx is ..." as in "In computing, phishing is ..." An article I created recently was change to this format. What this is saying is that all information about the topic is limited to relating to the qualifier. Phishing only is used in computing and no where else. Subpersonality only is used in transpersonal psychology and no where else. If this were true, then the articles should be titled Phishing (computing) and Subpersonality (transpersonal psychology). However, it is not true that every sentence and every of bit of information in the Phishing article relates to computing. Every sentence in Subpersonality does not relate to transpersonal psychology and subpersonality certainly is not limited to the field of transpersonal psychology. Most telling, Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#First_sentences states "If the topic of the article may be unfamiliar to some readers, establish a context." I agree with establishing context, but do not agree with establishing context by beginning the article with "In xxx,". The MoS example given results in qualifying trusted third party, entity, and the two parties to being cryptography elements. However, only "entity" is cryptography element. The two parties, e.g., Bob and Alice, are humans and certainly not only cryptography element. The example given in the MoS incorrectly approves limiting trusted third party, entity, and the two parties to cryptography. The Trusted third party article also addresses "outside cryptography". How can it do that if the article is limited to cryptography by the lead sentence to the article? If this "In xxxx,"-qualifier lead technique is acceptable, then the lead sentence to Trusted third party should read "In cryptography, a trusted third party (TTP) is ... ." In law, a trusted third party is ..." This makes the articles look more like disambiguous pages rather than an article. I proposed that Manual of Style should explicitly reject the use of "In xxx," as an acceptable way to provide context in the first sentence of an article. If you agree, disagree, or have a different observation/solution, please post below. Bebestbe (talk) 14:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

We should certainly not prohibit the usage; consider, for example, Abelian group, which begins "In mathematics..." and the implication seen here is quite correct. How much caution is warranted? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
I agree with the examples that were given here by both above contributors. I think that Bebestbe has made clear that the "In xxx,"-start of the lead can be a bad choice. However, we've also seen that it can be a good start. So, IMHO a strict prohibition is not appropriate, but you have my support in the specific cases that you've shown. Tomeasytalk 16:46, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
The tradeoff here is speed for accuracy, and there's no way around that. Some things in the lead section will not be precise, and will only be qualified and explained later, because the lead section draws people in and summarizes. I wouldn't mind saying in the guideline that people should at least think twice before over-simplifying in the lead section, and I wouldn't mind a recommendation that over-simplification should be remedied as quickly as possible, preferably in the first section. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:24, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Precise context is nice, but it's far better to establish an imprecise context than none at all. The summary is necessarily imprecise, as Dank55 suggested - it only highlights the most important qualities and doesn't deal with exceptions. That said, the "in X" should denote the primary field associated with the term; if there is no such field, perhaps 2 or 3 should be listed. Dcoetzee 02:07, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Intuition

The word “counterintuitively” should be deleted from

It's is the short form of it is or it has; counterintuitively, the possessive its has no apostrophe.

We don't need some party of editors declaring their intuition to be the intuition. As to my intuition, I would note that pronouns in general do not have apostrophes in their possessives:

—SlamDiego←T 23:40, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

The fewer 18-letter words in WP:MOS, the better. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:07, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Spare a thought for those who get confused or, like me occasionally, slip up when typing quickly. They're very easy to get wrong. Tony (talk) 09:54, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Does anyone have any objection to removing just the word "counterintuitively"? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:44, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I think it's perfectly logical, and helps the reader to see the point of including this guideline. Tony (talk) 15:58, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Could the point be rephrased in such a way as not to appear to be making assumptions on what is and what is not intuitive? We're better off being objective about it, what we can say for close enough to certain it is a common mistake. JIMp talk·cont 18:18, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
How about "the possessive its, just like the possessive his and hers, has no apostrophe"? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:50, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
No need for "just", but a good idea. It may be clearer to use the substantive possessives. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:01, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
As rarely, I agree with Anderson. Tony (talk) 05:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

I would definitely delete counterintuitively. My intuition was never that it should have an apostrophe. Why should it? Just because the two-words short form it's is pronounced the same way. Is it then also counterintuitive that there is written without apostrophe? One of the first things I realized when I started learning English was that there are many ways in which one pronunciation might be spelled. BTW, that sucks about this language ;-) Anyway, my point is that for me, personally, it was never the intuition and I am quite proud that it wasn't. If you have this intuition it only shows that you do not see the strikingly difference in those terms (semantically and grammatically). So, when we use counterintuitively in the MOS, we do not only impose on others what a common-sense intuition would be, which I find already a little bit insulting. Moreover, we exhibit that our intuition with respect to understanding this language is under-developed. Tomeasytalk 17:27, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Exactly. —SlamDiego←T 07:13, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Indeed. Seeing such phrasing makes me wonder about the intelligence of the intended readership. It is not flattering for Wikipedia. :-) Waltham, The Duke of 07:27, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Stability

Looking through the history for the main page I was astonished to discover how many edits—eg. over thirty in the last fortnight—are made to MoS. Its absurd that such a key set of WP guidelines be so unstable. Most editors have a hard enough time as it is keeping tabs on the various WP rules and guidelines—this endless chopping and changing is absurd. Do you expect every editor to check MoS every couple of days or so? I'll repeat that word: absurd. Yes things need to be discussed, but the frequency with which the main page is edited is, IMO, unacceptable, and makes a mockery of the concept of MoS. I write this in the full expectation that opposing parties will exploit replying to this as an opportunity continue to score points. That's fine—but stop letting it spill over onto the guidelines. Frankly, I think the page is verging on needing protecting almost-instinct 00:17, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

My suggestion is to make a big push to get everyone to slug it out, and then leave it alone for a while. Tony thinks it won't work, and he's right about most things, but if so, that's really a shame. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Considering the number of reverts, I'd say that simply counting edits is wrong, at least (or, some might say, especially) in the Manual of Style. If you will check the style updates, once a month, you will see that the actual changes are relatively few, and you can monitor them through said updates. Waltham, The Duke of 05:29, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Precisely: His Grace, as often, hits the nail on the head. Many day-to-day edits are reverted or subsumed in subsequent edits. It's surprising how little actually does change. That's my experience not only in perusing monthly diffs at MOS main page, but most other style-guide and policy pages. Tony (talk) 09:07, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
More accurately, it is stable because most editors know nothing about it, or have more sense than to care what it says; those who do care arrive individually, and are successfully reverted by the handful who have assumed ownership of the page, contrary to policy. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:59, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I see the consensus is that I'm wrong so I withdraw my comments ;-)
But seriously its difficult for new editors to come to terms with the MoS—it seems so huge at first—and we worry about getting shot down for going outside the guidelines ... it just can feel like the ground is shifting beneath our feet ... almost-instinct 13:06, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I do not think you are wrong. There are two issues:
  • Edit frequency
  • Rate of change of policy
If edit frequency is low, then it is easy to conclude that policy is stable. If edit frequency is high, more effort is required to see what has changed. The effort involved in checking the net effect of rapid changes at wp:mosnum recently was one reason (amongst many) why I stopped being involved in a major debate. Lightmouse (talk) 14:15, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Reply to Almost-Instinct: I take your objection seriously, AI, and you come across on your userpage as intelligent and thoughtful, but I'm not qualified to respond to it because I'm North American, and so my instincts will be sufficiently off from yours that we will misunderstand each other in some ways. You say that you don't want to bring any articles through the GA/FA process. Certainly it can be daunting, but what you get back from having a lot of good writers look over your stuff can be more than worth the hassle. Can you give me an example of some of your work that you feel is made more difficult by either WP:MOS or by requirements at WP:GAN or WP:FAC? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:38, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Reply to Lightmouse: after I did the categorization work of "general style guidelines" vs "style/editing/policy guidelines" vs "specific guidelines", I decided to sit back for a while and watch. Everything I've seen makes me think I got it right. The thing that makes WP:MOSNUM so frustrating for a lot of us is that a lot of it concerns very targeted information, targeted to a specific set of articles and editors, but it's mixed in together with material that draws a very wide audience, things needed in most articles, such as how to deal with dates. I think the Duke was exactly right when he suggested we should pull some of this material apart; I wouldn't mind transferring the well-tread material to WP:MOS. It's the two different sets of editors rubbing elbows that causes the friction, which is why I didn't put WP:MOSNUM in CAT:GEN; it seems to function more as a "specific" guideline to me. Other than WP:LAYOUT (which I think I'm about to take out of CAT:GEN), and WP:MOS, the other 19 pages in CAT:GEN tend to be very collegial and stable, and also widely useful. I think WP:MOS and WP:LAYOUT could become more collegial and stable after a few issues are worked out. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:53, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Stability and WP:CONSENSUS

Okay, let's tackle the issue of stability. The folks at WP:CONSENSUS and WP:VPP know very well what "consensus" means, and I'm going to go point them to this conversation, so if this is wrong, I'll get an earful in a hurry. Let's take the latest addition to WP:MOS, from User:Betswiki (a new editor, or at least a new account, so I'll go leave a message on their talk page, and please don't BITE):

An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is the omission of material from quoted text or some other omission, perhaps the absence of the end of a sentence, deliberately left out by the author, often used in the representation of conversation in print. The ellipsis is represented by ellipsis points, a series of dots (three dots within a sentence, four dots at the end of a sentence). In traditional publishing the dots are separated by spaces and are separated from the surrounding text by spaces.

Not that bad, but not quite right, which makes it a good example for my point. There's an infobox at the top of every guideline and policy page that says, "Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus." So I have to curb my impulse to yank the edit just because I don't like it. I'm also not allowed to yank it on the grounds that the editor may not have followed that policy when they edited; that doesn't give anyone a "right" to revert. But there are lots of reasons to believe that most of this edit doesn't represent consensus and should be reverted. The first is precedence: new users get pointed to WP:MOS, it's the most commonly visited style guideline page, and its recommendations are argued constantly at WP:FAC. WP:SILENCE counts reading something and not taking action as indicative of consensus, and I don't see any history in the WT:MOS archives of argumentation over any of the things discussed in the new edit, so the previous text (before the last few days) represents at least the approximate consensus of thousands of people. That means that it doesn't matter if someone has a new clever argument, or knows that Chicago does it differently; that's not sufficient to change the page. WP:BRD does permit people to "act first, answer questions later", even on a guideline page, but anyone who has a habit of making changes without having their reasons handy is in line for a trip to WP:ANI for violation of "6. Attempting to ... impose one's own view of 'standards to apply' rather than those of the community" from WP:POINT. On a guideline page, your argument needs to be, not why you personally think it was an improvement, but why you believe that everything you've read on Wikipedia tells you that you changed it from something that didn't have consensus to something that did. (See WP:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_44#Using a policy page as a scratchpad to develop a proposal for Kim's discussion and links.)

If WP:MOS doesn't reflect consensus, that's easy to show. Regulars at WP:FAC and WP:GAN can search their memory of what people said when the issue came up. If the issue can be identified by keywords, the last database dump of en.wikipedia or page-specific Google searches would pull up evidence of disgruntlement if it exists. If there's no disgruntlement, then it has consensus. Anyone can start a new discussion on this talk page, and that discussion might lead to a new consensus, but three guys and a lot of handwaving can't overturn the apparent consensus of thousands of people. Three guys arguing about what they've seen at WP:FAC, WP:GAN, the WT:MOS archives, etc, can be persuasive, in my view, as long as they're being honest and accurate, of course.

So: is there anything in the new edit concerning ellipses that people believe already has consensus? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 20:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh come on now; thousands of people have read and approved "An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is a series of three dots. It marks the omission of material from quoted text." Yeah, right. Is there any evidence that any user has ever noticed this bland truism, much less considered the alternatives? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:50, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

As for the matter at issue, I italicise the parts which seem to me mere statements of fact:

An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is the omission of material from quoted text or some other omission, perhaps the absence of the end of a sentence, deliberately left out by the author, [and] often used in the representation of conversation in print. The ellipsis is represented by ellipsis points, a series of dots (three dots within a sentence, four dots at the end of a sentence). In traditional publishing the dots are separated by spaces and are separated from the surrounding text by spaces.

I do not claim any of the text is the best possible phrasing; but it shares that with the text it replaced and with the rest of the section.

The last sentence is vague on dating; for certain values of "traditional" I believe both claims made are true. But do we need a history of typography here? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:11, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

>Is there any evidence that any user has ever noticed
Not knowing the finer points of WP:SILENCE is exactly why I invited the folks from WP:CONSENSUS and WP:VPP. WP:MOS was viewed 68,000 times in May; isn't that at least a suggestion that at least a hundred people read about ellipses? WT:MOS has around 120 archives, including rare comments about ellipses, and comments about things on either side of that section of WP:MOS; did everyone skip that part? People preparing articles for WP:GAN are strongly encouraged, and at WP:FAC are required, to read WP:MOS; are they all faking it? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 23:33, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
I think that editors, in general, do not learn MOS by referencing it. They learn by being corrected. I know I didn't learn most things from Chicago Manual or from my corporate MOS because I was curious or just thought to look something up. I learned it because I got marked-up text back from my editor. My point is that you shouldn't take page views as an indication of how many people are actually learning things from the MOS. --Laser brain (talk) 03:42, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Indeed, much of the Manual is learnt indirectly, not least because:
  • It's too large to learn by heart unless one is very interested
  • Parts of it are simply hard to understand for some people, no matter how much they are explained
  • Many people are simply too bored to look (and that also applies on policy and how-to pages and all other documentation)
  • A great (possibly the greatest) part of the Manual is not really necessary to an editor due to specialisation; however, straying out of the usual field is rather difficult to predict
  • Etc., etc.
In all things there are those people who understand them better and can comfortably explain them to others; it is often a matter of how something is presented to one. Waltham, The Duke of 05:23, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Experience shows that relatively few FA nominations are reviewed for MOS issues; on the other hand, most of those that are are reviewed with mechanical incompetence. Experience also shows that this often genuinely comes as a surprise, and justifiably so, to the nominator; the "rules" that are enforced are rarely sound English; sometimes they are mere recommendations here, often they ought to be, and quite often they ought not to be even recommendations, since the article is in sound English, or one of the variations which can be sound English. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 12:48, 23 June 2008 (UTC) ←What a total surprise that Anderson should take this opportunity to trumpet his anti-MOS agenda again. Tony (talk) 14:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

WP:CONSENSUS doesn't care whether people have read a page or not, only what their position is, as evidenced by what they do or say. If they do things that WP:MOS says and don't express any other preference, that's silent consensus. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:08, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
And how about the normal case, when half of them don't do them? I omit the poor chivvied FA nominators. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:17, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Opening sentence in lists

I'm not sure if this is more relevant at Wikipedia talk:Lead section, but I think this page gets more activity... Most lists open with "This is a list of <Repeat the article title>", or "This is a complete list of <repeat the article title>", or "comprehensive" or any other similar words. A discussion was started a while ago at Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates/Archive 3#Straight repetitions of the title in the opening sentence regarding this, as WP:FLC is obviously the place where this sort of thing is seen frequently. Regarding FLs, if a list is featured, then it should already be complete and comprehensive, and shouldn't need stating as such. But it's also not a very good way of engaging the reader to the article. We know it's a list of cats (or whatever) from the title. Articles don't begin this way. Today's Main Page article Blue Iguana doesn't begin with "This is an article about Blue Iguanas. The Blue Iguana is a critically endangered species of lizard". Can we please state a "ban" on WP:MOS from introducing list articles in this way? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:14, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

It's a ridiculous habit, and it's disappointing that FL reviewers haven't been cracking down on it. (Usually, it's a contravention of Cr. 2.) I think it's difficult to legislate against; what about inserting something explicit into the FL criteria, in terms of "should be avoided unless there is a good reason"? Tony (talk) 07:23, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Well, it's not just a problem at FL. It's mostly all lists. Of course things filter down, so if a FL does it a "start-class list" will copy, but then if you try to fix it you come up against a wall. If WP:LS#Establish context or WP:LS#Bold title mentioned something, it could be linked to in edit summaries when being fixed and referred to in FLCs. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:33, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
That works! Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:55, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Theoretical note: It is really boring to read a long "List of ..." article title and then to have to read it again immediately, on the line below. This is just where the lead should be describing the context of the list, not irritating the reader by senseless repetition. Tony (talk) 08:11, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
  • I take issue with His Grace: the first sentence is tedious. See my fix, to prove the point that straight repetitions of "List of ..." titles are a way of turning off potential readers. Tony (talk) 09:01, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Titles of articles should be repeated in bold. The exceptions listed at Wikipedia:Lead_section#Bold_title are inappropriate. If article originator concludes that the topic of an article has no commonly accepted name, then either they are not looking hard enough or they are structuring an article for which the topic is not well thought out. As for the title being simply descriptive, that is subjective and not a viable guideline. In short, if the title of the article does not work well being repeated in bold in the first sentence, then someting is wrong with the title or the topic. That is why the title in bold rule was created - to force article originators to think before creating an article name or topic. THe exceptions to Wikipedia:Lead_section#Bold_title are merely a lazy way to get around thinking before creating an article name or topic. Bebestbe (talk) 15:19, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

←Anderson, it's the topic, isn't it, not the title. In any case, at FLC there's general consensus, including the two directors, that this has turned into a lazy way for authors to open their "list" articles. The practice is particularly problematic given the length of many "list" titles. Have a look for yourself, except that reviewers (mostly others apart from me) have been insisting on a recasting in nominations; easier to find in the list of existing FLs. Tony (talk) 13:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

It may not be laziness, but a lack of knowledge of what to do. I usually write as the first sentence something like "List aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa is a compilation of xxxxxxxxxxx.", where xxxxxxxxxxx explains the list contents using words other than contained in the name of the list. This uses the name of the article/list at the very beginning of the first sentence (like all Wikipedia articles should) and offers more information than provided by the name of the list. Please feel free to post this technique as a suggestion in the List MoS. Bebestbe (talk) 15:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
No, it's almost always better not to repeat verbatim the title wording. Take it straight on to give the reader new information. See my link above. Tony (talk) 15:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
I regret to say, Tony, that I do not approve of your change to the lead in the slightest. Yes, the first sentence repeats the title, but the title is the subject of the page, and that subject should always be introduced in the article, and more specifically in the first sentence. Blue Iguana may not start with "This is an article about Blue Iguanas", but this is because articles should not refer to themselves, which is practically never true for lists; the article still has "Blue Iguana" in the first sentence, most prominent in its bold typeface. I should agree with a change not saying "this is a list of..." as long as it still introduces the subject, but your edit simply removed the introduction. The list as it stands now makes no sense without the title, a situation which should be avoided in all mainspace pages; the title is not any more integral a part of the prose than headings are. Waltham, The Duke of 21:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Tony has a partial point: we need not repeat the title exactly in stating the subject of the article, when (as here) it is more complex than Blue Iguana; for example, in biographical articles we often use the full name, or the native form, as opposed to the common English form in the title. But we should state the subject of the article in its first, or topic, sentence. This list didn't state its subject particularly clearly or concisely, and I hope Tony is merely reacting to that flaw. This version may be an improvement. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:06, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

← I am glad to see that the two of you have finally reached a solution on the article (and one which I also agree with, by the way). Following the history was interesting, but also worrying, at least in the start; I was this close to starting counting reverts. Please be careful from now on. I suggest using talk pages more; you don't need to "discuss" through edit summaries. Waltham, The Duke of 22:39, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

In contrast to the current* "First sentences" guideline, I find it extremely web-UNfriendly not to hyperlink the subject of a wikipedia page to its official website (if there is one). Web users intuitively want to be able to link to appropriately relevant information when they read a phrase. I understand and completely agree that IN GENERAL the subject of a Wikipedia page should not be hyperlinked to anything else--after all, the Wikipedia article is presumably the explanation of the subject--but in the case where the topic of the page is an organization (or product, or person) that has an OFFICIAL website, it seems both appropriate to link to it from the (bolded) subject of a Wikipedia page, and INappropriate NOT to hyperlink to it. Does this make sense (to anyone besides me)? Is there a way we can get this concept considered for official inclusion** in the guideline?

Thanks... philiptdotcom (talk) 01:02, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Even apart from current guidelines and policies, this one doesn't have a chance because the wiki culture is so completely opposed to letting people or organizations dominate the web page that's about them in any way. There is no chance this would get the broad consensus necessary. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:50, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
On the more technical side, external links are discouraged in the entirety of the body of any given article; the only sections where they are supposed to be used are "(Foot)notes", "References", and "External links". The exception for the text in bold exists because it refers to internal links.
On the more theoretical side, the official sites are usually biased, which is why they are rarely used as sources. Which brings me to the practical side...
Unless the official site is used as a source, in which case it is to be found in the "References" section, it will be the first link in the "External links section". Just go to the bottom of the article and you'll find it. After all, you've come to Wikipedia for our view of the subject, not the subject's view of itself; further research opportunities are given after the article ends (we should not presume that we'd ever contain all the information you'd need, of course). If you are not satisfied by this configuration, I respectfully suggest referring to Google or one of its competitors. Waltham, The Duke of 03:06, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the infopinions. I guess I haven't quite made the leap between "web mentality" and "wiki mentality." Although intuitively (and actually) "wiki" is a subset of the "web," evidently wiki culture is such a big thing (like amazon.com, in its own way) that it makes its own rules RE: web usability. Live and learn... Aloha, philiptdotcom (talk) 01:53, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Names of articles in multiple languages and bolding in the lead section

Posted at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style and Wikipedia talk:Lead section I have a question about bolding the name in the lead section of an article. At Kosovan Serb Assembly, I have put that name in bold as well as the two Serbian spellings of the name in its original language. Is this proper, or should only the English name be in bold? Please respond on my talk. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:21, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Block quotes: four lines or four sentences?

The following issue came up during the peer review of Golden Film. What is meant in the following phrase: "A long quote (more than four lines, or consisting of more than one paragraph, regardless of number of lines) is formatted as a block quotation, which Wikimedia's software will indent from both margins." More than four lines doesn't make sense, since this depends on your browser window size and display type. More than four sentences would make sense, since this is calculable by counting full stops and question marks. – Ilse@ 16:41, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Presumably what is intended is more than four lines of standard text (somewhere around 300 characters), but what do we want to say? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:11, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
It's not well worded, is it. "(four or more lines, or a paragraph of any length)"? I suspect that the intention was not "five or more", which is the current indication; people often write "over 18 years old" to mean "at least 18 years old", and this may suffer from the same looseness. Tony (talk) 08:49, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
The last time we talked about this, I was talking to myself, as I recall. I see 1.5- and 2-line block quotations in magazines all the time, though never in newspapers. I wouldn't mind a guideline that says something like this: "A general principle of layout is that a little white space is fine and a lot of white space is not. If there are blank lines nearby, then (repeat current guideline). If there are no blank lines nearby, then block quotations that are two lines or more in most browsers are fine, if you want to draw attention to the quotation." - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:33, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

No break dashes

Similar to how we use nbsp for say "22 miles", is there an nb-dash for "1992–present" so they appear on the same line? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 17:32, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

A "prevent line-break" function? I doubt it. You're raising this because of frequent line-breaks of this type of expression in tables at FLC? I'm not surprised, but a solution may lie in getting tough on the management of column widths instead. PS, I think "22 miles" now doesn't need the hard-space. See Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Non-breaking_spaces, which was changed last month. Tony (talk) 08:52, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
Partly for tables, but also for prose where the first year of a span is on one line and the second on another. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 20:08, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
Not such a problem in running prose, is it? After all, numbers followed by an unspaced en dash at line's end flag a range to the reader. Tony (talk) 05:45, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

If needed, there is {{nowrap}}. JIMp talk·cont 04:42, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

k. d. lang

See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (capital letters)#Capitalisation. Whether or not to capitalize all proper nouns comes up from time to time. The current vote is 3-0 in favor of "k. d. lang" on the talk page. My understanding is that the only current exceptions to capitalizing a proper noun are for a few companies that have a trademark capitalizing the second letter, such as iPod. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 16:13, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

My feeling is that kd is in the same boat as iPod, and that the exceptions should be widened. Tony (talk) 08:21, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
We've got consensus agreeing with you, it looks like. With permission, I'll copy your input over there, to keep the !votes in one place. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:08, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Administrative divisions of a country

What are the procedures for referring to an administrative division of a country. Should we name the administrative division with a comma then the country or should we just put the name of the admministrative division? Is it Alabama, USA or just New York? Is it Alsace, France or just Alsace? Can you point me to whether there is a style guide for something like this? Pocopocopocopoco (talk) 03:41, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I believe that this is not as much a matter of style as it is a matter of context; if there is a strong national context in an article, then the country is usually redundant. And so on. This is mostly an editorial decision. That said, a certain consistency should exist within each article, as usual. Now, what could be regulated by the Manual of Style is something like this dilemma: [[Portland, Oregon]] versus [[Portland, Oregon|Portland]], [[Oregon]]. I don't think I've ever seen any relevant guideline, although the latter option seems to be preferred (so that the state may be included), and I've even seen a template creating it, {{city-state}}. Perhaps the existence of other, similar templates could indicate the trend for such cases; I shouldn't know. Maybe some one else here does. Waltham, The Duke of 04:00, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
Yes, context, definitely, and hard to legislate on. But please, let's remember that we're not writing addresses on envelopes according to postal conventions: where a place is well-known to English-speakers, avoid the humdrum trotting out the ever larger concentric circles around a location. "Paris, France" is tedious. Alsace might need contextualising, though. Tony (talk) 08:20, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
More to the point, unless there is some special reasion (a list of capitals, or being explicitly contrasted with Paris, Texas), it is redundant and unidiomatic.
I find [[Portland, Oregon|Portland]], [[Oregon]] a useless tic; Portland, Oregon is the name of the article, and it links to Oregon if anybody wants to go there. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:57, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
Agree with all of that. Sometimes you'll need a good copyeditor on this one, but just try to put yourself in the shoes of the likely reader for the article and ask yourself what they're likely to need to be told. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:03, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

I've just come from the help desk after answering a question about infoboxes and nav boxes (you can see that here). Whilst I was able to find a MOS section on Info boxes, information about Nav boxes is rather limited and hard to find - it took several minutes of searching before I found the section Template:Navbox. Is there a guideline page about how and where to use such boxes as there is for the info box? If so, could you add the link to it to the MOS contents page? Also, could you please add to the information I gave at the Help Desk, as I fear that I may not have given enough information. Thanks! StephenBuxton (talk) 11:17, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

I fear that there is not much to see here; both navboxes and succession boxes are relatively unregulated (with the former slightly better-off). The one basic guideline concerns the navboxes' position, and can be found here. You might also be interested in the comparative study of categories, lists, and navboxes. I don't think there is anything else about navboxes in the guidelines. Wait for a second opinion, though; I don't know the guidelines by heart. Waltham, The Duke of 10:50, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Ambiguity regarding references to articles about people with initials in their name

I had inquired at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Naming_.28and_referring_to.29_articles_about_people_with_initials_as_their_.22common.22_first_name as to a clarification about naming (and referring to) articles about people with initials in their name. The current Wikipedia convention is to use a full stop after each initial, correct? That seemed to be the consensus at the Pump, but it was suggested I bring it up here so the MOS can clarify the Wikipedia policy. Thoughts? — X96lee15 (talk) 02:10, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes. WP:NAME (or is it WP:Naming conventions (people)?) gives "H. G. Wells" as an example. And WP:NAME is policy; we grovel in its presence. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:58, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
The simple problem is that we kneel before an example; there is no actual guideline regulating initials. Which is why we still have cases of unspaced initials. On the Village Pump discussion it has been mentioned that it is a matter of common usage whether to apply spaces or not between the initials; I consider it strictly a matter of punctuation, where house rules should apply. D.J. White is wrong because D.J. is not an acronym, and the cases where it should be allowed not to have spaces after full stops should be very limited indeed. Waltham, The Duke of 09:49, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
Simple, logical, I like it. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:44, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

OMG

From this month's TCMOS "New Q & A" newsletter: "Q. I'm curious about your equating collective nouns with mass nouns in CMOS 5.8. The explanation at Wikipedia states that it is incorrect to equate the two." I knew it; we're all chasing each other around. Pretty soon Wikipedia and all the style guides will turn into one big Ouroboros. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 20:47, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Is a musical band referred to in the single or plural tense?

From Kaiser Chiefs discography: "Kaiser Chiefs are currently recording their third album". Is this correct, or should it be "Kaiser Chiefs is currently recording its third album". The band is one band, even though it is made up of more than one person, correct? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

This probably depends on the articles choice of regional orthography. From the American and British English differences article;
In BrE, collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is, respectively, on the body as a whole or on the individual members whereas In AmE, collective nouns are usually singular in construction:Zebulin (talk) 07:47, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Actually, even in American English it would sound really odd to say "Kaiser Chiefs is". Generally American English respects the number of the noun. In American English you would say "The Who is recording..." whereas in British English you might say "The Who are", but the difference is that "The Who" sounds like a singular noun, whereas "Kaiser Chiefs" sounds like more than one Kaiser Chief.
(Oh, by the way -- plural number, not tense.) --Trovatore (talk) 05:05, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Attempt to undermine MOS and Naming Conventions talk pages

On 25 June, Anderson raised some reason at the Naming conventions policy talk page for why the use of en dashes in article titles should be changed, without providing the folks there the proper context of the debate that has been closed here on this matter. A day and a half later, without a single comment on the matter by another editor, he launched in and changed the policy thus, in so doing introducing a conflict between the Naming conventions policy page and MOS, where before there was none.

These are underhand tactics that deserve to be rebutted, and SOON. The change introduces the possibility that an editor will argue that because some "reliable source" uses a hyphen in a compound item in a "page name", this is fine for WP's page names too, despite MOS's guidance on en dashes in both article titles and the main text. On a legalistic level, the new wording fails, because proof has to be shown of the use of a hyphen in a page name in that reliable source; what exactly are these "page names" in reliable sources? I though that was a particularly WPian term. Neverthess, Anderson's hasty change looks like an attempt to drive a wedge between two of WP's most important pages. We must not let this happen.

Now, I've reinstated the previous text, which just pointed to the section on dashes in MOS, pure and simple. I trust that Anderson is not going to reinforce his deception by bad behaviour in edit warring. He has to learn that, to start with, consensus is required on a talk page. Tony (talk) 15:00, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

This is a lie; it passes the bounds of credible ignorance. [Comment from Tony1: Be careful, Anderson. A lie is a purposeful, knowing untruth. You'd better be prepared to prove that this was the case, or this personal attack will bounce back] Tony (talk) 02:59, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
  • In fact, I presented a proposal in full at that talk page, in this section, which includes a link to the discussion here; I stated that here, four days ago.
  • On the substantive point at issue, this vast "stealth" change, alters
    For use of hyphens, dashes and hair spaces in page names, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes).
    to two lines:
    See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes) and
    Use a hyphen or dash in a page name if reliable sources on the subject do.
  • On the only substantive change here, the removal of hair spaces, Tony agrees with me; the remainder adopts the usual (although not invariable) format of WP:NC when referring to a guideline, and summarizes on the common basis of the long discussion of dashes here and of WP:NAME: usage, what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize.
In short, this is a tempest in a teapot. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:57, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
No it's not, Anderson. It's called "deception". Worse, in fact, than your misleading edit summaries here, where you sneak in changes hoping no one will notice. No explanation ever on my last posting on that. Disappointed. Tony (talk) 18:03, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
One of your latest edits says you are going to get some sleep; if you get eight hours you may see more clearly. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:09, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
I feel obliged to remind the honourable colleague that the importance of edits is not proportionate to the number of words changed. Mr Anderson has changed a direct reference to the Manual of Style to a simple "See also", and introduced the concept of reliable sources to hyphenation, despite the fact that hyphenation practices differ widely amongst sources because of their own style conventions. It is a notable change, and there was no consensus for it. Waltham, The Duke of 18:39, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Then come and discuss it; I don't see it as any real change, and am therefore perfectly willing to see alternatives. At worst it substitutes a decidable rule for but a hyphen is used in Mon-Khmer languages, which marks no specific relationship, and in Sino-Japanese trade, in which Sino-, being a prefix, lacks lexical independence which nobody understands or can apply with certainty. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:26, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Nominator gives thumbs-up to flushing autoformatting down the pan

Yesterday, I attempted to solve a massive overlinking issue with List_of_Final_Fantasy_compilation_albums, a new nomination I was reviewing at WP:FLC, by removing all of the autoformatting. No one minds US date formatting, even if it requires a comma, just as they accept Euro formatting after their signature.

I was delighted that nominator PresN responded at the FLC page: "Well, can't say I'm sad to see the sea of blue leave. It's much easier to read now, thank you."

You may wish to compare the previous autoformatted version with the new, normal script version. Scrolling down side by side is best, but the difference is clear by comparing one after the other, too. Tony (talk) 04:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

If I may offer a different opinion... I am a believer in proper date formatting. Not everyone uses the same date format and to attempt to force one style on everyone is counter-productive. Date format is an option that everyone has on their Preferences page and we should support that. The key difficulty is that the only method currently available is to wikilink dates, which creates more blue text than desirable. I accept that and it causes me no pain. By the way, I am American, yet I prefer the Asian-style date format like 2008 July 3. As suggested, I compared the two versions and I find a major inconsistency in the revised one. The dates in the main body are all in American format (July 3, 2008) while all of the dates in the References section are in the user's preferred format; on my screen that's 2008 July 3. Since we strive for consistency, I must give a thumbs-down to this modified version. Truthanado (talk) 14:48, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
Auto-lemon prevents our identifying embarrassing inconsistencies in formatting within an article. And since when were you upset by the other person's "colour/color"? Heck, we've all learned to read and write in the two main spellings, and the differences are about as superficial as ... the order of the elements in a full date. Tony (talk) 16:00, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

3rd century?

Ancient Egypt is one FA in which the names of single-digit centuries are spelled out (sixth century or something), but most FA's, and WP:MOSNUM, use 1st century, etc. Does anyone have a strong preference either way? I've asked a couple of history editors, also. I don't think I've ever seen 11th century spelled out in a mature article on Wikipedia. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:36, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

My preference is for the digital form in all cases i.e. 1st century, 21st century. Lightmouse (talk) 04:06, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
I would agree, but would spell out the adjective: in a fifth-century style. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:01, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm with Lightmouse; I think making an exception for the hyphenated adjective could result in some oddities: The fifth-century style belies its origins in the 6th century. Barnabypage (talk) 20:26, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Comparable numbers should indeed be consistently styled, something we should say more clearly than we do; but that's an example of a clash between two different stylistic goods. When that happens, a compromise between them should be worked out on a case by case basis: in this case, next century would be one way out. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:30, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

"Box" quote versus "block" quote

I'd like to make the case that it can occasionally be appropriate to treat a quotation in the same manner as an image. That is, for a quotation to be allotted a space set apart from the main body of the text, where it will provide an illustrative statement that adds insight or some sort of cohesion to the section of the article that surrounds it, in the manner that an image does. Such a quotation doesn't always naturally flow into or out of the section to which it is attached, but can nonetheless be indispensably relevant to the topic.

Of course, I have an example. I moved a quotation like this from the "Production" heading of an article about a movie to the "Plot" heading (scroll down a little), since it is the plot the quotation concerns, and then added another such "box" quotation of my own to the "Production" heading. And, of course, I've had a friendly disagreement. Moving the plot quotation was apparently considered to be correct, but not any longer its presentation in the "box" quote format, which was how I originally found it. I kind of liked it that way, and it was the first time I'd seen a quotation presented in that form in Wikipedia. It performs differently from the prescribed "block" quote mode, by granting the quoted text a further removal from the main body. This effect is sometimes desirable, as in the circumstance I'm describing. The "Plot" section of the article in question is nothing else but a rote synopsis of the action of the film--perhaps rightly. But I consider it useful and interesting to include some of the writer's thoughts on the story off in a sidebar, where the quotation won't detract from the thrust of the synopsis. Another editor is of the opinion that the quotation should be presented in the sanctioned "block" quote style, where I feel it does not naturally proceed from the text before it, nor lead into what comes after. Yet it has the semblance of belonging where it is, in the linear progression of the plot. The "box" quote version of the other quotation I provided remains "boxed," further down.

I'm certainly not asking for a validation of my point of view in this particular dispute (as I'm convinced I'll get the other editor to agree), but I am looking for consensus on briefly outlining the (limited) appropriateness of these hovering "box" quotes in the Quotations heading of the Manual of Style.

Note: This is similar to pull quotes, as used frequently in magazines and newspapers, but is not the same, in that the text does not appear anywhere else in the article. Pull quotes, I'm sure you would agree, are "unencyclopedic" gimmickry, a form of advertising. Aratuk (talk) 01:16, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Strangely enough, we do have a template for pullquotes: {{cquote}}; and unfortunately there is no consensus that this is gimmickry. :-( Hesperian 01:28, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Is it ever appropriate to set a piece of text appart from the main body of an article? I'd say that this type of thing does have its place on WP. How does this compare to cquote? A box containing text certainly looks more encyclopædic. The boxes are placed to the side, thus really are set apart from the text. Cquotes, on the other hand, appear within the flow of the text: little more than centre-aligned blockquotes within sets of gimmicky oversized inverted commas. I'd say depreciate cquote in favour of these box-quotes. JIMp talk·cont 02:28, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
And what's the model for encyclopedic info boxes? I haven't seen a recent print edition of Britannica in ages. Wikipedia is the model for "encyclopedic," at least operationally. I'm in favor of multiple coexisting models of graphic standards which might be employed differently across different subject matters, and not being adherents of the Masterpiece Theatre vogue. Wikipedia needs to realize that to a great extent it will never be encyclopedic, particularly in terms of appearance. But, hopefully in terms of reliability of information. We do seem to have the Star Trek universe pretty authoritatively mapped out. Aratuk (talk) 03:40, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks! Aratuk (talk) 03:40, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Rock and roll / rock 'n' roll etc etc

Apologies if this has come up before (I suspect it has), but is there any guidance on how to decide which punctuation variant of terms should be used for a title when there are competing alternatives? Currently there is some discussion that Rock and roll should be retitled "Rock 'n' roll", or "Rock & roll", or "Rock 'n roll", or... etc etc. All these variants are used in the real world, and a Google apparently indicates that "Rock 'n' roll" is more common than "Rock and roll". Thoughts? Ghmyrtle (talk) 15:54, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I sense another long discussion on this one. IMHO, the "punctuation variant" should match the cited references. If the references disagree, then the editor should pick the variant that matches the majority of the cited refs. Truthanado (talk) 21:33, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
So, on that basis, in your view should the article be retitled "Rock 'n' roll"? Ghmyrtle (talk) 11:42, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Quotation Marks misconception

I’m about to make a change to: Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation_marks; just warning here (and will note change after doing), since this is a high-visibility page.

The prior revision states:

“this system is referred to as typesetters' quotation because many typographers favor it for aesthetic reasons.”

This contradicts Quotation mark#Punctuation (for reference, this revision), which states:

“The printing press required that the easily damaged smallest pieces of type for the comma and period be protected behind the more robust quotation marks.” (AUE: FAQ excerpt: ", vs ,")

I will thus change the MoS to reflect this, with citation.

Nbarth (email) (talk) 00:03, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Done! Here is the diff, and new revision.
Nbarth (email) (talk) 00:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I would revert this; aesthetic punctation may have originated in technical necessity, but it has been retained long after the technical necessity ceased to exist. I might add the CMS comment that it is preferred because "logical" punctuation is harder to do with the precision expected of a professional publication; copyediting it requires collation with the original text being quoted. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:35, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
The text in question describes the reasons behind the name 'typesetters' quotation'. Whether and why the quotation convention has been retained is irrelevant.
"I might add the CMS comment that it is preferred because "logical" punctuation is [...]". Preferred by CMS does not mean preferred by Wikipedia. Ilkali (talk) 19:50, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
But it is not the reason for the name, because it is not the reason typesetters use it. Nor is it Wikipedia's preference beyond a small group of provincial language-reformers. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:20, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
"use it" is present tense. The name was coined in the past. Ilkali (talk) 20:22, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
If typesetters had ceased to use the system, the name would also have gone out of use, and we would have no need to discuss it. It is called "typesetters' punctuation" because typesetters do use it, and they do not use it because of nineteenth-century practicalities. (In fact, we have no need to discuss the reason anyway; both names belong in the article, and may be mentioned here, but we have an encyclopedia for matters of fact.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:32, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
"It is called "typesetters' punctuation" because typesetters do use it". Do all typesetters use it? Do they use it more than other people? I think you are talking nonsense. It is referred to by that name because it has always been referred to by that name. Ilkali (talk) 20:36, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Do they use it more than other people? Yes, of course they do; until the advent of desktop publication, very few other people worried about it at all. And those that did called it aesthetic punctuation. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:43, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

There is some disagreement over an example of links in a quotation, and I wonder if some view can be made which offers a greater guidance than what is already written in WP:MOSQUOTE about Linking: "Unless there is a good reason to do so, Wikipedia avoids linking from within quotes, which may clutter the quotation, violate the principle of leaving quotations unchanged, and mislead or confuse the reader."

The case I am thinking of is for John Patrick Kenneally, the quotation being immediately before section 2. Originally, a number of names, "British Isles" and "British Commonwealth of Nations" were linked as indicated (see here.), but an editor removed the British-related links, on grounds that are now a matter being considered as part of Arbcom procedings (because of the claimed way in which indiscriminate removal of "British Isles" completely is being carried out by that editor). Subsequently, to help prevent an edit-war get going, and paying attention to WP:MOSQUOTE, I removed the other links and placed an explanatory sentence which allowed the links to still have a presence in the article here, leaving a message on the an involved editor's talk page User talk:Bardcom/Archives/2008/July#John Patrick Kenneally. However, the changes were reverted.

So, my question is: how good or pressing do the "good reasons" have to be? From other cases, my impression was that only in very few cases were links in quotations immune from being removed.  DDStretch  (talk) 14:00, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

IMHO the reasons have to be really darn good. We (for better or worse) use logical quotation to avoid spoiling the intent of the quotation. By adding links we add meaning to the quotation that the original author did not intend. If they wanted to expand on the meaning of a particular word in their quotation, then they would have done so in the quoted work, and it's not our place to assume otherwise. I'm familiar with the train-wreck ArbCom case you're referring to, and in this case I think you're getting the drive-by affects. The question is not if "British Isles" is a valid term, but whether the quoted work uses those words. If it does, then the words belong there, unlinked. If I say "Canada is great!" and 3 months later Canada changes it's name to North-Western New South Coldland I would be pretty pissed if someone changed my quoted words to read "North-Western New South Coldland is great!". Livitup (talk) 13:39, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation and interpretation that largely matches the one I now have. I especially agree with your points made in your last sentence: the Arbcom case editor some time ago replaced "British Isles" from Frodsham which introduced an inaccuracy when matched up with the reference (though in this case it wasn't in a direct quote), which led to some small exchanges in a variety of places, including further attempts to undermine the status of the reference as a reliable source in order to justify keeping "British Isles" out of that article. Hence the now current explicit notes surrounding its use there.  DDStretch  (talk) 15:21, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
WP takes its duty to preserve quoted material in its original form—as far as practicable—very seriously. The dangers of linking within it are many: first among them are that the linked material may change without scrutiny, making nonsense of the original item linked, or worse, subtlely changing its perceived meaning by our readers. Just as linking bold text is deprecated, the task is simply to work around this principle by linking or piping the item outside the quotation—it's not rocket science. Tony (talk) 17:08, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for this comment. The solution you suggest was the one I carried out to fix the incomplate removal of links within the quotation. The reversal of my fix prompted my message here.  DDStretch  (talk) 17:46, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Category:General style guidelines

Category:General style guidelines has been nominated for deletion to allow for additional categorization. You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for Discussion page. Bebestbe (talk) 20:19, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Quotation query

I am aware that as a result of frequent and endless debate, MoS favours so-called "logical quotation". However, the guidelines don't seem to be very clear on what this means. At the moment they say that punctuation marks "are placed inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation". According to the MoS, when a sentence fragment is quoted, "the period is outside." However, in this case, am I not allowed to put the period inside, because it is part of the text (MoS) that I am quoting? Or does "sense of the punctuation" carry some more subtle meaning? I note that the MoS itself has, later on

"She said that she 'would not allow this.' "

with the period inside a sentence fragment where the original statement was "I would not allow this." (Period inside again.) Either the first "deplorable" example is misleading (because it appears to be quoting an example where "deplorable" is at the end of the quoted sentence), or the rest is confusing. What gives? Geometry guy 09:09, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I think the latter case (which is in an unrelated section on brackets) is probably a case of the MoS not observing itself. I would use that she "would not allow this". . Ilkali (talk) 09:35, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
This doesn't make sense to me. The whole principle of logical quotation is to remain true to the source, so if the source ends in a period, why not include it in the quote? This tells readers that the quotee's sentence did not continue. It should at least be permitted, if not required.
The issue is more stark if one compares with quoted questions. Geometry guy rarely copyedits his talk page contributions, so he can be verbose, hence it is best to quote him in fragments. For instance as part of a long post he asks "if the source ends in a period, why not include it in the quote?" The question mark has to go inside – despite the fact that it's a sentence fragment! Questions are not the only issue either: did you notice Geometry guy exclaiming "it's a sentence fragment!"? The shock is his; we remain calm, but we certainly don't want to quote "despite the fact that". Geometry guy 19:35, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
My understanding of logical quoting is that any meaningful elements are retained - exclamation and question marks fall under this category. I think the sentence fragment clause is a little poorly motivated and would personally prefer a system where all non-meaningful terminal punctuation is omitted. In the current system, for example, would we use the following?
Ilkali said "I like kittens." and "I hate badgers."
The period in that first sentence is awful, because without looking ahead it's not clear if it ends the entire sentence or just the nested one. Does it really matter where the quoted sentence ends? Whether's there's more text in the sentence or not, a diligent reader always has to assume there might be more text somewhere in the source that retracts or recontextualises the quote. What's wrong with the following?
Ilkali said "I like kittens" and "I hate badgers".
Ilkali (talk) 20:40, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Nothing, in my view, but there is also nothing wrong with
Ilkali said "I like kittens" and "I hate badgers."
I think we have to permit both and let editors decide which best conveys the "sense" of the quotations. Whatever we do, the guidelines need to be clarified, because they are causing unnecessary disputes between editors at the moment. Geometry guy 21:09, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
"there is also nothing wrong with [...]". Well, with the exception that it's not particularly logical. I think there's some value to consistency, so I am usually against policies of "let editors decide". Can you indicate exactly what part of the current wording is unclear? Ilkali (talk) 23:48, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Why is it not logical? Suppose the full quotation were "I like kittens. I hate badgers." Then, according to MoS, the final period would have to go inside the quotation because it is not a sentence fragment but a full sentence. On the other hand, one might punctuation your quotation as "I like kittens; I hate badgers." Now "I hate badgers" is a sentence fragment, and the MoS seems to require that the punctuation goes outside. I fail to see any logic going on here. A period can be a meaningful element too and some human judgement is evidently required to punctuate well. Geometry guy 07:43, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
"Why is it not logical?" Because the punctuation in question operates on the nesting sentence, not the nested one. To put it inside the quotation is to put it in the wrong scope. If it weren't for the limitations of mechanical printing presses, nobody would ever have started doing it. Ilkali (talk) 09:07, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
In GGuy's hypothesis, the period is both in the nesting sentence and in the nested one. If the quoted text were (as it often is) a full sentence or a full paragraph, would Ilkali insist on moving the final period only outside the quotation marks? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:02, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
It's not about 'moving'. We have two separate sentences (one nested, one nesting), each of which can be given a terminating period. We could include both of them, like so:
Ilkali said "This is a sentence.".
But that looks pretty ugly. In this situation, logical and typesetters' quoting would omit the external period. In typesetters' quoting (but not logical quoting), this makes it impossible to tell if a terminal internal period actually terminates the nested sentence, since it would be there either way. My own personal preference (which I do not exercise in Wikipedia article space) is to omit the internal one. I argued for this policy above.
The only policy that involves moving punctuation is typesetters' quoting, in the case where the quoted text does not end in a punctuation symbol but one from the nesting sentence is inserted into it. Ilkali (talk) 18:29, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
But if the passage were:
Ilkali said, "I like kittens but I hate badgers".
"Badger is the common name for any animal of three subfamilies, which belong to the family Mustelidae: the same mammal family as the ferrets, the weasels, the otters, and several other types of carnivore. I think ferrets stink and will not put up with their relatives."
Ilkali's preference would result either in inconsistency between the two paragraphs, or in a violation of invariable idiom in the second. I would not prohibit either, but I do not see that one is more logical than the other. He is correct in saying that
Ilkali said "This is a sentence.".
would be clumsy; indeed, it is incorrect. But either period may be removed without impairing the accuracy of the quotation or the clarity of the sentence. If the presence of the period after sentence were the point at issue, omitting the internal period would be unfair quotation, but that is a different, and rare, issue. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:24, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Your example makes no sense to me. How is the first part (Ilkali said [...]) supposed to be related to the second ("Badger is the [...]")? Ilkali (talk) 19:42, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
So? I did put in a connection, the bit about ferrets, but I was just looking for enough text to make a paragraph. I could have (and probably should have) used Lorem ipsum; the point about punctuation would remain. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:13, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Make it therefore:

Ilkali said: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua".
"Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

The first paragraph quotes a sentence; the second is a quoted paragraph. One ends, by Ilkali's rule, with a period; the second with a quote mark. Where's the logic? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:13, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

My words: "I [...] would personally prefer a system where all non-meaningful terminal punctuation is omitted". By my 'rule', the second paragraph would end with is est laborum"., not is est laborum.". Note that expressing my personal preferences does not mean I am petitioning for a change to the MoS. Ilkali (talk) 20:30, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Good. This personal preference is so unusual (and does any style guide support it?) that it may be worth, for once, recommending against it. It is as illogical as aesthetic punctuation, without the aesthetic and practical advantages of wrapping whole paragraphs in quotes. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:37, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I would explain how you are wrong, but it doesn't matter anyway and you've shown remarkable resistance to understanding things that I say. Let's revive this later, when you've started editing your own POV into the section against consensus. Ilkali (talk) 20:44, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I apologise for the above incivility. There's no point getting snippy over something that doesn't even affect the MoS. Ilkali (talk) 22:31, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
The second example is correct. It is so easy. Look if the quoted material starts with a capital letter or not. If the former, the period should be inside; if the latter, use otherwise. However, there are some examples that omit beginning part of a sentence. For example, "... would explain how you are wrong, but it doesn't matter anyway and you've shown remarkable resistance to understanding things that I say." The period is inside because the quoted material is still complete, emphasized by the use of the comma before the quotation as well the ellipsis. --Efe (talk) 12:01, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
There is no such thing as "correct" here. My use of a different convention is not a consequence of not understanding logical quoting, it is a consequence of thinking logical quoting is stupid. All either of us have is preferences. But as I already said, I follow Wikipedia's preference when editing articles. Ilkali (talk) 12:14, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Anyway, Im just helping others clear out this discussion. So if your now following Wiki's preference, then, this issue is "resolved". Cheers. --Efe (talk) 12:42, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
What issue? I'm "now" following the MoS? I always have. I said so at the very start of my discussion with PManderson. This section wasn't made to discuss my preferences - they were just described in passing - but to question whether the manual violates its own quotation convention. Ilkali (talk) 12:53, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, Ilkali. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:26, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I intend to clarify this part of the MoS, drawing on the discussion here. Also, I think the whole "Note" on the rationale for MoS policy is out-of-date and largely redundant. The MoS should present clear guidelines to editors, not complicated rationales on how those guidelines were arrived at. However, the key reason for logical quotation (faithfulness to the source) should still be mentioned. Geometry guy 19:27, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Okay, done. It may need tweaking. Geometry guy 16:29, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Looks good to me, G-Guy. For the record, the previous language also had some logic to it that hasn't been mentioned yet: the idea was to throw the period or comma outside the quotation marks whenever you could come up with a reasonable excuse to do so, because a period or comma inside is sometimes misinterpreted, especially in American English, but the period or comma outside never is. But your language is fine, won't hurt anything, and will seem less officious to some, IMO. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:28, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Inventing initialisms

I would suggest that the "USGDP" example be changed. Two paragraphs before this example, the MoS states that it should be "U.S." and not "US", rendering the example null and void. — MusicMaker5376 21:41, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

To quote the same paragraph: In longer abbreviations incorporating the country's initials (USN, USAF), periods are not used. So USGDP, if it were real, would be correct. With the space, I would use "US GDP", certainly in a table; as often, MOS's rules oversimplify the complex compromises involved in actually writing English. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:23, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Sept, I'm not going to beat you up because you do a lot of good work, but really, how many times are you going to trot this out? Are you volunteering yourself to teach a course on the 100 or so useful style guides to all Wikipedians who need help with writing? If not, doesn't it make sense not to beat editors up if they follow a simplified ruleset? And doesn't it make sense for WP:MOS to reflect whatever simplified compromises people have actually arrived at? I can't see any practical alternative. Additionally, WP:MOS is not meant to be a comprehensive style guide; WP:MOS is more the result of sitting back and waiting for conflicts to come to us, and then having it out and recording the result. WP:MOS is not supposed to have a comprehensive answer to questions that people haven't asked. The world is full of good style guidelines and dictionaries to look things up in, many of them online, almost all of them free or cheap. We're not here to compete or to teach, we're here because the alternative to being here is endless debate on article talk pages and in article review processes. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:18, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Rule for a much improved MOS: If it's simplified, make it advice, and warn the reader that it's not an infallible rule; if it's oversimplified, leave it out. Make a ruleset only if it is a decent rule which can be safely followed by the ignorant and the mindless, because it will be. (And yes, I do recognize the irony here.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:27, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
This would not get rid of all of MOS, by any means; it might revise 90%, but if so, that 90% badly needs revision. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:32, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure what "make it advice" means. Sometimes there are edit wars, and sometimes people can't agree during article reviews. We can't just say "Well, we advise this, but do what you want" when they come to a style guidelines page with an argument; if they had been able to settle it by themselves based on "advice", they would have done that already. If it's a style question, then they're probably here to get an answer, based in part on their trust and respect for the people who hang out on this page, so that they can get resolution and move on. I don't believe that WT:MOS is a page that tries to stifle all dissent and inflict the will of the privileged few...or if that's what we've tried to do, then we suck at it, because there are more than 120 archive pages, and I've never personally seen any attempt to enforce silence on anybody on this page. I know that I listen to all viewpoints, and in a large majority of cases, I support what someone else wants, especially people who aren't "regulars". I take your point that more people means more legitimacy, and I notice that we do seem to have more people involved in discussions than we used to, and that makes me happy. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:51, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

"actor" vs. "actress"

In some places (notably the Screen Actors Guild), the generic "actor" has become a preferred term over "actress" for female as well as male thespians. In some cases it seems to be a matter of preference among the people themselves. Has this been discussed here, and if so what is the MoS's guidance? Jgm (talk) 15:24, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

North American style guides say that "actress" is a perfectly acceptable word, without the usual icky gender-neutral problems of other "-ess" words. However, "actor" is also perfectly acceptable when applied to a male, a female, or a mixed group. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:15, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd say stick with only "actor" if possible. For instance, to disambiguate an actor, "(actor)" is appended to an article's title regardless if they are male or female. Gary King (talk) 19:28, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I think this is something that doesn't have to be decided at the MOS level. Let people work it out in individual articles; we don't require uniformity on this sort of thing, and attempts to legislate it can look politically motivated. --Trovatore (talk) 19:38, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Actually this is EXACTLY the type of matter that Manual of Styles were developed to address. However, in practice, Wikipedia's structure, lacking an oversight board to ensure consistent application of matters of style, means that such questions will get revisted over and over and over until a true community consensus eveolves. -- The Red Pen of Doom 19:50, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I completely disagree. --Trovatore (talk) 19:55, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Alright, you modified what I completely disagree with. Sure, it will evolve. That's fine. We shouldn't legislate it here until such consensus does evolve. My concern is that the MOS not be used to push left-wing social theories (or right-wing ones either, or even center ones, but so far I haven't seen that happen). The correct function of the MOS is, first, to keep the encyclopedia written in a high register using precise language, and second, to avoid distracting stylistic inconsistencies. I don't see actor v actress as one of the latter. --Trovatore (talk) 20:06, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
And here I disagre, the MOS page is the centralized page where the consensus should evolve because this is where people (should) be looking to for guidance in their individual article discussions about style differences. -- The Red Pen of Doom 20:19, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I think there is nothing wrong with this difference persisting in individual articles. --Trovatore (talk) 20:24, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Then why bother having a MOS at all?-- The Red Pen of Doom 20:58, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Primarily to keep language in a high register. --Trovatore (talk) 21:09, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

This particular usage issue appears to already be covered by Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language -- The Red Pen of Doom 20:56, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

I take it there's no existing consensus then (grin).

Here's the particular situation that led me to ask the question. I noticed an omission of a female thespian at List of people from North Carolina. As I added her, I used the descriptor actor. However in looking at the resulting article, I noticed that all the other female thespians listed on the page are described as actresses. The hobgoblin of my little mind led me to briefly consider changing all those instances, but figured I would try to check here first.

I did look at the Gender-neutral section RedPen points to above. On one hand, the section specifially points to actress as an example of "non-neutral language that can be easily avoided", but I'm not sure how that's true here except by going to the generic actor. On the other hand, it's telling me to use gender-neutral language "when it can be done without loss of . . . precision". Now, the particular person I added has a common female name, so there isn't any loss of precision or detail. But this wouldn't be true for all female thespians (cf. Sean Young or Michael Learned). Finally, the section tells me that "Where the gender is known, gender-specific items are also appropriate ("Bill Gates is a businessman" or "Nancy Pelosi is a congresswoman")." Ho-kay, so actress is non-neutral, but businesswoman is appropriate. I find myself more puzzled than ever.

Also, to throw in my tuppence on the question as to whether this should be addressed in the Style book, I vote emphatically so. If consistency wasn't a major goal here, we wouldn't need a Manual of Style in the first place. And if the consensus is that "actor" is appropriate in all cases, I'd hope somebody would built an actress-seeking bot and make it so. Despite the fact that we do weasel out of consistency in some areas (ie. the UK/US language divide), in those cases we are doing so intentionally and not because we are worried about how it "looks". Jgm (talk) 22:01, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

I am glad that I am not the only one who found the Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language less than completely enlightening. -- The Red Pen of Doom 22:41, 13 July 2008 (UTC)'
My view is that the MoS has gotten too pushy withal, and that in some cases this pushiness is politically motivated ("looks" was perhaps misplaced). We don't need that much of a Manual of Style. The gender-neutral thing I find acceptable because of its very modest pretensions ("please consider" and so on); if we were to get into enforcing it with bots there would be blood in the streets. --Trovatore (talk) 22:14, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Prescriptive pushiness is the major function of MOS; Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language is consensus (if it is; I support it) because it is not prescriptive; this is how to be more neutral if the article requires it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:32, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
In Wikipedia, the MOS can only be as "pushy" as the consensus of the community wants it to be. Once there are words giving guidance on the MOS, if there are large numbers of people who disagree, the consensus will shift (eventually and perhaps through much heated discussion) to language that a large majority of the community can agree with. -- The Red Pen of Doom 22:47, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Unfortunately, this is not true in practice, although it may become true eventually. The objectors show up one or two at a time, are reverted and shouted at by the handful of True Believers, and are never able to demonstrate consensus for the change against the handful before they give up. They go away despising MOS and the processes that use it, but this doesn't seem to matter. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:53, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

On the point at issue: some female thespians (good dodge!) are called actors, some actresses. This is partly a chronological matter (Anne Bracegirdle was an actress; anything else would be an anachronism); partly a matter of genre and self-identification. This is a point that requires intelligence and information; two things bots notoriously lack. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:32, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

See my reply in the next section on whether WP:MOS is useless (clue: it isn't). On the point in this section, I really don't see a problem, "guys" (which I consider gender-neutral these days), and I agree largely with everything said that's focused on the question at hand. The page you're pointing to is a how-to guide, it's not part of the style guidelines, as Sept points out. "If you want to do it, here's how to do it." That page points to what WP:MOS says, which is a shining example of unofficious, community-debated succinctness: "Consider using gender-neutral language where this can be done with clarity and precision." You don't have to do it, but do think about it. This is exactly the attitude journalists currently take: they think about it, and they think about the tradeoffs in clarity and precision. Also, consider the fact that women, blacks, gays, little people, indigenous people...the list goes on and eventually includes everyone, since everyone is an outsider somewhere...should be given some deference in how one refers to them as a member of their group. We don't have to call them what they want to be called, but we owe it to them and to ourselves to give it some thought. It's hard to see what damage is done by calling a woman an actress if she wants to be called an actress. This does not contradict Trovatore's position, which I'm quite sympathetic to, especially when the focus is on good encyclopedic style. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:40, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Golly, that's heartwarming stuff. But as an editor who does want to give it some thought and try to do it right (and thus hopefully as the very audience the MoS and attendant how-to pages are intended to address), I still have the original problem of not knowing how best to handle this situation and not finding any useful advice in these reference pages. Adding the dimension of self-identification or preference (which was not part of my original query) doesn't help much either, since unless I accost the subject of my query in the grocery to demand which term she prefers I will likely never know. And, even if I were to go to the effort to find out a person's preferred descriptor before doing a simple list-add, we'd wind up with a list with all males and some females listed as actors with the remainder of the females listed as actresses which I'd argue winds up being less clear and more likely to cause reader confusion or error than either of the alternatives that might be prescribed by a less unofficious and thus more useful style guide. Jgm (talk) 12:13, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry, Jgm, I really am not following what the problem is. Let me thrash around a little bit and try to guess. I told you what the North American style guides say: either word is correct. Are you saying they don't have a clue? Are you saying that people won't know what an "actress" is? Are you saying that it's only permissible to use one word for any concept in Wikipedia, and that the point of Wikipedia's style guidelines is to enlighten all our writers on what that correct word is? Help me out here. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:59, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
I tried to state the specific problem I'm having in my last couple of sentences above. The more general problem is that a goal of and desire for consistency (and thus readability and improved understanding) may conflict with the idea that "either is correct". Style guides may say something like that (or more likely that neither is incorrect), but I imagine that the in-house style guide for any given publication is going to be a lot more specific about how and when the choice is to be made for that publication, and, perhaps more pertinently, an editor is going to want to see a consistent usage within a particular article even when the publication's style guide is vague or inconsistent on a point. I've already pointed out that the resources that are provided here regarding this usage issue have not been helpful to me as a writer/editor for this endeavor. I think the right thing for me to do in that case is to point out that fact here. Do you disagree? You seem to be doing a lot of pointing out what the MoS isn't, but what is it if not a place for contributors to go for guidance on points of usage? Jgm (talk) 17:05, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Trovatore has already shown clearly during the gender-neutral war last year on this page that he's male and harks from a former age in his attitude to the way 51% of the population is framed by the language. He just doesn't understand, and reacts with indignation when his old-fashioned precepts are challenged. Even Anderson is vaguely reasonable on this issue. Yes, of course the diminutive "-ess" should be dropped by all writers who value inclusiveness and who see the power of language to manipulate readers' perceptions of power in society. Trovatore will leap to the attack by accusing them of "political correctness", and I would rebut that by saying that's a misnomer for "political inclusiveness". It's a well-established practice since the 1970s—so commonplace as to be a yawn. Writers who refuse to give up the marking of the female form, with the inevitable framing of the male as the default—cannot aspire to WP's basic pillar of NPOV. They end up weakening the authority of the project. Tony (talk) 12:36, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

You are the one not being neutral if you insist on codifying specific sociological theories into a Manual of Style of all things. These theories make specific factual claims, such as the claim that the use of he as the unmarked form is intended to privilege maleness (could be the other way around, if you think about it; who really wants to be "unmarked"?). The MoS should not be taking a position on whether these claims are true. --Trovatore (talk) 17:24, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Tony, I can't tell if you're saying that "actress" is unacceptable in North America; there is a fairly strong consensus (outside Wikipedia) that it's okay, but other "-ess" words are generally not; is there a different consensus on this point in Wikipedia? Second, I completely understand the difficulty of your volunteer firefighting job, but if Trovatore hasn't "leapt to the attack" since last year, then please don't bring it up; we're not here to beat people up for past mistakes. What Trovatore said above was perfectly reasonable. If he or anyone else turns into some kind of language-fascist, we can wait to deal with that if/when it happens. Third, I think it's important to say that, for instance, recommending against "-ess" words is not an NPOV issue, at least in 2008 in North America. The issue is not that some people say "stewardess" and some people say "flight attendant" and we have decided we don't like the tone of the former; the issue is that no one has said "stewardess" in professional writing for 30 years (except for a laugh); it's just not professional English, on the order of "ain't". It's important to say this because, occasionally, people wander through who honestly don't know this; they think it's still an NPOV issue. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:16, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
I've said what I think. Something so specific is difficult to legislate against, and I'm not proposing any change to the current wording of the GNL section in MOS. Tony (talk) 14:23, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't think there is enough consensus in WP or in the rest of the world to make a MOS guidline for this. There certainly isn't a consensus to get rid of "actress". Actor says "As actress is a specifically feminine word, some feminists assert that the word is sexist. Gender-neutral usage of actor has re-emerged in modern English,[3] especially when referring to male and female performers collectively, but actress remains a commonly used word." Furthermore an admittedly unscientfic survey of the lead sections of articles on famous female thespians shows that Sigourney Weaver, Jody Foster, Reese Witherspoon, and Scarlett Johansson are all actresses where as only Angelina Jolie is an actor. I think the MOS should codify consensus rather than force it. Rusty Cashman (talk) 22:29, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Jgm, I think you're probably right, I'm probably being less than helpful, but I copyedit very few entertainment articles so I don't really know. It's a good idea to try to stick with style choices in any one article, so if a woman is referred to as an actress, keep referring to her as an actress in that article. As Gary points out, the article-naming convention is to use "(actor)". Some pages can't be consistent: for instance, the page you mention has "Best Actress" awards in an infobox at the end...not a lot you can do about that. I think you're asking for consistency across a group of articles, and I would be very inclined to follow the recommendation of whichever wikiproject was most closely associated with that range of articles. I haven't heard an argument for forcing "actor" or "actress" across all of Wikipedia. You say you're looking for an "in-house style guide", but the problem is that Wikipedia is less like an almanac where everything should be formatted the same way and more like a magazine, where different contributors are interviewing different people and constantly asking to write what they want to write, and what will make their subjects happy. You asked me what I think our style guidelines are good for; my essay is here. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:27, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Dan, for the thoughtful response, and please accept my apologies for snarkiness earlier. I enjoyed and agree with most of the points that you make in your essay. And of course I am not pushing any agenda and I am not that hung up on which word I use in a list article; what I think a was (am) trying to do is be a coalmine canary of sorts and highlight that this point of usage will be an issue of increasing contention (among folks who do have an axe to grind one way or another) since the trend in the profession is slowly but surely towards the generic usage (as evidenced by the Screen Actors Guild approach) while the general public still finds it jolting and, as others have brought up, issues of self-identification, era, etc. will make simple answers difficult. This seems to me like a perfect recipe for a near-future shitstorm, and, as I hope I got across, the resources in place to help head off or at least moderate the shitstorm are pretty weak at the moment. Any effort that can be made to proactively hash this out would seem to have the precise sorts of benefits that you posit in your essay. Jgm (talk) 02:33, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks kindly. Which would you say are the most relevant wikiprojects or other collaborations? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:44, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
I think the real point of Screen Actors Guild is that the plural (several thespians of unstated sex) is becoming actors; that may well be true, and most occupations made that move by the end of Middle English. Whether this does or should apply to individual thespians is another question altogether. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:31, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Linking City, State

Is it Los Angeles, California, or Los Angeles, California? Thanks, Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 18:34, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

And is there an MOS section that says which to do? I didn't see anything on MOS:LINK Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 18:35, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Both WP:MOSLINK and WP:OVERLINK say not to link "country names such as United States, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, India and China, and the names of cities such as New York City, London, Moscow and Paris". I think you could reasonably consider LA to be a part of that list, so I think we'd recommend that the answer is "As a general rule, link neither, because of the low probability that someone will feel a need to know more about Los Angeles than they are already likely to know." Obviously, you should go ahead and link it if you think there's something about the article that might give someone a reason to want to know general information about Los Angeles. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
I wasn't specifically talking about LA (I agree that doesn't need to be linked usually), but what is the general rule for Anycity, Anystate? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 16:46, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
WP:OVERLINK says to link to "the flag of Tokelau" instead of "the flag of Tokelau". The idea is that flag of Tokelau can get the reader pretty quickly to flag (through the infobox at the bottom), if they're interested. At FAC, I have generally been citing this to apply to "city, state", too, because people can get from there to the state if they want to. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:57, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Funny how different answers the same question can get... (dreamy expression) Waltham, The Duke of 22:36, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd suggest not linking two or more words next to each other to different articles, because generally readers, or at least I assume that several words in a row all link to the same article. It's easier to read the links that way. Gary King (talk) 08:14, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Tell that to the main-page people... Most segments have an overlinking problem. Unfortunately, that's not as easy to solve as it might initially sound.
Oh, and one annoying detail: in Boston, Massachusetts, the links are not next to each other—there's a comma between them. Technicality? Maybe. It all depends on whether the comma is considered big enough for its colour to be casually obvious... I guess that, with a surface of three pixels, it fails that test. Waltham, The Duke of 09:52, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Tutorials on hyphens and dashes

Because this aspect of MoS is often the subject of technical criticism on FAC and FLC pages, I've prepared a set of exercises to assist editors at large to absorb and apply the guidelines on hyphens and dashes. You may be interested in having a snoop around the page, which I finished today—it's a start. I'm posting this to generate feedback on how to improve the exercises, which is welcome on the talk page there. The option of extending the page to cover other aspects of MoS (ellipsis, when we finally get the guideline sorted <clears throat>, numbers, currencies, chronological items, and caps come to mind).

Know your Manual of Style. Tony (talk) 14:52, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Thank you, Tony. I'll take a stab at them later today. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 15:13, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, Tony. I was not aware of the rule demonstrated in 1.9. Always nice to learn something new. By the way, aren't examples 1.3 and 1.7 essentially the same? — Bellhalla (talk) 16:08, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
I admit to not knowing 1.9 either. I'm fairly certain I've sent a writer off to replace an en dash with a hyphen in such a case at least once. Does that mean our article Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act is incorrect? It would require an en dash? --Laser brain (talk) 17:54, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Laser brain, I think that does require an unspaced ndash. From WP:DASH, "As a substitute for some uses of and, to or versus for marking a relationship involving independent elements". "And" is the word the hyphen is replacing. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 22:20, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
And this is very largely our invention; Wikipedia should follow the usage of good printed sources, not invent out own. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:27, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Reliable printed sources often have their own in-house style which conflict from one to another. Who are we to decide which is more right? And, if the MOS is wrong, we discuss it and change it, until then we're supposed to follow it, no? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 22:44, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
No. It's a guideline; guidelines should not be followed against usage and judgment. It would be preferable to follow the collection of in-house style guides which make up printed English, than the ukases of a handful of self-appointed language-reformers. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:15, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
I can't tell if you actually disagree with something Tony has written or if you're just being a contrarian. --Laser brain (talk) 23:27, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
1.9 is sensible, and IIRC Fowler supports it. Much of the rest of this varies between unsourced good advice and pure invention: 1.1 is wrongly explained; we don't get to decide how people's surnames are spelled; we should observe how they are spelled. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:45, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
What's pure invention? Suggest rewording in 1.1: "Removing the hyphen would be wrong:" lest some dimwit thinks to add hyphens to unhyphenated names. --Laser brain (talk) 20:34, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) does anyone know what "South-West winds" would use? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 22:44, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Spacing: All disjunctive en dashes are unspaced, except when there is a space within either or both of the items (the New York – Sydney flight; the New Zealand – South Africa grand final; July 3, 1888 – August 18, 1940, but July–August 1940).

I rarely see full dates squashed up, so it's clearly intuitive. In the case of "Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act", a purist would suggest the use of an en dash (it's very compressed with a hyphen). Smoot–Hawley looks better, to start with, and is not an individual's surname (like Lady Featherstone-Morley, who now has no eyebrows), but the coming together of the surnames of two congressional representatives. That's how I'd advise if starting from scratch, but I'm not sure it's worth changing now. Problem is, I'm practically sure that Congress uses a hyphen in its official publications, a carry-over from the typewriter era. I don't have CMOS handy, but they probably go for the hyphen too, although CMOS is so often ... not very good. "African-American"—CMOS says hyphenate, and Noetica agrees. He won't mind my pasting this in from an email:

CMOS is deeply committed to hyphens in most cases anyway, so their ruling is predictable and consistent.... In fact even New Hart's (p. 80) allows both styles in different circumstances, if we go by its ruling on Greek conjoined with American: "Greek–American negotiations", but "Greek-American wife". In fact, I go along with that. Many others would also, especially in [BrEng]. So I favour "He is an African-American [poet]"; and I favour "African–American trade tensions", and yes: "joint American–British project".

Anderson: "And this is very largely our invention; Wikipedia should follow the usage of good printed sources, not invent out own." No, WP does what is best for its readers. It is no slave to printed sources, since it's read online, not on dead trees, and has a unique readership profile. That doesn't mean that WP doesn't take notice of dead-tree sources; but it judges them in context. I'll reword 1.1; receiving your endorsement for one of the exercises was far more than I'd expected. Tony (talk) 04:45, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

In case anyone is interested, Section 5.117 of CMOS 14th ed. states: "The en dash is also used in place of a hyphen in a compound adjective when one of the elements of the adjective is an open compound (such as New York) or when two or more of the elements are hyphenated compounds." So, the en dash would only be used in something like "New York–London flight" or "post–Civil War period". However, in the same breath it also instructs the writer on communicating such marks to the typesetter, proving Tony's point that we are not serving the same master. --Laser brain (talk) 05:04, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
I've found that to be awkward. Scientific American, which has editorial standards I admire, went with it for a while largely to avoid the triple-bungers that are a problem in much science writing ("ultra high–bandwidth connection" for "ultra-high-bandwidth connection"); however, I think they've dropped it. Must check. Tony (talk) 10:26, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Except for two or three issues, like linking, we are producing text-strings, just as though we were killing trees; in fact, we provide a facility to print out our articles. This is not one of the exceptions; we are not entitled to invent new standards, nor are the half-dosen of us entitled to impose new standands on the rest of Wikipedia. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:12, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Matthew: "south-west winds", but most people write "southwest winds", especially in North America. But "east–west runway", because direction/motion ("to") is involved. Tony (talk) 10:29, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

(parentheses)

Why are the subpages of this page indicated by parentheses? For example, shouldn't Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) really be Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers? Teh Rote (talk) 20:17, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

You could ask why it's not Manual of style, too. People seem to be unwilling to make costly moves now that these features are part of the furniture. Tony (talk) 15:00, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I do ask. Weigh the costs of self-violation in the eyes of the competition and the public media, versus that of making a few well-placed redirects. --Rfsmit (talk) 21:29, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Ah, but they are not subpages, Teh Rote. They are "supplementary pages". At least that's the unofficially official view. (snicker) Waltham, The Duke of 17:19, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Would you also suggest that Lost (TV series)'s extended articles should be Lost (TV series)/List of episodes, Lost (TV series)/Season 1 etc etc? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 21:53, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Well, no, because sub-pages are disabled in the article space. Teh Rote (talk) 00:52, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Bold text in headings

The section on Section headings states: "The triple apostrophes ( ''' ) that make words appear in boldface are not used in headings." I'm not sure what the rationale for this rule is, but shouldn't an exception be made for text that would also appear in bold in running text? In mathematical discourse it is common to use boldface for certain types of quantities, such as vectors and fields, and in theoretical computer science for complexity classes. See, for example, NP (complexity)#Why some NP problems are hard to solve.  --Lambiam 11:25, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

The rationale is the very simple technical explanation that Wikipedia already applies boldness to section headers with CSS, so it's superfluous. I'd also argue that Wikipedia generally avoids the kind of markup proliferation common to scientific texts, and that while including such markup in the article body may help with readability it just creates inconsistency in article headers. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:40, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
On my browser I see do extra boldness coming in if I use the apostrophes (I've edited the heading of this section as an example). I guess there might be rare occasions where this might be of some use, but we don't necessarily have to anticipate every possible exception in the MoS (it already says in the lead that there will be occasional exceptions).--Kotniski (talk) 11:50, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

But you don't see it on level 3 headers

Or on level 4 headers

Ahem. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:55, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

If there is one thing I hate right now, that is inconsistencies. If "in mathematical discourse it is common to use boldface for certain types of quantities, such as vectors and fields, and in theoretical computer science for complexity classes", then why is there no mention of either here? Waltham, The Duke of 20:10, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Watering down of non-use of pixel sizes

A few hours ago, I changed the wording back to saying that the size of images should not be specified. This was previously the wording, and was consistent with the established consensus and with Wikipedia:Image use policy. While I was correcting the removal of the explanation of when the lead image of an article should be have a size specified, I had an edit conflict with another editor who put back the wording of saying that specifying image sizes is not necessary, which is completely different to not recommended. It is my recollection that not recommended had consensus because specifying size over-rides user preferences. Has consensus changed to say that forcing small images (less than 300px) is now preferable to following user preferences? --AliceJMarkham (talk) 13:36, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like (hopefully) just an edit conflict situation. I've not seen the consensus change (and I hope it doesn't). – Kieran T (talk) 13:52, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
The edit conflict was specifically with a reversion of my correction of the wording. --AliceJMarkham (talk) 13:55, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

The word 'necessary' has been stable for half a year now, since I put it in there [3] I think the facts on the ground back me up here. Check the featured article today for example, it specifies sizes for all but one of its images. We can't reasonably tell people that this is "not recommended" when it's actually widespread practice and not objected to even in the articles that have received the most scrutiny. Haukur (talk) 15:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

The word 'necessary' has been contrary to established consensus for 6 months. That doesn't make it right. If you want to establish a new consensus for rewording the MoS, Wikipedia:Image use policy and Wikipedia:Extended image syntax and doing a complete about turn compared to existing consensus, I'd suggest that you should set up a poll on this issue and not change the wording against existing consensus until the results of that poll are in. In the meantime, I request that you leave the MoS consistent with current consensus, WP:IUP and WP:EIS. --AliceJMarkham (talk) 07:16, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Alice. There is consensus that overriding default thumb size user preferences should only be done when there is a strong justification for doing so. "It looks nicer to me this way" is not a strong justification, because it fails to take into account the fact that people view Wikipedia with a range of device resolutions and network bandwidths. Hesperian 07:32, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Surely the fact that explicit pixel sizes are very commonly used, even in featured articles, is more compelling evidence as to what current consensus is than statements appearing on other possibly little-read policy pages?--Kotniski (talk) 07:59, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Exactly, consensus is as consensus does. Today's featured article gives us another example. The prohibition Alice and Hesperian are supporting is a dead letter, not actually followed or supported by the general editor. Haukur (talk) 08:19, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
That sounds back-to-front to me. It used to be standard practice to specify them, then user preference was added to mediawiki. Once user preference was added, fixed sizes became deprecated and, I understand, intended to be phased out. The reason why they weren't all yanked out by a bot is that there are some legitimate reasons for having them in specific circumstances. The fact that one editor has changed the wording of the MoS and it has managed to stay that way for months has meant that users are unaware that it is intended for them to be phased out, which means that they have remained in common use. Multiple polls over years have maintained the consensus that they shouldn't be there, with the only variation being the strength of the wording. Using common misuse due to an error in the MoS to justify continued misuse doesn't seem right to me. --AliceJMarkham (talk) 08:16, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't think multiple polls (though you would do well to link to them) hold much weight against actual practice. At most 1% of Wikipedia's readers are logged in and let's generously say that 10% of them change their image size preferences. That gives us at most 0.1% of readers seeing anything but the (usually too small) 180 px default. That's just no good which is why image size is commonly specified. Haukur (talk) 08:23, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
BTW, congratulations on breaking WP:3RR. --AliceJMarkham (talk) 11:51, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I didn't. Neither did you. Haukur (talk) 11:58, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Indeed you're correct. You reverted 3 times. I'd forgotten that 3RR is for exceeding 3. My apologies. --AliceJMarkham (talk) 13:10, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
It's okay, we could have gone slower anyway. Haukur (talk) 13:18, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Ooh, that sounds like fun. :p --AliceJMarkham (talk) 13:34, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
180px is too small for you, on your screen, at your bandwidth. Try telling someone on dialup, or a handheld computer, that their explicit thumb size preferences are to be overruled on a whim. If you are so sure that the 180px default default is usually too small, then you are at liberty to address that problem by submitting a bug report asking for the default default to be changed. What you shouldn't be doing is working around that perceived problem by institutionalising the bad habit of over-ruling user preferences on dodgy grounds. Hesperian 11:53, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
P.S. I have protected this page for next two days; edit warring sets the wrong tone for this discussion. Hesperian 11:53, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I think this probably isn't needed any more, as the participants are talking here, but can you at least put the right template on the page to indicate it's protected? Livitup (talk) 15:53, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Is it okay if I just go ahead and unprotect it? We'll play nice and other sections may need to be edited. Until I get a reply I'll add a 'protected' template. Note that it's "my" version that's protected so I have nothing to "gain" from unprotecting it. Haukur (talk) 19:44, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree, unprotect it. We might aim at a compromise wording which points out the issues while letting editors make the decision.--Kotniski (talk) 19:55, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Sounds like a plan, I'll go ahead then. Haukur (talk) 20:09, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
180px is too small for the typical user on the typical screen at the typical bandwidth. A tiny percentage of readers has an explicit thumb size specified. I agree, however, that the users should be able to set a preference that overrides explicit size specifications. That's the only bug that should be fixed, but it's a fairly minor one. Haukur (talk) 11:58, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Actually, let me strike that - not because it's untrue but because it's a poor way to approach the problem. The whole point is that different images require different width settings. Some images are indeed fine with a width of 180px. More typically something like 220px or 250px is a more appropriate size. Any one-size-fits-all solution will unnecessarily nail our feet to the ground. Haukur (talk) 12:06, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
And you do realize that you have a big honking 500px image on your user page, right? :) Haukur (talk) 12:39, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree with Haukur's arguments. We shouldn't be shaping our policy to suit a very small percentage of users who have set preferences, if in doing so we make the experience of the encyclopedia worse for the vast majority. And the community pretty much seems to have decided this one by its actions.--Kotniski (talk) 13:15, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

While I can see where Haukur is coming from, I think that a more appropriate course of action to address non-logged-in users would be a feature request to mediawiki for the "default" size of images to be proportioned to the width of the browser window at the time that the page is loaded. I'm pretty sure that the browser will return the size of the viewable area if asked, and using this to select one of the existing set of sizes would improve the wikipedia experience for all users who are not logged in. Mind you, I'd also like to see at least one larger size option than 300px available in preferences, since I run my browser at 1600x1200. I also don't know how accurate his 1% logged in and 10% change prefs numbers are. I'd be curious to know if wikimedia accumulates page hits stats that are able to provide a real figure for this. --AliceJMarkham (talk) 13:34, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I would be curious too, those were just guesses at an upper limit. I'll see if I can find any actual numbers. Haukur (talk) 14:32, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I give up. It would be fairly easy to log the ratio of hits from logged in vs. logged out users but perhaps this isn't currently being done. Assumptions similar to mine seem to be commonplace, though. Here's an example:
"Users who are logged in (an exceedingly small minority of users to whom this change is not really directed) will see the actual, current version of the page. This makes sense: such users are typically those who are editing Wikipedia, they will understand these changes which will be opaque to more than 99% of the Wikipedia users."[4]
As for how many logged in users change the default size of images I had no luck getting actual numbers on that either. My gut feeling is that 10% is quite a generous guess for that and that the real number is probably quite a bit smaller. I'm open for other views/guesses, of course. Haukur (talk) 14:56, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Whatever the figures, it must realistically be only a very small minority who have the setting configured. Alice's idea for a feature request is worth pursuing though - something needs to be done to ensure articles with images (and other objects, like tables) display sensibly regardless of browser parameters. I'm often annoyed when, for example, picture galleries are superimposed on infoboxes, or expanses of whitespace appear due to image aligning problems. And editors can hardly be blamed for this, since in another browser configuration the same pages might look perfectly all right.--Kotniski (talk) 16:11, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
It would indeed be nice if something could be done about that. I also think Masem's ideas are very sensible. Haukur (talk) 17:16, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
There's two points that I would add to this discussion.
  • One thing not to forget is what happens when an article prints. Best I can tell, the images stay at the user's settings when the print is called. While we should avoid specifying image size, there should be a reasonable allowance that when an image has fine detail that just is not visible at the default 180px particularly in print mode (as you can't click to make it larger once its on paper) we should have allowance that detailed images may need more pixel space. (Also, I think that this becomes a problem if we altered the mediawiki software to detect browser sizes, as when it prints, the image will (likely) not be reloaded, and thus print at the screen resolution-based size, possibly exceeding reasonably dimensions on paper.)
  • What would it take to have the mediawiki software altered to add additional size "classes" as the current "thumb" allows? That is, maybe if we had perhaps two addition size classes: "medium" that would default around 250px, and "large" defaulting to around 350px, but both classes overridable by user preferences. "thumb" is still preferred over these, but that would allow non-specific size setting still adjustable by user prefs; a user may want all images at 180px and thus set that size for each of these other classes, and that's their loss if the page editor believed a larger size was needed, but for the bulk of users, these will come out fine and we'll still be true to the intent of avoided specifying image sizes. --MASEM 16:23, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Have tried to bring developers into this discussion via bugzilla: bug 14785. It was marked as a duplicate of bug 495; this is a developer Brion Vibber's reply:

As long as we deal in raster images, there's not a good feasible way to size images based on window size (and even if there was, it's probably not a good idea).
As a totally separate issue, it would be nice if the default thumb size varied appropriately with images of different aspect ratios -- the fixed width system is pretty crappy at this, which is a large part of the reason explicit sizes are often used.
In general, though, "pixel"s are the only actually portable size specifier for the web -- and they don't refer to physical device pixels for extremely high-resolution devices such as printers and high-resolution displays (on systems actually optimized for it with resolution-independent UIs -- most current systems are *altogether awful* on high-resolution displays, by which I mean high-DPI displays, not "really big screens with lots of pixels" which have relatively low pixel densities, and are perfect for nice pixel-specified images and *many windows* on the screen at once).

--Kotniski (talk) 07:30, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I have edited the relevant section of the MOS with what I hope will be a wording more or less satisfactory to all. I also removed two paragraphs which didn't seem to add anything that wasn't obvious. I'm off for a few days' break now, so I'll leave it with you.--Kotniski (talk) 08:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I can definitely live with that. It's short and to the point and leaves final judgment to the editor. Haukur (talk) 08:44, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm not 100% happy with it, but I'll live with it for a while and see how it translates to actual articles. --AliceJMarkham (talk) 02:33, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Reopening this discussion

Woah woah woah. All the discussion above seems to rather neatly sidestep the original question: whether the lead image in articles should be special-cased - a long-standing exception to the "don't specify sizes" guideline. Given that consensus very much is for special-casing the first image (it's done practically everywhere), this should be put back in - in a stroke, the MoS has recommended that the majority of article lead images be reduced to about 40% of their original size. Some version of this should go back in. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 13:36, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

No objections from me. Haukur (talk) 14:35, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Nor from me, but the version that goes in should make sense (unlike the version I removed).--Kotniski (talk) 07:51, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I've re-added some wording on this. Comments? Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 09:13, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Well, the injunction against specifying sizes less than 300px for the lead image again puts us squarely in conflict with actual practice. Checking the lead images of the FAs today and yesterday I see they're set at 220px and 200px. Haukur (talk) 10:58, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Are you sure? Until ten days ago that was exactly what the MoS had said for some time, and I certainly don't think it's uncommon. Could it be that your sample set (of, umm, two) is a little small? Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:43, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I'll increase my sample size by 50%. Check the featured article the day before yesterday and you'll see the lead image is set to 250px. So far this guideline is batting a zero. But it's not specific to these article, the size tends to be specified in the infobox templates. Take Template:Infobox Settlement as an example. Haukur (talk) 13:43, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Infoboxen have their own guidelines (30em/250px) because of the additional bulk of the infobox itself. The point I'm trying to make is that (a) said "injunction" had been in place for some time (and despite anecdotal evidence is used on various articles) and (b) that specifying a different override of the first thumbnail's size isn't really "at odds" with such a guideline but merely a variation of it. I'm happy to discuss the specific size of 300px; I was a bit concerned that the provision for overriding the 180px default on the lead image was removed in its entirety from the section. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 14:42, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Lead images are as often as not in infoboxes and the boxes are not all 250px. In my opinion lead images rarely display satisfactorily at 180px so the guideline already had support for large lead images. Haukur (talk) 15:09, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
The wording it used was, and I quote, "It may be appropriate to specify the size of a lead image that captures the essence of the article, but it is recommended that lead images be no smaller than 300px, as this will make the image smaller for users who have set 300px in their user preferences." This text was removed in its entirety, thus leaving no provision for having a larger first image. That's the whole point of this sub-thread. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 15:29, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
New wording is fine to me. Cheers! Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:49, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
  1. ^