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There’s a new proposal to add dating recommendations to the guidelines for short descriptions. Short descriptions are a prominent part of the mobile user experience, but the discussion so far has had relatively few voices. Since you are a top contributor to one or more Manual of Style pages, I thought you might be interested. Cheers — jameslucas ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ 01:45, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello! I'm not really into arguing about this edit, but just to make it clear: doesn't the template currently say "a redirect from any page inside or outside of project (Wikipedia: or WP:) space"? I'd be happy with anything as long as it stays consistent, so as to know what to use the next time. — Mike Novikoff 03:50, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
I've seen several people mention that you do not mince words, so I assume you'd prefer I not do so either. I'm happy to discuss the finer points of capitalizing eponyms at the appropriate pages. But I feel your behavior has been problematic, so I'll bring my perspective here. Do with it what you will. Allow me to briefly summarize our interactions as I've seen them. I've tried to strip this of the MOS stuff, to make it more clear what I see as a problem:
Now as I said above, the question of whether our house style should mandate adjectival eponyms be in the uppercase is truly unimportant, and I don't wish to discuss it here. The thing I found objectionable was you bringing an issue to an RfC, not getting the answer you wanted, waiting 3 years, making the change unannounced with a misleading edit summary, getting reverted again, pontificating about how the MOS commands us to make this change, and then—when asked where the MOS makes this command—you write it up yourself, again leaving a misleading-at-best edit summary. If I'm severely misunderstanding your thinking here, then please enlighten me. I think you've behaved obnoxiously here, but I can see that many in the community hold you in high esteem, and I truly want to do the same. So please help me understand. Otherwise, I'd ask that you stop with this. Either take the question to some broader audience again for a discussion, or just leave well enough alone. My apologies for such a long message. Best, Ajpolino ( talk) 05:23, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
{{
moved discussion to}}
) is that you're making a lot of noise and casting a lot of aspersions (some of which are mutually contradictory), but the important facts of the matter are this:
Timeline nit-picks and whatnot
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RfC... anything at all- I've never claimed to the contrary. I see the 2017 RfC as "not taking up your favored position" but have never claimed, nor do I currently think, that in enshrined the lowercase.
MOS:ISMCAPS has evolved to directly address this gist of thisand
The fact that DOCTCAPS...I continue not to understand what part of MOS:ISMCAPS addresses this issue. Could you quote out the text you're referring to? We don't seem to be seeing this text the same way.
You and a few of your wikiproject friends...- give me a break. I doubt I've ever interacted with Iztwoz or Quercus solaris outside of the gram-x bacteria pages. Believe it or not, there is no anti-capitalization cabal that you're fighting here.
Nor does most of the rest...- that's really beside the point. No one is asking "which style is most common?". The only question here is "Should Wikipedia's house style recommend X?" (Or I suppose you see it as "Can't you all see that Wikipedia's house style already demands X??).
It's also becoming clear that further detailed response is a waste of time, and seemingly a trap. I don't mind long and detailed posts and critiques, but this is a Gish gallop [note: not a "gish gallop"!], a firehose of disparate claims and statements and insinuations and complaints and accusations, going off in all directions, such that each attempt to address one of them both results in falling behind on answering the rest of them (which you then use as an "I didn't get an answer" excuse to take actions like reverting material you self-professedly have not substantive only processy questions about), and generates a new re-reply which simply injects another 20 points to try to address. This is not productive discussion, but a FILIBUSTER technique. It could literally go on for years without resolution, and I think we have better things to do.
The substantive matters have been brought up at
WT:MOS#MOS:EPONYM. Your attempt to manufacture a behavioral problem out of my having gathered eponym-related material from MoS subpages and put them in clarified form in the main MoS page – with a footnote on exceptions specifically designed to encompass cases like the one at issue
iff the community decides they are valid exceptions), is clearly a non-starter. Other respondents (e.g. Dicklyon) at the WT:MOS thread are already observing that you don't seem to have a substantive objection to the MOS:EPONYM material, that sources prefer "Gram-negative", and that you're being unclear enough that you seem to be in favor of "Gram-negative" in the first place, though that seems (on a deeper review of your input here and in article-talk) to be the opposite of the case. This is, basically, a bunch of
noise. It has turned into a combo
BATTLEGROUND /
SOCIAL /
FORUM thing: WP talk pages do not exist for "the sport of debate" as a form of entertainment. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
21:53, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
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Three years! |
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-- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 11:28, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
If you are going to move Perryprog's response to your comment, then I think you should move your two side points in that comment to the "extended discussion" as well or else move back Perryprog's response to where it was and instead leave your response in the "extended discussion" with a diff to his initial response. I don't think separating just Perryprog's response from the comment it is responding to is beneficial, and the other editor may have desired to have his response to your comment available below it rather than in a separate section. – wallyfromdilbert ( talk) 04:31, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
If
Perryprog wants to un-refactor their reply post about my !vote back into the !voting section, I won't re-revert, but I do not believe this will be a good idea. Given that RfCs run typically for a full month, and this is a hot-button topic, we can expect this to get huge. I think it's great you've started this RfC (and it's interesting who's being smoked out as ... rather unfriendly to TG/NG/GQ concerns of any kind), but trying to "police" refactoring on the behalf of others who haven't even raised any objections is unlikely to be helpful (nor good for your own blood pressure, LOL). PS: One option is adding a "This !vote has followup comments regarding it in the [[#Extended comments]] section below" hatnote. I think there's even a template for that somewhere.
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
05:45, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi SMCc. Appreciated the encouraging words on Gerda's T/P. It's the little things..Cheers! Si Simon Adler ( talk) 04:16, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
Greetings! I would sincerely be obliged if you can spare some time to review a page Khes. Thanks and regards RAJIVVASUDEV ( talk) 08:25, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
References
Ah, interesting, thanks for this! Took me a moment to understand what was going on (slow brain at the best of times + insufficient coffee) but I followed it back from the redirect to the RfD and I now absolutely see the point – all very sensible! Cheers DBaK ( talk) 10:12, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
Hey man. I was shocked to learn about the indefinite block of Koavf, one of the most prolific editors of Wikipedia, at 09:28, 2 December 2020 (UTC). Did that appear in the Wikipedia news? Because I think that is big news. I am still digesting it. Geeze. Thinker78 ( talk) 19:56, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
Robert_McClenon and I have left new questions for you at Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2020/Candidates/SMcCandlish/Questions#Questions_from_David_Tornheim. I look forward to your responses. -- David Tornheim ( talk) 02:16, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
Greetings. The addition of collapse templates is what is causing the stray bullet to appear. If you want the list format to be both MoS-compliant and aesthetically pleasing, then you could move your 1:53, 3 December comment along with the collapsed portion to the end of the thread, which would also put it in chronological order. I'm fine with it where it is, but please don't use it as a reason to disrupt the proper formatting of the page. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 02:48, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
I'll try addressing this one final time; no more.
A simple technical demonstration:
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<ul><li>Yak yak. <dl><dd>Yakkety yak. <dl><dd>Blah blah.</dd></dl></dd></dl></li></ul> <div style="margin-left:0"> <table class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="background: transparent; text-align: left; border: 1px solid Silver; margin: 0.2em auto auto; width:100%; clear: both; padding: 1px;"> <tbody><tr> <th style="background: #CCFFCC; font-size:87%; padding:0.2em 0.3em; text-align:center;"><div style="display:inline;font-size:115%">collapse box (table) inserted</div> </th></tr> <tr> <td style="border: solid 1px Silver; padding: 0.6em; background: White;"> <dl><dd><dl><dd><dl><dd><dl><dd>Noise. <dl><dd>More noise.</dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl> </td></tr></tbody></table></div> <dl><dd><dl><dd><dl><dd>As we were saying .... <dl><dd>Yep.</dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl> The important part is For this reason, if you insert a block into a talk thread, list markup that comes inside and after the block should not begin with d-list markup ( The real solution here is obviously for the MW devs to stop treating |
I'm not particularly inclined to continue going over this stuff with you, at this page or anywhere else, because your
WP:BLUDGEON habits, of picking pointless sub-sub-sub-arguments about every single point anyone ever raises and recycling your same viewpoints over and over as if they have not already been addressed, are infuriating. We all have better things to do than engage in such circular argument for its own sake. I don't know what else anyone can say to you if you continue to refuse to notice and accept that when a list going *:::
is bisected with a block element, it resumes without the bullet (e.g. as ::::
), both to avoid stray bullets and to avoid falsely announcing a new, unrelated bullet list to screen readers. In over 15 years on WP, you are the only person I have ever encountered who keeps reverting it back to *:::
, and it's pretty unimaginable to me that anyone else would continue to do it even after it's explained to them why they're making a mistake. If tens of thousands of WP editors are not doing things your way, then odds are that your way is the one that's wrong.
WP:1AM was written more with sourcing-and-content disputes in mind, but the philosophical gist of it is applicable here. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
19:30, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
PS: This technical matter aside, please reconsider your WP:BLUDGEON and WP:GREATWRONGS approach to the sort of topic at which this arose. See in particular User talk:GPinkerton#December 2020 for where that tends to lead. I warned that editor (see above) about the likelihood of getting blocked for it, and it happened much faster even than I expected. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:06, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello, it seems like you raised this issue on the Orthopedic surgery talk page with mixed results. If you want to raise the issue again, I will support you in this effort as it is silly that the article is still named using the minority spelling. Getsnoopy ( talk) 23:19, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello SMcCandlish,
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the redirect whitelist.
Rank | Username | Num reviews | Log |
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1 | DannyS712 bot III ( talk) | 67,552 | Patrol Page Curation |
2 | Rosguill ( talk) | 63,821 | Patrol Page Curation |
3 | John B123 ( talk) | 21,697 | Patrol Page Curation |
4 | Onel5969 ( talk) | 19,879 | Patrol Page Curation |
5 | JTtheOG ( talk) | 12,901 | Patrol Page Curation |
6 | Mcampany ( talk) | 9,103 | Patrol Page Curation |
7 | DragonflySixtyseven ( talk) | 6,401 | Patrol Page Curation |
8 | Mccapra ( talk) | 4,918 | Patrol Page Curation |
9 | Hughesdarren ( talk) | 4,520 | Patrol Page Curation |
10 | Utopes ( talk) | 3,958 | Patrol Page Curation |
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here
18:16, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
Wow, Kudos. I am Paptilian. Thank you generously for coming to my aid. I am impressed with your user page, and a few others I've visited. I want a professional user page myself. I learn something every time I use Wikipedia. I won't waste your time here. Thanks again, and I look forward to yet more interactions. Paptilian (talk) 23:29, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandlish, I have a guess that you may have some insight into this as I've seen you around various move requests.I'm looking at Notker the Stammerer and am rather confused by his name. I've only ever heard him reffered to as simply "Notker" (which wouldn't work for WP's purposes) or "Notker Balbus". Indeed "Notker Balbus" is how various books of medieval music I have do so (Hoppin 1978, Yudkin 1989, Reese 1940 for instance) and it seems the most common by far in VIAFF. I'm assuming the reason it has been at "the Stammerer" is because "Balbus" is the Latin word for "the Stammerer" – but is this really a viable reason to have such a name? I would move it myself but I just want to check if perhaps there is a policy or preference for english translations that I'm unaware of. Best - Aza24 ( talk) 18:50, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
That seems reasonable, though I think I would move the other names to the end of the lead instead of in a footnote; the MOS:BOLDSYN thing is to help people be sure they're at the right article, and most of them don't read footnotes (esp. on mobile). Yeah, medieval and especially latinised names are a pain, especially when they just went by rough phonetics without any regard for where a name came from and what it meant, e.g. Galfrid/ Geoffrey/ Gottfried/ Godfrey/ Gofraid, and Gruffudd/Gruffydd/ Griffith, and Goraidh/ Godred/ Guthred, often all latinised as Galfridus or God[f]redus, sometimes with different spellings for the exact same person. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:03, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
The Arbitration Committee has accepted and opened the Flyer22 and WanderingWanda case at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda/Evidence. Please add your evidence by December 30, which is when the evidence phase is scheduled to close. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda/Workshop, which closes January 13, 2020. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. To opt out of future mailings please see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda/Notification list. For the Arbitration Committee, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) via MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 09:03, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
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Beethoven in 1803 |
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The birthday display! -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 16:43, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello and greetings,
This is just for your kind info. Since previously you have participated in an inconclusive RfC discussion at this RfC in year going by, and since some related aspects are under discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Titles, honorifics and appeal to popularity may be you want to join in to share your inputs or opinions.
Thanks and regards
Bookku ( talk) 05:46, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar |
Thank you for keeping the Nithyananda page clean! I intended to fix all the poor grammar, but you beat me to it. It must've been quite a ride for you, to see the man's antics unfold over the past three years. Happy editing! Kind regards, Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI converse | fings wot i hav dun 09:33, 22 December 2020 (UTC) |
★Trekker (
talk) is wishing you
Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's
Solstice or
Christmas,
Diwali,
Hogmanay,
Hanukkah,
Lenaia,
Festivus or even the
Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!
Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{ subst: User:WereSpielChequers/Dec16a}}~~~~ to your friends' talk pages.
★Trekker ( talk) 17:42, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Best Wishes,
Lee Vilenski (
talk •
contribs) is wishing you a
Merry
Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes
WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a
Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!
Spread the cheer by adding {{ subst:Xmas2}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
I'm grateful that you ran for ArbCom, Mac. I wish you had been elected but it was encouraging to see that you had a very respectable showing of support despite not being an admin. That's huge, and I hope you'll try again. Happy Holidays to you and yours! Atsme 💬 📧 19:51, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
I also got a lot of opposes this year, as in 2017, because of my WP:MOS work. Just about everyone has a bone to pick with the MoS, and if you are one of the tiny handful of people who shepherd it and prevent willy-nilly changes to it, you will inevitably earn the ire and spite of a lot of other editors. No way around that other than by not doing MoS stuff any longer, and I decline to walk away from it. Someone has to do it. (Volunteers for that very thankless work are few – it's a lot like ArbCom in several ways!) The other down-vote reason this year was that lame humor essay from almost two years ago. It was less of a factor than I expected, so I think within a year or two it won't be much of one. I think if I ran in 2021 I would also not quite make it, but 2022 seems more plausible.
For my part, it will come down to whether I project that I'll have the time and willpower to do it for 1–2 years, a decision I'll have to make in Dec. 2021, Dec. 2022, etc. If I do, then I will run for ArbCom, regardless what I think my chances are. The body does need non-admins and it does need more people who understand WP policy as a system, as an organ in the WP creature. I think we mostly got a good slate of electees this year, and most of the still-sitting Arbs are also pretty reasonable (with maybe 2–3 exceptions, depending on the issue at hand). The number of them intent on overhauling the
WP:AC/DS system is encouraging, as that was to be my no. 1 priority as an Arb, aside from any ongoing case. PS: It's actually faintly feasible that I would seek adminship anyway before then. That'll only happen if I feel a burning urge to do tech stuff that requires the bit, like
WP:Interface-admin work. I have no desire to be an admin for the usual "cops on patrol" reasons. Heh.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
15:12, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi, I'm puzzled by your comment at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2020_December_24#Fiction_about_astronomical_locations, reversing what you said at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2020_November_23#Category:Astronomical_locations_in_fiction. Would you care to expand on your rationale? – Fayenatic London 21:04, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
(non-breaking space), and insertion of blank lines, and so on, without having to "white-hide" alphanumeric characters to make them effectively invisible. That'll also be better for
MOS:ACCESS purposes. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
16:18, 27 December 2020 (UTC); PS added: 16:21, 27 December 2020 (UTC)@ SMcCandish Sir, Wishing you good health, prosperity, happiness on this Christmas. Merry Christmas! RAJIVVASUDEV ( talk) 04:07, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
File:Christmas tree in field.jpg | Merry Christmas SMcCandlish |
Hi SMcCandlish, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas |
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Natalis soli invicto! | |
Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth ( talk) 15:21, 25 December 2020 (UTC) |
The best and happiest imaginable and unimaginable 2021 to you and yours (insert picture of money, drink/andorother, maskless faces, cake and Indian food here). I'll let you know I voted for you on that arbcom thing because your language and thought-process would have or will raise its issues and deliberation style to new levels (haven't looked for selection results). Since giving year-end yays is the chance to say good things without sounding too sappy, Wikipedia is so much better for you being here than it even knows. Enjoy the New Year. Randy Kryn ( talk) 12:52, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
For a long time it wasn't conventionalized to capitalize "sun", "earth", and "moon", in any context. This is one of numerous classes of things that are proper names in the philosophy sense (according to some but not all philosophers) yet about which linguists would argue ("But it starts with 'the' ..."). The orthography has just come down to publishers' house styles. It's becoming, slowly, conventionalized to capitalize them in an astronomical context, because we capitalize all other such bodies (places): Mars, etc. Retain lowercase for figural usage. Thus, "When the moon hits your eye / Like a big pizza pie" would still use lower case, because the Moon did not literally come out of orbit and strike someone; but "the Apollo missions to the Moon", where the Moon is an astronomical place. "The moon" in the song really means "moonlight". The caps convention was introduced by IAU and similar organizations, and is one that WP has adopted for clarity and for consistency within the class of names (just as we've picked up various nitpicks from ISO and other bodies in MOS:NUM, like putting a space between a measure and its unit; it's not more "correct" in an objective sense, just reader-helpful). The "Sun" and "Earth" style was introduced so we don't bop up and own from upper to lower case in a list of bodies in the Solar System (or Solar system; I forget which is preferred for the system of our star, Sol; not to be confused with "the solar system of Alpha Centauri", a generic usage).
Exactly what to capitalize seems to be in flux; we don't have an entirely self-consistent system deployed yet. I see that we have an article at Kuiper belt and I would think it would be at Kuiper Belt (it's the, i.e. our, Kuiper Belt, not any Kuiper belt around any ol' star). And we're doing "the asteroid belt", which seems completely wrong. This is where simplistic but conflicting approaches to "proper name" really break down. Here we have a descriptive term that is a just non-proper descriptive label when used generically ("a binary star system with three asteroid belts") but which is serving in the capacity of a proper name when it has the one particular referent that refers to our home system ("the Asteroid Belt is between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars"). These are basically homonyms, as they have different definitions (albeit the latter is a one-member subclass of the former). Same kind of case: If I name my cat simply "Cat", that's a proper name for that specific cat, and should not be lowercased. Cf. names that just mean 'girl', 'boy', 'man', etc.: Mädchen, Cailín/Colleen, Chico, Andre/Andrés/Andrew, capitalized when used as individuals' names, including in the originating languages (Mädchen is unfortunately common as an actual name in German; I met a German young woman named this, who hated it and was planning a legal name change). So, it may take a while to settle out. At least doing "Earth", "Sun", "Moon" is just one of those 1000+ style choices a publisher can select from, and we selected that particular approach. And not everyone is happy with it. So, I would expect push back in advocating for the Asteroid Belt and the Solar System (and more so for the latter than for Solar system, though the article is perhaps surprisingly presently at Solar System). I'll need to go over the guideline language and discussions behind it again to figure how why we're seeing these inconsistencies.
I don't presently have any influence over editors of CMoS, Hart's, etc. I have started to try establish a little. I participate (slightly) in the American Dialect Society's mailing list, which is populated by some big-name pros in English dialectal study, orthography, etc. (Ben Yagoda and his ilk), but it will probably take years. Almost a decade ago, I pointed out a related pair of clear errors (not matters of subjective opinion, but flat-out objective mistakes) in CMoS 15th ed., both directly to one of its editorial people and on their forum/blog, and those errors remain in the 17th ed. So, not only do I not have direct influence, I get the sense that they just DGaF about such matters. They seem unwilling to make any changes at all except for things about which they receive thousands and thousands of messages, and even then it seems to mostly be in the hands of Bryan A. Garner, who wrote the majority of CMoS grammar and orthography material, from the 15th ed. at least. And then it would have to get approval of chief editor Carol Saller, and who knows who else.
—
SMcCandlish
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16:46, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
Anyway, to return to your first point, it's not that I'm being disrespected, I just don't have a rep with them yet. I'm just one of many kind-of-faceless editors at a project, rather than a tenured professor or the managing editor of a big-name paper style guide, so I'm not on their radar. I'll try submitting to CMoS a fix for that pair of errors again before the 18th ed. If you're curious, in the section on capitalization and organisms, they cite ICZN as an authority for common names of animal breeds, but it is not one (it only standardizes the scientific names of species, not vernacular names of them, and no names of any kind of breeds); and they say to capitalize breed names, then in the example list include two breed names, one capitalized and one not, so they confusingly contradict their own advice. CMoS needs some other work, but it's more subjective, like consolidating its scattered advice on when to use logical quotation into one place.
We do "moon goddess" lowercase for consistency with other such terms ("war god", etc.), and because the ancients understood the moon as a mystical thing/force, not as a large sphere of rock in orbit around a planet; the moon in that sense is a religio-mythical concept not an astronomical body per se. (It's one of those things that some philosophers would argue is a proper name – and some would not, because "moon" can take a "the" in front of it), but it has no orthographic significance since it hasn't become conventionalized to capitalize it in that context.) More people will resist "Sun", "Moon", "Earth" the more that the capitalization is extended beyond a strictly scientific astronomical convention. It reminds me of the "capitalize vernacular names of bird species" thing. People largely went along with it when the argument was that it was an ornithology convention (which it really isn't, though it gets close to being one) and that it wouldn't be applied outside that context. Then the very people making that argument/promise started applying it to primates and cetaceans and felids and plants and amphibians, which led to 8+ years of fighting, and then a return to across-the-board lowercase. We don't need a repeat of anything like that, ever. It's best to avoid specialized style, but if we're going to adopt it in narrow cases (usually only for reader clarity and/or for consistency with something else), it has to be restrained to where it contextually belongs, or the exception will just get eliminated later (with a lot of drama and bad blood).
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
19:10, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Silvery salamander, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Clone.
( Opt-out instructions.) -- DPL bot ( talk) 06:10, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
The apologists have arrived! I go on a Wikibreak for three days and they're already all over the place Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI converse | fings wot i hav dun 14:06, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
![]() | 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 165 | ← | Archive 167 | Archive 168 | Archive 169 | Archive 170 | Archive 171 | → | Archive 175 |
There’s a new proposal to add dating recommendations to the guidelines for short descriptions. Short descriptions are a prominent part of the mobile user experience, but the discussion so far has had relatively few voices. Since you are a top contributor to one or more Manual of Style pages, I thought you might be interested. Cheers — jameslucas ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ 01:45, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello! I'm not really into arguing about this edit, but just to make it clear: doesn't the template currently say "a redirect from any page inside or outside of project (Wikipedia: or WP:) space"? I'd be happy with anything as long as it stays consistent, so as to know what to use the next time. — Mike Novikoff 03:50, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
I've seen several people mention that you do not mince words, so I assume you'd prefer I not do so either. I'm happy to discuss the finer points of capitalizing eponyms at the appropriate pages. But I feel your behavior has been problematic, so I'll bring my perspective here. Do with it what you will. Allow me to briefly summarize our interactions as I've seen them. I've tried to strip this of the MOS stuff, to make it more clear what I see as a problem:
Now as I said above, the question of whether our house style should mandate adjectival eponyms be in the uppercase is truly unimportant, and I don't wish to discuss it here. The thing I found objectionable was you bringing an issue to an RfC, not getting the answer you wanted, waiting 3 years, making the change unannounced with a misleading edit summary, getting reverted again, pontificating about how the MOS commands us to make this change, and then—when asked where the MOS makes this command—you write it up yourself, again leaving a misleading-at-best edit summary. If I'm severely misunderstanding your thinking here, then please enlighten me. I think you've behaved obnoxiously here, but I can see that many in the community hold you in high esteem, and I truly want to do the same. So please help me understand. Otherwise, I'd ask that you stop with this. Either take the question to some broader audience again for a discussion, or just leave well enough alone. My apologies for such a long message. Best, Ajpolino ( talk) 05:23, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
{{
moved discussion to}}
) is that you're making a lot of noise and casting a lot of aspersions (some of which are mutually contradictory), but the important facts of the matter are this:
Timeline nit-picks and whatnot
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RfC... anything at all- I've never claimed to the contrary. I see the 2017 RfC as "not taking up your favored position" but have never claimed, nor do I currently think, that in enshrined the lowercase.
MOS:ISMCAPS has evolved to directly address this gist of thisand
The fact that DOCTCAPS...I continue not to understand what part of MOS:ISMCAPS addresses this issue. Could you quote out the text you're referring to? We don't seem to be seeing this text the same way.
You and a few of your wikiproject friends...- give me a break. I doubt I've ever interacted with Iztwoz or Quercus solaris outside of the gram-x bacteria pages. Believe it or not, there is no anti-capitalization cabal that you're fighting here.
Nor does most of the rest...- that's really beside the point. No one is asking "which style is most common?". The only question here is "Should Wikipedia's house style recommend X?" (Or I suppose you see it as "Can't you all see that Wikipedia's house style already demands X??).
It's also becoming clear that further detailed response is a waste of time, and seemingly a trap. I don't mind long and detailed posts and critiques, but this is a Gish gallop [note: not a "gish gallop"!], a firehose of disparate claims and statements and insinuations and complaints and accusations, going off in all directions, such that each attempt to address one of them both results in falling behind on answering the rest of them (which you then use as an "I didn't get an answer" excuse to take actions like reverting material you self-professedly have not substantive only processy questions about), and generates a new re-reply which simply injects another 20 points to try to address. This is not productive discussion, but a FILIBUSTER technique. It could literally go on for years without resolution, and I think we have better things to do.
The substantive matters have been brought up at
WT:MOS#MOS:EPONYM. Your attempt to manufacture a behavioral problem out of my having gathered eponym-related material from MoS subpages and put them in clarified form in the main MoS page – with a footnote on exceptions specifically designed to encompass cases like the one at issue
iff the community decides they are valid exceptions), is clearly a non-starter. Other respondents (e.g. Dicklyon) at the WT:MOS thread are already observing that you don't seem to have a substantive objection to the MOS:EPONYM material, that sources prefer "Gram-negative", and that you're being unclear enough that you seem to be in favor of "Gram-negative" in the first place, though that seems (on a deeper review of your input here and in article-talk) to be the opposite of the case. This is, basically, a bunch of
noise. It has turned into a combo
BATTLEGROUND /
SOCIAL /
FORUM thing: WP talk pages do not exist for "the sport of debate" as a form of entertainment. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
21:53, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
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Three years! |
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-- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 11:28, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
If you are going to move Perryprog's response to your comment, then I think you should move your two side points in that comment to the "extended discussion" as well or else move back Perryprog's response to where it was and instead leave your response in the "extended discussion" with a diff to his initial response. I don't think separating just Perryprog's response from the comment it is responding to is beneficial, and the other editor may have desired to have his response to your comment available below it rather than in a separate section. – wallyfromdilbert ( talk) 04:31, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
If
Perryprog wants to un-refactor their reply post about my !vote back into the !voting section, I won't re-revert, but I do not believe this will be a good idea. Given that RfCs run typically for a full month, and this is a hot-button topic, we can expect this to get huge. I think it's great you've started this RfC (and it's interesting who's being smoked out as ... rather unfriendly to TG/NG/GQ concerns of any kind), but trying to "police" refactoring on the behalf of others who haven't even raised any objections is unlikely to be helpful (nor good for your own blood pressure, LOL). PS: One option is adding a "This !vote has followup comments regarding it in the [[#Extended comments]] section below" hatnote. I think there's even a template for that somewhere.
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
05:45, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi SMCc. Appreciated the encouraging words on Gerda's T/P. It's the little things..Cheers! Si Simon Adler ( talk) 04:16, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
Greetings! I would sincerely be obliged if you can spare some time to review a page Khes. Thanks and regards RAJIVVASUDEV ( talk) 08:25, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
References
Ah, interesting, thanks for this! Took me a moment to understand what was going on (slow brain at the best of times + insufficient coffee) but I followed it back from the redirect to the RfD and I now absolutely see the point – all very sensible! Cheers DBaK ( talk) 10:12, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
Hey man. I was shocked to learn about the indefinite block of Koavf, one of the most prolific editors of Wikipedia, at 09:28, 2 December 2020 (UTC). Did that appear in the Wikipedia news? Because I think that is big news. I am still digesting it. Geeze. Thinker78 ( talk) 19:56, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
Robert_McClenon and I have left new questions for you at Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2020/Candidates/SMcCandlish/Questions#Questions_from_David_Tornheim. I look forward to your responses. -- David Tornheim ( talk) 02:16, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
Greetings. The addition of collapse templates is what is causing the stray bullet to appear. If you want the list format to be both MoS-compliant and aesthetically pleasing, then you could move your 1:53, 3 December comment along with the collapsed portion to the end of the thread, which would also put it in chronological order. I'm fine with it where it is, but please don't use it as a reason to disrupt the proper formatting of the page. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 02:48, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
I'll try addressing this one final time; no more.
A simple technical demonstration:
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<ul><li>Yak yak. <dl><dd>Yakkety yak. <dl><dd>Blah blah.</dd></dl></dd></dl></li></ul> <div style="margin-left:0"> <table class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="background: transparent; text-align: left; border: 1px solid Silver; margin: 0.2em auto auto; width:100%; clear: both; padding: 1px;"> <tbody><tr> <th style="background: #CCFFCC; font-size:87%; padding:0.2em 0.3em; text-align:center;"><div style="display:inline;font-size:115%">collapse box (table) inserted</div> </th></tr> <tr> <td style="border: solid 1px Silver; padding: 0.6em; background: White;"> <dl><dd><dl><dd><dl><dd><dl><dd>Noise. <dl><dd>More noise.</dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl> </td></tr></tbody></table></div> <dl><dd><dl><dd><dl><dd>As we were saying .... <dl><dd>Yep.</dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl></dd></dl> The important part is For this reason, if you insert a block into a talk thread, list markup that comes inside and after the block should not begin with d-list markup ( The real solution here is obviously for the MW devs to stop treating |
I'm not particularly inclined to continue going over this stuff with you, at this page or anywhere else, because your
WP:BLUDGEON habits, of picking pointless sub-sub-sub-arguments about every single point anyone ever raises and recycling your same viewpoints over and over as if they have not already been addressed, are infuriating. We all have better things to do than engage in such circular argument for its own sake. I don't know what else anyone can say to you if you continue to refuse to notice and accept that when a list going *:::
is bisected with a block element, it resumes without the bullet (e.g. as ::::
), both to avoid stray bullets and to avoid falsely announcing a new, unrelated bullet list to screen readers. In over 15 years on WP, you are the only person I have ever encountered who keeps reverting it back to *:::
, and it's pretty unimaginable to me that anyone else would continue to do it even after it's explained to them why they're making a mistake. If tens of thousands of WP editors are not doing things your way, then odds are that your way is the one that's wrong.
WP:1AM was written more with sourcing-and-content disputes in mind, but the philosophical gist of it is applicable here. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
19:30, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
PS: This technical matter aside, please reconsider your WP:BLUDGEON and WP:GREATWRONGS approach to the sort of topic at which this arose. See in particular User talk:GPinkerton#December 2020 for where that tends to lead. I warned that editor (see above) about the likelihood of getting blocked for it, and it happened much faster even than I expected. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:06, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello, it seems like you raised this issue on the Orthopedic surgery talk page with mixed results. If you want to raise the issue again, I will support you in this effort as it is silly that the article is still named using the minority spelling. Getsnoopy ( talk) 23:19, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello SMcCandlish,
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the redirect whitelist.
Rank | Username | Num reviews | Log |
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1 | DannyS712 bot III ( talk) | 67,552 | Patrol Page Curation |
2 | Rosguill ( talk) | 63,821 | Patrol Page Curation |
3 | John B123 ( talk) | 21,697 | Patrol Page Curation |
4 | Onel5969 ( talk) | 19,879 | Patrol Page Curation |
5 | JTtheOG ( talk) | 12,901 | Patrol Page Curation |
6 | Mcampany ( talk) | 9,103 | Patrol Page Curation |
7 | DragonflySixtyseven ( talk) | 6,401 | Patrol Page Curation |
8 | Mccapra ( talk) | 4,918 | Patrol Page Curation |
9 | Hughesdarren ( talk) | 4,520 | Patrol Page Curation |
10 | Utopes ( talk) | 3,958 | Patrol Page Curation |
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here
18:16, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
Wow, Kudos. I am Paptilian. Thank you generously for coming to my aid. I am impressed with your user page, and a few others I've visited. I want a professional user page myself. I learn something every time I use Wikipedia. I won't waste your time here. Thanks again, and I look forward to yet more interactions. Paptilian (talk) 23:29, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandlish, I have a guess that you may have some insight into this as I've seen you around various move requests.I'm looking at Notker the Stammerer and am rather confused by his name. I've only ever heard him reffered to as simply "Notker" (which wouldn't work for WP's purposes) or "Notker Balbus". Indeed "Notker Balbus" is how various books of medieval music I have do so (Hoppin 1978, Yudkin 1989, Reese 1940 for instance) and it seems the most common by far in VIAFF. I'm assuming the reason it has been at "the Stammerer" is because "Balbus" is the Latin word for "the Stammerer" – but is this really a viable reason to have such a name? I would move it myself but I just want to check if perhaps there is a policy or preference for english translations that I'm unaware of. Best - Aza24 ( talk) 18:50, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
That seems reasonable, though I think I would move the other names to the end of the lead instead of in a footnote; the MOS:BOLDSYN thing is to help people be sure they're at the right article, and most of them don't read footnotes (esp. on mobile). Yeah, medieval and especially latinised names are a pain, especially when they just went by rough phonetics without any regard for where a name came from and what it meant, e.g. Galfrid/ Geoffrey/ Gottfried/ Godfrey/ Gofraid, and Gruffudd/Gruffydd/ Griffith, and Goraidh/ Godred/ Guthred, often all latinised as Galfridus or God[f]redus, sometimes with different spellings for the exact same person. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:03, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
The Arbitration Committee has accepted and opened the Flyer22 and WanderingWanda case at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda/Evidence. Please add your evidence by December 30, which is when the evidence phase is scheduled to close. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda/Workshop, which closes January 13, 2020. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. To opt out of future mailings please see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda/Notification list. For the Arbitration Committee, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) via MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 09:03, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
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Beethoven in 1803 |
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The birthday display! -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 16:43, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello and greetings,
This is just for your kind info. Since previously you have participated in an inconclusive RfC discussion at this RfC in year going by, and since some related aspects are under discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Titles, honorifics and appeal to popularity may be you want to join in to share your inputs or opinions.
Thanks and regards
Bookku ( talk) 05:46, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar |
Thank you for keeping the Nithyananda page clean! I intended to fix all the poor grammar, but you beat me to it. It must've been quite a ride for you, to see the man's antics unfold over the past three years. Happy editing! Kind regards, Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI converse | fings wot i hav dun 09:33, 22 December 2020 (UTC) |
★Trekker (
talk) is wishing you
Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's
Solstice or
Christmas,
Diwali,
Hogmanay,
Hanukkah,
Lenaia,
Festivus or even the
Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!
Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{ subst: User:WereSpielChequers/Dec16a}}~~~~ to your friends' talk pages.
★Trekker ( talk) 17:42, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Best Wishes,
Lee Vilenski (
talk •
contribs) is wishing you a
Merry
Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes
WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a
Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!
Spread the cheer by adding {{ subst:Xmas2}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
I'm grateful that you ran for ArbCom, Mac. I wish you had been elected but it was encouraging to see that you had a very respectable showing of support despite not being an admin. That's huge, and I hope you'll try again. Happy Holidays to you and yours! Atsme 💬 📧 19:51, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
I also got a lot of opposes this year, as in 2017, because of my WP:MOS work. Just about everyone has a bone to pick with the MoS, and if you are one of the tiny handful of people who shepherd it and prevent willy-nilly changes to it, you will inevitably earn the ire and spite of a lot of other editors. No way around that other than by not doing MoS stuff any longer, and I decline to walk away from it. Someone has to do it. (Volunteers for that very thankless work are few – it's a lot like ArbCom in several ways!) The other down-vote reason this year was that lame humor essay from almost two years ago. It was less of a factor than I expected, so I think within a year or two it won't be much of one. I think if I ran in 2021 I would also not quite make it, but 2022 seems more plausible.
For my part, it will come down to whether I project that I'll have the time and willpower to do it for 1–2 years, a decision I'll have to make in Dec. 2021, Dec. 2022, etc. If I do, then I will run for ArbCom, regardless what I think my chances are. The body does need non-admins and it does need more people who understand WP policy as a system, as an organ in the WP creature. I think we mostly got a good slate of electees this year, and most of the still-sitting Arbs are also pretty reasonable (with maybe 2–3 exceptions, depending on the issue at hand). The number of them intent on overhauling the
WP:AC/DS system is encouraging, as that was to be my no. 1 priority as an Arb, aside from any ongoing case. PS: It's actually faintly feasible that I would seek adminship anyway before then. That'll only happen if I feel a burning urge to do tech stuff that requires the bit, like
WP:Interface-admin work. I have no desire to be an admin for the usual "cops on patrol" reasons. Heh.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
15:12, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi, I'm puzzled by your comment at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2020_December_24#Fiction_about_astronomical_locations, reversing what you said at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2020_November_23#Category:Astronomical_locations_in_fiction. Would you care to expand on your rationale? – Fayenatic London 21:04, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
(non-breaking space), and insertion of blank lines, and so on, without having to "white-hide" alphanumeric characters to make them effectively invisible. That'll also be better for
MOS:ACCESS purposes. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
16:18, 27 December 2020 (UTC); PS added: 16:21, 27 December 2020 (UTC)@ SMcCandish Sir, Wishing you good health, prosperity, happiness on this Christmas. Merry Christmas! RAJIVVASUDEV ( talk) 04:07, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
File:Christmas tree in field.jpg | Merry Christmas SMcCandlish |
Hi SMcCandlish, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas |
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Natalis soli invicto! | |
Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth ( talk) 15:21, 25 December 2020 (UTC) |
The best and happiest imaginable and unimaginable 2021 to you and yours (insert picture of money, drink/andorother, maskless faces, cake and Indian food here). I'll let you know I voted for you on that arbcom thing because your language and thought-process would have or will raise its issues and deliberation style to new levels (haven't looked for selection results). Since giving year-end yays is the chance to say good things without sounding too sappy, Wikipedia is so much better for you being here than it even knows. Enjoy the New Year. Randy Kryn ( talk) 12:52, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
For a long time it wasn't conventionalized to capitalize "sun", "earth", and "moon", in any context. This is one of numerous classes of things that are proper names in the philosophy sense (according to some but not all philosophers) yet about which linguists would argue ("But it starts with 'the' ..."). The orthography has just come down to publishers' house styles. It's becoming, slowly, conventionalized to capitalize them in an astronomical context, because we capitalize all other such bodies (places): Mars, etc. Retain lowercase for figural usage. Thus, "When the moon hits your eye / Like a big pizza pie" would still use lower case, because the Moon did not literally come out of orbit and strike someone; but "the Apollo missions to the Moon", where the Moon is an astronomical place. "The moon" in the song really means "moonlight". The caps convention was introduced by IAU and similar organizations, and is one that WP has adopted for clarity and for consistency within the class of names (just as we've picked up various nitpicks from ISO and other bodies in MOS:NUM, like putting a space between a measure and its unit; it's not more "correct" in an objective sense, just reader-helpful). The "Sun" and "Earth" style was introduced so we don't bop up and own from upper to lower case in a list of bodies in the Solar System (or Solar system; I forget which is preferred for the system of our star, Sol; not to be confused with "the solar system of Alpha Centauri", a generic usage).
Exactly what to capitalize seems to be in flux; we don't have an entirely self-consistent system deployed yet. I see that we have an article at Kuiper belt and I would think it would be at Kuiper Belt (it's the, i.e. our, Kuiper Belt, not any Kuiper belt around any ol' star). And we're doing "the asteroid belt", which seems completely wrong. This is where simplistic but conflicting approaches to "proper name" really break down. Here we have a descriptive term that is a just non-proper descriptive label when used generically ("a binary star system with three asteroid belts") but which is serving in the capacity of a proper name when it has the one particular referent that refers to our home system ("the Asteroid Belt is between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars"). These are basically homonyms, as they have different definitions (albeit the latter is a one-member subclass of the former). Same kind of case: If I name my cat simply "Cat", that's a proper name for that specific cat, and should not be lowercased. Cf. names that just mean 'girl', 'boy', 'man', etc.: Mädchen, Cailín/Colleen, Chico, Andre/Andrés/Andrew, capitalized when used as individuals' names, including in the originating languages (Mädchen is unfortunately common as an actual name in German; I met a German young woman named this, who hated it and was planning a legal name change). So, it may take a while to settle out. At least doing "Earth", "Sun", "Moon" is just one of those 1000+ style choices a publisher can select from, and we selected that particular approach. And not everyone is happy with it. So, I would expect push back in advocating for the Asteroid Belt and the Solar System (and more so for the latter than for Solar system, though the article is perhaps surprisingly presently at Solar System). I'll need to go over the guideline language and discussions behind it again to figure how why we're seeing these inconsistencies.
I don't presently have any influence over editors of CMoS, Hart's, etc. I have started to try establish a little. I participate (slightly) in the American Dialect Society's mailing list, which is populated by some big-name pros in English dialectal study, orthography, etc. (Ben Yagoda and his ilk), but it will probably take years. Almost a decade ago, I pointed out a related pair of clear errors (not matters of subjective opinion, but flat-out objective mistakes) in CMoS 15th ed., both directly to one of its editorial people and on their forum/blog, and those errors remain in the 17th ed. So, not only do I not have direct influence, I get the sense that they just DGaF about such matters. They seem unwilling to make any changes at all except for things about which they receive thousands and thousands of messages, and even then it seems to mostly be in the hands of Bryan A. Garner, who wrote the majority of CMoS grammar and orthography material, from the 15th ed. at least. And then it would have to get approval of chief editor Carol Saller, and who knows who else.
—
SMcCandlish
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16:46, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
Anyway, to return to your first point, it's not that I'm being disrespected, I just don't have a rep with them yet. I'm just one of many kind-of-faceless editors at a project, rather than a tenured professor or the managing editor of a big-name paper style guide, so I'm not on their radar. I'll try submitting to CMoS a fix for that pair of errors again before the 18th ed. If you're curious, in the section on capitalization and organisms, they cite ICZN as an authority for common names of animal breeds, but it is not one (it only standardizes the scientific names of species, not vernacular names of them, and no names of any kind of breeds); and they say to capitalize breed names, then in the example list include two breed names, one capitalized and one not, so they confusingly contradict their own advice. CMoS needs some other work, but it's more subjective, like consolidating its scattered advice on when to use logical quotation into one place.
We do "moon goddess" lowercase for consistency with other such terms ("war god", etc.), and because the ancients understood the moon as a mystical thing/force, not as a large sphere of rock in orbit around a planet; the moon in that sense is a religio-mythical concept not an astronomical body per se. (It's one of those things that some philosophers would argue is a proper name – and some would not, because "moon" can take a "the" in front of it), but it has no orthographic significance since it hasn't become conventionalized to capitalize it in that context.) More people will resist "Sun", "Moon", "Earth" the more that the capitalization is extended beyond a strictly scientific astronomical convention. It reminds me of the "capitalize vernacular names of bird species" thing. People largely went along with it when the argument was that it was an ornithology convention (which it really isn't, though it gets close to being one) and that it wouldn't be applied outside that context. Then the very people making that argument/promise started applying it to primates and cetaceans and felids and plants and amphibians, which led to 8+ years of fighting, and then a return to across-the-board lowercase. We don't need a repeat of anything like that, ever. It's best to avoid specialized style, but if we're going to adopt it in narrow cases (usually only for reader clarity and/or for consistency with something else), it has to be restrained to where it contextually belongs, or the exception will just get eliminated later (with a lot of drama and bad blood).
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
19:10, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Silvery salamander, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Clone.
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The apologists have arrived! I go on a Wikibreak for three days and they're already all over the place Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI converse | fings wot i hav dun 14:06, 30 December 2020 (UTC)