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Archive 125 | ← | Archive 130 | Archive 131 | Archive 132 | Archive 133 | Archive 134 | Archive 135 |
Ok, I think we're ready for voting here. You indicated in the discussion that you may of changed your stance, so I just would like to see if you wanted to update it. -- Deathawk ( talk) 00:05, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
Just a quick note: I have noticed you getting a bit annoyed with some other editors recently. From personal experience, I know how crap it can feel to be on the receiving end of you when you feel like people are not understanding your points. I would probably avoid replying to FC on the current MoS thread. I have not seen them before, and—judging by their contributions—they are not especially familiar with P+G talk pages. They are clearly passionate about the discussion taking place, as demonstrated by the additional effort of contacting Microsoft. I am sure there are plenty of MoS regulars who will be happy to take over dealing with them. – Sb 2001 20:08, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
That detail aside, let's get to the alleged civility issue. WP has a tension between WP:CIVIL and WP:CIR. It's been there the entire time CIR has existed, and even longer, ("competence is required" was said at ANI, AN, AE, etc., long before it was codified). CIR really is true. Part of the competence to edit productively here is competence with English, well above middling ESL level. When it comes to editing MoS (or trying to ensure compliance with it), an even higher level of competency is required – beyond mere fluency, into detailed knowledge about the finer points of English usage and style. So, there's not automatically a civility issue with questioning someone's English competence, given sufficient evidence. (In your case, I did not have it, and apologize again. I did not do due diligence, since a dictionary did actually have the term in question after all, and one case is never enough to assess someone's language skills anyway.) Having the civility to collaborate here is also a CIR matter, so it makes the tension between CIVIL and CIR kind of recursive.
However, the appearance of "native" somewhere in a thread does not necessarily mean a civility problem is happening, even if it's about an editor not an inanimate bit of language. After your post here, someone in that WT:MOS thread has in fact questioned whether another editor (a different one) is a native speaker of English, based on how they write and what assertions they've made about grammar. This actually appears to be on-point to me, given the nature of the debate – whether an alleged rule defended by that person, added without broad consensus, actually reflects linguistic reality about English (which consensus so far says it does not). This is kind of a case of life imitating art, I guess, in that the accusation that someone questioned whether someone else is a native English speaker was false, then became true post hoc.
In the end, I'm not sure that "native" is the right word, since plenty of native speakers have terrible grammar and spelling, and plenty of advanced ESL learners do better than they do at it. It's more a matter of fluency. But "native" still has a linguistic meaning, and that's what was originally being used in the thread. E.g., the abilities to split infinitives and to end sentences with prepositions is a native feature of English, and has been for centuries; both will be found in the works of the best English-language writers. The "rules" to never do either are non-native impositions (from other languages or from theories about language "improvement") by prescriptive grammarians, back in the Victorian era.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:28, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
The issues the MoS has encountered recently are, as you said, to do with a lack of competency. The editors in question are showing a lack of willingness to break the rules. I do not care whether one chooses to stick an article in front of a trademark like '.NET Framework'. Personally, I would rather the capital 'F' on 'Framework' goes at the same time as 'the' going on the front, but recognise your point about editors changing it. I also know that I am somewhat of an 'undercapper', so am probably not the best person to involve in this specific issue. I should not have assumed that it was you who used the term 'non-native' (although, I am sure you can understand why I did; thanks for your further apologies—consider that finished). EEng's decision to fire this in the direction of another editor was a little tactless. FC—however—should not have raised it on that page to strengthen his case, or weaken that of others. I have done the same in the past, though, as part of a 'last attempt' to persuade editors that they are being unreasonable. I hold nothing against him, and am sure that he will be back soon enough, hopefully in a more laid-back frame of mind. – Sb 2001 00:34, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
".NET Framework" is a proper name, like "Hypertext Markup Language"; both of these are also of a descriptive structure, like "JPEG image format" (not a proper name), but that's true of a lot of proper names, like "Pacific Coast Highway", "Central Park", "the Wikipedia Manual of Style", etc. If it's published as the .NET Framework, it just is (as the Linux kernel is that and not the "Linux Kernel"; "Linux" is the proper name, "kernel" is a descriptive disambiguator distinguishing between that and the Linux project, Linux as a family of GNU/Linux complete OSes, etc., etc.). There's a usage distinction (though rarely arising in this particular case): one might write "A comparison of the features of the .NET and Oracle Application Development frameworks demonstrates that ..."; we'd do this for the same reason we'd say "Adkazian has taught at both Oxford and Cambridge universities". This lower-case-when-genericized-as-plural style is not universally recognized, but has become the dominant usage since ca. the 1980s. Because there are still some old people who object to it (and I'm pushing 50, so I'm not mocking), it's best written around when possible. I've discovered through trial and error that people are less likely to "correct" it to an upper-case plural if there are three or more, but still – just take away the temptation. Similarly one could in theory write something like "In the handling of data arrays, the PHP, Fortran, and .NET frameworks are confusingly different", using "framework" in completely different sense, about the syntax of parsing (PHP and Fortran are not software frameworks at all), but this would be confusing and anyone would be sensible to rewrite it to use a different word; it would be like using the word "case" in the generic sense of "instance" in a legal context, where it would be confused with the term of art "case" meaning "lawsuit or prosecution". "Framework" in the software context is a term of art with a specific contextual meaning (or rather a range of such meanings, related but not synonymous).
"Non-native" – Not just EEng; CT did, too, and they're not necessarily wrong, though it runs up against what I was getting into above. When are we digging at people to "
WP:WIN" versus trying to assess whether someone is actually competent to be trying to affect our style guide and its interpretation? Is there a more tactful way to do the latter? I'm not really sure of the answer to the last question, and it applies to all
WP:CIR concerns. E.g., "you don't yet know enough about deletion policy to meaningfully participate at AfD; your last ten posts there have just clouded matters and inflamed other parties" will be accepted by one person as "Oh, I guess I'd better read up on the policies in more detail" but by the next person as a vicious personal swipe that questions their mentality. I don't see a clear path around this human-nature obstacle. I've addressed it the best I could at the time at
WP:HOTHEADS in the two sections on avoid commenting on contributor rather than contribution, but this is hardly failsafe; some are apt to treat criticism of something they said or did as criticism of their person. I've tried to AGF about FC and CL's misinterpretation or alleged misinterpretation that "This is normal in native English usage", etc. (clearly about strings of words) was somehow about an individual's English-language competence; but since the misinterpretation is actually unlikely, and it happened with those two and only those two back-to-back, and they have a tag-teaming history, and both were engaged in a three-day-long pattern of incivility against someone for daring to disagee with them about something in
MOS:COMP, it really strains AGF to the breaking point.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 09:53, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums. Legobot ( talk) 04:25, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Codename Lisa ( talk) 09:04, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
Hello, my esteemed colleague.
It has been pointed out to me that up to this point, I have interpreted your behavior erroneously. People whom I deeply respect are of the opinion that your behavior so far can only be interpreted as patient and well-meaning. As such, I am here to do what every mature person should: to own up to his or her own mistake and apologize. Please accept my apology. With respect to making amends, I offer you the following remedial courses of action:
Best regards, |
The concern to me is that in one topic I'm aware of (English-language usage and style), your editing exhibits civility and AGF problems, a TAGTEAM, and
WP:CIR issues, as well has serious PoV problems. Not a value judgement about you, but a problem statement about editing behavior, which is rectifiable. Even the accusations and aspersions against me are not a big deal to me at a personal level (they're easy to disprove, and my skin is thick). The concern is that this is a pattern you'll engage in at all, which may affect others if you continue to do so. Another concern is that it's being pursued in furtherance of a linguistic position that multiple editors have already clearly disproven.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 05:42, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
@ Codename Lisa: I forgot to ping above. Anyway, if I said something you feel needs an apology or retraction, let me know. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:00, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
PS: Tiny clarification about the above: I don't think "madness" was uncivil, exactly, since it doesn't seem to be about an editor(s); rather it is a description of English usage you don't like, thus an indicator of a PoV problem. It wouldn't be any different from someone describing Hinduism as insane, or a preference for dogs over cats as some form of lunacy. We really have to avoid thinking like that about style and grammar, or everyone would be fighting style holy wars all day.
PPS: I would suggest not encouraging FleetCommand to apologize or retract anything (not in my direction, anyway). It's not something I need, and I'm honestly uncomfortable with "extracted" shows of contrition. For some people (self included sometimes) it can take a lengthy period of post hoc reflection to realize on one's own that one has misstepped. My memory for this stuff is generally short, and I don't bear grudges I can divest myself of.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 12:27, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
Style: @ Codename Lisa: Agreed that simple and consistent style rules help produce better content (though WP:FAC has a rather strained relationship to MoS, due to pro- WP:VESTED-editors and anti- WP:MERCILESS-editing prejudices in that clique). However, the WT:MOS discussion has made it pretty clear that most of the RfC respondents don't consider MOS:COMP#Definite article a "simple and all-catching rule", but a made-up oversimplification that doesn't match reality. It might be nice if English were that programmatic and regular, but it's not. Trying to force it to be so on WP just tends to piss everyone off and breed new MoS haters. Eroding of respect for WP's policies and guidelines is an increasing problem that threatens the stability of the whole project, so we should avoid anything that increases that effect.
Us pesky hominids: FC isn't being "creepy" (unless I'm not privy to something), just cantankerous, and exhibiting human nature: seeking allies, defending territory, advancing personal preferences and perceptions as rules and truth. These are instincts we have to resist here, but it takes work and practice. Sometimes people have to be separated from topic areas in which they have difficulty reigning in these impulses. With regard to the urge to be part of an us in particular, we do need to collaborate, but it's really easy for it to turn into an insular clique or aggressive gang. The best defense against this is to try to expand any given us by making it more inclusive, and to be in as many "uses" as you can manage, and have them cross-communicate. You understand different perspectives and wants and rationales better that way, and it helps prevent "us versus them" thinking and behavior. E.g., it's hard to side with WikiProject A against WikiProject B if you're participating in both and understand their viewpoints; the person who can is in a great position to mediate the dispute and find compromise.
Hope this helps. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 12:43, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
It is at Talk:Diccionario de la lengua española. I am confused about the English titles policy of Wikipedia and its application. I tried to move the page from Diccionario de la Lengua Española to its English translation as the author of the dictionary (the RAE) uses but I got opposition to it. Your input is welcomed. Thinker78 ( talk) 19:02, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
In the article Association of Academies of the Spanish Language I added lang templates, and some of them were for Spanish names of people because I thought that the screen reader then would pronounce the names properly, but another editor deleted the templates from the names of people. I disagree with him because as mentioned above I thought the screen reader would pronounce them properly with the template but I'm kind of new using those templates so I don't know if I was mistaken in the use I gave to the template or the other editor was mistaken in deleting them. Can you provide some guidance? Thinker78 ( talk) 00:34, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Berlin
but Munich ({{lang-de|{{noitalic|München}})
or Munich ({{lang|de|München}})
– the {{
lang}}
and {{
lang-de}}
template families don't behave consistently with regard to italics, which are not used around proper names except for titles of works that would take italics anyway. For a book title like the Spanish dictionary at the RM, I'd be inclined to put that in a language template ({{
lang|es}}
not {{
lang-es}}
), since it's an entire non-English phrase. We don't do it with personal names; while I agree with your rationale for wanting to do it, the consensus seems to be that it's too much template cruft in the wikicode. An exception is when dealing with names that natively are not in the Latin alphabet. Sometimes there's a common westernization, followed by the original name, and a stricter Romanization (or multiple of them if there are multiple systems); examples to follow. In simpler cases, just the non-Latin is templated: Vladimir Putin {{lang-rus|Влади́мир Пу́тин}}
. Some of the templates for Asian languages wrap the English name too, as in {{Nihongo|Utada Hikaru|宇多田 ヒカル}}
, which produces Utada Hikaru (宇多田 ヒカル). However, this same template can be used differently, to give a rough Westernization, Japanese script, and a more technical Romanization: {{nihongo|Showa|昭和|Shōwa}}
. That template is not required; for the simple case, one could also do Utada Hikaru ({{lang|ja|宇多田 ヒカル}})
. The complex case is used when the Western name order is used in English: {{Nihongo|Hikaru Utada|宇多田 ヒカル|Utada Hikaru}}
. A really complex case is found at
Mao Zedong:
'''Mao Zedong''' ({{zh|s=毛泽东|w='''''Mao Tse-Tung'''''}} {{IPAc-en|audio=Zh-Mao_Zedong.ogg|ˈ|m|aʊ|_|d|z|ə|ˈ|d|ʊ|ŋ|,_|z|ə|-|,_|-|ˈ|d|ɒ|ŋ}}; December 26, 1893{{spaced ndash}}September 9, 1976), [[courtesy name]] '''Runzhi''' (潤芝),also known as '''Chairman Mao''', was ...
{{
Infobox Chinese}}
, which you can see at work under Mao's personal infobox.Hope this helps. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 07:09, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains. Legobot ( talk) 04:25, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for re-phrasing my comment on the AFD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Elf cat, you are correct that I was proposing to merge and redirect. However, I also equally believe that simply deleting the content would be an acceptable alternative. Is there a specific way I should phrase that on AFD discussions in the future? Randomeditor1000 ( talk) 13:37, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi, When you closed the discussion over there were you aware that there were changes in the article being discussed? -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 17:18, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
The left-hand margin of the desktop site has started to show links to Wikidata and through it to Commons and Wikispecies, just as it previously started showing links to other language wikis via Wikidata. Look at Aloidendron as an example.
taxon
. I asked for I'd value your comments and opinions. This should presumably be discussed somewhere – at a Village pump page perhaps? Peter coxhead ( talk) 10:53, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
1 item = 1 concept methodology of Wikidatais a deep problem. As I have noted elsewhere it causes serious problems when one language wiki splits/forks an article and another doesn't (examples are that we have Berry and Berry (botany) and most other wikis have only one article; we have only one article for a monospecific genus, many other wikis have an article for both the genus and species). However, even within this approach, the current situation muddles the concept 'taxonomic name' and the concept 'taxon'. Yes, taxonomic names are indeed concepts in their own right, with their own literature, etc. but so are taxa. Correct data modelling shows a 1:N relationship between taxa and taxonomic names. Since articles are about taxa, not names, they should be linked via the taxon entity with different entities used to connect taxonomic name (synonyms) to their literature, if this is appropriate for Wikidata.
@ Peter coxhead: Brya is one of the two editors I had in mind with all of the above, so your comment, although entirely coincidental, is not unexpected. (The other is Snipre, a French editor in good graces with that community--he has other issues mostly related to a misunderstanding of basic taxonomy outside biology.)
I don't see any issue with interwiki links being on Wikidata. Where before it was one editor on a specific wiki having a change ripple through the others because of bots, now it's one place to go and see (and [dis]agree) with changes to the linkages--the changes for which are much more trivial to undo.
The Bonnie and Clyde problem is well-documented. I have actually moved from my previous position, that Wikidata should support redirects, or anchor links, to the idea that the problem really shouldn't be "solved". I can elide if you want, but I don't think that's the point of this discussion.
Yes, indeed, it muddles names and concepts. No argument from me. :) (CAVEAT: I may have a wrong understanding of all of this though and would thus be miscommunicating; reference d:WD:WikiProject Taxonomy for biological taxonomy stuffs.)
SMC: Most of the mess unrelated to stuff that looks like duplicates is resolved in the best way that Wikidata can, and I don't think it should be abandoned just because of Wikidata's current mess of duplicates (in biology). Baby, bathwater, etc.
I am not aware of the current Wikispecies integration; I vaguely recall some stuff about how both communities would/could benefit... but that was a presentation a year or more ago. It took pulling Lydia's (the product manager) teeth to even get Wikispecies included in the interproject linking system on Wikidata--apparently there were some office politics that she would not discuss in public (and I assume that was WMF office politics, but it may also have been her contract with the major donors to Wikidata... I haven't spent a lot of time speculating).
Your comment on item 2: It looks like you jumped from my comment 2 to my comment 4.2. Suggest re-reading each separately. :)
An RFC here probably wouldn't help too much and would look too much like the battleground that is being driven here by a certain editor who shall not be named. What is mostly needed is people who are familiar with the subject matter to influence discussions there (or perhaps to integrate with how Wikidata does it--I'm really not knowledgeable enough to say). The tag teaming control mostly stems from people without subject knowledge observing "these people must know what they're talking about because they talk a mean game"--and this is largely true across many of the domains on Wikidata. Biology is just the one that annoys me because I see the pushing there--unlike the other domains (maybe modeling of works, but the solution for that modeling is livable to me). If enough people here would invest a little time there, the matter might fix itself (though it might come with a million or two bot edits... Wikidata is more than equipped for such).
Regarding #3, I got the least used of three Wikispecies link templates deleted earlier this year ( Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2017 February 25#Template:WikispeciesCompact), while suggesting that perhaps all three of them should be deleted. The discussion only attracted two other people, one who supported deleting all, one who didn't.
I pay attention to Wikispecies. Wikispecies put all the vernacular names they had onto Wikidata, with Wikispecies as a reference. Then they deleted the vernacular names from Wikispecies and are now pulling them from Wikidata. There was never any referencing of the vernacular names when they were on Wikispecies, and there is a lot of garbage. "Translations" of scientific names into random languages, and POV pushing by a long-blocked former en.Wiki editor who insisted that certain vernacular names are incorrect (e.g. Juniperus virginiana can't be called a "cedar"). Aside from vernacular names, Wikispecies hasn't provided anything to Wikidata and doesn't pull anything from Wikidata. Wikispecies missed the boat in terms of providing much taxonomic content to Wikidata. Wikidata's taxonomic content is ultimately driven by Lsjbot's articles created for the Cebuano Wikipedia. Lsjbot uses Catalog of Life as a source; CoL has some garbage entries, and the principal taxonomy editors on Wikidata aren't very pleased about using CoL. A year or so ago, some Wikispecies editors finally noticed that CoL existed and started harvesting data from there. This didn't go over well with the Wikidata editors, but it didn't matter much since this was duplicating content Wikidata had already dealt with due to Lsjbot. Plantdrew ( talk) 17:34, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
Just an FYI: You mentioned you were concerned about them, but not which page is riddled with them. So I wondered if you were referring to this page, and if not, now you have two of them. Mathglot ( talk) 11:01, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
s/he
. Not sure I have the patience for doing
Gopi Shankar Madurai right now. Just to make a point, I also wrote
User:SMcCandlish/It yesterday, though have not had opportunity to use it. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 13:57, 7 November 2017 (UTC)Ever consider running for adminship? North America 1000 11:22, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Booches. Inre: content restored. North America 1000 14:11, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
cuegloss}}
for linking to glossary entries:
rack,
the wire. Pool, billiards, and snooker are insanely jargon-heavy, even for sports, so we've made extensive use of this at articles like
Nine-ball. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 17:37, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
Just wanted to say that I particularly appreciated the comment you left at the thread I started at WT:RFA regarding RfAs and canvassing (sorry for the delay, I hadn't reviewed the thread in awhile). It does vex me a little that I'll never know how my RfA might have turned out if that issue hadn't subsumed the entire process, and I do think it's a little ridiculous that one (IMO relatively minor, though stupid) lapse in judgment derailed the entire process, but I suppose it is what it is. Nobody's approached me to try again, and I'm sure as hell not going to self-nominate. Anyway, thanks again. DonIago ( talk) 14:30, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Draft talk:Brian Clifton (composer). Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
Would you mind splitting your move request at Talk:National_Geographic_(magazine)#Requested_move_10_November_2017 ? There's several issues to discuss regarding the channel move, and I wouldn't want them to conflate with the very obvious and probably uncontroversial move for the magazine's article.
Regarding the channel, use of "channel" as a disambiguation phrase is inaccurate as it is actually a television network. Also, since there are clearly several versions of the network in various countries, we should preserve the "U.S." part of it. Also, as you mentioned, "National Geographic Channel" is a potentially viable natural disambiguation method to explore.
Like I said, I just don't want to muddy an obvious move for the magazine itself. -- Netoholic @ 19:30, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
Vive la difference! WP:PRIMARY vs. WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. -- В²C ☎ 23:28, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Alexis Reich. Since you had some involvement with the Alexis Reich redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Mathglot ( talk) 08:52, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Patriot Prayer. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
|
Thinker78 ( talk) 05:39, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
It is @ Ice cream headache. Thinker78 ( talk) 22:42, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
I think you've screwed up and broken something (why/how:) by not signing this. TIA
How's it going apart from that? Andrewa ( talk) 13:02, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Islamic terrorism in Europe (2014–present). Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi, Just wanted to apologise for accusing you on the RM - I'm still confused by it all but hey ho anyway just wanted to apologise for getting rattled with you, Happy editing :), – Davey2010 Talk 20:05, 18 November 2017 (UTC) |
Hi.I am not sure, but I think your signature has some code that creates a new line. I relisted a move discussion initiated by you, and the relist comment was in the new line. special:diff/811022083. :) —usernamekiran (talk) 01:19, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
<br />
in front of it in that case). But your relist comment was on a line by itself because you put it after a </p>
, which ends a paragraph block. It's okay if it's on a line by itself; no one will care. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 01:29, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
I noticed an by the seemingly new editor Dr. Bob in Arizona in the article Ice cream headache, where he seems to synthesize a primary source, in contravention with Wikipedia:No original research#Primary,_secondary_and_tertiary_sources. I looked for a template to notify him about that, but I didn't find any. I don't know if any exist; if one does exist, please let me know, and if not, I suggest creating one. Thinker78 ( talk) 02:52, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
Primary source inline}}
exists. However, I'm not sure this needs to be flagged rather than cleaned up. It's permissible to use a primary source with attribution (rather than using assertions from it "in Wikipedia's voice"), and {{
Primary source inline}}
in this case, because primary source as a citation is ok in this case in my opinion. I was thinking more of a template {{
subst:uw-primarysrc}}
that says the following -or something like the following: "Thank you for your contribution. Please note that, on Wikipedia, per
Wikipedia:No original research unless restricted by another policy,
primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia; however, please do not analyze, evaluate, interpret, or synthesize material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so. Thank you!"
Thinker78 (
talk) 04:49, 19 November 2017 (UTC) edited 06:42, 19 November 2017 (UTC) Edited again 07:19, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi. Maybe I'm misreading the indents, but over at Talk:Race (human categorization), I think you may have mistaken my reply for someone else's reply. I was saying (albeit not explicitly) that Wikipedia is quite properly biased in favor of science. I would comment over there, but I don't want to complicate things further. Rivertorch FIRE WATER 20:23, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Seriously, good luck, but if you do succeed, please please please please please try to work on the TL;dr aspects of your communications. Arbcom is rife with over-the-top bullshit and self-promulgating nonsense, as evidenced with the first third of every case finding, don't make it even worse than it already is. I have utmost respect for your capabilities but if new Arbcom members could do one thing, it would be to reduce the nausea. I won't question you extensively on this aspect because I think it's a little rude to quiz fellow contestants but really, that would be my only critique. When I see you've added 4.2KB to a discussion where in essence you've said "yep", I turn off. The community will do the same... The Rambling Man ( talk) 22:27, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
Hello, SMcCandlish – I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. I was just looking at the Template:Reign documentation page, and I think there might be a mistake in the Augustus example in the Parameters section. I think there should be a close parentheses instead of double curly brackets. Can you take a look at it? – Corinne ( talk) 23:30, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
By the way, would it be possible for you to add another option to the list? The first one in the list of examples says the line can break after the "r.", and the space between "r." and the years is a regular space, and I can see that the two years are separated by an en-dash with no space around it. In the second option, the line cannot break after the "r." and the space between the "r." and the years is a thin space. I can see in the example, though, that the years are separated by an en-dash with a bit of space either side of it. What I'd like is a template like the first one, with a regular space between "r." and the years, it cannot break between the "r." and the years, and the en-dash between the two years has no space around it. – Corinne ( talk) 23:37, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
Reign}}
is now super-badass. May have to purge the page again to see the new documentation (unless you go directly to
Template:Reign/doc). With some minimal meta-templating effort, the new features can also be made available to {{
Circa}}
and {{
Floruit}}
.
TheDoctorWho (
talk) has given you a
Turkey! Turkeys promote
WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a turkey, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy Thanksgiving!
Spread the goodness of turkey by adding {{ Thanksgiving Turkey}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
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I feel like I owe you an apology for sort of publicly "making fun" of the term "Wikipedia's voice", which you used some time ago in a discussion. I've since then seen other editors use the term, and feel somewhat foolish that I attempted to make you look odd, while only embarrassing myself with my own ignorance. I still think the term is odd, but whatever, I'm sorry for both of us about my behavior. Huggums537 ( talk) 23:14, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi. We're into the last five days of the Women in Red World Contest. There's a new bonus prize of $200 worth of books of your choice to win for creating the most new women biographies between 0:00 on the 26th and 23:59 on 30th November. If you've been contributing to the contest, thank you for your support, we've produced over 2000 articles. If you haven't contributed yet, we would appreciate you taking the time to add entries to our articles achievements list by the end of the month. Thank you, and if participating, good luck with the finale! Create women biographies in any field with a requirement of readable prose containing 1kb. Abishe ( talk) 14:43, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Aside from our disagreements, I love things like you caught on one WP style page which mentioned cubist art existing in the 15th century. Makes me wonder if anyone has done a satire about famous artists from other eras painting in cubist, fauve, or impressionistic styles (they must have?). Would be nice to see a da Vinci or even a van Gogh cubist work. Van Gogh didn't miss the emergence of cubism by much, and right in his old neighborhood (I was able to visit Paris this year, and loved exploring Montmartre on a daily or nightly basis)! Randy Kryn ( talk) 15:36, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
This seems pretty dubious to me. It certainly a unique and well-known object, and probably a proper name - there are plenty of sources that treat it as such, another, though the picture is mixed, and I admit the majority don't. I won't re-open the matter, but it should not have been put through as a technical. Johnbod ( talk) 17:09, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
I have no issue at all with that particular WP:RM/TR move going to a full WP:RM; the outcome will be the same either way. :-) I don't list things at RM/TR unless I'm absolutely certain.
Sources do not consistently capitalize this, or even consistently give it a particular appellation; "Duenos inscription" is just one of many descriptive titles that article could have. To the extent this is a work rather than an artifact, that name also happens to be a form of incipit (i.e. a designation that is simply repetition of material in the work, not a title assigned by the author, nor an evocative rather than descriptive name made up after the fact, e.g the "Grand Vase of Quirinal" or whatever); incipits are sentence case. And so on. I really do think these things through. Not sure how many thousands more RMs it's going to take before people realize that MOS:CAPS says something and that what it says means something, and that people's idiosyncratic ideas about what a proper name or proper noun are don't overturn it. <shrug> Presumably it will take thousands more because it's not been sinking in very much yet. Or maybe it's just a matter of churn: as one editor comes to grok this with fullness, another new one arrives who has not considered these matters yet.
PS: (post-EC): The very fact that sources are not consistent in capitalization and (!) the majority of them do not capitalize, does mean, in fact, that it can be speedily moved. The entire point of RM/TR is that if there is a clear-cut
WP:P&G reason for a move, such that no amount of opinion-shouting is ever going to get around that fact and the sourcing, then the move should proceed without wasting the time arguing about it, because the conclusion is already predictable by anyone who properly understands policy and its application.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 17:40, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Another lurker. The relevant grammatical material is covered at Proper noun#Strong and weak proper names, although sadly not entirely correctly. Misunderstanding the difference between strong and weak proper noun phrases (NPs) in English and their relationship to capitalization underlies much of the confusion in relevant discussions. Here's my take on it, for what it's worth.
Peter coxhead ( talk) 07:40, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
At any rate, and regardless of these concerns, there is a strong prescriptivism current (two, actually: a nationalistic one and a traditionalistic/preservative one) at play, in direct defiance of where the language is going. Ironically, many of the same people who were all ranty-pants about MoS needing to be "sourced" and to bend toward WP:COMMONNAME's approach (i.e., the reason we now have the "permit a stylization if a strong majority of RS do it consistently" rules) are also often those pushing a pet peeve of some kind, usually a WP:SSF-based one. In my own personal writing, I'm also a bit preservative of various style stuff. I just have learned to sharply divide what WP needs from what I prefer (e.g. I loathe sentence case for headings, table headers, etc., and I personally capitalize more stuff than WP does, and I hate "c." for "ca.", and ...).
If the Rosetta Stone were just an artifact, I would have no problem with "Rosetta stone" (more to the point, the real world wouldn't and thus WP wouldn't). But it's a document, albeit a stone one. The conventions for written works are different, so both of those things get title case (for as long as title case is around for documentary works, and it's definitely eroding!). That convention isn't entirely consistent – incipits get sentence case, and after-the-fact labels for documents and similar works (musical compositions, etc.) often do as well, but generally within particular confines that do a lot of their own typographic standards-setting, e.g. classical music, where names like "Foo's xth symphony" are common in sentence case, being modern classifiers not actual titles. And with that stuff, too, WP just follows the dominant source usage. We have "Lindisfarne Gospels" because the real world says so.
A key thing about proper names is they are not merely descriptive, when descriptive at all. When they're not just abstract or arbitrary (like "Stanton") they're metaphoric, evocative, a step removed from the literal. The Rocky Mountains is a proper name because it's suggestive of unusual rockiness (all mountains are, of course rocky, being made of rock). The Grand Tetons is a proper name because they are not really some big teats. The Pacific Ocean, likewise, isn't really a sea of peace. The Duenos inscription really is an inscription that says "Duenos"; the Gundustrup cauldron really is just the cauldron found there; these labels evoke nothing non-descriptive.
Anyway, it's a shame you're not German; you'd be really happy with the capitalization of all nouns (and compounded noun phrases) in that language. English ditched it for a reason: it's not helpful. German's retained it for a conflicting reason of traditionalism, of resistance to simplification shifts. It's the same kind of argument you're making, though yours is just narrower and more nuanced. You're basically arguing for a return to the capitalization standards of ca. 1850–1950.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 13:37, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
And yes, Johnbod, this is of course original research. This is a discussion, not an article. Every time we internally deliberate about and try to interpret WTF is going on with style in the real world and what implications this should [or not] have for our own MoS and AT policy, we're engaging in a form of OR, it is not forbidden OR, and it's a necessary part of the process. Our internal rule systems and the consensus discussions that arrive at them and (in this case) question them are not part of the encyclopedia content, any more than a book about how to oil paint is itself an oil painting. We write them based on our own analyses (supplemented by sources of course), so this is always an OR process.
There is unlikely to exist any published, peer-reviewed (much less secondary,
literature reviewed) research on why capitalization differs, in the aggregate, for one particular class of terms like artifacts studied mostly as sources of written material versus those that are merely functional or artistic, or events of one sort but not of another, or movements of one sort but not of another. The only practical ways around this real-world problem are a) just impose a no-exceptions rule (people didn't like that) or b) follow the majority of the sources and just let it be rather arbitrary (the system we have now). No one's come up with an alternative, other than sporadic attempts to follow the style, for any topic, found in specialized works about the topic, which proved to be nightmare and is why we have a centralized MoS and AT policy in the first place, and arrived at them very quickly, in the life span of the project. (WP started in January 2001; MoS existed (as a page directly offering style and titles advice) by August 2002
[10] (it existed earlier as an index of pre-existing material in other pages; e.g. what is now
MOS:JARGON dates to at least October 2001
[11]), and AT forked off of it the same month.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 22:55, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Also, our titles are not definitions or explanations as a matter of WP:AT policy; it is not their job to explain to readers what something is or how it differs from other things or classes of things, other than (when ambiguous) just barely enough to ensure readers arrive at the correct article (per WP:AT#DAB, WP:DAB). There is nothing with a name similar to "Gundestrup cauldron" or "Duenos inscription", so capitalizing in the title will serve no purpose. From the very first sentence of each article it's instantly clear that neither is a category of objects, so capitalizing it in running prose in that article serves no purpose. Because such objects (weak proper names, as Peter_coxhead has it) require a leading "the", they cannot be confused with a class of objects (depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron not *depicted on Gundestrup cauldron; usually cooked in a dutch oven not *usually cooked in dutch oven); so the capitalization serves no purpose in other articles either. [And "dutch oven" is increasingly decapitalized, like "french fries", because they're not particularly Dutch; cf. english in American billiards jargon, and scotch doubles in sports generally, and many other examples.]
Even when either sort of label doesn't conform to this "Gundestrup cauldron" vs. "dutch oven" split (there are always exceptions in English), no one is actually confused frequently enough that anyone cares, or style guides throughout English would have additional rules in favor of capitalization, but you won't find "capitalize anything that's unique" in any style guide anywhere. Your "capitalize for disambiguation" is a solution in search of a problem, and if there were consensus to do it on WP, it would be listed at WP:AT#DAB as a disambiguation type, and much of MOS:CAPS, MOS:TM, NC:CAPS, etc., would not exist.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:23, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
SMcCandlish Are you saying that even if an object is referred to in the preponderance of scholarly works (say, for example, works of art history) with all the terms capitalized, you would de-capitalize all but the first term in WP titles and articles? How about the Winged Victory of Samothrace, often called just the Winged Victory? (In a glance at the article, I saw that the word "Victory" is in italics throughout the article for some reason; I don't think it has to be italicized, but it is capitalized.) I think it would look very strange as "the Winged victory". Perhaps Nebra sky disk should be written "Nebra Sky Disk". I think there is a difference between the many ordinary unique things in the world (like the elm tree in Chicago you gave as an example) and famous, extraordinary unique things like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Rosetta Stone, and, perhaps also the Gundestrup Cauldron. Before you answer, I think you should pause and think about this a little. With Johnbod's background in art history, it behooves us to carefully consider his opinions. – Corinne ( talk) 16:09, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Let's just cover the larger issue (again) in fine policy detail: The entire point of this whole discussion (and every prior discussion similar to it over the last decade) is that (while some people don't like it) Wikipedia capitalizes when a substantial majority of reliable sources do so consistently for the specific topic in question. This does not mean "when specialized sources all following essentially same insular house style do so", or virtually everything on WP would be capitalized, because specialized works capitalize for emphasis (including insider-ese signification) in virtually every field (pop-culture works capitalize genre names, theatre and film works capitalize methods and techniques and other jargon, ornithology works capitalize common names of species, government works capitalize government job titles even when not used in front of individual names, military writing capitalizes equipment names any time they match official designations, pop music journalism tends to mimic marketing stylization of logos and album covers – insert 1000 more examples here). The failure of various people to absorb the fact that WP prefers general-audience secondary sourcing over specialist primary sourcing – and that names are not magically exempt – is the cause of virtually all capitalization debate on Wikipedia.
I does not behoove us to consider specialists' opinions when it comes to capitalization and other general writing-style matters (only for strictly-encoded designations like biological binomials and ISO unit symbols) because almost all fields overcapitalize within their topical materials. WP would have no manual of style at all, but a one-line rule to follow the style most used in specialist works on a topic-by-topic basis. This is how WP was first written, by default, and it was abandoned in less than a year, because is presented serious comprehensibility problems for anyone other than specialists who write but don't need to read "their" topic's articles (plus, of course, for any topic where two+ specializations intersect, which is most topics, a style conflict resulted). Capitalization as jargonistic signification is a style that works very well in expert-to-same-kind-of-expert communication, but it is disastrously awful on Wikipedia, causing many problems, including first and foremost reader confusion, plus a profusion of overcapitalization of other things (in the mistaken belief that it's actually Wikipedia style to capitalize "important stuff" in any given context), a constant source of pointless conflict, and inspiration of further attempts to impose specialized jargon and usage, as if each WP article category were a technical journal with its own independent style guide.
WP permits plenty of specialist-preferred style – when it is consistently used in the real world, is the subject of a field-wide standard, and does not confuse readers. Much of MOS:NUM (maths usage, ISO stuff, etc.) qualifies. Another example is that genus and species are presented in the format Felis chaus and that format only, even though some newspapers and such get either the italics or the capitalization wrong. But "capitalize everything that's unique in my field because the journals I like tend to do so" doesn't qualify. This is not a new debate; it was settled – against this idea – in one of the biggest RfCs in WP's history.
There's a clear WP:CIR problem when someone fails to understand or refuses to accept, after an initial short adjustment period, that WP has its own stylesheet, just like all professional-grade publishers, and that those who write here are expected to write in that style or (on WP in particular) write as they like, within reason, and just not impede the work of others to clean up the material to be compliant, and also to not forum-shop until the end of time one's unhappiness with a particular style quirk here. The idea that various academic specialists are having trouble with this is silly posturing by a handful of tendentious, topically prescriptive individuals. They are in reality entirely professionally familiar with the fact that the journals they write for have differing style guides; e.g. every ornithologist knows that the species capitalization habit they love in orn. journals is not permitted (even in orn. articles) in broader biology journals, and so on. This extends beyond academics; e.g., everyone who's actually in or formerly in the US Marine Corp knows full well that the US military habit of writing "John M. Doe is a Marine" and "When the Marine's tour of duty was over ..." is not reflected in everyday writing, where it's "marine".
Can we please just drop this now? Everything in this entire thread is rehash of the same stuff we've all already been over innumerable times before (other than Peter's idea of having us address a distinction between strong and weak proper-noun phrases more clearly). We have a simple rule to follow: Use simple, plain style unless for a particular case a strong majority of sources consistently do something different. This is entirely in agreement with the
core content policies, and it isn't going to change to push the particular pseudo-linguistic PoV of any camp of topical specialists. Trying to get that result just has to stop. It's abuse of WP as a
topical language-reform advocacy playground, and it wastes an insane amount of editorial productivity on re-re-re-arguing about the style trivia ad nauseam.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 03:06, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
Capital letters in encyclopedic writing never serve a "promoting" purpose; the is the central, unmistakeable message of MOS:CAPS. So lower-casing the inappropriate use of capitals isn't "demoting", it's just normalizing promotional over-stylization back to neutrality (capitalizing "the Rocky Mountains" isn't non-neutral because it's 100% conventional, while "Gundestrup Cauldron" is only found in about 40% of sources, "Nebra Sky Disc" about 35%, and "Duenos Inscription" 10% or less. Capitalizing them is taking a stand, using capitals to assert an implication of unusual importance against real-world consensus (so it's also a form of WP:OR; we've been over that before, too). Everyone with even rudimentary English skills already knows that capitalization is not used consistently, is frequently encountered simply for visual effect in signage and marketing, and in regular prose it varies by writer and context even for the same subject. We figure that out around third grade, and no one is confused by "the Players Championship" (vs. "The Players Championship" or "The PLAYERS Championship"), just like no one is confused by "the Duenos inscription" not having a capital I. Anyone who cannot understand (or refuses to accept) that capital letters are used here for pre-defined conventional things and in accordance the dominant usage in RS needs to stay out of style matters at Wikipedia. The very nature of the argument they're presenting is based on an emotive belief (not supported by real linguistics); this belief system (a form of ipse dixit) does not respond to logic or evidence; such persons consequently turn tendentious and circular-reasoned; and they waste many editors' time forum-shopping the same rejected thing over and over and over.
In its belief-and-tradition roots, depth of feeling, resistance to reason, and central motivation, this urge to capitalize out of respect is precisely the same as the also-rejected demand (coincidentally re-re-re-raised at
WT:MOS just now) to use a special post-nominal phrase or abbreviation after Muhammad's name at every occurrence ("Muhammad S.A.W."); that fact that one is about a religious figure and the other is about a broader class of topics is just a difference of degree.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 07:08, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
PPS: Randy, all your "holding to a guideline so strictly that you act to use it without exception", "the bar is set so high that nothing can be an exception", "you can't compromise even a little", "exceptions are never supported", "have never applied a common sense exception", "Maybe you don't think anything is exception worthy", "followed each and every time", etc. hyperbole is a mile-high straw man. No MoS regulars ever suggest such a thing, and the very post you wrote that in response to has a paragraph beginning "WP permits plenty of specialist-preferred style", which outlines the general rationales that have been well-received for exceptions (and of course "do it because almost all the RS do so in this case" is the general one – the very notion you and John are fighting against with your right hands is the one you're trying to depend upon with your left). A strong sense of traditionalism or a personal feeling that topics you consider important must be signified as important with capital letters, despite the fact that our central rule about capitalization is to not do that, are not rationales for making an exception, especially one not supported by the sources.
How many more ways can this possibly be said before the light bulb goes on, guys? If you already understand this and just refuse to accept it, please stop pestering my talk page about it, or recycling the same stuff tendentiously in RM discussions. Open an RfC to require WP to follow the majority style in specialist writing rather than the majority style across all reliable sources.
The closest thing to a "no exceptions" rule being advocated by anyone in this discussion is that presented by Johnbod: that everything that is "unique" has a proper name and that this must be capitalized, no matter what the reliable-sources analysis shows to be real-world usage. Unless I'm missing something, you're presenting the same argument, except yours is dressed up in a "and do it to be respectful" tuxedo, while John's is wearing a "do it because my colleagues and I do it when we write stuff for each other" academic labcoat.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 07:11, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Marlon Brando. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Regarding your edit of 21:01, 29 May 2016 of Wikipedia:Manual of Style, in which you inserted
— Anomalocaris ( talk) 11:44, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
I'm very interested in the desysop case to which you referred here... can you provide any pointers to help me find it? Andrewa ( talk) 20:56, 30 November 2017 (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 125 | ← | Archive 130 | Archive 131 | Archive 132 | Archive 133 | Archive 134 | Archive 135 |
Ok, I think we're ready for voting here. You indicated in the discussion that you may of changed your stance, so I just would like to see if you wanted to update it. -- Deathawk ( talk) 00:05, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
Just a quick note: I have noticed you getting a bit annoyed with some other editors recently. From personal experience, I know how crap it can feel to be on the receiving end of you when you feel like people are not understanding your points. I would probably avoid replying to FC on the current MoS thread. I have not seen them before, and—judging by their contributions—they are not especially familiar with P+G talk pages. They are clearly passionate about the discussion taking place, as demonstrated by the additional effort of contacting Microsoft. I am sure there are plenty of MoS regulars who will be happy to take over dealing with them. – Sb 2001 20:08, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
That detail aside, let's get to the alleged civility issue. WP has a tension between WP:CIVIL and WP:CIR. It's been there the entire time CIR has existed, and even longer, ("competence is required" was said at ANI, AN, AE, etc., long before it was codified). CIR really is true. Part of the competence to edit productively here is competence with English, well above middling ESL level. When it comes to editing MoS (or trying to ensure compliance with it), an even higher level of competency is required – beyond mere fluency, into detailed knowledge about the finer points of English usage and style. So, there's not automatically a civility issue with questioning someone's English competence, given sufficient evidence. (In your case, I did not have it, and apologize again. I did not do due diligence, since a dictionary did actually have the term in question after all, and one case is never enough to assess someone's language skills anyway.) Having the civility to collaborate here is also a CIR matter, so it makes the tension between CIVIL and CIR kind of recursive.
However, the appearance of "native" somewhere in a thread does not necessarily mean a civility problem is happening, even if it's about an editor not an inanimate bit of language. After your post here, someone in that WT:MOS thread has in fact questioned whether another editor (a different one) is a native speaker of English, based on how they write and what assertions they've made about grammar. This actually appears to be on-point to me, given the nature of the debate – whether an alleged rule defended by that person, added without broad consensus, actually reflects linguistic reality about English (which consensus so far says it does not). This is kind of a case of life imitating art, I guess, in that the accusation that someone questioned whether someone else is a native English speaker was false, then became true post hoc.
In the end, I'm not sure that "native" is the right word, since plenty of native speakers have terrible grammar and spelling, and plenty of advanced ESL learners do better than they do at it. It's more a matter of fluency. But "native" still has a linguistic meaning, and that's what was originally being used in the thread. E.g., the abilities to split infinitives and to end sentences with prepositions is a native feature of English, and has been for centuries; both will be found in the works of the best English-language writers. The "rules" to never do either are non-native impositions (from other languages or from theories about language "improvement") by prescriptive grammarians, back in the Victorian era.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:28, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
The issues the MoS has encountered recently are, as you said, to do with a lack of competency. The editors in question are showing a lack of willingness to break the rules. I do not care whether one chooses to stick an article in front of a trademark like '.NET Framework'. Personally, I would rather the capital 'F' on 'Framework' goes at the same time as 'the' going on the front, but recognise your point about editors changing it. I also know that I am somewhat of an 'undercapper', so am probably not the best person to involve in this specific issue. I should not have assumed that it was you who used the term 'non-native' (although, I am sure you can understand why I did; thanks for your further apologies—consider that finished). EEng's decision to fire this in the direction of another editor was a little tactless. FC—however—should not have raised it on that page to strengthen his case, or weaken that of others. I have done the same in the past, though, as part of a 'last attempt' to persuade editors that they are being unreasonable. I hold nothing against him, and am sure that he will be back soon enough, hopefully in a more laid-back frame of mind. – Sb 2001 00:34, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
".NET Framework" is a proper name, like "Hypertext Markup Language"; both of these are also of a descriptive structure, like "JPEG image format" (not a proper name), but that's true of a lot of proper names, like "Pacific Coast Highway", "Central Park", "the Wikipedia Manual of Style", etc. If it's published as the .NET Framework, it just is (as the Linux kernel is that and not the "Linux Kernel"; "Linux" is the proper name, "kernel" is a descriptive disambiguator distinguishing between that and the Linux project, Linux as a family of GNU/Linux complete OSes, etc., etc.). There's a usage distinction (though rarely arising in this particular case): one might write "A comparison of the features of the .NET and Oracle Application Development frameworks demonstrates that ..."; we'd do this for the same reason we'd say "Adkazian has taught at both Oxford and Cambridge universities". This lower-case-when-genericized-as-plural style is not universally recognized, but has become the dominant usage since ca. the 1980s. Because there are still some old people who object to it (and I'm pushing 50, so I'm not mocking), it's best written around when possible. I've discovered through trial and error that people are less likely to "correct" it to an upper-case plural if there are three or more, but still – just take away the temptation. Similarly one could in theory write something like "In the handling of data arrays, the PHP, Fortran, and .NET frameworks are confusingly different", using "framework" in completely different sense, about the syntax of parsing (PHP and Fortran are not software frameworks at all), but this would be confusing and anyone would be sensible to rewrite it to use a different word; it would be like using the word "case" in the generic sense of "instance" in a legal context, where it would be confused with the term of art "case" meaning "lawsuit or prosecution". "Framework" in the software context is a term of art with a specific contextual meaning (or rather a range of such meanings, related but not synonymous).
"Non-native" – Not just EEng; CT did, too, and they're not necessarily wrong, though it runs up against what I was getting into above. When are we digging at people to "
WP:WIN" versus trying to assess whether someone is actually competent to be trying to affect our style guide and its interpretation? Is there a more tactful way to do the latter? I'm not really sure of the answer to the last question, and it applies to all
WP:CIR concerns. E.g., "you don't yet know enough about deletion policy to meaningfully participate at AfD; your last ten posts there have just clouded matters and inflamed other parties" will be accepted by one person as "Oh, I guess I'd better read up on the policies in more detail" but by the next person as a vicious personal swipe that questions their mentality. I don't see a clear path around this human-nature obstacle. I've addressed it the best I could at the time at
WP:HOTHEADS in the two sections on avoid commenting on contributor rather than contribution, but this is hardly failsafe; some are apt to treat criticism of something they said or did as criticism of their person. I've tried to AGF about FC and CL's misinterpretation or alleged misinterpretation that "This is normal in native English usage", etc. (clearly about strings of words) was somehow about an individual's English-language competence; but since the misinterpretation is actually unlikely, and it happened with those two and only those two back-to-back, and they have a tag-teaming history, and both were engaged in a three-day-long pattern of incivility against someone for daring to disagee with them about something in
MOS:COMP, it really strains AGF to the breaking point.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 09:53, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums. Legobot ( talk) 04:25, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Codename Lisa ( talk) 09:04, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
Hello, my esteemed colleague.
It has been pointed out to me that up to this point, I have interpreted your behavior erroneously. People whom I deeply respect are of the opinion that your behavior so far can only be interpreted as patient and well-meaning. As such, I am here to do what every mature person should: to own up to his or her own mistake and apologize. Please accept my apology. With respect to making amends, I offer you the following remedial courses of action:
Best regards, |
The concern to me is that in one topic I'm aware of (English-language usage and style), your editing exhibits civility and AGF problems, a TAGTEAM, and
WP:CIR issues, as well has serious PoV problems. Not a value judgement about you, but a problem statement about editing behavior, which is rectifiable. Even the accusations and aspersions against me are not a big deal to me at a personal level (they're easy to disprove, and my skin is thick). The concern is that this is a pattern you'll engage in at all, which may affect others if you continue to do so. Another concern is that it's being pursued in furtherance of a linguistic position that multiple editors have already clearly disproven.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 05:42, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
@ Codename Lisa: I forgot to ping above. Anyway, if I said something you feel needs an apology or retraction, let me know. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:00, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
PS: Tiny clarification about the above: I don't think "madness" was uncivil, exactly, since it doesn't seem to be about an editor(s); rather it is a description of English usage you don't like, thus an indicator of a PoV problem. It wouldn't be any different from someone describing Hinduism as insane, or a preference for dogs over cats as some form of lunacy. We really have to avoid thinking like that about style and grammar, or everyone would be fighting style holy wars all day.
PPS: I would suggest not encouraging FleetCommand to apologize or retract anything (not in my direction, anyway). It's not something I need, and I'm honestly uncomfortable with "extracted" shows of contrition. For some people (self included sometimes) it can take a lengthy period of post hoc reflection to realize on one's own that one has misstepped. My memory for this stuff is generally short, and I don't bear grudges I can divest myself of.
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SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 12:27, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
Style: @ Codename Lisa: Agreed that simple and consistent style rules help produce better content (though WP:FAC has a rather strained relationship to MoS, due to pro- WP:VESTED-editors and anti- WP:MERCILESS-editing prejudices in that clique). However, the WT:MOS discussion has made it pretty clear that most of the RfC respondents don't consider MOS:COMP#Definite article a "simple and all-catching rule", but a made-up oversimplification that doesn't match reality. It might be nice if English were that programmatic and regular, but it's not. Trying to force it to be so on WP just tends to piss everyone off and breed new MoS haters. Eroding of respect for WP's policies and guidelines is an increasing problem that threatens the stability of the whole project, so we should avoid anything that increases that effect.
Us pesky hominids: FC isn't being "creepy" (unless I'm not privy to something), just cantankerous, and exhibiting human nature: seeking allies, defending territory, advancing personal preferences and perceptions as rules and truth. These are instincts we have to resist here, but it takes work and practice. Sometimes people have to be separated from topic areas in which they have difficulty reigning in these impulses. With regard to the urge to be part of an us in particular, we do need to collaborate, but it's really easy for it to turn into an insular clique or aggressive gang. The best defense against this is to try to expand any given us by making it more inclusive, and to be in as many "uses" as you can manage, and have them cross-communicate. You understand different perspectives and wants and rationales better that way, and it helps prevent "us versus them" thinking and behavior. E.g., it's hard to side with WikiProject A against WikiProject B if you're participating in both and understand their viewpoints; the person who can is in a great position to mediate the dispute and find compromise.
Hope this helps. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 12:43, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
It is at Talk:Diccionario de la lengua española. I am confused about the English titles policy of Wikipedia and its application. I tried to move the page from Diccionario de la Lengua Española to its English translation as the author of the dictionary (the RAE) uses but I got opposition to it. Your input is welcomed. Thinker78 ( talk) 19:02, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
In the article Association of Academies of the Spanish Language I added lang templates, and some of them were for Spanish names of people because I thought that the screen reader then would pronounce the names properly, but another editor deleted the templates from the names of people. I disagree with him because as mentioned above I thought the screen reader would pronounce them properly with the template but I'm kind of new using those templates so I don't know if I was mistaken in the use I gave to the template or the other editor was mistaken in deleting them. Can you provide some guidance? Thinker78 ( talk) 00:34, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Berlin
but Munich ({{lang-de|{{noitalic|München}})
or Munich ({{lang|de|München}})
– the {{
lang}}
and {{
lang-de}}
template families don't behave consistently with regard to italics, which are not used around proper names except for titles of works that would take italics anyway. For a book title like the Spanish dictionary at the RM, I'd be inclined to put that in a language template ({{
lang|es}}
not {{
lang-es}}
), since it's an entire non-English phrase. We don't do it with personal names; while I agree with your rationale for wanting to do it, the consensus seems to be that it's too much template cruft in the wikicode. An exception is when dealing with names that natively are not in the Latin alphabet. Sometimes there's a common westernization, followed by the original name, and a stricter Romanization (or multiple of them if there are multiple systems); examples to follow. In simpler cases, just the non-Latin is templated: Vladimir Putin {{lang-rus|Влади́мир Пу́тин}}
. Some of the templates for Asian languages wrap the English name too, as in {{Nihongo|Utada Hikaru|宇多田 ヒカル}}
, which produces Utada Hikaru (宇多田 ヒカル). However, this same template can be used differently, to give a rough Westernization, Japanese script, and a more technical Romanization: {{nihongo|Showa|昭和|Shōwa}}
. That template is not required; for the simple case, one could also do Utada Hikaru ({{lang|ja|宇多田 ヒカル}})
. The complex case is used when the Western name order is used in English: {{Nihongo|Hikaru Utada|宇多田 ヒカル|Utada Hikaru}}
. A really complex case is found at
Mao Zedong:
'''Mao Zedong''' ({{zh|s=毛泽东|w='''''Mao Tse-Tung'''''}} {{IPAc-en|audio=Zh-Mao_Zedong.ogg|ˈ|m|aʊ|_|d|z|ə|ˈ|d|ʊ|ŋ|,_|z|ə|-|,_|-|ˈ|d|ɒ|ŋ}}; December 26, 1893{{spaced ndash}}September 9, 1976), [[courtesy name]] '''Runzhi''' (潤芝),also known as '''Chairman Mao''', was ...
{{
Infobox Chinese}}
, which you can see at work under Mao's personal infobox.Hope this helps. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 07:09, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains. Legobot ( talk) 04:25, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for re-phrasing my comment on the AFD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Elf cat, you are correct that I was proposing to merge and redirect. However, I also equally believe that simply deleting the content would be an acceptable alternative. Is there a specific way I should phrase that on AFD discussions in the future? Randomeditor1000 ( talk) 13:37, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi, When you closed the discussion over there were you aware that there were changes in the article being discussed? -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 17:18, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
The left-hand margin of the desktop site has started to show links to Wikidata and through it to Commons and Wikispecies, just as it previously started showing links to other language wikis via Wikidata. Look at Aloidendron as an example.
taxon
. I asked for I'd value your comments and opinions. This should presumably be discussed somewhere – at a Village pump page perhaps? Peter coxhead ( talk) 10:53, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
1 item = 1 concept methodology of Wikidatais a deep problem. As I have noted elsewhere it causes serious problems when one language wiki splits/forks an article and another doesn't (examples are that we have Berry and Berry (botany) and most other wikis have only one article; we have only one article for a monospecific genus, many other wikis have an article for both the genus and species). However, even within this approach, the current situation muddles the concept 'taxonomic name' and the concept 'taxon'. Yes, taxonomic names are indeed concepts in their own right, with their own literature, etc. but so are taxa. Correct data modelling shows a 1:N relationship between taxa and taxonomic names. Since articles are about taxa, not names, they should be linked via the taxon entity with different entities used to connect taxonomic name (synonyms) to their literature, if this is appropriate for Wikidata.
@ Peter coxhead: Brya is one of the two editors I had in mind with all of the above, so your comment, although entirely coincidental, is not unexpected. (The other is Snipre, a French editor in good graces with that community--he has other issues mostly related to a misunderstanding of basic taxonomy outside biology.)
I don't see any issue with interwiki links being on Wikidata. Where before it was one editor on a specific wiki having a change ripple through the others because of bots, now it's one place to go and see (and [dis]agree) with changes to the linkages--the changes for which are much more trivial to undo.
The Bonnie and Clyde problem is well-documented. I have actually moved from my previous position, that Wikidata should support redirects, or anchor links, to the idea that the problem really shouldn't be "solved". I can elide if you want, but I don't think that's the point of this discussion.
Yes, indeed, it muddles names and concepts. No argument from me. :) (CAVEAT: I may have a wrong understanding of all of this though and would thus be miscommunicating; reference d:WD:WikiProject Taxonomy for biological taxonomy stuffs.)
SMC: Most of the mess unrelated to stuff that looks like duplicates is resolved in the best way that Wikidata can, and I don't think it should be abandoned just because of Wikidata's current mess of duplicates (in biology). Baby, bathwater, etc.
I am not aware of the current Wikispecies integration; I vaguely recall some stuff about how both communities would/could benefit... but that was a presentation a year or more ago. It took pulling Lydia's (the product manager) teeth to even get Wikispecies included in the interproject linking system on Wikidata--apparently there were some office politics that she would not discuss in public (and I assume that was WMF office politics, but it may also have been her contract with the major donors to Wikidata... I haven't spent a lot of time speculating).
Your comment on item 2: It looks like you jumped from my comment 2 to my comment 4.2. Suggest re-reading each separately. :)
An RFC here probably wouldn't help too much and would look too much like the battleground that is being driven here by a certain editor who shall not be named. What is mostly needed is people who are familiar with the subject matter to influence discussions there (or perhaps to integrate with how Wikidata does it--I'm really not knowledgeable enough to say). The tag teaming control mostly stems from people without subject knowledge observing "these people must know what they're talking about because they talk a mean game"--and this is largely true across many of the domains on Wikidata. Biology is just the one that annoys me because I see the pushing there--unlike the other domains (maybe modeling of works, but the solution for that modeling is livable to me). If enough people here would invest a little time there, the matter might fix itself (though it might come with a million or two bot edits... Wikidata is more than equipped for such).
Regarding #3, I got the least used of three Wikispecies link templates deleted earlier this year ( Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2017 February 25#Template:WikispeciesCompact), while suggesting that perhaps all three of them should be deleted. The discussion only attracted two other people, one who supported deleting all, one who didn't.
I pay attention to Wikispecies. Wikispecies put all the vernacular names they had onto Wikidata, with Wikispecies as a reference. Then they deleted the vernacular names from Wikispecies and are now pulling them from Wikidata. There was never any referencing of the vernacular names when they were on Wikispecies, and there is a lot of garbage. "Translations" of scientific names into random languages, and POV pushing by a long-blocked former en.Wiki editor who insisted that certain vernacular names are incorrect (e.g. Juniperus virginiana can't be called a "cedar"). Aside from vernacular names, Wikispecies hasn't provided anything to Wikidata and doesn't pull anything from Wikidata. Wikispecies missed the boat in terms of providing much taxonomic content to Wikidata. Wikidata's taxonomic content is ultimately driven by Lsjbot's articles created for the Cebuano Wikipedia. Lsjbot uses Catalog of Life as a source; CoL has some garbage entries, and the principal taxonomy editors on Wikidata aren't very pleased about using CoL. A year or so ago, some Wikispecies editors finally noticed that CoL existed and started harvesting data from there. This didn't go over well with the Wikidata editors, but it didn't matter much since this was duplicating content Wikidata had already dealt with due to Lsjbot. Plantdrew ( talk) 17:34, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
Just an FYI: You mentioned you were concerned about them, but not which page is riddled with them. So I wondered if you were referring to this page, and if not, now you have two of them. Mathglot ( talk) 11:01, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
s/he
. Not sure I have the patience for doing
Gopi Shankar Madurai right now. Just to make a point, I also wrote
User:SMcCandlish/It yesterday, though have not had opportunity to use it. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 13:57, 7 November 2017 (UTC)Ever consider running for adminship? North America 1000 11:22, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Booches. Inre: content restored. North America 1000 14:11, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
cuegloss}}
for linking to glossary entries:
rack,
the wire. Pool, billiards, and snooker are insanely jargon-heavy, even for sports, so we've made extensive use of this at articles like
Nine-ball. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 17:37, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
Just wanted to say that I particularly appreciated the comment you left at the thread I started at WT:RFA regarding RfAs and canvassing (sorry for the delay, I hadn't reviewed the thread in awhile). It does vex me a little that I'll never know how my RfA might have turned out if that issue hadn't subsumed the entire process, and I do think it's a little ridiculous that one (IMO relatively minor, though stupid) lapse in judgment derailed the entire process, but I suppose it is what it is. Nobody's approached me to try again, and I'm sure as hell not going to self-nominate. Anyway, thanks again. DonIago ( talk) 14:30, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Draft talk:Brian Clifton (composer). Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
Would you mind splitting your move request at Talk:National_Geographic_(magazine)#Requested_move_10_November_2017 ? There's several issues to discuss regarding the channel move, and I wouldn't want them to conflate with the very obvious and probably uncontroversial move for the magazine's article.
Regarding the channel, use of "channel" as a disambiguation phrase is inaccurate as it is actually a television network. Also, since there are clearly several versions of the network in various countries, we should preserve the "U.S." part of it. Also, as you mentioned, "National Geographic Channel" is a potentially viable natural disambiguation method to explore.
Like I said, I just don't want to muddy an obvious move for the magazine itself. -- Netoholic @ 19:30, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
Vive la difference! WP:PRIMARY vs. WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. -- В²C ☎ 23:28, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Alexis Reich. Since you had some involvement with the Alexis Reich redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Mathglot ( talk) 08:52, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Patriot Prayer. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
|
Thinker78 ( talk) 05:39, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
It is @ Ice cream headache. Thinker78 ( talk) 22:42, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
I think you've screwed up and broken something (why/how:) by not signing this. TIA
How's it going apart from that? Andrewa ( talk) 13:02, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Islamic terrorism in Europe (2014–present). Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi, Just wanted to apologise for accusing you on the RM - I'm still confused by it all but hey ho anyway just wanted to apologise for getting rattled with you, Happy editing :), – Davey2010 Talk 20:05, 18 November 2017 (UTC) |
Hi.I am not sure, but I think your signature has some code that creates a new line. I relisted a move discussion initiated by you, and the relist comment was in the new line. special:diff/811022083. :) —usernamekiran (talk) 01:19, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
<br />
in front of it in that case). But your relist comment was on a line by itself because you put it after a </p>
, which ends a paragraph block. It's okay if it's on a line by itself; no one will care. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 01:29, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
I noticed an by the seemingly new editor Dr. Bob in Arizona in the article Ice cream headache, where he seems to synthesize a primary source, in contravention with Wikipedia:No original research#Primary,_secondary_and_tertiary_sources. I looked for a template to notify him about that, but I didn't find any. I don't know if any exist; if one does exist, please let me know, and if not, I suggest creating one. Thinker78 ( talk) 02:52, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
Primary source inline}}
exists. However, I'm not sure this needs to be flagged rather than cleaned up. It's permissible to use a primary source with attribution (rather than using assertions from it "in Wikipedia's voice"), and {{
Primary source inline}}
in this case, because primary source as a citation is ok in this case in my opinion. I was thinking more of a template {{
subst:uw-primarysrc}}
that says the following -or something like the following: "Thank you for your contribution. Please note that, on Wikipedia, per
Wikipedia:No original research unless restricted by another policy,
primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia; however, please do not analyze, evaluate, interpret, or synthesize material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so. Thank you!"
Thinker78 (
talk) 04:49, 19 November 2017 (UTC) edited 06:42, 19 November 2017 (UTC) Edited again 07:19, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi. Maybe I'm misreading the indents, but over at Talk:Race (human categorization), I think you may have mistaken my reply for someone else's reply. I was saying (albeit not explicitly) that Wikipedia is quite properly biased in favor of science. I would comment over there, but I don't want to complicate things further. Rivertorch FIRE WATER 20:23, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Seriously, good luck, but if you do succeed, please please please please please try to work on the TL;dr aspects of your communications. Arbcom is rife with over-the-top bullshit and self-promulgating nonsense, as evidenced with the first third of every case finding, don't make it even worse than it already is. I have utmost respect for your capabilities but if new Arbcom members could do one thing, it would be to reduce the nausea. I won't question you extensively on this aspect because I think it's a little rude to quiz fellow contestants but really, that would be my only critique. When I see you've added 4.2KB to a discussion where in essence you've said "yep", I turn off. The community will do the same... The Rambling Man ( talk) 22:27, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
Hello, SMcCandlish – I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. I was just looking at the Template:Reign documentation page, and I think there might be a mistake in the Augustus example in the Parameters section. I think there should be a close parentheses instead of double curly brackets. Can you take a look at it? – Corinne ( talk) 23:30, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
By the way, would it be possible for you to add another option to the list? The first one in the list of examples says the line can break after the "r.", and the space between "r." and the years is a regular space, and I can see that the two years are separated by an en-dash with no space around it. In the second option, the line cannot break after the "r." and the space between the "r." and the years is a thin space. I can see in the example, though, that the years are separated by an en-dash with a bit of space either side of it. What I'd like is a template like the first one, with a regular space between "r." and the years, it cannot break between the "r." and the years, and the en-dash between the two years has no space around it. – Corinne ( talk) 23:37, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
Reign}}
is now super-badass. May have to purge the page again to see the new documentation (unless you go directly to
Template:Reign/doc). With some minimal meta-templating effort, the new features can also be made available to {{
Circa}}
and {{
Floruit}}
.
TheDoctorWho (
talk) has given you a
Turkey! Turkeys promote
WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a turkey, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy Thanksgiving!
Spread the goodness of turkey by adding {{ Thanksgiving Turkey}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
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I feel like I owe you an apology for sort of publicly "making fun" of the term "Wikipedia's voice", which you used some time ago in a discussion. I've since then seen other editors use the term, and feel somewhat foolish that I attempted to make you look odd, while only embarrassing myself with my own ignorance. I still think the term is odd, but whatever, I'm sorry for both of us about my behavior. Huggums537 ( talk) 23:14, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi. We're into the last five days of the Women in Red World Contest. There's a new bonus prize of $200 worth of books of your choice to win for creating the most new women biographies between 0:00 on the 26th and 23:59 on 30th November. If you've been contributing to the contest, thank you for your support, we've produced over 2000 articles. If you haven't contributed yet, we would appreciate you taking the time to add entries to our articles achievements list by the end of the month. Thank you, and if participating, good luck with the finale! Create women biographies in any field with a requirement of readable prose containing 1kb. Abishe ( talk) 14:43, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Aside from our disagreements, I love things like you caught on one WP style page which mentioned cubist art existing in the 15th century. Makes me wonder if anyone has done a satire about famous artists from other eras painting in cubist, fauve, or impressionistic styles (they must have?). Would be nice to see a da Vinci or even a van Gogh cubist work. Van Gogh didn't miss the emergence of cubism by much, and right in his old neighborhood (I was able to visit Paris this year, and loved exploring Montmartre on a daily or nightly basis)! Randy Kryn ( talk) 15:36, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
This seems pretty dubious to me. It certainly a unique and well-known object, and probably a proper name - there are plenty of sources that treat it as such, another, though the picture is mixed, and I admit the majority don't. I won't re-open the matter, but it should not have been put through as a technical. Johnbod ( talk) 17:09, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
I have no issue at all with that particular WP:RM/TR move going to a full WP:RM; the outcome will be the same either way. :-) I don't list things at RM/TR unless I'm absolutely certain.
Sources do not consistently capitalize this, or even consistently give it a particular appellation; "Duenos inscription" is just one of many descriptive titles that article could have. To the extent this is a work rather than an artifact, that name also happens to be a form of incipit (i.e. a designation that is simply repetition of material in the work, not a title assigned by the author, nor an evocative rather than descriptive name made up after the fact, e.g the "Grand Vase of Quirinal" or whatever); incipits are sentence case. And so on. I really do think these things through. Not sure how many thousands more RMs it's going to take before people realize that MOS:CAPS says something and that what it says means something, and that people's idiosyncratic ideas about what a proper name or proper noun are don't overturn it. <shrug> Presumably it will take thousands more because it's not been sinking in very much yet. Or maybe it's just a matter of churn: as one editor comes to grok this with fullness, another new one arrives who has not considered these matters yet.
PS: (post-EC): The very fact that sources are not consistent in capitalization and (!) the majority of them do not capitalize, does mean, in fact, that it can be speedily moved. The entire point of RM/TR is that if there is a clear-cut
WP:P&G reason for a move, such that no amount of opinion-shouting is ever going to get around that fact and the sourcing, then the move should proceed without wasting the time arguing about it, because the conclusion is already predictable by anyone who properly understands policy and its application.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 17:40, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Another lurker. The relevant grammatical material is covered at Proper noun#Strong and weak proper names, although sadly not entirely correctly. Misunderstanding the difference between strong and weak proper noun phrases (NPs) in English and their relationship to capitalization underlies much of the confusion in relevant discussions. Here's my take on it, for what it's worth.
Peter coxhead ( talk) 07:40, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
At any rate, and regardless of these concerns, there is a strong prescriptivism current (two, actually: a nationalistic one and a traditionalistic/preservative one) at play, in direct defiance of where the language is going. Ironically, many of the same people who were all ranty-pants about MoS needing to be "sourced" and to bend toward WP:COMMONNAME's approach (i.e., the reason we now have the "permit a stylization if a strong majority of RS do it consistently" rules) are also often those pushing a pet peeve of some kind, usually a WP:SSF-based one. In my own personal writing, I'm also a bit preservative of various style stuff. I just have learned to sharply divide what WP needs from what I prefer (e.g. I loathe sentence case for headings, table headers, etc., and I personally capitalize more stuff than WP does, and I hate "c." for "ca.", and ...).
If the Rosetta Stone were just an artifact, I would have no problem with "Rosetta stone" (more to the point, the real world wouldn't and thus WP wouldn't). But it's a document, albeit a stone one. The conventions for written works are different, so both of those things get title case (for as long as title case is around for documentary works, and it's definitely eroding!). That convention isn't entirely consistent – incipits get sentence case, and after-the-fact labels for documents and similar works (musical compositions, etc.) often do as well, but generally within particular confines that do a lot of their own typographic standards-setting, e.g. classical music, where names like "Foo's xth symphony" are common in sentence case, being modern classifiers not actual titles. And with that stuff, too, WP just follows the dominant source usage. We have "Lindisfarne Gospels" because the real world says so.
A key thing about proper names is they are not merely descriptive, when descriptive at all. When they're not just abstract or arbitrary (like "Stanton") they're metaphoric, evocative, a step removed from the literal. The Rocky Mountains is a proper name because it's suggestive of unusual rockiness (all mountains are, of course rocky, being made of rock). The Grand Tetons is a proper name because they are not really some big teats. The Pacific Ocean, likewise, isn't really a sea of peace. The Duenos inscription really is an inscription that says "Duenos"; the Gundustrup cauldron really is just the cauldron found there; these labels evoke nothing non-descriptive.
Anyway, it's a shame you're not German; you'd be really happy with the capitalization of all nouns (and compounded noun phrases) in that language. English ditched it for a reason: it's not helpful. German's retained it for a conflicting reason of traditionalism, of resistance to simplification shifts. It's the same kind of argument you're making, though yours is just narrower and more nuanced. You're basically arguing for a return to the capitalization standards of ca. 1850–1950.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 13:37, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
And yes, Johnbod, this is of course original research. This is a discussion, not an article. Every time we internally deliberate about and try to interpret WTF is going on with style in the real world and what implications this should [or not] have for our own MoS and AT policy, we're engaging in a form of OR, it is not forbidden OR, and it's a necessary part of the process. Our internal rule systems and the consensus discussions that arrive at them and (in this case) question them are not part of the encyclopedia content, any more than a book about how to oil paint is itself an oil painting. We write them based on our own analyses (supplemented by sources of course), so this is always an OR process.
There is unlikely to exist any published, peer-reviewed (much less secondary,
literature reviewed) research on why capitalization differs, in the aggregate, for one particular class of terms like artifacts studied mostly as sources of written material versus those that are merely functional or artistic, or events of one sort but not of another, or movements of one sort but not of another. The only practical ways around this real-world problem are a) just impose a no-exceptions rule (people didn't like that) or b) follow the majority of the sources and just let it be rather arbitrary (the system we have now). No one's come up with an alternative, other than sporadic attempts to follow the style, for any topic, found in specialized works about the topic, which proved to be nightmare and is why we have a centralized MoS and AT policy in the first place, and arrived at them very quickly, in the life span of the project. (WP started in January 2001; MoS existed (as a page directly offering style and titles advice) by August 2002
[10] (it existed earlier as an index of pre-existing material in other pages; e.g. what is now
MOS:JARGON dates to at least October 2001
[11]), and AT forked off of it the same month.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 22:55, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Also, our titles are not definitions or explanations as a matter of WP:AT policy; it is not their job to explain to readers what something is or how it differs from other things or classes of things, other than (when ambiguous) just barely enough to ensure readers arrive at the correct article (per WP:AT#DAB, WP:DAB). There is nothing with a name similar to "Gundestrup cauldron" or "Duenos inscription", so capitalizing in the title will serve no purpose. From the very first sentence of each article it's instantly clear that neither is a category of objects, so capitalizing it in running prose in that article serves no purpose. Because such objects (weak proper names, as Peter_coxhead has it) require a leading "the", they cannot be confused with a class of objects (depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron not *depicted on Gundestrup cauldron; usually cooked in a dutch oven not *usually cooked in dutch oven); so the capitalization serves no purpose in other articles either. [And "dutch oven" is increasingly decapitalized, like "french fries", because they're not particularly Dutch; cf. english in American billiards jargon, and scotch doubles in sports generally, and many other examples.]
Even when either sort of label doesn't conform to this "Gundestrup cauldron" vs. "dutch oven" split (there are always exceptions in English), no one is actually confused frequently enough that anyone cares, or style guides throughout English would have additional rules in favor of capitalization, but you won't find "capitalize anything that's unique" in any style guide anywhere. Your "capitalize for disambiguation" is a solution in search of a problem, and if there were consensus to do it on WP, it would be listed at WP:AT#DAB as a disambiguation type, and much of MOS:CAPS, MOS:TM, NC:CAPS, etc., would not exist.
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:23, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
SMcCandlish Are you saying that even if an object is referred to in the preponderance of scholarly works (say, for example, works of art history) with all the terms capitalized, you would de-capitalize all but the first term in WP titles and articles? How about the Winged Victory of Samothrace, often called just the Winged Victory? (In a glance at the article, I saw that the word "Victory" is in italics throughout the article for some reason; I don't think it has to be italicized, but it is capitalized.) I think it would look very strange as "the Winged victory". Perhaps Nebra sky disk should be written "Nebra Sky Disk". I think there is a difference between the many ordinary unique things in the world (like the elm tree in Chicago you gave as an example) and famous, extraordinary unique things like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Rosetta Stone, and, perhaps also the Gundestrup Cauldron. Before you answer, I think you should pause and think about this a little. With Johnbod's background in art history, it behooves us to carefully consider his opinions. – Corinne ( talk) 16:09, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Let's just cover the larger issue (again) in fine policy detail: The entire point of this whole discussion (and every prior discussion similar to it over the last decade) is that (while some people don't like it) Wikipedia capitalizes when a substantial majority of reliable sources do so consistently for the specific topic in question. This does not mean "when specialized sources all following essentially same insular house style do so", or virtually everything on WP would be capitalized, because specialized works capitalize for emphasis (including insider-ese signification) in virtually every field (pop-culture works capitalize genre names, theatre and film works capitalize methods and techniques and other jargon, ornithology works capitalize common names of species, government works capitalize government job titles even when not used in front of individual names, military writing capitalizes equipment names any time they match official designations, pop music journalism tends to mimic marketing stylization of logos and album covers – insert 1000 more examples here). The failure of various people to absorb the fact that WP prefers general-audience secondary sourcing over specialist primary sourcing – and that names are not magically exempt – is the cause of virtually all capitalization debate on Wikipedia.
I does not behoove us to consider specialists' opinions when it comes to capitalization and other general writing-style matters (only for strictly-encoded designations like biological binomials and ISO unit symbols) because almost all fields overcapitalize within their topical materials. WP would have no manual of style at all, but a one-line rule to follow the style most used in specialist works on a topic-by-topic basis. This is how WP was first written, by default, and it was abandoned in less than a year, because is presented serious comprehensibility problems for anyone other than specialists who write but don't need to read "their" topic's articles (plus, of course, for any topic where two+ specializations intersect, which is most topics, a style conflict resulted). Capitalization as jargonistic signification is a style that works very well in expert-to-same-kind-of-expert communication, but it is disastrously awful on Wikipedia, causing many problems, including first and foremost reader confusion, plus a profusion of overcapitalization of other things (in the mistaken belief that it's actually Wikipedia style to capitalize "important stuff" in any given context), a constant source of pointless conflict, and inspiration of further attempts to impose specialized jargon and usage, as if each WP article category were a technical journal with its own independent style guide.
WP permits plenty of specialist-preferred style – when it is consistently used in the real world, is the subject of a field-wide standard, and does not confuse readers. Much of MOS:NUM (maths usage, ISO stuff, etc.) qualifies. Another example is that genus and species are presented in the format Felis chaus and that format only, even though some newspapers and such get either the italics or the capitalization wrong. But "capitalize everything that's unique in my field because the journals I like tend to do so" doesn't qualify. This is not a new debate; it was settled – against this idea – in one of the biggest RfCs in WP's history.
There's a clear WP:CIR problem when someone fails to understand or refuses to accept, after an initial short adjustment period, that WP has its own stylesheet, just like all professional-grade publishers, and that those who write here are expected to write in that style or (on WP in particular) write as they like, within reason, and just not impede the work of others to clean up the material to be compliant, and also to not forum-shop until the end of time one's unhappiness with a particular style quirk here. The idea that various academic specialists are having trouble with this is silly posturing by a handful of tendentious, topically prescriptive individuals. They are in reality entirely professionally familiar with the fact that the journals they write for have differing style guides; e.g. every ornithologist knows that the species capitalization habit they love in orn. journals is not permitted (even in orn. articles) in broader biology journals, and so on. This extends beyond academics; e.g., everyone who's actually in or formerly in the US Marine Corp knows full well that the US military habit of writing "John M. Doe is a Marine" and "When the Marine's tour of duty was over ..." is not reflected in everyday writing, where it's "marine".
Can we please just drop this now? Everything in this entire thread is rehash of the same stuff we've all already been over innumerable times before (other than Peter's idea of having us address a distinction between strong and weak proper-noun phrases more clearly). We have a simple rule to follow: Use simple, plain style unless for a particular case a strong majority of sources consistently do something different. This is entirely in agreement with the
core content policies, and it isn't going to change to push the particular pseudo-linguistic PoV of any camp of topical specialists. Trying to get that result just has to stop. It's abuse of WP as a
topical language-reform advocacy playground, and it wastes an insane amount of editorial productivity on re-re-re-arguing about the style trivia ad nauseam.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 03:06, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
Capital letters in encyclopedic writing never serve a "promoting" purpose; the is the central, unmistakeable message of MOS:CAPS. So lower-casing the inappropriate use of capitals isn't "demoting", it's just normalizing promotional over-stylization back to neutrality (capitalizing "the Rocky Mountains" isn't non-neutral because it's 100% conventional, while "Gundestrup Cauldron" is only found in about 40% of sources, "Nebra Sky Disc" about 35%, and "Duenos Inscription" 10% or less. Capitalizing them is taking a stand, using capitals to assert an implication of unusual importance against real-world consensus (so it's also a form of WP:OR; we've been over that before, too). Everyone with even rudimentary English skills already knows that capitalization is not used consistently, is frequently encountered simply for visual effect in signage and marketing, and in regular prose it varies by writer and context even for the same subject. We figure that out around third grade, and no one is confused by "the Players Championship" (vs. "The Players Championship" or "The PLAYERS Championship"), just like no one is confused by "the Duenos inscription" not having a capital I. Anyone who cannot understand (or refuses to accept) that capital letters are used here for pre-defined conventional things and in accordance the dominant usage in RS needs to stay out of style matters at Wikipedia. The very nature of the argument they're presenting is based on an emotive belief (not supported by real linguistics); this belief system (a form of ipse dixit) does not respond to logic or evidence; such persons consequently turn tendentious and circular-reasoned; and they waste many editors' time forum-shopping the same rejected thing over and over and over.
In its belief-and-tradition roots, depth of feeling, resistance to reason, and central motivation, this urge to capitalize out of respect is precisely the same as the also-rejected demand (coincidentally re-re-re-raised at
WT:MOS just now) to use a special post-nominal phrase or abbreviation after Muhammad's name at every occurrence ("Muhammad S.A.W."); that fact that one is about a religious figure and the other is about a broader class of topics is just a difference of degree.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 07:08, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
PPS: Randy, all your "holding to a guideline so strictly that you act to use it without exception", "the bar is set so high that nothing can be an exception", "you can't compromise even a little", "exceptions are never supported", "have never applied a common sense exception", "Maybe you don't think anything is exception worthy", "followed each and every time", etc. hyperbole is a mile-high straw man. No MoS regulars ever suggest such a thing, and the very post you wrote that in response to has a paragraph beginning "WP permits plenty of specialist-preferred style", which outlines the general rationales that have been well-received for exceptions (and of course "do it because almost all the RS do so in this case" is the general one – the very notion you and John are fighting against with your right hands is the one you're trying to depend upon with your left). A strong sense of traditionalism or a personal feeling that topics you consider important must be signified as important with capital letters, despite the fact that our central rule about capitalization is to not do that, are not rationales for making an exception, especially one not supported by the sources.
How many more ways can this possibly be said before the light bulb goes on, guys? If you already understand this and just refuse to accept it, please stop pestering my talk page about it, or recycling the same stuff tendentiously in RM discussions. Open an RfC to require WP to follow the majority style in specialist writing rather than the majority style across all reliable sources.
The closest thing to a "no exceptions" rule being advocated by anyone in this discussion is that presented by Johnbod: that everything that is "unique" has a proper name and that this must be capitalized, no matter what the reliable-sources analysis shows to be real-world usage. Unless I'm missing something, you're presenting the same argument, except yours is dressed up in a "and do it to be respectful" tuxedo, while John's is wearing a "do it because my colleagues and I do it when we write stuff for each other" academic labcoat.
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 07:11, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Marlon Brando. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Regarding your edit of 21:01, 29 May 2016 of Wikipedia:Manual of Style, in which you inserted
— Anomalocaris ( talk) 11:44, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
I'm very interested in the desysop case to which you referred here... can you provide any pointers to help me find it? Andrewa ( talk) 20:56, 30 November 2017 (UTC)