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The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:March 14, 1891, lynchings. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
"Canada in particular is undergoing major usage shifts, as can be seen by comparing fairly current Canadian dictionaries and style guides with those from the 1990s and earlier (on the plus side, it's shifting away from chaos and slowly towards standardization) ... we know the shifts are moving from the coastal cities inland)"—can you throw some sources my way? These are surprising things to read—I'm not aware of such "major shifts" that have occurred since I was in high school in the 1990s, and the idea that "shifts are moving from the coastal cities inland" seems counterintuitive—traditionally (and from personal experience) the east coast tends to be linguistically conservative. I'd be surprised if there were trends converging from both coasts, and I'm not aware of any evidence of that. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:01, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
The current Canadian dictionaries and style guides go into some of the corpus material, and at least one of them discusses changes that are underway; I think Editing Canadian English has the most of that material. The works that're more specific are journal papers; some might be cited at Canadian English; I don't presently have JSTOR, etc., but it's worth seeing what's come out from 2005 onward. After construction at my place, lots of my books are in boxes; the two to look at first would be latest editions of Editing Canadian English (2000) and The Canadian Style (1997), and compare what they say to old editions. I'm pulling the dates from Amazon listings. Oxford also puts out two Canadian English dictionaries (both 2005, with different editors; I think I have only one of them), and a Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation (2003, which I do have, but it's a pocket book), and a Guide to Canadian English Usage (2005; I don't think I have that one yet). One of the university-oriented style manuals produced in the US by Diana Hacker, et al., also has an adapted Canadian edition, which I have around somewhere, though I'd consider that a tertiary source (someone Canadian just edited it to reflect a few Can. vs. US distinctions). That's A Canadian Writer's Referece; I have 2011, but there's a 2016 version now (too expensive for what it is, if you ask me, though it's on discount sale at Amazon right now). The first two I mentioned, and the Oxford GCEU, are the big ones, and they conflict on many points. Oh! Editing Canadian English is now out in the new 3rd ed. [1] (2015; it was still in production last I'd looked). Should provide an additional reference point on what's shifting, by comparing three successive editions. There's also the Canadian Press Stylebook (2013 seems to be latest edition, and I think mine's from 2008 or so), which will reflect news-style biases from AP Stylebook, etc. – lots of punctuation-dropping, space-dropping, and other compression techniques.
Anyway, the gist is that on any choices between "American" and "British" style, Canadian usage is mixed, the mixture varies regionally, and it's shifting over time in various ways (maybe more since the '80s than the '90s). I didn't live there long enough to entirely absorb the style, or determine sub-styles, and that was over a decade ago anyway. I have not tried to work much on the
Canadian English article, or I would have a much better sense of exactly which sources say what.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
06:00, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
How much stability there is or isn't in Canadian orthography will be clear from a comparison of current and generation-old or older Canadian style guides and dictionaries. Whether to characterize the shift as "major" or not seems like not worth arguing about; the important thing is whether the orthography is actual stabilizing or becoming more diverse again. What I was seeing half a decade ago was a nascent trend toward standardization; since at least two of the key works have more recent editions, they're liable to indicate whether the trend continued or foundered. Another set of sources is academic material. I don't have a lot of it on hand, but references to it are easy to find via Google in minutes. From the 1960s to ca. 2000, it's been frequently questioned whether Canadian English (especially in written form) really exists as a consistent, identifiable thing unto itself, generally because of a refusal to standardize, i.e. because of an embracement of conflicting, diverse usage, which varies greatly on a regional basis, over time, and especially in areas of differing cultural history, and this uncertainty is tied closely to a comparative lack of a strong national identity among Canadians (Bednarek 2009, citing lots of previous work [2]). Lilles (2000) [3] and Sutherland (2000) [4] seem to be the most-cited in this regard; the first of these has been subjected to a some criticism [5], but it still referenced a lot.
The key question is whether standardization has reduced or increased in the last generation. And it's really more a question (and research) for the
Canadian English article, which appears to ignore this controversy entirely; our article is engaging in
begging the question, and what looks like some original research. It really doesn't have much to do with MoS, at which we do appear to have a consensus to treat Canadian English (to the extent it can be identified) as a major national variety for ENGVAR purposes, though perhaps at the cost of setting up potential arguments down the road about exactly what that means in orthographic terms. The lack of active disputes seems to suggest either that that orthography's become rather stable during or maybe even before WP's existence (WP started Jan. 2001), or that Canadians in the aggregate are loath to argue with much insistence about such matters (which is actually a reliably sourceable possibility), or both.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
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10:10, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
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You are invited to view the closure at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Proposal: Adopt WP:WikiProject Video games/Article guidelines into MoS, an RFC launched by you. ~ Winged Blades Godric 05:08, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandish. Just a note to let you know I've closed an RFC you initiated, at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#RfC:_Capitalisation_of_traditional_game/sports_terminology. Apologies for the delay, I'm working through the closure backlog as best I can. Kind regards, Fish+ Karate 13:12, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
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I saw your comment here. The dispute on this article goes back a few years, and if I can summarise from memory, there is a group of editors who believe that as Ayurveda is sometimes portrayed as being efficacious medicine in the modern age, it should be fully subject to MEDRS. Therefore the article's lead should begin by debunking it. Then there is another group which says that as this is a belief system which predates modern medicine, the lead should be a summary of its history. I can see that there may be merits on both sides, or at least that neither view is automatically disruptive or against our principles. Historically, there were savage back-and-forths in editing and much name-calling on the talk page. I was asked to take a look and (again from memory) initially applied 0RR and a strict civility rule. A couple of editors were blocked, I think there was a central discussion, my actions were upheld, the restriction was changed to a prohibition on edit-warring, and the article settled down for about three years. Fast forward to the present. As far as I can see, the restrictions have worked, and it's hard to argue given the history that a return to open warfare is in anybody's interest. Articles are not improved by name-calling or edit-warring. They are improved by civilised discussion, a strong consensus from a wide range of editors, and a willingness to compromise in the face of nuance. I don't see any tearing hurry to resolve this as the article is protected for a while; I will read up on the story again in the next few days and see if I remember it all correctly, and what, if anything, needs to be changed. I believe I am in quite a good position to judge this, as I am neither involved nor WP:INVOLVED in the situation, and I think the years of peace on the article bear out my admin judgement. On the other hand the article isn't terribly good. Perhaps one of the problems has been the historical focus on what the lead should say, a sign that there are camps of editors who want the article to take very different slants. Perhaps rather than arguing about the first paragraph, there needs to be a discussion about what exactly the article should be about, and how much weight it gives to the subject's history, and how much to its manifestation in the present day. It's a difficult situation and I'd be grateful for your thoughts on it, either here or at article talk. -- John ( talk) 22:20, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
The key encyclopedic challenge with things like this is that none of the central tenets have a scientific basis. No one can find chi or kunalini "energy" in laboratory-controlled conditions. Ergo, it appears to be in the same category as semi-recent Western belief in phlogiston, the four elements, cold as a force unto itself (rather than lack of heat), the idea that disease can be cured with mercury and leeches and is caused by bad air or the Devil, acceptance of Fruedian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypes, and so on. Some of these beliefs (especially in Satan, Freud, and Jung) are still prevalent in certain circles, but we do not treat them as a form of scientifically backed medical diagnosis on Wikipedia.
I've seen people raise this before, so I'll pre-emptively address it here: I think that MEDRS being "only a guideline" is similar to CIVILPOV being "only an essay"; it's the wrong approach to thinking about it at all. Guidelines are best practices we really should be following unless there are very strong reasons to not do so in a particular case. The principal difference between policies and guidelines isn't even level of consensus, but the nature of the rules: policies are the bare minimum for the project to be functional at all, while guidelines are what enable to it run smoothly instead of in fits and starts, and essays (of the site-wide buy-in variety) are what fine-tune it to high performance. They're all consensus. The consensus conflict here is, overall, between V/RS and NOR plus FRINGE and MEDRS on one side, NPOV as the fulcrum, and SYSTEMICBIAS on the other. The consensus weight seems to lean heavily against playing up ayurveda as medicine.
The fact that ayurveda is old has nothing at all to do with how we present its efficaciousness; exorcism of disease demons and application of leeches and such are also ancient. The lead should include a brief summary of ayurveda's history, but also include the skeptical scientific consensus (which includes doctors from India – plenty of scientists come from there and not everyone's a devout Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain, any more than everyone in the West is all about Jesus and the Bible). The medical responsibility angle would suggest front-loading that material, even if the bulk of the lead is the historical background. That's the long version; I could distill the key points to a couple of sentences for the article talk page if it would be helpful, but I tend not to wander onto such pages if I can help it; they seem to be drama magnets.
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Bitcoin Cash. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
In case you haven't read it, this might interest you: Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million. Thinker78 ( talk) 05:26, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
I have been editing the article Pieve Vergonte and someone placed said template in the article. I'm a member of the guild, but I don't know what to make of the template. For me, it is saying that all guild members may be working on the article, but it may mean also that a single editor is editing the article and that I shouldn't edit. Also, the template may have been placed because I am working on the article. How should I interpret the template? In the guild, it says "Consider adding {{GOCEinuse}} to articles you are in the process of copy editing", but the template itself says, "This article or section is currently undergoing a major edit by the Guild of Copy Editors. As a courtesy, please do not edit this page while this message is displayed", which seems to be saying that editors who are not guild members should not edit, but guild members are working on it and are welcome to edit. It is kind of confusing the seemingly contradictory information. Maybe the template should say that a member is working on the article, that way other members and editors would understand they shouldn't edit while it is up? Thinker78 ( talk) 04:23, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
{{
In use}}
. You could probably just boldly redirect it, and failing that, take it to
WP:TFD. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
17:02, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:List of oldest living people. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
[6] E Eng 22:50, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Appeasement. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandlish The Arbitration Committee has asked that evidence presentations be kept to around 500 words and 50 diffs. Your presentation is over 1400 words. Please edit your section to focus on the most relevant evidence. If you wish to submit over-length evidence, you must first obtain the agreement of the arbitrators by posting a request on the /Evidence talk page. For the Arbitration Committee, Amortias ( T)( C) 00:45, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
As a part of this discussion from a few years ago, you managed to convince the W3C to update their copy of the specification and their cheatsheet for <cite>. However, the WHATWG still uses the old definition (both in the element definition and its suggested rendering, and apparently their FAQ [ FAQ spot 2]). Do you know the best way to herd those cats to The Better Way? :) -- Izno ( talk) 02:42, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
The One True HTML5struck me as a correct analysis after reading this bit in their FAQ. -- Izno ( talk) 04:32, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi. Should proper names be enclosed in {{
lang}}? I've just been to
Anatole France and someone has templated every single french word and name. This strikes me as extreme, but I'd leave well enough alone if there were no harm. But {{
lang}} automatically italicizes everything, so in many of these cases, either the template has to be removed, or it has to be supplemented with |italic=unset
. The closest direction I find is
MOS:LANG which gives Assemblée nationale as an appropriately-templated term, but I couldn't find explicit direction on personal names, and figured you'd have some insight. Thanks.
Phil wink (
talk)
20:32, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Munich ({{lang-de|italic=no|München}})
. It's not wrong to do something like {{
lang|fr|italic=no|Guillaume Apollinaire}}
, but it probably serves no encyclopedic purpose except in the person's own lead (all it's going to do for a proper name by itself is offer a pronunciation clue to higher-end screen readers with multilingual support). It's arguably important that our articles indicate correct pronunciation at the subject's own article – though we also have templates that do this – but not such much in a running sentence that happens to mention that person, especially given that in running English the average speaker is very unlikely to drop into a French-correct pronunciation of a name like Guillaume Apollinaire, and doing so can be distracting.E.g., I watched a lot of stuff about Montserrat after the volcano went off there, and about 90% of the time, English-speaking newscasters used the English pronunciation, /mɒntsəˈræt/ (mont-suh-RAT) or something close to this (often without the first t), about 9% of the time a bastardized "Franglais" pronunciation along the lines of /mɒnseˈra/ (mon-say-RAH), which came across as pretentious, and in one case the correct French (which our own article doesn't even use; it's something like /mõse'ʁa/ (with a nasalized first vowel, and a guttural r), which was so distracting I tended to lose track of the sentence. The same effect is sometimes heard in the Southwestern US when certain Hispanic newscasters insist on full-Spanish pronunciation of Spanish names even for subjects (like various actors and sports figures with English as their first or only language) who don't use them (think "Gonzales" approximately as "gohn-SAH-lace"). It's a form of hypercorrection, similar to insisting on sticking in a č in names that shouldn't have one like Stana Katic (the fact that her grandfather would have used Katič is irrelevant).
Anyway, some argue not to use lang templates for proper names at all, only for words, because Guillaume Apollinaire is the guy's name in English, and Spanish, and whathaveyou, not just in French. This view would make an exception for Munich ({{lang-de|italic=no|München}})
, since the names differ. Another way of looking at it is that my first name "Stanton" tends to get converted into /əstän'ton/ (uhStahn-TONE) or /ə'stänton/ (uhSTAHN-tone) by Spanish speakers, instead of /'Stæntən/ (the "STAN-tuhn" you'd probably expect), or in some English dialects, /`Stæʔən/ with a glottal stop and almost no final vowel before the n – "STA'-nn"). But Spanish Wikipedia should not use /əstän'ton/ (much less the more Castillian /əsθän'ton/ with a 'th' sound) to render my name if they had an article on me; that would be
eye dialect, bending orthography to try to match colloquial speaking accent.
The short version: There's not a clear consensus on when to use language templates with proper names, but it's generally minimized, and only used when it seems particularly helpful at a first occurrence, usually to contrast English and something else. When we need to indicate pronunciation of a proper name (including English versus something else) we usually do it with pronunciation templates, as at
Tycho Brahe (though the audio file once provided for that one in Danish was terrible; the speaker ran it together sloppily as something like /ˈtɪgəˈbrɑ/ when it should have been enunciated clearly and as two names, as /ˈtyːə ˈbʁɑ/; I see that someone's finally removed it from the article). Given the recent re-tooling of the lang templates (and the auto-italicization that is non-trivial to turn off), we now have an additional reason to not use lang templates around person and place names; it will vastly clutter up the markup if we don't we reserve the use of the template around proper names for cases where it's especially pertinent. Sorry this is a long answer, but the point is to provide several points of argument articulation. We probably need to revisit this at MoS, especially since the template changes have serious consequences of code bloat, a problem that didn't exist only a couple of months ago.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
22:53, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
{{lang|fr|Assemblée nationale}}
), and the italics appear to be merely an artifact of the template update — it seems likely that this update has changed, even contradicted, the intended style advice in the Manual of Style itself. Finally (in case you have to give this advice again), you've suggested using |italic=no
above, but on balance it seems to me more sound to use |italic=unset
. The first forces no italic regardless of circumstance, whereas the second just goes with whatever the wikicode around it demands. This second option seems much more intuitive from a user perspective, and would continue yielding non-surprising results if, say, the code were copied for use in a different context. Cheers.
Phil wink (
talk)
00:41, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
{{
lang|xx}}
and {{
lang-xx}}
versions of the templates for a given language were inconsistent. Some peeps are working on tracking down all the italicized cases that shouldn't be in italics; see
Template talk:Lang for more info; I think they'd appreciate more eyes and hands on the job. I would like to see a shorthand syntax like |i=n
(or |i=u
, |i=y
) also be available. You're correct about MOS:LANG and {{
lang|fr|Assemblée nationale}}
; last I looked at MOS:LANG and was working on it, it was not yet certain whether the templates would auto-italicize, and since they now do, that needs an update to show |italics=unset
; the rule is to not italicize proper names of any kind (unless they would be italicized for some other reason, e.g. being a book title). I agree on |italics=unset
versus |italics=no
; I hadn't thought about it until this second, because I'm generally working in plain article text where the non-italics is the desired result for such thing. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:19, 20 February 2018 (UTC)The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Robin Hood. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
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Will "water ski" still be separate words under your proposal? If so I can fully support it. Thanks. Randy Kryn ( talk) 14:46, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
I hate to sound like a broken "Mr. Critical" record, but I think you're taking an unhelpful approach to this. It's not a tit-for-tat negotiation; we do not support or oppose based on whether we'll get what we want later on some side topic. Whether it should be "water ski[s]", "water-ski[s]" or "waterski[s]" as a noun is completely irrelevant to the question of what to do with the verb and the verbal/gerund forms for the activity (and directly derived regular nouns like "waterskier"). More to the point, what you (or I, or whoever) prefer is irrelevant; we do what needs to be done, with an eye to consistency when the sources support it, and tolerant of inconsistency between different grammatical forms when they don't. I've not done the "water[-]ski" noun research because it's not the RM before us, and the answer to the question would have no bearing on this RM. It's basically the same as the "comma-Jr." thing; what you or I love [in my off-WP writing, I habitually use that comma, though I realize it dates me] and what was firmly traditional (at all or in a particular dialect) in 1977 is out the window if usage in reputable sources has provably changed. (I have no idea whether "water ski" [n] has been changing). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:21, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Hey SMcCandlish, I have a question on university naming… specifically University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. It was recently moved to remove the endash because "that's what the university wants." However, I disagree, because most of the time we use the endash for universities like this not the dash. Not sure if the others at WT:MOS would agree with you or not, but since you've been helpful in the past, I figured I'd ask you first… what do we use? Thanks, Corky 02:58, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
There is a discussion about whether to add clarifying text (shown in boldface) to MOS:JOBTITLES at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Clarification of "Titles of people" that you may be interested in. Sincerely, HopsonRoad ( talk) 14:26, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 130 | ← | Archive 133 | Archive 134 | Archive 135 | Archive 136 | Archive 137 | → | Archive 140 |
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:March 14, 1891, lynchings. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
"Canada in particular is undergoing major usage shifts, as can be seen by comparing fairly current Canadian dictionaries and style guides with those from the 1990s and earlier (on the plus side, it's shifting away from chaos and slowly towards standardization) ... we know the shifts are moving from the coastal cities inland)"—can you throw some sources my way? These are surprising things to read—I'm not aware of such "major shifts" that have occurred since I was in high school in the 1990s, and the idea that "shifts are moving from the coastal cities inland" seems counterintuitive—traditionally (and from personal experience) the east coast tends to be linguistically conservative. I'd be surprised if there were trends converging from both coasts, and I'm not aware of any evidence of that. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:01, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
The current Canadian dictionaries and style guides go into some of the corpus material, and at least one of them discusses changes that are underway; I think Editing Canadian English has the most of that material. The works that're more specific are journal papers; some might be cited at Canadian English; I don't presently have JSTOR, etc., but it's worth seeing what's come out from 2005 onward. After construction at my place, lots of my books are in boxes; the two to look at first would be latest editions of Editing Canadian English (2000) and The Canadian Style (1997), and compare what they say to old editions. I'm pulling the dates from Amazon listings. Oxford also puts out two Canadian English dictionaries (both 2005, with different editors; I think I have only one of them), and a Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation (2003, which I do have, but it's a pocket book), and a Guide to Canadian English Usage (2005; I don't think I have that one yet). One of the university-oriented style manuals produced in the US by Diana Hacker, et al., also has an adapted Canadian edition, which I have around somewhere, though I'd consider that a tertiary source (someone Canadian just edited it to reflect a few Can. vs. US distinctions). That's A Canadian Writer's Referece; I have 2011, but there's a 2016 version now (too expensive for what it is, if you ask me, though it's on discount sale at Amazon right now). The first two I mentioned, and the Oxford GCEU, are the big ones, and they conflict on many points. Oh! Editing Canadian English is now out in the new 3rd ed. [1] (2015; it was still in production last I'd looked). Should provide an additional reference point on what's shifting, by comparing three successive editions. There's also the Canadian Press Stylebook (2013 seems to be latest edition, and I think mine's from 2008 or so), which will reflect news-style biases from AP Stylebook, etc. – lots of punctuation-dropping, space-dropping, and other compression techniques.
Anyway, the gist is that on any choices between "American" and "British" style, Canadian usage is mixed, the mixture varies regionally, and it's shifting over time in various ways (maybe more since the '80s than the '90s). I didn't live there long enough to entirely absorb the style, or determine sub-styles, and that was over a decade ago anyway. I have not tried to work much on the
Canadian English article, or I would have a much better sense of exactly which sources say what.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
06:00, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
How much stability there is or isn't in Canadian orthography will be clear from a comparison of current and generation-old or older Canadian style guides and dictionaries. Whether to characterize the shift as "major" or not seems like not worth arguing about; the important thing is whether the orthography is actual stabilizing or becoming more diverse again. What I was seeing half a decade ago was a nascent trend toward standardization; since at least two of the key works have more recent editions, they're liable to indicate whether the trend continued or foundered. Another set of sources is academic material. I don't have a lot of it on hand, but references to it are easy to find via Google in minutes. From the 1960s to ca. 2000, it's been frequently questioned whether Canadian English (especially in written form) really exists as a consistent, identifiable thing unto itself, generally because of a refusal to standardize, i.e. because of an embracement of conflicting, diverse usage, which varies greatly on a regional basis, over time, and especially in areas of differing cultural history, and this uncertainty is tied closely to a comparative lack of a strong national identity among Canadians (Bednarek 2009, citing lots of previous work [2]). Lilles (2000) [3] and Sutherland (2000) [4] seem to be the most-cited in this regard; the first of these has been subjected to a some criticism [5], but it still referenced a lot.
The key question is whether standardization has reduced or increased in the last generation. And it's really more a question (and research) for the
Canadian English article, which appears to ignore this controversy entirely; our article is engaging in
begging the question, and what looks like some original research. It really doesn't have much to do with MoS, at which we do appear to have a consensus to treat Canadian English (to the extent it can be identified) as a major national variety for ENGVAR purposes, though perhaps at the cost of setting up potential arguments down the road about exactly what that means in orthographic terms. The lack of active disputes seems to suggest either that that orthography's become rather stable during or maybe even before WP's existence (WP started Jan. 2001), or that Canadians in the aggregate are loath to argue with much insistence about such matters (which is actually a reliably sourceable possibility), or both.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
10:10, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
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You were recently listed as a party to or recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility in infobox discussions. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility in infobox discussions/Evidence. Please add your evidence by February 17, 2018, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility in infobox discussions/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 11:49, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
You are invited to view the closure at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Proposal: Adopt WP:WikiProject Video games/Article guidelines into MoS, an RFC launched by you. ~ Winged Blades Godric 05:08, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandish. Just a note to let you know I've closed an RFC you initiated, at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#RfC:_Capitalisation_of_traditional_game/sports_terminology. Apologies for the delay, I'm working through the closure backlog as best I can. Kind regards, Fish+ Karate 13:12, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
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I saw your comment here. The dispute on this article goes back a few years, and if I can summarise from memory, there is a group of editors who believe that as Ayurveda is sometimes portrayed as being efficacious medicine in the modern age, it should be fully subject to MEDRS. Therefore the article's lead should begin by debunking it. Then there is another group which says that as this is a belief system which predates modern medicine, the lead should be a summary of its history. I can see that there may be merits on both sides, or at least that neither view is automatically disruptive or against our principles. Historically, there were savage back-and-forths in editing and much name-calling on the talk page. I was asked to take a look and (again from memory) initially applied 0RR and a strict civility rule. A couple of editors were blocked, I think there was a central discussion, my actions were upheld, the restriction was changed to a prohibition on edit-warring, and the article settled down for about three years. Fast forward to the present. As far as I can see, the restrictions have worked, and it's hard to argue given the history that a return to open warfare is in anybody's interest. Articles are not improved by name-calling or edit-warring. They are improved by civilised discussion, a strong consensus from a wide range of editors, and a willingness to compromise in the face of nuance. I don't see any tearing hurry to resolve this as the article is protected for a while; I will read up on the story again in the next few days and see if I remember it all correctly, and what, if anything, needs to be changed. I believe I am in quite a good position to judge this, as I am neither involved nor WP:INVOLVED in the situation, and I think the years of peace on the article bear out my admin judgement. On the other hand the article isn't terribly good. Perhaps one of the problems has been the historical focus on what the lead should say, a sign that there are camps of editors who want the article to take very different slants. Perhaps rather than arguing about the first paragraph, there needs to be a discussion about what exactly the article should be about, and how much weight it gives to the subject's history, and how much to its manifestation in the present day. It's a difficult situation and I'd be grateful for your thoughts on it, either here or at article talk. -- John ( talk) 22:20, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
The key encyclopedic challenge with things like this is that none of the central tenets have a scientific basis. No one can find chi or kunalini "energy" in laboratory-controlled conditions. Ergo, it appears to be in the same category as semi-recent Western belief in phlogiston, the four elements, cold as a force unto itself (rather than lack of heat), the idea that disease can be cured with mercury and leeches and is caused by bad air or the Devil, acceptance of Fruedian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypes, and so on. Some of these beliefs (especially in Satan, Freud, and Jung) are still prevalent in certain circles, but we do not treat them as a form of scientifically backed medical diagnosis on Wikipedia.
I've seen people raise this before, so I'll pre-emptively address it here: I think that MEDRS being "only a guideline" is similar to CIVILPOV being "only an essay"; it's the wrong approach to thinking about it at all. Guidelines are best practices we really should be following unless there are very strong reasons to not do so in a particular case. The principal difference between policies and guidelines isn't even level of consensus, but the nature of the rules: policies are the bare minimum for the project to be functional at all, while guidelines are what enable to it run smoothly instead of in fits and starts, and essays (of the site-wide buy-in variety) are what fine-tune it to high performance. They're all consensus. The consensus conflict here is, overall, between V/RS and NOR plus FRINGE and MEDRS on one side, NPOV as the fulcrum, and SYSTEMICBIAS on the other. The consensus weight seems to lean heavily against playing up ayurveda as medicine.
The fact that ayurveda is old has nothing at all to do with how we present its efficaciousness; exorcism of disease demons and application of leeches and such are also ancient. The lead should include a brief summary of ayurveda's history, but also include the skeptical scientific consensus (which includes doctors from India – plenty of scientists come from there and not everyone's a devout Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain, any more than everyone in the West is all about Jesus and the Bible). The medical responsibility angle would suggest front-loading that material, even if the bulk of the lead is the historical background. That's the long version; I could distill the key points to a couple of sentences for the article talk page if it would be helpful, but I tend not to wander onto such pages if I can help it; they seem to be drama magnets.
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Bitcoin Cash. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
In case you haven't read it, this might interest you: Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million. Thinker78 ( talk) 05:26, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
I have been editing the article Pieve Vergonte and someone placed said template in the article. I'm a member of the guild, but I don't know what to make of the template. For me, it is saying that all guild members may be working on the article, but it may mean also that a single editor is editing the article and that I shouldn't edit. Also, the template may have been placed because I am working on the article. How should I interpret the template? In the guild, it says "Consider adding {{GOCEinuse}} to articles you are in the process of copy editing", but the template itself says, "This article or section is currently undergoing a major edit by the Guild of Copy Editors. As a courtesy, please do not edit this page while this message is displayed", which seems to be saying that editors who are not guild members should not edit, but guild members are working on it and are welcome to edit. It is kind of confusing the seemingly contradictory information. Maybe the template should say that a member is working on the article, that way other members and editors would understand they shouldn't edit while it is up? Thinker78 ( talk) 04:23, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
{{
In use}}
. You could probably just boldly redirect it, and failing that, take it to
WP:TFD. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
17:02, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:List of oldest living people. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
[6] E Eng 22:50, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Appeasement. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandlish The Arbitration Committee has asked that evidence presentations be kept to around 500 words and 50 diffs. Your presentation is over 1400 words. Please edit your section to focus on the most relevant evidence. If you wish to submit over-length evidence, you must first obtain the agreement of the arbitrators by posting a request on the /Evidence talk page. For the Arbitration Committee, Amortias ( T)( C) 00:45, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
As a part of this discussion from a few years ago, you managed to convince the W3C to update their copy of the specification and their cheatsheet for <cite>. However, the WHATWG still uses the old definition (both in the element definition and its suggested rendering, and apparently their FAQ [ FAQ spot 2]). Do you know the best way to herd those cats to The Better Way? :) -- Izno ( talk) 02:42, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
The One True HTML5struck me as a correct analysis after reading this bit in their FAQ. -- Izno ( talk) 04:32, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi. Should proper names be enclosed in {{
lang}}? I've just been to
Anatole France and someone has templated every single french word and name. This strikes me as extreme, but I'd leave well enough alone if there were no harm. But {{
lang}} automatically italicizes everything, so in many of these cases, either the template has to be removed, or it has to be supplemented with |italic=unset
. The closest direction I find is
MOS:LANG which gives Assemblée nationale as an appropriately-templated term, but I couldn't find explicit direction on personal names, and figured you'd have some insight. Thanks.
Phil wink (
talk)
20:32, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Munich ({{lang-de|italic=no|München}})
. It's not wrong to do something like {{
lang|fr|italic=no|Guillaume Apollinaire}}
, but it probably serves no encyclopedic purpose except in the person's own lead (all it's going to do for a proper name by itself is offer a pronunciation clue to higher-end screen readers with multilingual support). It's arguably important that our articles indicate correct pronunciation at the subject's own article – though we also have templates that do this – but not such much in a running sentence that happens to mention that person, especially given that in running English the average speaker is very unlikely to drop into a French-correct pronunciation of a name like Guillaume Apollinaire, and doing so can be distracting.E.g., I watched a lot of stuff about Montserrat after the volcano went off there, and about 90% of the time, English-speaking newscasters used the English pronunciation, /mɒntsəˈræt/ (mont-suh-RAT) or something close to this (often without the first t), about 9% of the time a bastardized "Franglais" pronunciation along the lines of /mɒnseˈra/ (mon-say-RAH), which came across as pretentious, and in one case the correct French (which our own article doesn't even use; it's something like /mõse'ʁa/ (with a nasalized first vowel, and a guttural r), which was so distracting I tended to lose track of the sentence. The same effect is sometimes heard in the Southwestern US when certain Hispanic newscasters insist on full-Spanish pronunciation of Spanish names even for subjects (like various actors and sports figures with English as their first or only language) who don't use them (think "Gonzales" approximately as "gohn-SAH-lace"). It's a form of hypercorrection, similar to insisting on sticking in a č in names that shouldn't have one like Stana Katic (the fact that her grandfather would have used Katič is irrelevant).
Anyway, some argue not to use lang templates for proper names at all, only for words, because Guillaume Apollinaire is the guy's name in English, and Spanish, and whathaveyou, not just in French. This view would make an exception for Munich ({{lang-de|italic=no|München}})
, since the names differ. Another way of looking at it is that my first name "Stanton" tends to get converted into /əstän'ton/ (uhStahn-TONE) or /ə'stänton/ (uhSTAHN-tone) by Spanish speakers, instead of /'Stæntən/ (the "STAN-tuhn" you'd probably expect), or in some English dialects, /`Stæʔən/ with a glottal stop and almost no final vowel before the n – "STA'-nn"). But Spanish Wikipedia should not use /əstän'ton/ (much less the more Castillian /əsθän'ton/ with a 'th' sound) to render my name if they had an article on me; that would be
eye dialect, bending orthography to try to match colloquial speaking accent.
The short version: There's not a clear consensus on when to use language templates with proper names, but it's generally minimized, and only used when it seems particularly helpful at a first occurrence, usually to contrast English and something else. When we need to indicate pronunciation of a proper name (including English versus something else) we usually do it with pronunciation templates, as at
Tycho Brahe (though the audio file once provided for that one in Danish was terrible; the speaker ran it together sloppily as something like /ˈtɪgəˈbrɑ/ when it should have been enunciated clearly and as two names, as /ˈtyːə ˈbʁɑ/; I see that someone's finally removed it from the article). Given the recent re-tooling of the lang templates (and the auto-italicization that is non-trivial to turn off), we now have an additional reason to not use lang templates around person and place names; it will vastly clutter up the markup if we don't we reserve the use of the template around proper names for cases where it's especially pertinent. Sorry this is a long answer, but the point is to provide several points of argument articulation. We probably need to revisit this at MoS, especially since the template changes have serious consequences of code bloat, a problem that didn't exist only a couple of months ago.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
22:53, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
{{lang|fr|Assemblée nationale}}
), and the italics appear to be merely an artifact of the template update — it seems likely that this update has changed, even contradicted, the intended style advice in the Manual of Style itself. Finally (in case you have to give this advice again), you've suggested using |italic=no
above, but on balance it seems to me more sound to use |italic=unset
. The first forces no italic regardless of circumstance, whereas the second just goes with whatever the wikicode around it demands. This second option seems much more intuitive from a user perspective, and would continue yielding non-surprising results if, say, the code were copied for use in a different context. Cheers.
Phil wink (
talk)
00:41, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
{{
lang|xx}}
and {{
lang-xx}}
versions of the templates for a given language were inconsistent. Some peeps are working on tracking down all the italicized cases that shouldn't be in italics; see
Template talk:Lang for more info; I think they'd appreciate more eyes and hands on the job. I would like to see a shorthand syntax like |i=n
(or |i=u
, |i=y
) also be available. You're correct about MOS:LANG and {{
lang|fr|Assemblée nationale}}
; last I looked at MOS:LANG and was working on it, it was not yet certain whether the templates would auto-italicize, and since they now do, that needs an update to show |italics=unset
; the rule is to not italicize proper names of any kind (unless they would be italicized for some other reason, e.g. being a book title). I agree on |italics=unset
versus |italics=no
; I hadn't thought about it until this second, because I'm generally working in plain article text where the non-italics is the desired result for such thing. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:19, 20 February 2018 (UTC)The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Robin Hood. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
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Will "water ski" still be separate words under your proposal? If so I can fully support it. Thanks. Randy Kryn ( talk) 14:46, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
I hate to sound like a broken "Mr. Critical" record, but I think you're taking an unhelpful approach to this. It's not a tit-for-tat negotiation; we do not support or oppose based on whether we'll get what we want later on some side topic. Whether it should be "water ski[s]", "water-ski[s]" or "waterski[s]" as a noun is completely irrelevant to the question of what to do with the verb and the verbal/gerund forms for the activity (and directly derived regular nouns like "waterskier"). More to the point, what you (or I, or whoever) prefer is irrelevant; we do what needs to be done, with an eye to consistency when the sources support it, and tolerant of inconsistency between different grammatical forms when they don't. I've not done the "water[-]ski" noun research because it's not the RM before us, and the answer to the question would have no bearing on this RM. It's basically the same as the "comma-Jr." thing; what you or I love [in my off-WP writing, I habitually use that comma, though I realize it dates me] and what was firmly traditional (at all or in a particular dialect) in 1977 is out the window if usage in reputable sources has provably changed. (I have no idea whether "water ski" [n] has been changing). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:21, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Hey SMcCandlish, I have a question on university naming… specifically University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. It was recently moved to remove the endash because "that's what the university wants." However, I disagree, because most of the time we use the endash for universities like this not the dash. Not sure if the others at WT:MOS would agree with you or not, but since you've been helpful in the past, I figured I'd ask you first… what do we use? Thanks, Corky 02:58, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
There is a discussion about whether to add clarifying text (shown in boldface) to MOS:JOBTITLES at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Clarification of "Titles of people" that you may be interested in. Sincerely, HopsonRoad ( talk) 14:26, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Joseph Stalin. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
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