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The MoS states:
A long quote (more than four lines
What exactly does this mean? Four lines on an iPhone, or four lines on my 30" monitor? I believe it might mean "sentences", but I am not so sure. Clarity is needed, as well as some guidelines for flexibility in use. For instance, there are times where a single-line quotation should be blocked, if it is of importance.
Maury ( talk) 17:14, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
I noticed that some articles have an image gallery at the bottom while others put images inline with the text. I find that inline with the text improves readability and the gallery often lacks captions. Is there or should there be a guideline about this? Gallery example Inline example Thanks, Daniel.Cardenas ( talk) 18:55, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Something bugs me about the policy of not linking initial bolded words. Articles say things like
instead of
or
instead of
The policy necessitates redundant words, and those sometimes appear stupid. If the battle of Bettendorf was actually a public debate about whether miniskirts should be worn on Sundays, so that the word "battle" is merely a metaphor, then that needs to be stated, but to say that a battle is a battle and and theorem is a theorem seems like needless extra words that convey no information and sometimes insult the reader. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:15, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
User:Kodster is using AWB to remove html code and insert diacritics. Not sure how I feel about this in every case, but I reverted the edit he just made to WP:MoS, and left this message on his talk page:
We prefer the html code to the diacritic or typographer's symbol for a number of symbols. I'm not positive that the diacritic ring that you inserted is one of them, but it probably is. The reasons are that html is likely to be preserved when the text is copied outside Wikipedia, and the diacritic is not; also, it is nearly impossible to look at those little circles and figure out what they are without the html code. I'll revert, but feel free to come talk about it on our talk page.
- Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 01:28, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
I've requested approval for a task for my bot, which would convert " &emdash; " to "&emdash;", in article mainspace. It would use AWB, and I would do it by looking through "What transcludes page" - Template:Cite journal, then all the other cite templates, followed by Template:Unreferenced. It may not get every single article, but a large majority of them. What are the thoughts of others here? The request is here. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 10:15, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Such confidence! I disagree.
First, if you want the HTML mnemonic entity this is not "&emdash;" but "—".
Secondly, I loathe no-space em dashes in the browser window. The web, as you may recall, is not paper. The ways in which it isn't include: (i) most browsers don't know that you can wrap immediately in front of or immediately after an unspaced em dash, and their ignorance results in immensely jagged right edges where a spaced dash would allow wrapping. (ii) Browsers don't know that apparently unspaced em dashes need a judicious application of thin spaces if they're not (at least in certain widely-used fonts) going to attach themselves to those characters that have wide midriffs.
Hooray for spaced em dashes! I shall continue to use them. -- Hoary ( talk) 09:27, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Hi, all. Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes.
I see that there's an ongoing dispute about correct usage.
"The dispute appears to be over whether "
British Isles" or "
Britain and
Ireland" should be used."
- from a post by
Neıl 8 May 2008 at the second of the two references following.
There appear to be two editors who are very interested in this issue, but several others have also posted about it.
Previous discussion at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Blind_reversion_of_edits.2C_despite_earlier_warnings and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive414#Wikistalking
I've looked for a definite and consistent guideline on this but haven't found one. I'd like to see discussion, resulting in a definite guideline being added to the appropriate page in the
WP:MOS, and (probably) in the pages of relevant Wikiprojects.
Disclaimer: I have not been involved in this dispute in any way, and have no interest whatsoever in however it may shake out -- I'm just trying to attain Wiki-peace and consistency.
--
Writtenonsand (
talk)
14:33, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
British Isles is a geographic term not a political one. The Islands of Britain, Ireland, and all of the thousand or so smaller islands in the archipelago are the "British isles." it has nothing to do with which states occupy any of the islands. "Britain" is the island that contains England, Scotland and Wales, but strictly none of the lesser islands. "Great Britain" is the political union of England, Wales and Scotland, and therefore includes outlying islands of Britain, but not Ireland. The "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the political entity (formerly United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) which changed in 1922. Xandar ( talk) 16:01, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
"well trampled ground"...Right, and if someone comes along here to start an NPOV war, I feel somewhat optimistic that we'll be able to show them the door (which may mean that WT:MOS is the place to discuss certain NPOV issues, because you can never get rid of these battles on policy pages...hm, I hadn't thought of that, I'll cogitate on this). My very small point is that British Isles says:
Encyclopædia Britannica, the Oxford University Press - publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary - and the UK Hydrographic Office (publisher of Admiralty charts) have all occasionally used the term "British Isles and Ireland" (with Britannica and Oxford contradicting their own definitions of the "British Isles")
and the phrase "British Isles and Ireland" gets over 50K Google hits, so there is clearly confusion in the air. If the confusion all by itself is a reason to avoid the phrase, then we nicely avoid a trip to some place like WP:POVN.
And now for something completely different. I undented there because the formatting that {{ quote}} uses doesn't look right if the main text is indented. I reached to type my usual "←" to acknowledge the undent, and then decided that this has officially become silly, unless people really are using indentation in the same way that messageboards use it. That is, if a single indent (for instance) in the middle of a long thread still means to people around here "I'm replying to the last person who posted without any indentation, not to the message right above me", then warning people about undenting makes sense. But I never see that, or I'm not aware that that's going on; when Wikipedians want to be very clear that they're responding to a specific post and not to the whole thread, they generally insert their response immediately under that post. Does anyone around here use "messageboard indentation" style in their indents? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 17:44, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed that the usual wikipedia style seems to be only translating the subject of an article in its first line, for example, Shaposhnikov Yevgeniy Ivanovich ( Russian: Шапошников Евгений Иванович) would only appear in the article on Yevgeniy Shaposhnikov, not, for example, in the article on the Soviet Air Forces. Is this a currently applicable guideline or merely common, but uncodified, practice? Buckshot06 ( talk) 11:20, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Well, three times in 24 hours the question has come up whether to favor academic or journalistic values. This might be another case where I'm weighing in on a question where my experience (especially with article reviewing) is not sufficient to say anything useful; we'll see. I have no idea what the outcome of this discussion will be; people seem to be all over the place on this one. I could be wrong, but I believe this could be the core of an issue that Sept and Gimmetrow have recently raised at Talk:Roman Catholic Church.
At WT:Manual_of_Style_(capital_letters)#Gabriel, we'd like to know if there's anything wrong with this text, which has been there for a while, I think:
The personal name of individual mythical creatures is capitalized (the angel Gabriel). [fixed quote 00:38, 14 May 2008 (UTC)]
It's claimed that there is nothing wrong with referring to an important figure to some Christians, Jews and Muslims as "mythical" because of this disclaimer (yes, it's a disclaimer in article-space, or the closest thing I've seen on WP) in the article
Christian mythology: {{
myth box Christianity}}.
"mythical" has special problems, but leaving that aside, the words "myth" and "mythology" really are used differently in different contexts. Some academics assert (I don't really believe it, but that's not the point) that "myth" does not carry any judgment about whether something is true or not, and those sources were consulted in this article. Journalists use the word "mythology" differently; I know that because
AP Stylebook gives "Capitalize the proper names of pagan and mythological gods and goddesses: Neptune, Thor, Venus, etc", and the first definition in Websters Online is "an allegorical narrative". That's one huge advantage of looking at words from a journalistic rather than an academic viewpoint; in American English at least, you can often get a quick answer, because Chicago and AP Stylebook are both the result of a long-time process of consensus-gathering among, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of writers. (I can't say anything about BrEng.) There's no such thing as a "consensus of all authors", although if you subjectively (and perhaps arbitrarily) narrow your focus, you can sometimes drill down to find consensus among a specific set of academics.
But we can't throw academic values overboard just because academic research is hard, because Wikipedia is based on academic values every bit as much as journalistic ones; it's a question of figuring out which values take precedence when there is conflict. So, in the current question, should we favor academic values or journalistic values, and why? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 14:47, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
On the general point, I would oppose making journalese our standard. It currently has a different set of flaws that the pretentious nonsense of Fowler's day; but it's not clear that it's any better than it was. (And applying CMOS to the particular case of Church may be a WP:ENGVAR violation, as some have suggested; it is certainly applying a generalization to a particular, very knotty, instance.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:23, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
I did a quick copyedit on PBS's excellent recent addition. My only two goals were to make it say the same thing in fewer words, and to change "as you would find it in other reliable verifiable English sources" to "in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias". From reading PBS's discussion above, I think he definitely didn't want people to be able to pick names out of any source, he wants them to follow proper usage, and I completely agree. I didn't change "If the foreign phrase or word does not appear often in English, then avoid using it (see Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms)." WP:Avoid neologisms doesn't talk about translation issues, so that might not be the right link. How about this? "If a descriptive foreign phrase or word does not appear often in English, then translate it." - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 20:00, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Avoid neologisms -- I was thinking of words that are commonly used in a foreign language but not often in English (with or without anglicization) to describe something, for example négationnisme/ negationism. [1] -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 22:03, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
There have been some discussion on
Template talk:Reflist about whether to remove multicolumn support from {{
reflist}}.
The simple solution would be to remove support for it in the reflist template, however, some users suggested it might be better to have a policy change? (I'm guessing they where referring to
MoS?). So if you have any thoughts about that please consider taking part in the discussion.
—
Apis (
talk)
21:42, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Arthur said that "the situation is deplorable." – in this sentence, does the period belong in or outside the quotes if the period was part of the quoted text? WP:MOS#Quotation marks seems contradictary as it states that the period should be inside when it "is part of the quoted text" and outside when "a sentence fragment is quoted". Epbr123 ( talk) 00:07, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Tony knows quite a lot about Wikipedian usage, and I do remember seeing that in FAs, although that's not what I'm used to seeing. For instance, the Guardian's online style guide says:
quotation marks
Use double quotes at the start and end of a quoted section, with single quotes for quoted words within that section. Place full points and commas inside the quotes for a complete quoted sentence; otherwise the point comes outside:
"Anna said, 'Your style guide needs updating,' and I said, 'I agree.' "
- Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 02:18, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't mind the preceding comma—said,—but it's fine without, isn't it? The thing about the final period is that if you want to highlight that "smelly" isn't the end of the quoted sentence, do this:
Otherwise, the default is the assumption that it is the end of a sentence, or it simply doesn't matter in the context. Tony (talk) 10:40, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Those who value external Manuals of Style may wish to consider CMOS §6.10:
This is no evidence for the refinement presently under discussion; is there a source for it? (And the general advice is sound; WP editors are not known for "extreme authorial precision". We also recomend double quotation marks.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:17, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
What is the proper way to render a pen name, stage name, or nickname of an individual in a situation such as this?
In a sense, this seems to be an instance of a word being discussed as a word, and that it should thus be italicized. But I'm not sure; maybe names are names and don't require any sort of punctuation even in "words-as-words" usages. Is there any difference in the example above and these versions?
Thanks for any help! — Dulcem ( talk) 01:00, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Did we reach any consensus here on whether there are times that a wikilink makes italics or quotes unnecessary? I didn't get why this was taken out of WP:MOS; was it too precise, or not precise enough? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 17:21, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
We have several desirable features for images (that they alternate left right and left; that they begin with a right; and so on.) It would be nice if all of them could be implemented for every article, but sometimes they can't be.
I don't see any reason, however, to have the requirement to face inward trump all the others; I can think of at least one image (the Cambridge statue of Newton "voyaging through the strange seas of Thought, alone") which should face outwards. But since people want to stress it, I've put it first. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:22, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Regarding today's edit in WP:DASH: is a fourth dash necessary? (hyphens, en-dashes, em-dashes, minus signs). Here's a minus sign: −, and here's an en-dash: –. Other than the minus being higher by just a hair, I see no difference at all in Firefox or IE. Yes, I see what WP:MOSNUM says, but WP:DASH came first. What's the rationale for making rules that concern nearly invisible differences? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 01:29, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Well logic would dictate that people use minus signs when they mean a minus sign. You don't mean x raised to the power of en dash 2, but x raised to the power of minus 2, so why write the former? As for practical reasons, when you use templates (who usually go with minus signs since that is what is meant), the minus and the en dash are vertically unaligned. See 2.234×10−4m2kg–4 vs. 2.234×10−4m2kg−4. Also, you can see that the en dash overlaps with some characters at certain zoom levels (compare the 4s and you'll see that the dashes overlaps while the minus doesn't (I use firefox in 1280x800 )). Headbomb ( ταλκ · κοντριβς) 01:53, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
You're right, I can see the difference in the exponents...good point. I withdraw the objection. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 01:59, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
More practical to tell us how to key it in. I think I know, but since on Safari in WP's default font, both seem exactly the same—even when zoomed in hugely—it's hard to confirm. Tony (talk) 02:08, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
See this picture. This is the largest zoom level where there is still overlap between the 4 and the en dash. You can also clearly see that the minus and the dash are unaligned. Headbomb ( ταλκ · κοντριβς) 02:16, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Is there any particular reason why it is written that ordinals should not be written in superscript? It is the correct, traditional way to write 2nd - not 2nd. Who decided this? It is open to discussion? EuroSong talk 18:49, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
:One thing that style guidelines are not good at: they don't appeal to people who don't do much writing. Without that context, people will probably think we have no idea what we're talking about, and there's not a lot we can do about that.
We can stay on this particular point (ordinals) for the sake of specificity if you like, Sept, or we can move to a larger discussion. My position is that both of you have things to say that are not only valid, but necessary to the future health of Wikipedia, but the signal gets lost in the noise when you feud. Tony, could you sit this one out for a sec? Sept, let's develop this theme fully and see where it goes. You have seen things happen at FAC that you don't like. You feel that our style guidelines are too extensive by an order of magnitude, that they lure us to put on paper hats and tell people how to write? You believe that this wastes a lot of people-hours at the level of FAC, and suppresses new contributions? Do I have this right? What do you think of my points above?
And, if I could ask a favor, let's restrict this discussion just to American usage, since we're lucky enough to have our "rebellious" phase largely behind us, and since that's all I'm competent to talk about. What's wrong with Chicago, in your view? There is still work to do around the edges, but basic language and orthography rules for professional American English are largely settled. If following Chicago is going to help people get a job or get a paper published, how in the heck are we hurting them by letting them know what it says, and even better, by letting them know when and why Chicago differs from what's needed on Wikipedia? I agree that there is occasional friction on Wikipedia with particular style editors and with particular guidance, but in the WP:GAU survey, 31 out of 31 editors wanted more language and style input in general from reviewers. Everything I see suggests that American Wikipedians generally want our input, and they're very happy that we're doing what we're doing. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 19:35, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
I need to focus on my review of Cold fusion for a few days, but I'll come back to this. Just to clear up a few points:
What Wikipedians do better than academicians, journalists, professionals and even bloggers is to lower the barriers to collaborative writing. (Our advantage over bloggers is providing the guaranteed readers; that lowers the barrier to getting your stuff actually read.) I will support everything that lowers barriers and respects what our writers actually want, and oppose everything that raises barriers.
Philip, you're with WP:MILHIST, one of Wikipedia's most successful wikiprojects. If you're saying that in WP:MILHIST articles, the way that respected military historians write is always acceptable in WP:MILHIST articles, I support that. Wikipedia is at its most powerful and most charming when articles about military history read like articles written by military historians. When I read an article about Agatha Christie novels, I want to smell the English country gardens. When I read a math article, I want to see the kind of blunt elegance I remember from my math days. So, I'm with you there.
But here's the problem: who's going to tell us how military historians write? Just coming up with an approximate description of professional American usage, which is what Chicago tries to do, is hard enough. The problem is that most of the time, people who want to run off and do things their own way are just embarrassing themselves. (Not in front of me, I don't care, but in front of their peers.) Let's take "2nd": the first 30 Google hits I get on "military 2nd" (which I believe would pick up 2nd) are 30-0 in favor of not superscripting. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I should be looking at 1000 hits, or looking more closely at military history sources to answer this question. But if it's true that "2nd" is much more common these days, then my position is that we don't do anyone any favors by telling them that 2nd is just fine; that's shirking our responsibility to help people become better writers, make a living, write papers that get accepted, impress their peers, or whatever other reasons people like to write in Wikipedia. It's also just a flat-out lie to tell someone that some kind of rare usage is not a problem, because we have no power or authority to make it not a problem. Editors get reverted all the time, and if most of the likely contributors to their articles think that "2nd" looks better than "2nd", then they're probably going to lose the battle to keep "2nd", and we're not doing them any favors if we tell them they won't.
Tony, you don't need to worry that I'll worship Chigago. One of the joys of writing for Wikipedia is that we don't have to try to sell something as consensus that couldn't possibly be consensus; Chicago is a business, and they have to pretend to professors and students and New Yorker writers and novelists that one of set of guidelines will work for all of them, which couldn't possibly be true. See the current discussion at WT:MOSCAPS; some of Chicago's capitalization guidelines are just silly. But this is fantastic: while Chicago is stuck trying to defend the status quo, we can run circles around them, and come off as much more practical and modern than they are. Who knows...we might get wider acceptance among people who write online for our style guidelines than Chicago, if we work hard and we document how we differ and why we think we're superior. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 19:07, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
There are many pages in the "naming conventions" category. It seems to me that if there's a page that concerns article titles that is optional, then it shouldn't be in the cat. I changed WP:MOS to say that article titles should conform to the cat; Kotniski changed it back to the single page WP:Naming conventions. Thoughts? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 15:56, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
At WP:MOS#Images, it states Do not place left-aligned images directly below second-level (===) headings, as this disconnects the heading from the text it precedes. Instead, either right-align the image, remove it, or move it to another relevant location. Would this also apply to headers lower than second-level?-- 十 八 00:11, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Do I need to put a.m. in front of every time in the article? Or can I assume the reader knows from a one-time deal? "Bleh happened at 8:15 a.m. Blah happened at 8:17. Blargh happened at 8:23." -- VegitaU ( talk) 20:43, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
There are a lot of definition lists in the guideline, formatted with wikitext semicolons and colons. While this does provide a clear format, the HTML document structure tends to be broken:
Replacing these with subheadings formatted with more equals signs (=) would:
Any objections to converting most of the guideline from DLs to subheadings? — Michael Z. 2008-05-26 19:43 z
That's right. Purists prefer a space before the slash, and Name should be in quotes. I wish people used those tags in archives more often for easy linking. But on a non-archived page, my preference would be to keep things visible; it limits the effectiveness of something that lets you link if you can't tell just by looking at the page that you can link to it. The leading semicolon looks like this:
and the subheadings that can be linked to look like this:
So 5 equals signs makes a nice substitution for the semicolon if we want to preserve font size. If we want to follow the guideline to always nest subheadings "correctly" (but hey, we don't need to follow no stinkin' guidelines in WP-space), then we want 4 equals signs to follow a subheading of 3 equals signs. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 15:28, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
I just noticed that Wikipedia superiors used to indicate endnotes are set in a scientific style. If I wanted to square x, I would type x2. But if I wanted to cite a source for x, I should write x.² The latter aligns with the ascender line and is set 50% smaller than x. Unfortunately, the former adds leading to some lines, but not others. See this PDF for more information.— Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. ( talk) 06:15, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
{{{post}}} | |
---|---|
Does the manual of style have anything to say about the use of graphics to display textual information? If not, should it? I would have thought this was an extreme no-no, for both accessibility and stylistic reasons. Hesperian 01:12, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
As often, Tony has let his own prejudices run away with him; the question here is not infoboxes, but whether images should be used to display texts, in infoboxes or out of them. There is one argument against it, which we should make: it is unlikely to be read as text by devices for the visually impaired, and therefore deprives some of them of information without necessity. It would take a truly extraordinary visual effect, and this example isn't one, to make up for that, if it can be done at all. All we need do is state the reason not to. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 13:43, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
As you can see from the example on the right, I have reverted to a version that uses textual headers. We'll have to wait and see if it sticks. The question now is, should the MOS have anything to say on this point? Hesperian 06:52, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Notice that in our subsection that was titled "Periods and spaces" two days ago, the name was recently changed to "Periods/full stops and spaces", and I just swapped in parens for the slash. The first sentence includes full stop and period, and even though the "official" language for WP:MOS is American English, I'm fine with the pre-existing first sentence if there are a fair number of non-Americans who will be looking for guidance on "full stops" in the MOS...and I think there are. Given that first sentence, I'm fine with the change to the subheading (or what will become the subheading if/when we ditch the leading semicolons). Does anyone want a change from the current version? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 13:58, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
{{tl:MedInst}}
These are lists of articles used in special branches of medicine. Thus they have been named, in general, as "Instruments used in Field". The F needs to be capitalised as it is a name of a subject. Any bureaucrats coming to mediate?? sarindam7 ( talk) 22:09, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Since when do we capitalise the names of subjects? Read botany, biology, physics, whatever. They all refer to their topic in lower case unless at the beginning of a sentence. Sarindam is wrong; there is no reason to capitalise the names of fields, and these should all be moved (or moved back) to the lower case title. P.S. don't go looking for the discussion; it was on Sarindam's talk page, but is now archived. This will need to be discussed here. Hesperian 01:53, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
The wp:mosnum policy page cannot be used for reference because it contains non-policy. Anyone that reads it could be mislead into thinking that non-policy is policy. This is acceptable to the people that are controlling wp:mosnum now. Anyone that tries to remove non-policy is just reverted.
The wp:mosnum talk page used to be active with discussions on a variety of topics. It is now dominated by the binary prefix war and its collateral damage. The binary prefix war was moved to a page called Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (binary prefixes) but that lasted just a shortwhile before the page and the warfighting was moved back. It is a place for sockpuppets, puppetmasters and anonymous editors. They keep saying that the war will soon be over and then normal service will be resumed ...
The policy page and its talk page used to be worthwhile places. It had contributions on a variety of topics from many editors. Sadly, the policy page is not reliable and the talk page is scary. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how we can have a policy page and talk page where things other than binary prefixes matter? Lightmouse ( talk) 15:47, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
All of these pages are non-policy. That's why they're called guidelines. MOSNUM may have more statements of some editor's opinion than most, but nor by much, and it would be hard to prove. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:12, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
Please see the proposal at Wikipedia talk:Article size to update the article size guidelines, in particular to use industry standard word count instead of character count. Oakwillow ( talk) 18:31, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
Could someone update the units of measurements section to reflect the update of MOSNUM? I'd do it myself, but I don't have a lot of time for that this week. Headbomb ( ταλκ · κοντριβς) 10:28, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Should one ever use “curly” inverted commas - or only ever use "straight" ones?
The MoS says that curly ones are dangerous because they're difficult to type and can affect search results (imagine wondering why you can't find Jane's Addiction because the article has been titled Jane’s Addiction) and "recommends" that only straight are used. On the other hand on the first line of insertable characters beneath the edit window we see
– — … ‘ “ ’ ” ° ″ ′ ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → · §
Are they there just to tease us? Or are there some circumstances when they're appropriate?
For example the
Philip Larkin entry currently has a section entitled
1969 – 1985: “Beyond the light stand failure and remorse”
which to my mind looks good and is non-confusing almost- instinct 10:15, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
The same question has come up, without any good answer, at WT:WikiProject Hawaii/Manual_of_Style#It looks_like_you_guys_are_working_on_this_style_guideline:
"When the okina is used, which form to use. For instance: Keaweikekahiali`iokamoku uses what appears as %60 in the url;
Kiwala‘o uses what appears as %E2%80%98 in the url; Kame'eiamoku uses what appears as %27 in the url;
ʻIolani Palace uses what appears as %CA%BB in the url. [punctuation added]. Some of which don't always show up in all browsers. I don't know which should be preferred (if any at all). Mahalo. -- Ali'i 14:32, 2 June 2008 (UTC)"
We also haven't resolved when to use a breath mark ("okina") at all; help would be appreciated. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 12:02, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
Compelling reasons not to use curly quotes were put when this came up about six months ago; perhaps we need to dig up that debate. Yes, I noticed only the other day that the curlies are there below the edit box; they should be removed. Tony (talk) 12:32, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
On the separate topic of deleting some of the characters on the panel, I think that a check should be made of where they are used before deleting them. Are the curly brackets needed for any foreign language words, pronunciation syntax, complex mathematical notation, or somewhere else? They may not be found on some keyboards. Is is useful to have a full set of characters to use when a particular language keyboard does not have the required keys? I often use the panel of characters (although not the curly brackets) and it may look odd with some missing. Perhaps, there should be a link at the bottom of the panel to a page on the suggested use of special characters, and for example; the use of straight brackets in preference to curly brackets could be easily found and explained. This may help to stop editors using the panel inappropriately, and make it easy to quote from. Snowman ( talk) 12:48, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm unsure whether there should be a comma before "as well" in the following:
The election will coincide with the 2008 Senate elections in thirty-three states, House of Representatives elections in all states, and gubernatorial elections in eleven states, as well as various state referendums and local elections.
Theshibboleth ( talk) 08:18, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
How much do you love the image on Geometric Tortoise? If you don't know what I'm talking about, stare at it for ten seconds. Does the MOS need to address this? Hesperian 06:03, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Please can I have permission to write 'there is a 9 mm gap' and 'there is a 9 millimetre gap'. Currently the former is permitted but the latter is forbidden. Both are identical except that one is symbolic. Both are unambiguous. Lightmouse ( talk) 12:34, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
NIST's Special Publication 811 (page 16) takes the same position described by Tony1. They say it is because "the value of a quantity should be expressed in a way that is as independent of language as possible". On pages 17 and 18 the same guide says that "key elements of a scientific or technical paper, particularly the results of measurements and the values of quantities that influence the measurements, should be presented in a way that is as independent of language as possible" and that using symbols rather than spelled-out units promotes language independence. They go on to say
Occasionally, a value is used in a descriptive or literary manner and it is fitting to use the spelled-out name of the unit rather than its symbol. Thus, this Guide considers acceptable statements such as “the reading lamp was designed to take two 60-watt light bulbs,” or “the rocket journeyed uneventfully across 380 000 kilometers of space,” or “they bought a roll of 35-millimeter film for their camera.”
Even though the MOS suggests more extensive use of spelled-out units than NIST does, I think that a person with limited ability to read English is more apt to pay attention to the parts of an article that does uses symbols (such as tables), so when using symbols, we should follow NIST's lead and try to be as language-independent as possible.
I am not familiar with the customs of other languages as far as whether or not numerals used as adjectives are separated from the noun with a hyphen. Since I don't know any better, I will suppose NIST knows what they are talking about and that it does indeed vary from language to language. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 13:21, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Your example might be the most unambiguous of the lot; there are many cases much more confusing. Compare, for example:
The sentence must make sense as a person reads it; omitting the hyphen from the second sentence will cause a person to read it as the first, only realising their mistake (or, rather, the writer's) when reaching periods. I'd give you a better example—preferably one with millimetres—but I am not inspired enough at the moment. You get the point, though. Waltham, The Duke of 00:28, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
I take the point about mm adding a useful layer of context.
On the point about amibiguity, I agree that it is possible for ambiguous phrases to exist. That is my entire point. The hyphen is a very useful tool to disambiguate values. I will argue strongly for them in values with ambiguity, and against them in values where there is no ambiguity. Many editors use hyphens for disambiguation and not otherwise, yet this mandatory rule for mandatory use of hyphens in all cases turns such writing into a crime without a victim. Quotes about hyphens include "If you take the hyphen seriously, you will surely go mad" and Churchill's "One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided as far as possible". Please think carefully about what I am suggesting: I am lobbying for an end to the mandatory use of hyphens where values and units are unambiguous. If you interpret that as lobbying for a ban on hyphens, then you misunderstand my point.
Lightmouse (
talk)
10:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
"Many editors use hyphens for disambiguation and not otherwise, yet this mandatory rule for mandatory use of hyphens in all cases turns such writing into a crime without a victim." No, Anderson: you're the victim. Tony (talk) 03:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
As for its being an ENGVAR issue, less hyphenation in general in some dialect group does not equal less hyphenation of adjectives in that dialect group. The argument is making a slight logical jump.
Regarding language independance; if others use this argument to base their standards on, good for them; but I agree with Anderson, this is the English WP. That said though, hyphens still should not be used with abbreviations/symbols, since it's just not done that way in English (whatever the reason be).
JIMp talk· cont 04:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I have no statistics but my belief is that ambiguous unit values are rare. I cannot think of a single instance where I have come across a need to disambiguate a unit value with a hyphen. There are cases where I use hyphens as part of grammar but this is not one of them. I frequently read adjectival unit values freely written on Wikipedia and elsewhere that do not have hyphens. It makes no difference to the readability and unlike many grammar issues, it does not look odd. I would not be making such a fuss if it were not hard-coded into the widely used convert template. It is not opt-in, it is not opt-out, it is enforced. Anyway, it seems that I am the only one speaking out against this and I hate to disagree with some of the respected editors here. I have stated my opinion and I have not convinced you. Lightmouse ( talk) 19:12, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I have been informed that the article Edmonton municipal election, 1963 contains a quote. Now that I know it is a quote, I can see it. However, I have mistaken it more than once for ordinary text and converted a unit in the text. This has unintentionally annoyed the most frequent editor ( User:Sarcasticidealist). I think that there is something unusual about unflagged quotes. There must be some way in which that article can flag quote text to the uninitiated user. Can anyone suggest what needs to be done? Lightmouse ( talk) 11:05, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
The tag would make it easier for a bot to avoid. I am in the bad books of the principle editor, having failed to see the unflagged quote on three occasions. Can you take a look at the article? Lightmouse ( talk) 12:34, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
Has anyone ever created a bot that successfully avoids quotes? That would be quite suprising, considering the may ways quote marks are used. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 17:13, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
This is why commenting on the talk page is a good idea. Bots can do that; they can even be programmed to avoid doing a page twice. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:56, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
Double quotes would be fine too. I don't care how it is done. Something needs to be done to that article. Lightmouse ( talk) 04:46, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm no kind of guru either but I've had a go at the article. I put the excerpts in blockquotes, hope that this sorts things out nicely for all concerned. With respect to conversions to metric, perhaps some could be provided as footnotes. JIMp talk· cont 05:04, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I've gone ahead and added the footnote. JIMp talk· cont 07:30, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Some mention should be made (if there is a preference) of how to write fractions. Use the characters like ¾ or do it manually like 3/4? I believe there are only characters for the 4 or 5 most common fractions. Or should fractions be done away with altogether and only decimals used? Miken32 ( talk) 03:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Anderson marked his recent edit of the "Ellipses" section as "ce", but it was no mere copy-edit. Among about a dozen changes were:
I am reverting this change pending Anderson's raising of these issues here; that is the way things are done for all but non-substantive changes. At the very least, I must ask Anderson not to conceal substantive changes to MOS under edit summaries that indicate otherwise. I'm retaining his one worthwhile, uncontentious change, from "reliable" to "predictable".
In addition, I ask Anderson to take note of His Grace's edit summaries concerning Anderson's removal of the guideline WRT em-dash spacing. This is yet another instance in which Anderson's unilateral changes have had to be fixed. Tony (talk) 04:02, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
I see three threads here.
From the MOS, it would be "Governor Smith" or "Smith was the governor of someplace". How does it work with "Acting Governor Smith"? "Acting-Governor Smith"? "acting-Governor Smith"? "acting Governor Smith"? I'm trying to finish up Uriel Sebree and it was pointed out in the FA process how horribly inconsistent I was being. JRP ( talk) 22:56, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
How did other variations of the English language get introduced into Wikipedia if it was founded in the United States? Wouldn't the American origin have confined it to American English? Emperor001 ( talk) 01:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
It's not so much where Wikipedia originates from as who a particular article originates from. JIMp talk· cont 03:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
I appologize if I've offended anyone. I was just asking a question. Emperor001 ( talk) 02:05, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
Speaking of opening cans of worms, could someone please point out where in MoS &c. one might find a citeable guideline on whether we should be calling England "England" or "England, UK". Am I just being blind? Ta. almost- instinct 10:29, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
The Template:Cite journal produces markup that appears not to follow the manual of style - for instance adding a title produces "title". and if the journal article itself ends in a question mark it produces "title?". The MLA style which seems to be the only major format that uses quotations places the quotes after the punctuation. One would expect to obtain formatting that conforms to the MoS by filling in citation templates. Shyamal ( talk) 13:09, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
Someone—Anderson, I suspect, although I can't be bothered at this stage to investigate—has been littering MOS with dispute tags. He's just put another on the ellipsis section. Now, most of these tags refer to the talk page, but the relevant talk is stale and has been archived. We need to remove these dispute tags unless there's an ongoing dispute on the talk page. Tony (talk) 04:46, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to remind users that for some time now, the autoformatting of dates has not been required.
There are four advantages in not linking dates:
[[20 June|20]]
, [[20 June]] [[1997 in South African sport|1997]]
) (several forms of piped links break the date formatting function);It may be that WikiMedia can be persuaded to invest resources in revamping the mechanism to avoid or mitigate these problems, but this is unlikely to occur in the short to medium terms. Tony (talk) 14:00, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I didn't see anything about __FORCETOC__ in the article. I think it should be included because almost all Articles use FORCETOC —Preceding unsigned comment added by Condalence ( talk • contribs)
Sorry, the reason I said "almost all" was because most articles I see have FORCETOC. Could I request it to be added? FORCETOC really does serve a great purpose for long articles. That way instead of scrolling someone can just simply click to a paragraph. I do that a lot. Thanks. -- Condalence 22:35, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
PROPOSAL: - OK, this has been bothering me. Lately I've been seeing a lot of scientific articles beginning with the format "In xxx, xxxxx is ..." as in "In computing, phishing is ..." An article I created recently was change to this format. What this is saying is that all information about the topic is limited to relating to the qualifier. Phishing only is used in computing and no where else. Subpersonality only is used in transpersonal psychology and no where else. If this were true, then the articles should be titled Phishing (computing) and Subpersonality (transpersonal psychology). However, it is not true that every sentence and every of bit of information in the Phishing article relates to computing. Every sentence in Subpersonality does not relate to transpersonal psychology and subpersonality certainly is not limited to the field of transpersonal psychology. Most telling, Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#First_sentences states "If the topic of the article may be unfamiliar to some readers, establish a context." I agree with establishing context, but do not agree with establishing context by beginning the article with "In xxx,". The MoS example given results in qualifying trusted third party, entity, and the two parties to being cryptography elements. However, only "entity" is cryptography element. The two parties, e.g., Bob and Alice, are humans and certainly not only cryptography element. The example given in the MoS incorrectly approves limiting trusted third party, entity, and the two parties to cryptography. The Trusted third party article also addresses "outside cryptography". How can it do that if the article is limited to cryptography by the lead sentence to the article? If this "In xxxx,"-qualifier lead technique is acceptable, then the lead sentence to Trusted third party should read "In cryptography, a trusted third party (TTP) is ... ." In law, a trusted third party is ..." This makes the articles look more like disambiguous pages rather than an article. I proposed that Manual of Style should explicitly reject the use of "In xxx," as an acceptable way to provide context in the first sentence of an article. If you agree, disagree, or have a different observation/solution, please post below. Bebestbe ( talk) 14:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
The word “counterintuitively” should be deleted from
We don't need some party of editors declaring their intuition to be the intuition. As to my intuition, I would note that pronouns in general do not have apostrophes in their possessives:
— SlamDiego ←T 23:40, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I would definitely delete counterintuitively. My intuition was never that it should have an apostrophe. Why should it? Just because the two-words short form it's is pronounced the same way. Is it then also counterintuitive that there is written without apostrophe? One of the first things I realized when I started learning English was that there are many ways in which one pronunciation might be spelled. BTW, that sucks about this language ;-) Anyway, my point is that for me, personally, it was never the intuition and I am quite proud that it wasn't. If you have this intuition it only shows that you do not see the strikingly difference in those terms (semantically and grammatically). So, when we use counterintuitively in the MOS, we do not only impose on others what a common-sense intuition would be, which I find already a little bit insulting. Moreover, we exhibit that our intuition with respect to understanding this language is under-developed. Tomeasy talk 17:27, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Looking through the history for the main page I was astonished to discover how many edits—eg. over thirty in the last fortnight—are made to MoS. Its absurd that such a key set of WP guidelines be so unstable. Most editors have a hard enough time as it is keeping tabs on the various WP rules and guidelines—this endless chopping and changing is absurd. Do you expect every editor to check MoS every couple of days or so? I'll repeat that word: absurd. Yes things need to be discussed, but the frequency with which the main page is edited is, IMO, unacceptable, and makes a mockery of the concept of MoS. I write this in the full expectation that opposing parties will exploit replying to this as an opportunity continue to score points. That's fine—but stop letting it spill over onto the guidelines. Frankly, I think the page is verging on needing protecting almost- instinct 00:17, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Considering the number of reverts, I'd say that simply counting edits is wrong, at least (or, some might say, especially) in the Manual of Style. If you will check the style updates, once a month, you will see that the actual changes are relatively few, and you can monitor them through said updates. Waltham, The Duke of 05:29, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
I see the consensus is that I'm wrong so I withdraw my comments ;-)
But seriously its difficult for new editors to come to terms with the MoS—it seems so huge at first—and we worry about getting shot down for going outside the guidelines ... it just can feel like the ground is shifting beneath our feet ...
almost-
instinct
13:06, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Okay, let's tackle the issue of stability. The folks at WP:CONSENSUS and WP:VPP know very well what "consensus" means, and I'm going to go point them to this conversation, so if this is wrong, I'll get an earful in a hurry. Let's take the latest addition to WP:MOS, from User:Betswiki (a new editor, or at least a new account, so I'll go leave a message on their talk page, and please don't BITE):
An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is the omission of material from quoted text or some other omission, perhaps the absence of the end of a sentence, deliberately left out by the author, often used in the representation of conversation in print. The ellipsis is represented by ellipsis points, a series of dots (three dots within a sentence, four dots at the end of a sentence). In traditional publishing the dots are separated by spaces and are separated from the surrounding text by spaces.
Not that bad, but not quite right, which makes it a good example for my point. There's an infobox at the top of every guideline and policy page that says, "Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus." So I have to curb my impulse to yank the edit just because I don't like it. I'm also not allowed to yank it on the grounds that the editor may not have followed that policy when they edited; that doesn't give anyone a "right" to revert. But there are lots of reasons to believe that most of this edit doesn't represent consensus and should be reverted. The first is precedence: new users get pointed to WP:MOS, it's the most commonly visited style guideline page, and its recommendations are argued constantly at WP:FAC. WP:SILENCE counts reading something and not taking action as indicative of consensus, and I don't see any history in the WT:MOS archives of argumentation over any of the things discussed in the new edit, so the previous text (before the last few days) represents at least the approximate consensus of thousands of people. That means that it doesn't matter if someone has a new clever argument, or knows that Chicago does it differently; that's not sufficient to change the page. WP:BRD does permit people to "act first, answer questions later", even on a guideline page, but anyone who has a habit of making changes without having their reasons handy is in line for a trip to WP:ANI for violation of "6. Attempting to ... impose one's own view of 'standards to apply' rather than those of the community" from WP:POINT. On a guideline page, your argument needs to be, not why you personally think it was an improvement, but why you believe that everything you've read on Wikipedia tells you that you changed it from something that didn't have consensus to something that did. (See WP:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_44#Using a policy page as a scratchpad to develop a proposal for Kim's discussion and links.)
If WP:MOS doesn't reflect consensus, that's easy to show. Regulars at WP:FAC and WP:GAN can search their memory of what people said when the issue came up. If the issue can be identified by keywords, the last database dump of en.wikipedia or page-specific Google searches would pull up evidence of disgruntlement if it exists. If there's no disgruntlement, then it has consensus. Anyone can start a new discussion on this talk page, and that discussion might lead to a new consensus, but three guys and a lot of handwaving can't overturn the apparent consensus of thousands of people. Three guys arguing about what they've seen at WP:FAC, WP:GAN, the WT:MOS archives, etc, can be persuasive, in my view, as long as they're being honest and accurate, of course.
So: is there anything in the new edit concerning ellipses that people believe already has consensus? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 20:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
As for the matter at issue, I italicise the parts which seem to me mere statements of fact:
I do not claim any of the text is the best possible phrasing; but it shares that with the text it replaced and with the rest of the section.
The last sentence is vague on dating; for certain values of "traditional" I believe both claims made are true. But do we need a history of typography here? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:11, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Experience shows that relatively few FA nominations are reviewed for MOS issues; on the other hand, most of those that are are reviewed with mechanical incompetence. Experience also shows that this often genuinely comes as a surprise, and justifiably so, to the nominator; the "rules" that are enforced are rarely sound English; sometimes they are mere recommendations here, often they ought to be, and quite often they ought not to be even recommendations, since the article is in sound English, or one of the variations which can be sound English. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 12:48, 23 June 2008 (UTC) ←What a total surprise that Anderson should take this opportunity to trumpet his anti-MOS agenda again. Tony (talk) 14:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this is more relevant at Wikipedia talk:Lead section, but I think this page gets more activity... Most lists open with "This is a list of <Repeat the article title>", or "This is a complete list of <repeat the article title>", or "comprehensive" or any other similar words. A discussion was started a while ago at Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates/Archive 3#Straight repetitions of the title in the opening sentence regarding this, as WP:FLC is obviously the place where this sort of thing is seen frequently. Regarding FLs, if a list is featured, then it should already be complete and comprehensive, and shouldn't need stating as such. But it's also not a very good way of engaging the reader to the article. We know it's a list of cats (or whatever) from the title. Articles don't begin this way. Today's Main Page article Blue Iguana doesn't begin with "This is an article about Blue Iguanas. The Blue Iguana is a critically endangered species of lizard". Can we please state a "ban" on WP:MOS from introducing list articles in this way? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 07:14, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
←Anderson, it's the topic, isn't it, not the title. In any case, at FLC there's general consensus, including the two directors, that this has turned into a lazy way for authors to open their "list" articles. The practice is particularly problematic given the length of many "list" titles. Have a look for yourself, except that reviewers (mostly others apart from me) have been insisting on a recasting in nominations; easier to find in the list of existing FLs. Tony (talk) 13:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
← I am glad to see that the two of you have finally reached a solution on the article (and one which I also agree with, by the way). Following the history was interesting, but also worrying, at least in the start; I was this close to starting counting reverts. Please be careful from now on. I suggest using talk pages more; you don't need to "discuss" through edit summaries. Waltham, The Duke of 22:39, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
In contrast to the current* "First sentences" guideline, I find it extremely web-UNfriendly not to hyperlink the subject of a wikipedia page to its official website (if there is one). Web users intuitively want to be able to link to appropriately relevant information when they read a phrase. I understand and completely agree that IN GENERAL the subject of a Wikipedia page should not be hyperlinked to anything else--after all, the Wikipedia article is presumably the explanation of the subject--but in the case where the topic of the page is an organization (or product, or person) that has an OFFICIAL website, it seems both appropriate to link to it from the (bolded) subject of a Wikipedia page, and INappropriate NOT to hyperlink to it. Does this make sense (to anyone besides me)? Is there a way we can get this concept considered for official inclusion** in the guideline?
Thanks... philiptdotcom ( talk) 01:02, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Posted at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style and Wikipedia talk:Lead section I have a question about bolding the name in the lead section of an article. At Kosovan Serb Assembly, I have put that name in bold as well as the two Serbian spellings of the name in its original language. Is this proper, or should only the English name be in bold? Please respond on my talk. — Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 00:21, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
The following issue came up during the peer review of Golden Film. What is meant in the following phrase: "A long quote (more than four lines, or consisting of more than one paragraph, regardless of number of lines) is formatted as a block quotation, which Wikimedia's software will indent from both margins." More than four lines doesn't make sense, since this depends on your browser window size and display type. More than four sentences would make sense, since this is calculable by counting full stops and question marks. – Ilse @ 16:41, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
Similar to how we use nbsp for say "22 miles", is there an nb-dash for "1992–present" so they appear on the same line? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 17:32, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
If needed, there is {{ nowrap}}. JIMp talk· cont 04:42, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (capital letters)#Capitalisation. Whether or not to capitalize all proper nouns comes up from time to time. The current vote is 3-0 in favor of "k. d. lang" on the talk page. My understanding is that the only current exceptions to capitalizing a proper noun are for a few companies that have a trademark capitalizing the second letter, such as iPod. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 16:13, 28 June 2008 (UTC)
What are the procedures for referring to an administrative division of a country. Should we name the administrative division with a comma then the country or should we just put the name of the admministrative division? Is it Alabama, USA or just New York? Is it Alsace, France or just Alsace? Can you point me to whether there is a style guide for something like this? Pocopocopocopoco ( talk) 03:41, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
I've just come from the help desk after answering a question about infoboxes and nav boxes (you can see that here). Whilst I was able to find a MOS section on Info boxes, information about Nav boxes is rather limited and hard to find - it took several minutes of searching before I found the section Template:Navbox. Is there a guideline page about how and where to use such boxes as there is for the info box? If so, could you add the link to it to the MOS contents page? Also, could you please add to the information I gave at the Help Desk, as I fear that I may not have given enough information. Thanks! StephenBuxton ( talk) 11:17, 28 June 2008 (UTC)
I had inquired at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Naming_.28and_referring_to.29_articles_about_people_with_initials_as_their_.22common.22_first_name as to a clarification about naming (and referring to) articles about people with initials in their name. The current Wikipedia convention is to use a full stop after each initial, correct? That seemed to be the consensus at the Pump, but it was suggested I bring it up here so the MOS can clarify the Wikipedia policy. Thoughts? — X96lee15 ( talk) 02:10, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
From this month's TCMOS "New Q & A" newsletter: "Q. I'm curious about your equating collective nouns with mass nouns in CMOS 5.8. The explanation at Wikipedia states that it is incorrect to equate the two." I knew it; we're all chasing each other around. Pretty soon Wikipedia and all the style guides will turn into one big Ouroboros. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 20:47, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
From Kaiser Chiefs discography: "Kaiser Chiefs are currently recording their third album". Is this correct, or should it be "Kaiser Chiefs is currently recording its third album". The band is one band, even though it is made up of more than one person, correct? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 07:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
On 25 June, Anderson raised some reason at the Naming conventions policy talk page for why the use of en dashes in article titles should be changed, without providing the folks there the proper context of the debate that has been closed here on this matter. A day and a half later, without a single comment on the matter by another editor, he launched in and changed the policy thus, in so doing introducing a conflict between the Naming conventions policy page and MOS, where before there was none.
These are underhand tactics that deserve to be rebutted, and SOON. The change introduces the possibility that an editor will argue that because some "reliable source" uses a hyphen in a compound item in a "page name", this is fine for WP's page names too, despite MOS's guidance on en dashes in both article titles and the main text. On a legalistic level, the new wording fails, because proof has to be shown of the use of a hyphen in a page name in that reliable source; what exactly are these "page names" in reliable sources? I though that was a particularly WPian term. Neverthess, Anderson's hasty change looks like an attempt to drive a wedge between two of WP's most important pages. We must not let this happen.
Now, I've reinstated the previous text, which just pointed to the section on dashes in MOS, pure and simple. I trust that Anderson is not going to reinforce his deception by bad behaviour in edit warring. He has to learn that, to start with, consensus is required on a talk page. Tony (talk) 15:00, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Yesterday, I attempted to solve a massive overlinking issue with List_of_Final_Fantasy_compilation_albums, a new nomination I was reviewing at WP:FLC, by removing all of the autoformatting. No one minds US date formatting, even if it requires a comma, just as they accept Euro formatting after their signature.
I was delighted that nominator PresN responded at the FLC page: "Well, can't say I'm sad to see the sea of blue leave. It's much easier to read now, thank you."
You may wish to compare the previous autoformatted version with the new, normal script version. Scrolling down side by side is best, but the difference is clear by comparing one after the other, too. Tony (talk) 04:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Ancient Egypt is one FA in which the names of single-digit centuries are spelled out (sixth century or something), but most FA's, and WP:MOSNUM, use 1st century, etc. Does anyone have a strong preference either way? I've asked a couple of history editors, also. I don't think I've ever seen 11th century spelled out in a mature article on Wikipedia. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 15:36, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to make the case that it can occasionally be appropriate to treat a quotation in the same manner as an image. That is, for a quotation to be allotted a space set apart from the main body of the text, where it will provide an illustrative statement that adds insight or some sort of cohesion to the section of the article that surrounds it, in the manner that an image does. Such a quotation doesn't always naturally flow into or out of the section to which it is attached, but can nonetheless be indispensably relevant to the topic.
Of course, I have an example. I moved a quotation like this from the "Production" heading of an article about a movie to the "Plot" heading (scroll down a little), since it is the plot the quotation concerns, and then added another such "box" quotation of my own to the "Production" heading. And, of course, I've had a friendly disagreement. Moving the plot quotation was apparently considered to be correct, but not any longer its presentation in the "box" quote format, which was how I originally found it. I kind of liked it that way, and it was the first time I'd seen a quotation presented in that form in Wikipedia. It performs differently from the prescribed "block" quote mode, by granting the quoted text a further removal from the main body. This effect is sometimes desirable, as in the circumstance I'm describing. The "Plot" section of the article in question is nothing else but a rote synopsis of the action of the film--perhaps rightly. But I consider it useful and interesting to include some of the writer's thoughts on the story off in a sidebar, where the quotation won't detract from the thrust of the synopsis. Another editor is of the opinion that the quotation should be presented in the sanctioned "block" quote style, where I feel it does not naturally proceed from the text before it, nor lead into what comes after. Yet it has the semblance of belonging where it is, in the linear progression of the plot. The "box" quote version of the other quotation I provided remains "boxed," further down.
I'm certainly not asking for a validation of my point of view in this particular dispute (as I'm convinced I'll get the other editor to agree), but I am looking for consensus on briefly outlining the (limited) appropriateness of these hovering "box" quotes in the Quotations heading of the Manual of Style.
Note: This is similar to pull quotes, as used frequently in magazines and newspapers, but is not the same, in that the text does not appear anywhere else in the article. Pull quotes, I'm sure you would agree, are "unencyclopedic" gimmickry, a form of advertising. Aratuk ( talk) 01:16, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Apologies if this has come up before (I suspect it has), but is there any guidance on how to decide which punctuation variant of terms should be used for a title when there are competing alternatives? Currently there is some discussion that Rock and roll should be retitled "Rock 'n' roll", or "Rock & roll", or "Rock 'n roll", or... etc etc. All these variants are used in the real world, and a Google apparently indicates that "Rock 'n' roll" is more common than "Rock and roll". Thoughts? Ghmyrtle ( talk) 15:54, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
I’m about to make a change to: Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation_marks; just warning here (and will note change after doing), since this is a high-visibility page.
The prior revision states:
This contradicts Quotation mark#Punctuation (for reference, this revision), which states:
I will thus change the MoS to reflect this, with citation.
Nbarth ( email) ( talk) 00:03, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
There is some disagreement over an example of links in a quotation, and I wonder if some view can be made which offers a greater guidance than what is already written in WP:MOSQUOTE about Linking: "Unless there is a good reason to do so, Wikipedia avoids linking from within quotes, which may clutter the quotation, violate the principle of leaving quotations unchanged, and mislead or confuse the reader."
The case I am thinking of is for John Patrick Kenneally, the quotation being immediately before section 2. Originally, a number of names, " British Isles" and "British Commonwealth of Nations" were linked as indicated (see here.), but an editor removed the British-related links, on grounds that are now a matter being considered as part of Arbcom procedings (because of the claimed way in which indiscriminate removal of "British Isles" completely is being carried out by that editor). Subsequently, to help prevent an edit-war get going, and paying attention to WP:MOSQUOTE, I removed the other links and placed an explanatory sentence which allowed the links to still have a presence in the article here, leaving a message on the an involved editor's talk page User talk:Bardcom/Archives/2008/July#John Patrick Kenneally. However, the changes were reverted.
So, my question is: how good or pressing do the "good reasons" have to be? From other cases, my impression was that only in very few cases were links in quotations immune from being removed. DDStretch (talk) 14:00, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Category:General style guidelines has been nominated for deletion to allow for additional categorization. You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for Discussion page. Bebestbe ( talk) 20:19, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
I am aware that as a result of frequent and endless debate, MoS favours so-called "logical quotation". However, the guidelines don't seem to be very clear on what this means. At the moment they say that punctuation marks "are placed inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation". According to the MoS, when a sentence fragment is quoted, "the period is outside." However, in this case, am I not allowed to put the period inside, because it is part of the text (MoS) that I am quoting? Or does "sense of the punctuation" carry some more subtle meaning? I note that the MoS itself has, later on
with the period inside a sentence fragment where the original statement was "I would not allow this." (Period inside again.) Either the first "deplorable" example is misleading (because it appears to be quoting an example where "deplorable" is at the end of the quoted sentence), or the rest is confusing. What gives? Geometry guy 09:09, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Make it therefore:
The first paragraph quotes a sentence; the second is a quoted paragraph. One ends, by Ilkali's rule, with a period; the second with a quote mark. Where's the logic? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:13, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I intend to clarify this part of the MoS, drawing on the discussion here. Also, I think the whole "Note" on the rationale for MoS policy is out-of-date and largely redundant. The MoS should present clear guidelines to editors, not complicated rationales on how those guidelines were arrived at. However, the key reason for logical quotation (faithfulness to the source) should still be mentioned. Geometry guy 19:27, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
I would suggest that the "USGDP" example be changed. Two paragraphs before this example, the MoS states that it should be "U.S." and not "US", rendering the example null and void. — Music Maker 5376 21:41, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
In some places (notably the Screen Actors Guild), the generic "actor" has become a preferred term over "actress" for female as well as male thespians. In some cases it seems to be a matter of preference among the people themselves. Has this been discussed here, and if so what is the MoS's guidance? Jgm ( talk) 15:24, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
This particular usage issue appears to already be covered by Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language -- The Red Pen of Doom 20:56, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I take it there's no existing consensus then (grin).
Here's the particular situation that led me to ask the question. I noticed an omission of a female thespian at List of people from North Carolina. As I added her, I used the descriptor actor. However in looking at the resulting article, I noticed that all the other female thespians listed on the page are described as actresses. The hobgoblin of my little mind led me to briefly consider changing all those instances, but figured I would try to check here first.
I did look at the Gender-neutral section RedPen points to above. On one hand, the section specifially points to actress as an example of "non-neutral language that can be easily avoided", but I'm not sure how that's true here except by going to the generic actor. On the other hand, it's telling me to use gender-neutral language "when it can be done without loss of . . . precision". Now, the particular person I added has a common female name, so there isn't any loss of precision or detail. But this wouldn't be true for all female thespians (cf. Sean Young or Michael Learned). Finally, the section tells me that "Where the gender is known, gender-specific items are also appropriate ("Bill Gates is a businessman" or "Nancy Pelosi is a congresswoman")." Ho-kay, so actress is non-neutral, but businesswoman is appropriate. I find myself more puzzled than ever.
Also, to throw in my tuppence on the question as to whether this should be addressed in the Style book, I vote emphatically so. If consistency wasn't a major goal here, we wouldn't need a Manual of Style in the first place. And if the consensus is that "actor" is appropriate in all cases, I'd hope somebody would built an actress-seeking bot and make it so. Despite the fact that we do weasel out of consistency in some areas (ie. the UK/US language divide), in those cases we are doing so intentionally and not because we are worried about how it "looks". Jgm ( talk) 22:01, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
On the point at issue: some female thespians (good dodge!) are called actors, some actresses. This is partly a chronological matter ( Anne Bracegirdle was an actress; anything else would be an anachronism); partly a matter of genre and self-identification. This is a point that requires intelligence and information; two things bots notoriously lack. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:32, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Trovatore has already shown clearly during the gender-neutral war last year on this page that he's male and harks from a former age in his attitude to the way 51% of the population is framed by the language. He just doesn't understand, and reacts with indignation when his old-fashioned precepts are challenged. Even Anderson is vaguely reasonable on this issue. Yes, of course the diminutive "-ess" should be dropped by all writers who value inclusiveness and who see the power of language to manipulate readers' perceptions of power in society. Trovatore will leap to the attack by accusing them of "political correctness", and I would rebut that by saying that's a misnomer for "political inclusiveness". It's a well-established practice since the 1970s—so commonplace as to be a yawn. Writers who refuse to give up the marking of the female form, with the inevitable framing of the male as the default—cannot aspire to WP's basic pillar of NPOV. They end up weakening the authority of the project. Tony (talk) 12:36, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, Dan, for the thoughtful response, and please accept my apologies for snarkiness earlier. I enjoyed and agree with most of the points that you make in your essay. And of course I am not pushing any agenda and I am not that hung up on which word I use in a list article; what I think a was (am) trying to do is be a coalmine canary of sorts and highlight that this point of usage will be an issue of increasing contention (among folks who do have an axe to grind one way or another) since the trend in the profession is slowly but surely towards the generic usage (as evidenced by the Screen Actors Guild approach) while the general public still finds it jolting and, as others have brought up, issues of self-identification, era, etc. will make simple answers difficult. This seems to me like a perfect recipe for a near-future shitstorm, and, as I hope I got across, the resources in place to help head off or at least moderate the shitstorm are pretty weak at the moment. Any effort that can be made to proactively hash this out would seem to have the precise sorts of benefits that you posit in your essay. Jgm ( talk) 02:33, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Is it Los Angeles, California, or Los Angeles, California? Thanks, Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 18:34, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Because this aspect of MoS is often the subject of technical criticism on FAC and FLC pages, I've prepared a set of exercises to assist editors at large to absorb and apply the guidelines on hyphens and dashes. You may be interested in having a snoop around the page, which I finished today—it's a start. I'm posting this to generate feedback on how to improve the exercises, which is welcome on the talk page there. The option of extending the page to cover other aspects of MoS (ellipsis, when we finally get the guideline sorted <clears throat>, numbers, currencies, chronological items, and caps come to mind).
(outdent) does anyone know what "South-West winds" would use? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 22:44, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Spacing: All disjunctive en dashes are unspaced, except when there is a space within either or both of the items (the New York – Sydney flight; the New Zealand – South Africa grand final; July 3, 1888 – August 18, 1940, but July–August 1940).
I rarely see full dates squashed up, so it's clearly intuitive. In the case of "Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act", a purist would suggest the use of an en dash (it's very compressed with a hyphen). Smoot–Hawley looks better, to start with, and is not an individual's surname (like Lady Featherstone-Morley, who now has no eyebrows), but the coming together of the surnames of two congressional representatives. That's how I'd advise if starting from scratch, but I'm not sure it's worth changing now. Problem is, I'm practically sure that Congress uses a hyphen in its official publications, a carry-over from the typewriter era. I don't have CMOS handy, but they probably go for the hyphen too, although CMOS is so often ... not very good. "African-American"—CMOS says hyphenate, and Noetica agrees. He won't mind my pasting this in from an email:
CMOS is deeply committed to hyphens in most cases anyway, so their ruling is predictable and consistent.... In fact even New Hart's (p. 80) allows both styles in different circumstances, if we go by its ruling on Greek conjoined with American: "Greek–American negotiations", but "Greek-American wife". In fact, I go along with that. Many others would also, especially in [BrEng]. So I favour "He is an African-American [poet]"; and I favour "African–American trade tensions", and yes: "joint American–British project".
Anderson: "And this is very largely our invention; Wikipedia should follow the usage of good printed sources, not invent out own." No, WP does what is best for its readers. It is no slave to printed sources, since it's read online, not on dead trees, and has a unique readership profile. That doesn't mean that WP doesn't take notice of dead-tree sources; but it judges them in context. I'll reword 1.1; receiving your endorsement for one of the exercises was far more than I'd expected. Tony (talk) 04:45, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Matthew: "south-west winds", but most people write "southwest winds", especially in North America. But "east–west runway", because direction/motion ("to") is involved. Tony (talk) 10:29, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Why are the subpages of this page indicated by parentheses? For example, shouldn't Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) really be Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers? Teh Rote ( talk) 20:17, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
The section on Section headings states: "The triple apostrophes ( ''' ) that make words appear in boldface are not used in headings." I'm not sure what the rationale for this rule is, but shouldn't an exception be made for text that would also appear in bold in running text? In mathematical discourse it is common to use boldface for certain types of quantities, such as vectors and fields, and in theoretical computer science for complexity classes. See, for example, NP (complexity)#Why some NP problems are hard to solve. -- Lambiam 11:25, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Ahem. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:55, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
A few hours ago, I changed the wording back to saying that the size of images should not be specified. This was previously the wording, and was consistent with the established consensus and with Wikipedia:Image use policy. While I was correcting the removal of the explanation of when the lead image of an article should be have a size specified, I had an edit conflict with another editor who put back the wording of saying that specifying image sizes is not necessary, which is completely different to not recommended. It is my recollection that not recommended had consensus because specifying size over-rides user preferences. Has consensus changed to say that forcing small images (less than 300px) is now preferable to following user preferences? -- AliceJMarkham ( talk) 13:36, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
The word 'necessary' has been stable for half a year now, since I put it in there [3] I think the facts on the ground back me up here. Check the featured article today for example, it specifies sizes for all but one of its images. We can't reasonably tell people that this is "not recommended" when it's actually widespread practice and not objected to even in the articles that have received the most scrutiny. Haukur ( talk) 15:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I have to agree with Haukur's arguments. We shouldn't be shaping our policy to suit a very small percentage of users who have set preferences, if in doing so we make the experience of the encyclopedia worse for the vast majority. And the community pretty much seems to have decided this one by its actions.-- Kotniski ( talk) 13:15, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Have tried to bring developers into this discussion via bugzilla: bug 14785. It was marked as a duplicate of bug 495; this is a developer Brion Vibber's reply:
-- Kotniski ( talk) 07:30, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I have edited the relevant section of the MOS with what I hope will be a wording more or less satisfactory to all. I also removed two paragraphs which didn't seem to add anything that wasn't obvious. I'm off for a few days' break now, so I'll leave it with you.-- Kotniski ( talk) 08:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Woah woah woah. All the discussion above seems to rather neatly sidestep the original question: whether the lead image in articles should be special-cased - a long-standing exception to the "don't specify sizes" guideline. Given that consensus very much is for special-casing the first image (it's done practically everywhere), this should be put back in - in a stroke, the MoS has recommended that the majority of article lead images be reduced to about 40% of their original size. Some version of this should go back in. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 13:36, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
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 95 | ← | Archive 99 | Archive 100 | Archive 101 | Archive 102 | Archive 103 | → | Archive 105 |
The MoS states:
A long quote (more than four lines
What exactly does this mean? Four lines on an iPhone, or four lines on my 30" monitor? I believe it might mean "sentences", but I am not so sure. Clarity is needed, as well as some guidelines for flexibility in use. For instance, there are times where a single-line quotation should be blocked, if it is of importance.
Maury ( talk) 17:14, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
I noticed that some articles have an image gallery at the bottom while others put images inline with the text. I find that inline with the text improves readability and the gallery often lacks captions. Is there or should there be a guideline about this? Gallery example Inline example Thanks, Daniel.Cardenas ( talk) 18:55, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Something bugs me about the policy of not linking initial bolded words. Articles say things like
instead of
or
instead of
The policy necessitates redundant words, and those sometimes appear stupid. If the battle of Bettendorf was actually a public debate about whether miniskirts should be worn on Sundays, so that the word "battle" is merely a metaphor, then that needs to be stated, but to say that a battle is a battle and and theorem is a theorem seems like needless extra words that convey no information and sometimes insult the reader. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:15, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
User:Kodster is using AWB to remove html code and insert diacritics. Not sure how I feel about this in every case, but I reverted the edit he just made to WP:MoS, and left this message on his talk page:
We prefer the html code to the diacritic or typographer's symbol for a number of symbols. I'm not positive that the diacritic ring that you inserted is one of them, but it probably is. The reasons are that html is likely to be preserved when the text is copied outside Wikipedia, and the diacritic is not; also, it is nearly impossible to look at those little circles and figure out what they are without the html code. I'll revert, but feel free to come talk about it on our talk page.
- Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 01:28, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
I've requested approval for a task for my bot, which would convert " &emdash; " to "&emdash;", in article mainspace. It would use AWB, and I would do it by looking through "What transcludes page" - Template:Cite journal, then all the other cite templates, followed by Template:Unreferenced. It may not get every single article, but a large majority of them. What are the thoughts of others here? The request is here. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 10:15, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Such confidence! I disagree.
First, if you want the HTML mnemonic entity this is not "&emdash;" but "—".
Secondly, I loathe no-space em dashes in the browser window. The web, as you may recall, is not paper. The ways in which it isn't include: (i) most browsers don't know that you can wrap immediately in front of or immediately after an unspaced em dash, and their ignorance results in immensely jagged right edges where a spaced dash would allow wrapping. (ii) Browsers don't know that apparently unspaced em dashes need a judicious application of thin spaces if they're not (at least in certain widely-used fonts) going to attach themselves to those characters that have wide midriffs.
Hooray for spaced em dashes! I shall continue to use them. -- Hoary ( talk) 09:27, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Hi, all. Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes.
I see that there's an ongoing dispute about correct usage.
"The dispute appears to be over whether "
British Isles" or "
Britain and
Ireland" should be used."
- from a post by
Neıl 8 May 2008 at the second of the two references following.
There appear to be two editors who are very interested in this issue, but several others have also posted about it.
Previous discussion at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Blind_reversion_of_edits.2C_despite_earlier_warnings and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive414#Wikistalking
I've looked for a definite and consistent guideline on this but haven't found one. I'd like to see discussion, resulting in a definite guideline being added to the appropriate page in the
WP:MOS, and (probably) in the pages of relevant Wikiprojects.
Disclaimer: I have not been involved in this dispute in any way, and have no interest whatsoever in however it may shake out -- I'm just trying to attain Wiki-peace and consistency.
--
Writtenonsand (
talk)
14:33, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
British Isles is a geographic term not a political one. The Islands of Britain, Ireland, and all of the thousand or so smaller islands in the archipelago are the "British isles." it has nothing to do with which states occupy any of the islands. "Britain" is the island that contains England, Scotland and Wales, but strictly none of the lesser islands. "Great Britain" is the political union of England, Wales and Scotland, and therefore includes outlying islands of Britain, but not Ireland. The "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the political entity (formerly United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) which changed in 1922. Xandar ( talk) 16:01, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
"well trampled ground"...Right, and if someone comes along here to start an NPOV war, I feel somewhat optimistic that we'll be able to show them the door (which may mean that WT:MOS is the place to discuss certain NPOV issues, because you can never get rid of these battles on policy pages...hm, I hadn't thought of that, I'll cogitate on this). My very small point is that British Isles says:
Encyclopædia Britannica, the Oxford University Press - publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary - and the UK Hydrographic Office (publisher of Admiralty charts) have all occasionally used the term "British Isles and Ireland" (with Britannica and Oxford contradicting their own definitions of the "British Isles")
and the phrase "British Isles and Ireland" gets over 50K Google hits, so there is clearly confusion in the air. If the confusion all by itself is a reason to avoid the phrase, then we nicely avoid a trip to some place like WP:POVN.
And now for something completely different. I undented there because the formatting that {{ quote}} uses doesn't look right if the main text is indented. I reached to type my usual "←" to acknowledge the undent, and then decided that this has officially become silly, unless people really are using indentation in the same way that messageboards use it. That is, if a single indent (for instance) in the middle of a long thread still means to people around here "I'm replying to the last person who posted without any indentation, not to the message right above me", then warning people about undenting makes sense. But I never see that, or I'm not aware that that's going on; when Wikipedians want to be very clear that they're responding to a specific post and not to the whole thread, they generally insert their response immediately under that post. Does anyone around here use "messageboard indentation" style in their indents? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 17:44, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed that the usual wikipedia style seems to be only translating the subject of an article in its first line, for example, Shaposhnikov Yevgeniy Ivanovich ( Russian: Шапошников Евгений Иванович) would only appear in the article on Yevgeniy Shaposhnikov, not, for example, in the article on the Soviet Air Forces. Is this a currently applicable guideline or merely common, but uncodified, practice? Buckshot06 ( talk) 11:20, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Well, three times in 24 hours the question has come up whether to favor academic or journalistic values. This might be another case where I'm weighing in on a question where my experience (especially with article reviewing) is not sufficient to say anything useful; we'll see. I have no idea what the outcome of this discussion will be; people seem to be all over the place on this one. I could be wrong, but I believe this could be the core of an issue that Sept and Gimmetrow have recently raised at Talk:Roman Catholic Church.
At WT:Manual_of_Style_(capital_letters)#Gabriel, we'd like to know if there's anything wrong with this text, which has been there for a while, I think:
The personal name of individual mythical creatures is capitalized (the angel Gabriel). [fixed quote 00:38, 14 May 2008 (UTC)]
It's claimed that there is nothing wrong with referring to an important figure to some Christians, Jews and Muslims as "mythical" because of this disclaimer (yes, it's a disclaimer in article-space, or the closest thing I've seen on WP) in the article
Christian mythology: {{
myth box Christianity}}.
"mythical" has special problems, but leaving that aside, the words "myth" and "mythology" really are used differently in different contexts. Some academics assert (I don't really believe it, but that's not the point) that "myth" does not carry any judgment about whether something is true or not, and those sources were consulted in this article. Journalists use the word "mythology" differently; I know that because
AP Stylebook gives "Capitalize the proper names of pagan and mythological gods and goddesses: Neptune, Thor, Venus, etc", and the first definition in Websters Online is "an allegorical narrative". That's one huge advantage of looking at words from a journalistic rather than an academic viewpoint; in American English at least, you can often get a quick answer, because Chicago and AP Stylebook are both the result of a long-time process of consensus-gathering among, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of writers. (I can't say anything about BrEng.) There's no such thing as a "consensus of all authors", although if you subjectively (and perhaps arbitrarily) narrow your focus, you can sometimes drill down to find consensus among a specific set of academics.
But we can't throw academic values overboard just because academic research is hard, because Wikipedia is based on academic values every bit as much as journalistic ones; it's a question of figuring out which values take precedence when there is conflict. So, in the current question, should we favor academic values or journalistic values, and why? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 14:47, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
On the general point, I would oppose making journalese our standard. It currently has a different set of flaws that the pretentious nonsense of Fowler's day; but it's not clear that it's any better than it was. (And applying CMOS to the particular case of Church may be a WP:ENGVAR violation, as some have suggested; it is certainly applying a generalization to a particular, very knotty, instance.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:23, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
I did a quick copyedit on PBS's excellent recent addition. My only two goals were to make it say the same thing in fewer words, and to change "as you would find it in other reliable verifiable English sources" to "in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias". From reading PBS's discussion above, I think he definitely didn't want people to be able to pick names out of any source, he wants them to follow proper usage, and I completely agree. I didn't change "If the foreign phrase or word does not appear often in English, then avoid using it (see Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms)." WP:Avoid neologisms doesn't talk about translation issues, so that might not be the right link. How about this? "If a descriptive foreign phrase or word does not appear often in English, then translate it." - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 20:00, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Avoid neologisms -- I was thinking of words that are commonly used in a foreign language but not often in English (with or without anglicization) to describe something, for example négationnisme/ negationism. [1] -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 22:03, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
There have been some discussion on
Template talk:Reflist about whether to remove multicolumn support from {{
reflist}}.
The simple solution would be to remove support for it in the reflist template, however, some users suggested it might be better to have a policy change? (I'm guessing they where referring to
MoS?). So if you have any thoughts about that please consider taking part in the discussion.
—
Apis (
talk)
21:42, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Arthur said that "the situation is deplorable." – in this sentence, does the period belong in or outside the quotes if the period was part of the quoted text? WP:MOS#Quotation marks seems contradictary as it states that the period should be inside when it "is part of the quoted text" and outside when "a sentence fragment is quoted". Epbr123 ( talk) 00:07, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Tony knows quite a lot about Wikipedian usage, and I do remember seeing that in FAs, although that's not what I'm used to seeing. For instance, the Guardian's online style guide says:
quotation marks
Use double quotes at the start and end of a quoted section, with single quotes for quoted words within that section. Place full points and commas inside the quotes for a complete quoted sentence; otherwise the point comes outside:
"Anna said, 'Your style guide needs updating,' and I said, 'I agree.' "
- Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 02:18, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't mind the preceding comma—said,—but it's fine without, isn't it? The thing about the final period is that if you want to highlight that "smelly" isn't the end of the quoted sentence, do this:
Otherwise, the default is the assumption that it is the end of a sentence, or it simply doesn't matter in the context. Tony (talk) 10:40, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Those who value external Manuals of Style may wish to consider CMOS §6.10:
This is no evidence for the refinement presently under discussion; is there a source for it? (And the general advice is sound; WP editors are not known for "extreme authorial precision". We also recomend double quotation marks.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:17, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
What is the proper way to render a pen name, stage name, or nickname of an individual in a situation such as this?
In a sense, this seems to be an instance of a word being discussed as a word, and that it should thus be italicized. But I'm not sure; maybe names are names and don't require any sort of punctuation even in "words-as-words" usages. Is there any difference in the example above and these versions?
Thanks for any help! — Dulcem ( talk) 01:00, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Did we reach any consensus here on whether there are times that a wikilink makes italics or quotes unnecessary? I didn't get why this was taken out of WP:MOS; was it too precise, or not precise enough? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 17:21, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
We have several desirable features for images (that they alternate left right and left; that they begin with a right; and so on.) It would be nice if all of them could be implemented for every article, but sometimes they can't be.
I don't see any reason, however, to have the requirement to face inward trump all the others; I can think of at least one image (the Cambridge statue of Newton "voyaging through the strange seas of Thought, alone") which should face outwards. But since people want to stress it, I've put it first. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:22, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Regarding today's edit in WP:DASH: is a fourth dash necessary? (hyphens, en-dashes, em-dashes, minus signs). Here's a minus sign: −, and here's an en-dash: –. Other than the minus being higher by just a hair, I see no difference at all in Firefox or IE. Yes, I see what WP:MOSNUM says, but WP:DASH came first. What's the rationale for making rules that concern nearly invisible differences? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 01:29, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Well logic would dictate that people use minus signs when they mean a minus sign. You don't mean x raised to the power of en dash 2, but x raised to the power of minus 2, so why write the former? As for practical reasons, when you use templates (who usually go with minus signs since that is what is meant), the minus and the en dash are vertically unaligned. See 2.234×10−4m2kg–4 vs. 2.234×10−4m2kg−4. Also, you can see that the en dash overlaps with some characters at certain zoom levels (compare the 4s and you'll see that the dashes overlaps while the minus doesn't (I use firefox in 1280x800 )). Headbomb ( ταλκ · κοντριβς) 01:53, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
You're right, I can see the difference in the exponents...good point. I withdraw the objection. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 01:59, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
More practical to tell us how to key it in. I think I know, but since on Safari in WP's default font, both seem exactly the same—even when zoomed in hugely—it's hard to confirm. Tony (talk) 02:08, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
See this picture. This is the largest zoom level where there is still overlap between the 4 and the en dash. You can also clearly see that the minus and the dash are unaligned. Headbomb ( ταλκ · κοντριβς) 02:16, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Is there any particular reason why it is written that ordinals should not be written in superscript? It is the correct, traditional way to write 2nd - not 2nd. Who decided this? It is open to discussion? EuroSong talk 18:49, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
:One thing that style guidelines are not good at: they don't appeal to people who don't do much writing. Without that context, people will probably think we have no idea what we're talking about, and there's not a lot we can do about that.
We can stay on this particular point (ordinals) for the sake of specificity if you like, Sept, or we can move to a larger discussion. My position is that both of you have things to say that are not only valid, but necessary to the future health of Wikipedia, but the signal gets lost in the noise when you feud. Tony, could you sit this one out for a sec? Sept, let's develop this theme fully and see where it goes. You have seen things happen at FAC that you don't like. You feel that our style guidelines are too extensive by an order of magnitude, that they lure us to put on paper hats and tell people how to write? You believe that this wastes a lot of people-hours at the level of FAC, and suppresses new contributions? Do I have this right? What do you think of my points above?
And, if I could ask a favor, let's restrict this discussion just to American usage, since we're lucky enough to have our "rebellious" phase largely behind us, and since that's all I'm competent to talk about. What's wrong with Chicago, in your view? There is still work to do around the edges, but basic language and orthography rules for professional American English are largely settled. If following Chicago is going to help people get a job or get a paper published, how in the heck are we hurting them by letting them know what it says, and even better, by letting them know when and why Chicago differs from what's needed on Wikipedia? I agree that there is occasional friction on Wikipedia with particular style editors and with particular guidance, but in the WP:GAU survey, 31 out of 31 editors wanted more language and style input in general from reviewers. Everything I see suggests that American Wikipedians generally want our input, and they're very happy that we're doing what we're doing. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 19:35, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
I need to focus on my review of Cold fusion for a few days, but I'll come back to this. Just to clear up a few points:
What Wikipedians do better than academicians, journalists, professionals and even bloggers is to lower the barriers to collaborative writing. (Our advantage over bloggers is providing the guaranteed readers; that lowers the barrier to getting your stuff actually read.) I will support everything that lowers barriers and respects what our writers actually want, and oppose everything that raises barriers.
Philip, you're with WP:MILHIST, one of Wikipedia's most successful wikiprojects. If you're saying that in WP:MILHIST articles, the way that respected military historians write is always acceptable in WP:MILHIST articles, I support that. Wikipedia is at its most powerful and most charming when articles about military history read like articles written by military historians. When I read an article about Agatha Christie novels, I want to smell the English country gardens. When I read a math article, I want to see the kind of blunt elegance I remember from my math days. So, I'm with you there.
But here's the problem: who's going to tell us how military historians write? Just coming up with an approximate description of professional American usage, which is what Chicago tries to do, is hard enough. The problem is that most of the time, people who want to run off and do things their own way are just embarrassing themselves. (Not in front of me, I don't care, but in front of their peers.) Let's take "2nd": the first 30 Google hits I get on "military 2nd" (which I believe would pick up 2nd) are 30-0 in favor of not superscripting. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I should be looking at 1000 hits, or looking more closely at military history sources to answer this question. But if it's true that "2nd" is much more common these days, then my position is that we don't do anyone any favors by telling them that 2nd is just fine; that's shirking our responsibility to help people become better writers, make a living, write papers that get accepted, impress their peers, or whatever other reasons people like to write in Wikipedia. It's also just a flat-out lie to tell someone that some kind of rare usage is not a problem, because we have no power or authority to make it not a problem. Editors get reverted all the time, and if most of the likely contributors to their articles think that "2nd" looks better than "2nd", then they're probably going to lose the battle to keep "2nd", and we're not doing them any favors if we tell them they won't.
Tony, you don't need to worry that I'll worship Chigago. One of the joys of writing for Wikipedia is that we don't have to try to sell something as consensus that couldn't possibly be consensus; Chicago is a business, and they have to pretend to professors and students and New Yorker writers and novelists that one of set of guidelines will work for all of them, which couldn't possibly be true. See the current discussion at WT:MOSCAPS; some of Chicago's capitalization guidelines are just silly. But this is fantastic: while Chicago is stuck trying to defend the status quo, we can run circles around them, and come off as much more practical and modern than they are. Who knows...we might get wider acceptance among people who write online for our style guidelines than Chicago, if we work hard and we document how we differ and why we think we're superior. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 19:07, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
There are many pages in the "naming conventions" category. It seems to me that if there's a page that concerns article titles that is optional, then it shouldn't be in the cat. I changed WP:MOS to say that article titles should conform to the cat; Kotniski changed it back to the single page WP:Naming conventions. Thoughts? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 15:56, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
At WP:MOS#Images, it states Do not place left-aligned images directly below second-level (===) headings, as this disconnects the heading from the text it precedes. Instead, either right-align the image, remove it, or move it to another relevant location. Would this also apply to headers lower than second-level?-- 十 八 00:11, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Do I need to put a.m. in front of every time in the article? Or can I assume the reader knows from a one-time deal? "Bleh happened at 8:15 a.m. Blah happened at 8:17. Blargh happened at 8:23." -- VegitaU ( talk) 20:43, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
There are a lot of definition lists in the guideline, formatted with wikitext semicolons and colons. While this does provide a clear format, the HTML document structure tends to be broken:
Replacing these with subheadings formatted with more equals signs (=) would:
Any objections to converting most of the guideline from DLs to subheadings? — Michael Z. 2008-05-26 19:43 z
That's right. Purists prefer a space before the slash, and Name should be in quotes. I wish people used those tags in archives more often for easy linking. But on a non-archived page, my preference would be to keep things visible; it limits the effectiveness of something that lets you link if you can't tell just by looking at the page that you can link to it. The leading semicolon looks like this:
and the subheadings that can be linked to look like this:
So 5 equals signs makes a nice substitution for the semicolon if we want to preserve font size. If we want to follow the guideline to always nest subheadings "correctly" (but hey, we don't need to follow no stinkin' guidelines in WP-space), then we want 4 equals signs to follow a subheading of 3 equals signs. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 15:28, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
I just noticed that Wikipedia superiors used to indicate endnotes are set in a scientific style. If I wanted to square x, I would type x2. But if I wanted to cite a source for x, I should write x.² The latter aligns with the ascender line and is set 50% smaller than x. Unfortunately, the former adds leading to some lines, but not others. See this PDF for more information.— Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. ( talk) 06:15, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
{{{post}}} | |
---|---|
Does the manual of style have anything to say about the use of graphics to display textual information? If not, should it? I would have thought this was an extreme no-no, for both accessibility and stylistic reasons. Hesperian 01:12, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
As often, Tony has let his own prejudices run away with him; the question here is not infoboxes, but whether images should be used to display texts, in infoboxes or out of them. There is one argument against it, which we should make: it is unlikely to be read as text by devices for the visually impaired, and therefore deprives some of them of information without necessity. It would take a truly extraordinary visual effect, and this example isn't one, to make up for that, if it can be done at all. All we need do is state the reason not to. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 13:43, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
As you can see from the example on the right, I have reverted to a version that uses textual headers. We'll have to wait and see if it sticks. The question now is, should the MOS have anything to say on this point? Hesperian 06:52, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Notice that in our subsection that was titled "Periods and spaces" two days ago, the name was recently changed to "Periods/full stops and spaces", and I just swapped in parens for the slash. The first sentence includes full stop and period, and even though the "official" language for WP:MOS is American English, I'm fine with the pre-existing first sentence if there are a fair number of non-Americans who will be looking for guidance on "full stops" in the MOS...and I think there are. Given that first sentence, I'm fine with the change to the subheading (or what will become the subheading if/when we ditch the leading semicolons). Does anyone want a change from the current version? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 13:58, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
{{tl:MedInst}}
These are lists of articles used in special branches of medicine. Thus they have been named, in general, as "Instruments used in Field". The F needs to be capitalised as it is a name of a subject. Any bureaucrats coming to mediate?? sarindam7 ( talk) 22:09, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Since when do we capitalise the names of subjects? Read botany, biology, physics, whatever. They all refer to their topic in lower case unless at the beginning of a sentence. Sarindam is wrong; there is no reason to capitalise the names of fields, and these should all be moved (or moved back) to the lower case title. P.S. don't go looking for the discussion; it was on Sarindam's talk page, but is now archived. This will need to be discussed here. Hesperian 01:53, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
The wp:mosnum policy page cannot be used for reference because it contains non-policy. Anyone that reads it could be mislead into thinking that non-policy is policy. This is acceptable to the people that are controlling wp:mosnum now. Anyone that tries to remove non-policy is just reverted.
The wp:mosnum talk page used to be active with discussions on a variety of topics. It is now dominated by the binary prefix war and its collateral damage. The binary prefix war was moved to a page called Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (binary prefixes) but that lasted just a shortwhile before the page and the warfighting was moved back. It is a place for sockpuppets, puppetmasters and anonymous editors. They keep saying that the war will soon be over and then normal service will be resumed ...
The policy page and its talk page used to be worthwhile places. It had contributions on a variety of topics from many editors. Sadly, the policy page is not reliable and the talk page is scary. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how we can have a policy page and talk page where things other than binary prefixes matter? Lightmouse ( talk) 15:47, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
All of these pages are non-policy. That's why they're called guidelines. MOSNUM may have more statements of some editor's opinion than most, but nor by much, and it would be hard to prove. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:12, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
Please see the proposal at Wikipedia talk:Article size to update the article size guidelines, in particular to use industry standard word count instead of character count. Oakwillow ( talk) 18:31, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
Could someone update the units of measurements section to reflect the update of MOSNUM? I'd do it myself, but I don't have a lot of time for that this week. Headbomb ( ταλκ · κοντριβς) 10:28, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Should one ever use “curly” inverted commas - or only ever use "straight" ones?
The MoS says that curly ones are dangerous because they're difficult to type and can affect search results (imagine wondering why you can't find Jane's Addiction because the article has been titled Jane’s Addiction) and "recommends" that only straight are used. On the other hand on the first line of insertable characters beneath the edit window we see
– — … ‘ “ ’ ” ° ″ ′ ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → · §
Are they there just to tease us? Or are there some circumstances when they're appropriate?
For example the
Philip Larkin entry currently has a section entitled
1969 – 1985: “Beyond the light stand failure and remorse”
which to my mind looks good and is non-confusing almost- instinct 10:15, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
The same question has come up, without any good answer, at WT:WikiProject Hawaii/Manual_of_Style#It looks_like_you_guys_are_working_on_this_style_guideline:
"When the okina is used, which form to use. For instance: Keaweikekahiali`iokamoku uses what appears as %60 in the url;
Kiwala‘o uses what appears as %E2%80%98 in the url; Kame'eiamoku uses what appears as %27 in the url;
ʻIolani Palace uses what appears as %CA%BB in the url. [punctuation added]. Some of which don't always show up in all browsers. I don't know which should be preferred (if any at all). Mahalo. -- Ali'i 14:32, 2 June 2008 (UTC)"
We also haven't resolved when to use a breath mark ("okina") at all; help would be appreciated. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 12:02, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
Compelling reasons not to use curly quotes were put when this came up about six months ago; perhaps we need to dig up that debate. Yes, I noticed only the other day that the curlies are there below the edit box; they should be removed. Tony (talk) 12:32, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
On the separate topic of deleting some of the characters on the panel, I think that a check should be made of where they are used before deleting them. Are the curly brackets needed for any foreign language words, pronunciation syntax, complex mathematical notation, or somewhere else? They may not be found on some keyboards. Is is useful to have a full set of characters to use when a particular language keyboard does not have the required keys? I often use the panel of characters (although not the curly brackets) and it may look odd with some missing. Perhaps, there should be a link at the bottom of the panel to a page on the suggested use of special characters, and for example; the use of straight brackets in preference to curly brackets could be easily found and explained. This may help to stop editors using the panel inappropriately, and make it easy to quote from. Snowman ( talk) 12:48, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm unsure whether there should be a comma before "as well" in the following:
The election will coincide with the 2008 Senate elections in thirty-three states, House of Representatives elections in all states, and gubernatorial elections in eleven states, as well as various state referendums and local elections.
Theshibboleth ( talk) 08:18, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
How much do you love the image on Geometric Tortoise? If you don't know what I'm talking about, stare at it for ten seconds. Does the MOS need to address this? Hesperian 06:03, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Please can I have permission to write 'there is a 9 mm gap' and 'there is a 9 millimetre gap'. Currently the former is permitted but the latter is forbidden. Both are identical except that one is symbolic. Both are unambiguous. Lightmouse ( talk) 12:34, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
NIST's Special Publication 811 (page 16) takes the same position described by Tony1. They say it is because "the value of a quantity should be expressed in a way that is as independent of language as possible". On pages 17 and 18 the same guide says that "key elements of a scientific or technical paper, particularly the results of measurements and the values of quantities that influence the measurements, should be presented in a way that is as independent of language as possible" and that using symbols rather than spelled-out units promotes language independence. They go on to say
Occasionally, a value is used in a descriptive or literary manner and it is fitting to use the spelled-out name of the unit rather than its symbol. Thus, this Guide considers acceptable statements such as “the reading lamp was designed to take two 60-watt light bulbs,” or “the rocket journeyed uneventfully across 380 000 kilometers of space,” or “they bought a roll of 35-millimeter film for their camera.”
Even though the MOS suggests more extensive use of spelled-out units than NIST does, I think that a person with limited ability to read English is more apt to pay attention to the parts of an article that does uses symbols (such as tables), so when using symbols, we should follow NIST's lead and try to be as language-independent as possible.
I am not familiar with the customs of other languages as far as whether or not numerals used as adjectives are separated from the noun with a hyphen. Since I don't know any better, I will suppose NIST knows what they are talking about and that it does indeed vary from language to language. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 13:21, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Your example might be the most unambiguous of the lot; there are many cases much more confusing. Compare, for example:
The sentence must make sense as a person reads it; omitting the hyphen from the second sentence will cause a person to read it as the first, only realising their mistake (or, rather, the writer's) when reaching periods. I'd give you a better example—preferably one with millimetres—but I am not inspired enough at the moment. You get the point, though. Waltham, The Duke of 00:28, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
I take the point about mm adding a useful layer of context.
On the point about amibiguity, I agree that it is possible for ambiguous phrases to exist. That is my entire point. The hyphen is a very useful tool to disambiguate values. I will argue strongly for them in values with ambiguity, and against them in values where there is no ambiguity. Many editors use hyphens for disambiguation and not otherwise, yet this mandatory rule for mandatory use of hyphens in all cases turns such writing into a crime without a victim. Quotes about hyphens include "If you take the hyphen seriously, you will surely go mad" and Churchill's "One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided as far as possible". Please think carefully about what I am suggesting: I am lobbying for an end to the mandatory use of hyphens where values and units are unambiguous. If you interpret that as lobbying for a ban on hyphens, then you misunderstand my point.
Lightmouse (
talk)
10:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
"Many editors use hyphens for disambiguation and not otherwise, yet this mandatory rule for mandatory use of hyphens in all cases turns such writing into a crime without a victim." No, Anderson: you're the victim. Tony (talk) 03:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
As for its being an ENGVAR issue, less hyphenation in general in some dialect group does not equal less hyphenation of adjectives in that dialect group. The argument is making a slight logical jump.
Regarding language independance; if others use this argument to base their standards on, good for them; but I agree with Anderson, this is the English WP. That said though, hyphens still should not be used with abbreviations/symbols, since it's just not done that way in English (whatever the reason be).
JIMp talk· cont 04:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I have no statistics but my belief is that ambiguous unit values are rare. I cannot think of a single instance where I have come across a need to disambiguate a unit value with a hyphen. There are cases where I use hyphens as part of grammar but this is not one of them. I frequently read adjectival unit values freely written on Wikipedia and elsewhere that do not have hyphens. It makes no difference to the readability and unlike many grammar issues, it does not look odd. I would not be making such a fuss if it were not hard-coded into the widely used convert template. It is not opt-in, it is not opt-out, it is enforced. Anyway, it seems that I am the only one speaking out against this and I hate to disagree with some of the respected editors here. I have stated my opinion and I have not convinced you. Lightmouse ( talk) 19:12, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I have been informed that the article Edmonton municipal election, 1963 contains a quote. Now that I know it is a quote, I can see it. However, I have mistaken it more than once for ordinary text and converted a unit in the text. This has unintentionally annoyed the most frequent editor ( User:Sarcasticidealist). I think that there is something unusual about unflagged quotes. There must be some way in which that article can flag quote text to the uninitiated user. Can anyone suggest what needs to be done? Lightmouse ( talk) 11:05, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
The tag would make it easier for a bot to avoid. I am in the bad books of the principle editor, having failed to see the unflagged quote on three occasions. Can you take a look at the article? Lightmouse ( talk) 12:34, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
Has anyone ever created a bot that successfully avoids quotes? That would be quite suprising, considering the may ways quote marks are used. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 17:13, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
This is why commenting on the talk page is a good idea. Bots can do that; they can even be programmed to avoid doing a page twice. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:56, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
Double quotes would be fine too. I don't care how it is done. Something needs to be done to that article. Lightmouse ( talk) 04:46, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm no kind of guru either but I've had a go at the article. I put the excerpts in blockquotes, hope that this sorts things out nicely for all concerned. With respect to conversions to metric, perhaps some could be provided as footnotes. JIMp talk· cont 05:04, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I've gone ahead and added the footnote. JIMp talk· cont 07:30, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Some mention should be made (if there is a preference) of how to write fractions. Use the characters like ¾ or do it manually like 3/4? I believe there are only characters for the 4 or 5 most common fractions. Or should fractions be done away with altogether and only decimals used? Miken32 ( talk) 03:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Anderson marked his recent edit of the "Ellipses" section as "ce", but it was no mere copy-edit. Among about a dozen changes were:
I am reverting this change pending Anderson's raising of these issues here; that is the way things are done for all but non-substantive changes. At the very least, I must ask Anderson not to conceal substantive changes to MOS under edit summaries that indicate otherwise. I'm retaining his one worthwhile, uncontentious change, from "reliable" to "predictable".
In addition, I ask Anderson to take note of His Grace's edit summaries concerning Anderson's removal of the guideline WRT em-dash spacing. This is yet another instance in which Anderson's unilateral changes have had to be fixed. Tony (talk) 04:02, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
I see three threads here.
From the MOS, it would be "Governor Smith" or "Smith was the governor of someplace". How does it work with "Acting Governor Smith"? "Acting-Governor Smith"? "acting-Governor Smith"? "acting Governor Smith"? I'm trying to finish up Uriel Sebree and it was pointed out in the FA process how horribly inconsistent I was being. JRP ( talk) 22:56, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
How did other variations of the English language get introduced into Wikipedia if it was founded in the United States? Wouldn't the American origin have confined it to American English? Emperor001 ( talk) 01:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
It's not so much where Wikipedia originates from as who a particular article originates from. JIMp talk· cont 03:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
I appologize if I've offended anyone. I was just asking a question. Emperor001 ( talk) 02:05, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
Speaking of opening cans of worms, could someone please point out where in MoS &c. one might find a citeable guideline on whether we should be calling England "England" or "England, UK". Am I just being blind? Ta. almost- instinct 10:29, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
The Template:Cite journal produces markup that appears not to follow the manual of style - for instance adding a title produces "title". and if the journal article itself ends in a question mark it produces "title?". The MLA style which seems to be the only major format that uses quotations places the quotes after the punctuation. One would expect to obtain formatting that conforms to the MoS by filling in citation templates. Shyamal ( talk) 13:09, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
Someone—Anderson, I suspect, although I can't be bothered at this stage to investigate—has been littering MOS with dispute tags. He's just put another on the ellipsis section. Now, most of these tags refer to the talk page, but the relevant talk is stale and has been archived. We need to remove these dispute tags unless there's an ongoing dispute on the talk page. Tony (talk) 04:46, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to remind users that for some time now, the autoformatting of dates has not been required.
There are four advantages in not linking dates:
[[20 June|20]]
, [[20 June]] [[1997 in South African sport|1997]]
) (several forms of piped links break the date formatting function);It may be that WikiMedia can be persuaded to invest resources in revamping the mechanism to avoid or mitigate these problems, but this is unlikely to occur in the short to medium terms. Tony (talk) 14:00, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I didn't see anything about __FORCETOC__ in the article. I think it should be included because almost all Articles use FORCETOC —Preceding unsigned comment added by Condalence ( talk • contribs)
Sorry, the reason I said "almost all" was because most articles I see have FORCETOC. Could I request it to be added? FORCETOC really does serve a great purpose for long articles. That way instead of scrolling someone can just simply click to a paragraph. I do that a lot. Thanks. -- Condalence 22:35, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
PROPOSAL: - OK, this has been bothering me. Lately I've been seeing a lot of scientific articles beginning with the format "In xxx, xxxxx is ..." as in "In computing, phishing is ..." An article I created recently was change to this format. What this is saying is that all information about the topic is limited to relating to the qualifier. Phishing only is used in computing and no where else. Subpersonality only is used in transpersonal psychology and no where else. If this were true, then the articles should be titled Phishing (computing) and Subpersonality (transpersonal psychology). However, it is not true that every sentence and every of bit of information in the Phishing article relates to computing. Every sentence in Subpersonality does not relate to transpersonal psychology and subpersonality certainly is not limited to the field of transpersonal psychology. Most telling, Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#First_sentences states "If the topic of the article may be unfamiliar to some readers, establish a context." I agree with establishing context, but do not agree with establishing context by beginning the article with "In xxx,". The MoS example given results in qualifying trusted third party, entity, and the two parties to being cryptography elements. However, only "entity" is cryptography element. The two parties, e.g., Bob and Alice, are humans and certainly not only cryptography element. The example given in the MoS incorrectly approves limiting trusted third party, entity, and the two parties to cryptography. The Trusted third party article also addresses "outside cryptography". How can it do that if the article is limited to cryptography by the lead sentence to the article? If this "In xxxx,"-qualifier lead technique is acceptable, then the lead sentence to Trusted third party should read "In cryptography, a trusted third party (TTP) is ... ." In law, a trusted third party is ..." This makes the articles look more like disambiguous pages rather than an article. I proposed that Manual of Style should explicitly reject the use of "In xxx," as an acceptable way to provide context in the first sentence of an article. If you agree, disagree, or have a different observation/solution, please post below. Bebestbe ( talk) 14:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
The word “counterintuitively” should be deleted from
We don't need some party of editors declaring their intuition to be the intuition. As to my intuition, I would note that pronouns in general do not have apostrophes in their possessives:
— SlamDiego ←T 23:40, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I would definitely delete counterintuitively. My intuition was never that it should have an apostrophe. Why should it? Just because the two-words short form it's is pronounced the same way. Is it then also counterintuitive that there is written without apostrophe? One of the first things I realized when I started learning English was that there are many ways in which one pronunciation might be spelled. BTW, that sucks about this language ;-) Anyway, my point is that for me, personally, it was never the intuition and I am quite proud that it wasn't. If you have this intuition it only shows that you do not see the strikingly difference in those terms (semantically and grammatically). So, when we use counterintuitively in the MOS, we do not only impose on others what a common-sense intuition would be, which I find already a little bit insulting. Moreover, we exhibit that our intuition with respect to understanding this language is under-developed. Tomeasy talk 17:27, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Looking through the history for the main page I was astonished to discover how many edits—eg. over thirty in the last fortnight—are made to MoS. Its absurd that such a key set of WP guidelines be so unstable. Most editors have a hard enough time as it is keeping tabs on the various WP rules and guidelines—this endless chopping and changing is absurd. Do you expect every editor to check MoS every couple of days or so? I'll repeat that word: absurd. Yes things need to be discussed, but the frequency with which the main page is edited is, IMO, unacceptable, and makes a mockery of the concept of MoS. I write this in the full expectation that opposing parties will exploit replying to this as an opportunity continue to score points. That's fine—but stop letting it spill over onto the guidelines. Frankly, I think the page is verging on needing protecting almost- instinct 00:17, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Considering the number of reverts, I'd say that simply counting edits is wrong, at least (or, some might say, especially) in the Manual of Style. If you will check the style updates, once a month, you will see that the actual changes are relatively few, and you can monitor them through said updates. Waltham, The Duke of 05:29, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
I see the consensus is that I'm wrong so I withdraw my comments ;-)
But seriously its difficult for new editors to come to terms with the MoS—it seems so huge at first—and we worry about getting shot down for going outside the guidelines ... it just can feel like the ground is shifting beneath our feet ...
almost-
instinct
13:06, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Okay, let's tackle the issue of stability. The folks at WP:CONSENSUS and WP:VPP know very well what "consensus" means, and I'm going to go point them to this conversation, so if this is wrong, I'll get an earful in a hurry. Let's take the latest addition to WP:MOS, from User:Betswiki (a new editor, or at least a new account, so I'll go leave a message on their talk page, and please don't BITE):
An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is the omission of material from quoted text or some other omission, perhaps the absence of the end of a sentence, deliberately left out by the author, often used in the representation of conversation in print. The ellipsis is represented by ellipsis points, a series of dots (three dots within a sentence, four dots at the end of a sentence). In traditional publishing the dots are separated by spaces and are separated from the surrounding text by spaces.
Not that bad, but not quite right, which makes it a good example for my point. There's an infobox at the top of every guideline and policy page that says, "Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus." So I have to curb my impulse to yank the edit just because I don't like it. I'm also not allowed to yank it on the grounds that the editor may not have followed that policy when they edited; that doesn't give anyone a "right" to revert. But there are lots of reasons to believe that most of this edit doesn't represent consensus and should be reverted. The first is precedence: new users get pointed to WP:MOS, it's the most commonly visited style guideline page, and its recommendations are argued constantly at WP:FAC. WP:SILENCE counts reading something and not taking action as indicative of consensus, and I don't see any history in the WT:MOS archives of argumentation over any of the things discussed in the new edit, so the previous text (before the last few days) represents at least the approximate consensus of thousands of people. That means that it doesn't matter if someone has a new clever argument, or knows that Chicago does it differently; that's not sufficient to change the page. WP:BRD does permit people to "act first, answer questions later", even on a guideline page, but anyone who has a habit of making changes without having their reasons handy is in line for a trip to WP:ANI for violation of "6. Attempting to ... impose one's own view of 'standards to apply' rather than those of the community" from WP:POINT. On a guideline page, your argument needs to be, not why you personally think it was an improvement, but why you believe that everything you've read on Wikipedia tells you that you changed it from something that didn't have consensus to something that did. (See WP:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_44#Using a policy page as a scratchpad to develop a proposal for Kim's discussion and links.)
If WP:MOS doesn't reflect consensus, that's easy to show. Regulars at WP:FAC and WP:GAN can search their memory of what people said when the issue came up. If the issue can be identified by keywords, the last database dump of en.wikipedia or page-specific Google searches would pull up evidence of disgruntlement if it exists. If there's no disgruntlement, then it has consensus. Anyone can start a new discussion on this talk page, and that discussion might lead to a new consensus, but three guys and a lot of handwaving can't overturn the apparent consensus of thousands of people. Three guys arguing about what they've seen at WP:FAC, WP:GAN, the WT:MOS archives, etc, can be persuasive, in my view, as long as they're being honest and accurate, of course.
So: is there anything in the new edit concerning ellipses that people believe already has consensus? - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 20:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
As for the matter at issue, I italicise the parts which seem to me mere statements of fact:
I do not claim any of the text is the best possible phrasing; but it shares that with the text it replaced and with the rest of the section.
The last sentence is vague on dating; for certain values of "traditional" I believe both claims made are true. But do we need a history of typography here? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:11, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Experience shows that relatively few FA nominations are reviewed for MOS issues; on the other hand, most of those that are are reviewed with mechanical incompetence. Experience also shows that this often genuinely comes as a surprise, and justifiably so, to the nominator; the "rules" that are enforced are rarely sound English; sometimes they are mere recommendations here, often they ought to be, and quite often they ought not to be even recommendations, since the article is in sound English, or one of the variations which can be sound English. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 12:48, 23 June 2008 (UTC) ←What a total surprise that Anderson should take this opportunity to trumpet his anti-MOS agenda again. Tony (talk) 14:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this is more relevant at Wikipedia talk:Lead section, but I think this page gets more activity... Most lists open with "This is a list of <Repeat the article title>", or "This is a complete list of <repeat the article title>", or "comprehensive" or any other similar words. A discussion was started a while ago at Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates/Archive 3#Straight repetitions of the title in the opening sentence regarding this, as WP:FLC is obviously the place where this sort of thing is seen frequently. Regarding FLs, if a list is featured, then it should already be complete and comprehensive, and shouldn't need stating as such. But it's also not a very good way of engaging the reader to the article. We know it's a list of cats (or whatever) from the title. Articles don't begin this way. Today's Main Page article Blue Iguana doesn't begin with "This is an article about Blue Iguanas. The Blue Iguana is a critically endangered species of lizard". Can we please state a "ban" on WP:MOS from introducing list articles in this way? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 07:14, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
←Anderson, it's the topic, isn't it, not the title. In any case, at FLC there's general consensus, including the two directors, that this has turned into a lazy way for authors to open their "list" articles. The practice is particularly problematic given the length of many "list" titles. Have a look for yourself, except that reviewers (mostly others apart from me) have been insisting on a recasting in nominations; easier to find in the list of existing FLs. Tony (talk) 13:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
← I am glad to see that the two of you have finally reached a solution on the article (and one which I also agree with, by the way). Following the history was interesting, but also worrying, at least in the start; I was this close to starting counting reverts. Please be careful from now on. I suggest using talk pages more; you don't need to "discuss" through edit summaries. Waltham, The Duke of 22:39, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
In contrast to the current* "First sentences" guideline, I find it extremely web-UNfriendly not to hyperlink the subject of a wikipedia page to its official website (if there is one). Web users intuitively want to be able to link to appropriately relevant information when they read a phrase. I understand and completely agree that IN GENERAL the subject of a Wikipedia page should not be hyperlinked to anything else--after all, the Wikipedia article is presumably the explanation of the subject--but in the case where the topic of the page is an organization (or product, or person) that has an OFFICIAL website, it seems both appropriate to link to it from the (bolded) subject of a Wikipedia page, and INappropriate NOT to hyperlink to it. Does this make sense (to anyone besides me)? Is there a way we can get this concept considered for official inclusion** in the guideline?
Thanks... philiptdotcom ( talk) 01:02, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Posted at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style and Wikipedia talk:Lead section I have a question about bolding the name in the lead section of an article. At Kosovan Serb Assembly, I have put that name in bold as well as the two Serbian spellings of the name in its original language. Is this proper, or should only the English name be in bold? Please respond on my talk. — Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 00:21, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
The following issue came up during the peer review of Golden Film. What is meant in the following phrase: "A long quote (more than four lines, or consisting of more than one paragraph, regardless of number of lines) is formatted as a block quotation, which Wikimedia's software will indent from both margins." More than four lines doesn't make sense, since this depends on your browser window size and display type. More than four sentences would make sense, since this is calculable by counting full stops and question marks. – Ilse @ 16:41, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
Similar to how we use nbsp for say "22 miles", is there an nb-dash for "1992–present" so they appear on the same line? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 17:32, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
If needed, there is {{ nowrap}}. JIMp talk· cont 04:42, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (capital letters)#Capitalisation. Whether or not to capitalize all proper nouns comes up from time to time. The current vote is 3-0 in favor of "k. d. lang" on the talk page. My understanding is that the only current exceptions to capitalizing a proper noun are for a few companies that have a trademark capitalizing the second letter, such as iPod. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 16:13, 28 June 2008 (UTC)
What are the procedures for referring to an administrative division of a country. Should we name the administrative division with a comma then the country or should we just put the name of the admministrative division? Is it Alabama, USA or just New York? Is it Alsace, France or just Alsace? Can you point me to whether there is a style guide for something like this? Pocopocopocopoco ( talk) 03:41, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
I've just come from the help desk after answering a question about infoboxes and nav boxes (you can see that here). Whilst I was able to find a MOS section on Info boxes, information about Nav boxes is rather limited and hard to find - it took several minutes of searching before I found the section Template:Navbox. Is there a guideline page about how and where to use such boxes as there is for the info box? If so, could you add the link to it to the MOS contents page? Also, could you please add to the information I gave at the Help Desk, as I fear that I may not have given enough information. Thanks! StephenBuxton ( talk) 11:17, 28 June 2008 (UTC)
I had inquired at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Naming_.28and_referring_to.29_articles_about_people_with_initials_as_their_.22common.22_first_name as to a clarification about naming (and referring to) articles about people with initials in their name. The current Wikipedia convention is to use a full stop after each initial, correct? That seemed to be the consensus at the Pump, but it was suggested I bring it up here so the MOS can clarify the Wikipedia policy. Thoughts? — X96lee15 ( talk) 02:10, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
From this month's TCMOS "New Q & A" newsletter: "Q. I'm curious about your equating collective nouns with mass nouns in CMOS 5.8. The explanation at Wikipedia states that it is incorrect to equate the two." I knew it; we're all chasing each other around. Pretty soon Wikipedia and all the style guides will turn into one big Ouroboros. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 20:47, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
From Kaiser Chiefs discography: "Kaiser Chiefs are currently recording their third album". Is this correct, or should it be "Kaiser Chiefs is currently recording its third album". The band is one band, even though it is made up of more than one person, correct? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 07:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
On 25 June, Anderson raised some reason at the Naming conventions policy talk page for why the use of en dashes in article titles should be changed, without providing the folks there the proper context of the debate that has been closed here on this matter. A day and a half later, without a single comment on the matter by another editor, he launched in and changed the policy thus, in so doing introducing a conflict between the Naming conventions policy page and MOS, where before there was none.
These are underhand tactics that deserve to be rebutted, and SOON. The change introduces the possibility that an editor will argue that because some "reliable source" uses a hyphen in a compound item in a "page name", this is fine for WP's page names too, despite MOS's guidance on en dashes in both article titles and the main text. On a legalistic level, the new wording fails, because proof has to be shown of the use of a hyphen in a page name in that reliable source; what exactly are these "page names" in reliable sources? I though that was a particularly WPian term. Neverthess, Anderson's hasty change looks like an attempt to drive a wedge between two of WP's most important pages. We must not let this happen.
Now, I've reinstated the previous text, which just pointed to the section on dashes in MOS, pure and simple. I trust that Anderson is not going to reinforce his deception by bad behaviour in edit warring. He has to learn that, to start with, consensus is required on a talk page. Tony (talk) 15:00, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Yesterday, I attempted to solve a massive overlinking issue with List_of_Final_Fantasy_compilation_albums, a new nomination I was reviewing at WP:FLC, by removing all of the autoformatting. No one minds US date formatting, even if it requires a comma, just as they accept Euro formatting after their signature.
I was delighted that nominator PresN responded at the FLC page: "Well, can't say I'm sad to see the sea of blue leave. It's much easier to read now, thank you."
You may wish to compare the previous autoformatted version with the new, normal script version. Scrolling down side by side is best, but the difference is clear by comparing one after the other, too. Tony (talk) 04:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Ancient Egypt is one FA in which the names of single-digit centuries are spelled out (sixth century or something), but most FA's, and WP:MOSNUM, use 1st century, etc. Does anyone have a strong preference either way? I've asked a couple of history editors, also. I don't think I've ever seen 11th century spelled out in a mature article on Wikipedia. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 15:36, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to make the case that it can occasionally be appropriate to treat a quotation in the same manner as an image. That is, for a quotation to be allotted a space set apart from the main body of the text, where it will provide an illustrative statement that adds insight or some sort of cohesion to the section of the article that surrounds it, in the manner that an image does. Such a quotation doesn't always naturally flow into or out of the section to which it is attached, but can nonetheless be indispensably relevant to the topic.
Of course, I have an example. I moved a quotation like this from the "Production" heading of an article about a movie to the "Plot" heading (scroll down a little), since it is the plot the quotation concerns, and then added another such "box" quotation of my own to the "Production" heading. And, of course, I've had a friendly disagreement. Moving the plot quotation was apparently considered to be correct, but not any longer its presentation in the "box" quote format, which was how I originally found it. I kind of liked it that way, and it was the first time I'd seen a quotation presented in that form in Wikipedia. It performs differently from the prescribed "block" quote mode, by granting the quoted text a further removal from the main body. This effect is sometimes desirable, as in the circumstance I'm describing. The "Plot" section of the article in question is nothing else but a rote synopsis of the action of the film--perhaps rightly. But I consider it useful and interesting to include some of the writer's thoughts on the story off in a sidebar, where the quotation won't detract from the thrust of the synopsis. Another editor is of the opinion that the quotation should be presented in the sanctioned "block" quote style, where I feel it does not naturally proceed from the text before it, nor lead into what comes after. Yet it has the semblance of belonging where it is, in the linear progression of the plot. The "box" quote version of the other quotation I provided remains "boxed," further down.
I'm certainly not asking for a validation of my point of view in this particular dispute (as I'm convinced I'll get the other editor to agree), but I am looking for consensus on briefly outlining the (limited) appropriateness of these hovering "box" quotes in the Quotations heading of the Manual of Style.
Note: This is similar to pull quotes, as used frequently in magazines and newspapers, but is not the same, in that the text does not appear anywhere else in the article. Pull quotes, I'm sure you would agree, are "unencyclopedic" gimmickry, a form of advertising. Aratuk ( talk) 01:16, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Apologies if this has come up before (I suspect it has), but is there any guidance on how to decide which punctuation variant of terms should be used for a title when there are competing alternatives? Currently there is some discussion that Rock and roll should be retitled "Rock 'n' roll", or "Rock & roll", or "Rock 'n roll", or... etc etc. All these variants are used in the real world, and a Google apparently indicates that "Rock 'n' roll" is more common than "Rock and roll". Thoughts? Ghmyrtle ( talk) 15:54, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
I’m about to make a change to: Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation_marks; just warning here (and will note change after doing), since this is a high-visibility page.
The prior revision states:
This contradicts Quotation mark#Punctuation (for reference, this revision), which states:
I will thus change the MoS to reflect this, with citation.
Nbarth ( email) ( talk) 00:03, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
There is some disagreement over an example of links in a quotation, and I wonder if some view can be made which offers a greater guidance than what is already written in WP:MOSQUOTE about Linking: "Unless there is a good reason to do so, Wikipedia avoids linking from within quotes, which may clutter the quotation, violate the principle of leaving quotations unchanged, and mislead or confuse the reader."
The case I am thinking of is for John Patrick Kenneally, the quotation being immediately before section 2. Originally, a number of names, " British Isles" and "British Commonwealth of Nations" were linked as indicated (see here.), but an editor removed the British-related links, on grounds that are now a matter being considered as part of Arbcom procedings (because of the claimed way in which indiscriminate removal of "British Isles" completely is being carried out by that editor). Subsequently, to help prevent an edit-war get going, and paying attention to WP:MOSQUOTE, I removed the other links and placed an explanatory sentence which allowed the links to still have a presence in the article here, leaving a message on the an involved editor's talk page User talk:Bardcom/Archives/2008/July#John Patrick Kenneally. However, the changes were reverted.
So, my question is: how good or pressing do the "good reasons" have to be? From other cases, my impression was that only in very few cases were links in quotations immune from being removed. DDStretch (talk) 14:00, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Category:General style guidelines has been nominated for deletion to allow for additional categorization. You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for Discussion page. Bebestbe ( talk) 20:19, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
I am aware that as a result of frequent and endless debate, MoS favours so-called "logical quotation". However, the guidelines don't seem to be very clear on what this means. At the moment they say that punctuation marks "are placed inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation". According to the MoS, when a sentence fragment is quoted, "the period is outside." However, in this case, am I not allowed to put the period inside, because it is part of the text (MoS) that I am quoting? Or does "sense of the punctuation" carry some more subtle meaning? I note that the MoS itself has, later on
with the period inside a sentence fragment where the original statement was "I would not allow this." (Period inside again.) Either the first "deplorable" example is misleading (because it appears to be quoting an example where "deplorable" is at the end of the quoted sentence), or the rest is confusing. What gives? Geometry guy 09:09, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Make it therefore:
The first paragraph quotes a sentence; the second is a quoted paragraph. One ends, by Ilkali's rule, with a period; the second with a quote mark. Where's the logic? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:13, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I intend to clarify this part of the MoS, drawing on the discussion here. Also, I think the whole "Note" on the rationale for MoS policy is out-of-date and largely redundant. The MoS should present clear guidelines to editors, not complicated rationales on how those guidelines were arrived at. However, the key reason for logical quotation (faithfulness to the source) should still be mentioned. Geometry guy 19:27, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
I would suggest that the "USGDP" example be changed. Two paragraphs before this example, the MoS states that it should be "U.S." and not "US", rendering the example null and void. — Music Maker 5376 21:41, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
In some places (notably the Screen Actors Guild), the generic "actor" has become a preferred term over "actress" for female as well as male thespians. In some cases it seems to be a matter of preference among the people themselves. Has this been discussed here, and if so what is the MoS's guidance? Jgm ( talk) 15:24, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
This particular usage issue appears to already be covered by Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language -- The Red Pen of Doom 20:56, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I take it there's no existing consensus then (grin).
Here's the particular situation that led me to ask the question. I noticed an omission of a female thespian at List of people from North Carolina. As I added her, I used the descriptor actor. However in looking at the resulting article, I noticed that all the other female thespians listed on the page are described as actresses. The hobgoblin of my little mind led me to briefly consider changing all those instances, but figured I would try to check here first.
I did look at the Gender-neutral section RedPen points to above. On one hand, the section specifially points to actress as an example of "non-neutral language that can be easily avoided", but I'm not sure how that's true here except by going to the generic actor. On the other hand, it's telling me to use gender-neutral language "when it can be done without loss of . . . precision". Now, the particular person I added has a common female name, so there isn't any loss of precision or detail. But this wouldn't be true for all female thespians (cf. Sean Young or Michael Learned). Finally, the section tells me that "Where the gender is known, gender-specific items are also appropriate ("Bill Gates is a businessman" or "Nancy Pelosi is a congresswoman")." Ho-kay, so actress is non-neutral, but businesswoman is appropriate. I find myself more puzzled than ever.
Also, to throw in my tuppence on the question as to whether this should be addressed in the Style book, I vote emphatically so. If consistency wasn't a major goal here, we wouldn't need a Manual of Style in the first place. And if the consensus is that "actor" is appropriate in all cases, I'd hope somebody would built an actress-seeking bot and make it so. Despite the fact that we do weasel out of consistency in some areas (ie. the UK/US language divide), in those cases we are doing so intentionally and not because we are worried about how it "looks". Jgm ( talk) 22:01, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
On the point at issue: some female thespians (good dodge!) are called actors, some actresses. This is partly a chronological matter ( Anne Bracegirdle was an actress; anything else would be an anachronism); partly a matter of genre and self-identification. This is a point that requires intelligence and information; two things bots notoriously lack. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:32, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Trovatore has already shown clearly during the gender-neutral war last year on this page that he's male and harks from a former age in his attitude to the way 51% of the population is framed by the language. He just doesn't understand, and reacts with indignation when his old-fashioned precepts are challenged. Even Anderson is vaguely reasonable on this issue. Yes, of course the diminutive "-ess" should be dropped by all writers who value inclusiveness and who see the power of language to manipulate readers' perceptions of power in society. Trovatore will leap to the attack by accusing them of "political correctness", and I would rebut that by saying that's a misnomer for "political inclusiveness". It's a well-established practice since the 1970s—so commonplace as to be a yawn. Writers who refuse to give up the marking of the female form, with the inevitable framing of the male as the default—cannot aspire to WP's basic pillar of NPOV. They end up weakening the authority of the project. Tony (talk) 12:36, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, Dan, for the thoughtful response, and please accept my apologies for snarkiness earlier. I enjoyed and agree with most of the points that you make in your essay. And of course I am not pushing any agenda and I am not that hung up on which word I use in a list article; what I think a was (am) trying to do is be a coalmine canary of sorts and highlight that this point of usage will be an issue of increasing contention (among folks who do have an axe to grind one way or another) since the trend in the profession is slowly but surely towards the generic usage (as evidenced by the Screen Actors Guild approach) while the general public still finds it jolting and, as others have brought up, issues of self-identification, era, etc. will make simple answers difficult. This seems to me like a perfect recipe for a near-future shitstorm, and, as I hope I got across, the resources in place to help head off or at least moderate the shitstorm are pretty weak at the moment. Any effort that can be made to proactively hash this out would seem to have the precise sorts of benefits that you posit in your essay. Jgm ( talk) 02:33, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Is it Los Angeles, California, or Los Angeles, California? Thanks, Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 18:34, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Because this aspect of MoS is often the subject of technical criticism on FAC and FLC pages, I've prepared a set of exercises to assist editors at large to absorb and apply the guidelines on hyphens and dashes. You may be interested in having a snoop around the page, which I finished today—it's a start. I'm posting this to generate feedback on how to improve the exercises, which is welcome on the talk page there. The option of extending the page to cover other aspects of MoS (ellipsis, when we finally get the guideline sorted <clears throat>, numbers, currencies, chronological items, and caps come to mind).
(outdent) does anyone know what "South-West winds" would use? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 22:44, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Spacing: All disjunctive en dashes are unspaced, except when there is a space within either or both of the items (the New York – Sydney flight; the New Zealand – South Africa grand final; July 3, 1888 – August 18, 1940, but July–August 1940).
I rarely see full dates squashed up, so it's clearly intuitive. In the case of "Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act", a purist would suggest the use of an en dash (it's very compressed with a hyphen). Smoot–Hawley looks better, to start with, and is not an individual's surname (like Lady Featherstone-Morley, who now has no eyebrows), but the coming together of the surnames of two congressional representatives. That's how I'd advise if starting from scratch, but I'm not sure it's worth changing now. Problem is, I'm practically sure that Congress uses a hyphen in its official publications, a carry-over from the typewriter era. I don't have CMOS handy, but they probably go for the hyphen too, although CMOS is so often ... not very good. "African-American"—CMOS says hyphenate, and Noetica agrees. He won't mind my pasting this in from an email:
CMOS is deeply committed to hyphens in most cases anyway, so their ruling is predictable and consistent.... In fact even New Hart's (p. 80) allows both styles in different circumstances, if we go by its ruling on Greek conjoined with American: "Greek–American negotiations", but "Greek-American wife". In fact, I go along with that. Many others would also, especially in [BrEng]. So I favour "He is an African-American [poet]"; and I favour "African–American trade tensions", and yes: "joint American–British project".
Anderson: "And this is very largely our invention; Wikipedia should follow the usage of good printed sources, not invent out own." No, WP does what is best for its readers. It is no slave to printed sources, since it's read online, not on dead trees, and has a unique readership profile. That doesn't mean that WP doesn't take notice of dead-tree sources; but it judges them in context. I'll reword 1.1; receiving your endorsement for one of the exercises was far more than I'd expected. Tony (talk) 04:45, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Matthew: "south-west winds", but most people write "southwest winds", especially in North America. But "east–west runway", because direction/motion ("to") is involved. Tony (talk) 10:29, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Why are the subpages of this page indicated by parentheses? For example, shouldn't Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) really be Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers? Teh Rote ( talk) 20:17, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
The section on Section headings states: "The triple apostrophes ( ''' ) that make words appear in boldface are not used in headings." I'm not sure what the rationale for this rule is, but shouldn't an exception be made for text that would also appear in bold in running text? In mathematical discourse it is common to use boldface for certain types of quantities, such as vectors and fields, and in theoretical computer science for complexity classes. See, for example, NP (complexity)#Why some NP problems are hard to solve. -- Lambiam 11:25, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Ahem. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:55, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
A few hours ago, I changed the wording back to saying that the size of images should not be specified. This was previously the wording, and was consistent with the established consensus and with Wikipedia:Image use policy. While I was correcting the removal of the explanation of when the lead image of an article should be have a size specified, I had an edit conflict with another editor who put back the wording of saying that specifying image sizes is not necessary, which is completely different to not recommended. It is my recollection that not recommended had consensus because specifying size over-rides user preferences. Has consensus changed to say that forcing small images (less than 300px) is now preferable to following user preferences? -- AliceJMarkham ( talk) 13:36, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
The word 'necessary' has been stable for half a year now, since I put it in there [3] I think the facts on the ground back me up here. Check the featured article today for example, it specifies sizes for all but one of its images. We can't reasonably tell people that this is "not recommended" when it's actually widespread practice and not objected to even in the articles that have received the most scrutiny. Haukur ( talk) 15:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I have to agree with Haukur's arguments. We shouldn't be shaping our policy to suit a very small percentage of users who have set preferences, if in doing so we make the experience of the encyclopedia worse for the vast majority. And the community pretty much seems to have decided this one by its actions.-- Kotniski ( talk) 13:15, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Have tried to bring developers into this discussion via bugzilla: bug 14785. It was marked as a duplicate of bug 495; this is a developer Brion Vibber's reply:
-- Kotniski ( talk) 07:30, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I have edited the relevant section of the MOS with what I hope will be a wording more or less satisfactory to all. I also removed two paragraphs which didn't seem to add anything that wasn't obvious. I'm off for a few days' break now, so I'll leave it with you.-- Kotniski ( talk) 08:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Woah woah woah. All the discussion above seems to rather neatly sidestep the original question: whether the lead image in articles should be special-cased - a long-standing exception to the "don't specify sizes" guideline. Given that consensus very much is for special-casing the first image (it's done practically everywhere), this should be put back in - in a stroke, the MoS has recommended that the majority of article lead images be reduced to about 40% of their original size. Some version of this should go back in. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 13:36, 21 July 2008 (UTC)