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Gonzo_fan2007 ( talk) has move protected this page and WP:NAME to prevent move vandals. See User talk:Livitup#RE:Protection_of_MOS_and_NAME. If nobody cares, I'll drop it, but it seemed unnecessary to me so I thought I'd bring it up. Am I being over sensitive? Livitup ( talk) 14:48, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
See User talk:Gonzo fan2007#Wikipedia:Naming conventions I think this needs further discussion at a central place as it effects a lot of pages. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 16:13, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
The question of the title used for "Criticism" sections was raised on the village pump. Is there a style guideline on this anywhere? I couldn't find one. My stance is that "Criticism" is too connotative of "negative criticism", as this is the sense in which the word is most often used. User:Gadget850 mentions that many film articles use "Critical reception" or "Reception"; that might not work well for articles about non-artistic subjects, but perhaps there are some other suggested titles we can come up with? -- tiny plastic Grey Knight ⊖ 08:23, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
The blah was blah blah blah blah blah blah, and blah did blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Comma, no comma, doesn't matter? I like the comma. NYTM says keep the comma unless the clauses are "exceptionally short". - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 20:43, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
In American English (again...sorry, that's all I know), the 3 most commonly used style guides are in agreement when you have a conjunction joining two clauses that could stand as sentences on their own. I would tend to trust Tony's sense and the sense of some of the regulars at FAC that you have a little more leeway on other continents. NYTM says use a comma unless the two clauses are "exceptionally short": "Nero fiddled and Rome burned." AP Stylebook says: "The comma may be dropped if two clauses with expressly stated subjects are short. In general, however, favor use of a comma unless a particular literary effect is desired or if it would distort the sense of a sentence." TCMOS says "...a comma usually precedes the conjunction. If the clauses are very short and closely connected, the comma may be omitted", and gives examples of "The bus never came, so we took a taxi" [long enough to demand a comma], but "Timothy played the guitar and Betty sang". - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 03:50, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes — in American English, a comma almost always comes before a conjunction between two independent clauses (except in rare cases). Without the conjunction, it's a comma splice. Commas are key to clear prose, especially in the concise world of business writing. They are very rarely detrimental to the prose, but some people seem to think that they slow the reader down — I think that's only the case if the audience consists of speedreaders. Semicolons and transitional phrases can be fun for longer sentences, but it's usually best to just use the comma/conjunction, semicolon, or full stop...unless you're in high school, in which case you'll want to impress the teachers with your command of the language :)— Deckill er 04:30, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
WP:MOSQUOTE recommends using <p>...</p> paragraph tags around each paragraph in a block quotation. An easier workaround is to nest a single div, then wikitext respects the line breaks correctly. So the example becomes:
<blockquote><div> And bring us a lot of horilka, but not of that fancy kind with raisins, or with any other such things—bring us horilka of the purest kind, give us that demon drink that makes us merry, playful and wild! — Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba </div></blockquote>
Result:
And bring us a lot of horilka, but not of that fancy kind with raisins, or with any other such things—bring us horilka of the purest kind, give us that demon drink that makes us merry, playful and wild!
— Michael Z. 2008-06-12 04:33 z
I've just come across "he is a Professor of Biology". Should this be "he is a professor of biology" or "he is a professor of Biology"? Itsmejudith ( talk) 12:52, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
In the (apparently largely overlooked) guideline entitled "How to copy-edit", it is suggested that "when not at the end of a sentence, constructions such as London, England, call for a comma after the second element". Example: "He was born in London, England, during the Great Fire." From what I have noticed, this is applied more often than not, but there is a certain inconsistency; as the Manual of Style makes no mention of such instances, the inconsistency is unlikely to cease.
A more debatable suggestion is the follow-up: "Similarly, dates written in the American style demand a comma after the year unless the date falls at the end of the sentence." Example: "She was active between September 29, 1967, and February 10, 1992." (Off the top of my head; the one on the page is not good, because the "On this date" clause at the beginning of the sentence should be followed by a comma anyway.) This is not applied with any consistency, and I have the impression that American usage actually favours omitting the comma. Up to now, the almost ubiquitous auto-formatting made such usage impossible, and the discussion thereof unnecessary. Now, however, with the changing trends on the matter of date linking, I feel that we need to settle this issue as early as possible.
So, what is the honourable colleagues' opinion on both these questions, and on the potential inclusion in the Manual of a clause encouraging towards one on the other direction? The two appear somewhat distinct, but I think that, whichever way we go, we might benefit from some consistency. Waltham, The Duke of 15:16, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
My taste, for what it's worth, is for no commas after years in such examples, but for a comma after such things as London, England. I think it's because I'm so used to seeing dates written like that, my brain doesn't look for any other interpretation of the comma. I can understand, though, that American brains (which are constantly dealing with "Town, State" combinations) might treat the comma in London, England as similarly unambiguous.-- Kotniski ( talk) 17:55, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Is there a recommendation to use single and double primes in order to label minutes and seconds (or other units) instead of using apostrophes and quotation marks? I can't find one, but I do think there should be one. –– Bender235 ( talk) 18:23, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
″
(or ′
for single prime).Jim is 6'1" and ran a mile in 3'21".
as "Jim is six-one quote and ran a mile in three twenty one unquote." ––
Bender235 (
talk)
21:06, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't see the difference, and I favor the symbols that are actually on my keyboard. Call it lazy, I guess, but it's a lot easier and makes almost no difference. Nosleep ( talk) 09:42, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Hey folks - you'd think someone would have come up with this before, but have a look at {{[[Template:''|'']]}}. Problem solved? (sadly this can't be done for single prime.) Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:36, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Anderson's attempts to impose his own ideas on this section, and his usual smoke-bomb, the posting of a dispute tag, are evident both here and at MOSNUM. We need to talk through the issues and harmonise the texts at both pages, which have been out of kilter for a while.
Please participate at MOSNUM talk. Tony (talk) 06:20, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm still not quite following this, but it seems logical that MOS should contain either identical text to the relevant section of MOSNUM, or nothing but a link to the MOSNUM section, or (most consistently with the rest of MOS) a summary of the MOSNUM section. Having two "alternative" texts seems quite untenable. Maybe we should temporarily reduce the section here to one sentence and a link to MOSNUM, and then work on the wording over at MOSNUM; then when that's done, work on a shortened form of that wording for here. -- Kotniski ( talk) 08:59, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
Do we make an exact copy of the page name we are citing in a ref, or do we follow the MOS? For instance, if a page used for referencing is titled "PLAGIARIZM ON THE INTERNET -- HOW STUDENTS ARE PASSING EXAMS", do we type it in capital letters, or change it to lower case? And if it's the latter, do we use initial capital letters for all words that are not coordinating conjunctions, prepositions and articles, correct the double-hyphen and correct the spelling error, or leave it exactly as it is? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 04:11, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
I've hit this very unexpected bump here, and I need some advice on how best to deal with this before changing anything (assumimg we determine that anything needs to be changed).
At the moment I have Iowa class battleship up at FAR, in part becuase the last time the article was there was in 2005/2006, and as was expected things have changes at FAC since then. When I rebuilt the article back in march 07 I added a section discussing the class' reactivation potential, including two rquote from people on the opposite end of the debate. I now have word that the qutes are a little big for the rquote template, and ought to be transfered to blockquotes, but my concern is that by switching Rquote for blockquote I may end up bumping against both WP:NPOV and to a greater degree WP:POINT; block quote extends quotes across the whole page and can not be shortened to fit into the context of the materail like rquote. I am concerned that adding block quotes to the article may invite edit warring here over the issue. It is in light of the concerns that I am asking for a ruling from those who frequent this page for a more proffessional opinion on the issue before reformatting the quotes. I am also open to alternatives to both rquote and blockquote, if anyone would like to suggest something else. TomStar81 ( Talk) 22:57, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
Bots that correct MoS issues often come up at WP:BRFA and denied every time. A single bot to correct all errors that can be done safely has been suggested. It would only edit when three or more MoS issues are found (unless it is major) to reduce small edits. I'm willing to do the coding if it has supports. BJ Talk 20:49, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
--
) into an em dash ( —
), utilizing en dashes ( –
) for empty table cells, non-breaking spaces for numbers and their units ( either or utilizing the template {{nowrap}} ; e.g. 17 kg
), and so on. Be sure to check if there is not a bot that already preforms this task. You have my support.
ChyranandChloe (
talk)
00:35, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
Be careful with replacing -- with em dashes. Many computer programming languages use -- as an operator. -- Itub ( talk) 05:21, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't make sense to me that this text is buried in WP:CITE, when references are only one example. Doesn't it belong here?
SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 00:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
No responses, so I'll try again. Does anyone disagree that the text, currently located at WP:CITE, but pertaining to all portions of the article:
belongs here at MOS rather than buried at cite, since it's a global issue? Scrolling lists are creeping into articles, and they don't mirror, print, et al. An example (since corrected) was at Washington,_D._C.#Demographics (see the version before it was corrected here. The old version doesn't show a scroll bar on my laptop, but did on my other computer, not sure what that's about, but the nominator solved it by converting to a vertical template.) At any rate, I am increasingly seeing scroll bars in the text of articles, there have been many others. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 04:03, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
Is the placement of the closing quotation mark proper: Seeking to bring Africans into the established political processes, and hoping they would shun the recently formed African National Congress (ANC) parties, Welensky hit out at what he saw as the poor Colonial Office practice of making the situation "[consist] of two opposed policies, black rule and white rule. They naturally prefer to aim for black rule and hope they will experience this, which they regard as the apotheosis of Colonial Office policy". -- Efe ( talk) 11:21, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
The phrase "It was announced that" is rapidly becoming my greatest bête noir on Wikipedia. Typical instances might be
Either it was announced by a reliable source, in which case we simply state it as a fact, giving the appropriate citation, or it came from a dubious source, in which case it has no place in an encyclopaedic project. It is the fact of something happening, not the announcement of that fact, that comprises encyclopaedic content. Occasionally, the circulation of a rumour is worth reporting, but if the phrase is widespread, it ceases to serve as a warning that the press may have been muck-spreading, and simply diminishes the apparent confidence of an encyclopaedia in its facts. Am I right? If so, is there any way that this can be raised to the status of part of the MoS, so that we can free ourselves of this feeling of being uncertain and denying responsibility for what is posted on so many statements? Kevin McE ( talk) 14:46, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
This article apparently uses left-aligned images. I was wondering if such layout is allowed? -- BorgQueen ( talk) 15:32, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Archive 101 recently wrapped up, so I've added links to the section headings in the archive. Text searching the main archive page is a good way to find past discussions. Also, I archived the top section, which wasn't archiving on its own for some reason. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 15:38, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
When dealing with articles that have a global scope, is the term metre or meter (AE) preferred for article name titles? For example 40 meters, 80 meters? I note the SI spelling is "metre". =Nichalp «Talk»= 17:26, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
The earliest recorded use of the word metre in English was in 1797, although metric units should really be known as SI units. The SI stands for Système Internationale because the system was invented by the French. It can be called the MKS system (for metre/kilometre/second). This is why the British spell metre and litre in the French way. -- andreasegde ( talk) 11:27, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
What this all points out is that we need two different wikis for the two different languages that are American English and British English. If Norwegian gets two wikis, why doesn't English? Caerwine Caer’s whines 05:16, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
As long as there is a viable community of editors, why shouldn't there be a Wikipedia for each variety of English? Or at least some manner of dealing with English varoeties. While somewhat inconvenient for editors, it could be handled via appropriately coded templates and CSS in the skins to handle most cases seamlessly for readers. Something like {{engvar|cheque|US=check}}
or {{engvar|check|UK=cheque}}
, or redundantly,
{{engvar|cheque|US=check|UK=cheque}}
, with appropriate template coding could easily handle the two main varieties. Additional varieties could be supported with additional parameters that if not present would cause one of the two main ones chosen to be selected. Assuming the absence of a Canadian parameter would cause a user who wanted Canadian English to see the British English spelling, one could for example use {{engvar|tire|UK=tyre|CA=tire}}
to get the appropriate spelling for Canadian English. Systematic differences could be handled with parameterless templates so that one could get the correct spelling of "colo(u)r" with hon{{engvar -o(u)r}}
while leaving the template to figure things out for the less commonly known varieties instead of individual editors.
Possibly a more elegant solution than templates that would require changes to the MediaWiki software could be made, but I'm doubtful that such a change would be without side-effects, and it would need someone to code it. So what exactly would this kludge of a solution need?
.engvar-us , .engvar-uk {display:none}
(with one additional selector for each English variety supported)If we wished to get really fancy, using domain name/IP sniffing to have this also work for many readers who don't have an account, though I suspect that would require some hefty changes to the MediaWiki software.
Such a solution would be very easy for readers, not as easy for editors. Making it easier for editors would either require changes to the MediaWiki code (not likely to ever happen as any editor-friendly code-based solution likely would be at least as much of a resource hog as such rejected facilities as a built-in spell checker) or to have separate Wikis (perhaps just separate namespaces) as that would require no templates to be used at all. Such a solution has the problem of synchronizing the content of the various English language wikis. However, as long as the main English Wiki continued to function, that problem would be no worse than synchronizing between the different languages. Indeed, it should be easier, as most editors would be capable of "translating" between English varieties.
I'll admit there is no obvious easy solution to the problem of English varieties. If there were, it would likely have been adopted already. But if we wish Wikipedia to be judged as professionally competent, especially for the offline versions, Wikipedia needs to deal with the elephant of English varieties in some manner and stop pretending that it isn't in the room. Caerwine Caer’s whines 07:34, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
Have you ever merged a single article? Do you know how much time and effort it takes to merge two articles on a single topic? Or are you proposing that we simply branch and divide editors? Does a reader need to read both articles in order to get the available information?--after all, he can understand both, because it is the same language--Should every editor double every edit? Why would we only have two English-dialect Wikipedias, when the basis for having two applies equally well to having separate Wikipedias for various American dialects, or Wikipedias to represent the increasing variety in worldwide English usage with non-native speakers? This brainless scheme is a non-starter; it has been discussed and rejected before, and continuing this discussion would be a waste of time. If you care so much about seeing the Right s's and re's, you can simply write a skin that replaces words for you; it will be sometimes inaccurate, but we do not need to up-end Wikipedia in order to address them for you. — Centrx→ talk • 03:01, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
User:Bkonrad (AKA older != wiser) is making the case here that our guidance on bolding should be changed so that bolding is also used to indicate redirects to subheadings. Bkonrad has concerns about what they call the "FAC cabal", so to avoid the appear of cabal-ism, I've taken the discussion to WP:VPP#Bolding; please weigh in there. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 13:55, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
The bigger question implicated by this discussion on bolding is, "So what if that's the style guideline?" I'm bringing up the question at Village Pump#The bigger picture. I'm optimistic; I think we can learn some things from the nay-sayers, and I think the nay-sayers will be surprised and impressed at how many people are basically supportive of the style guidelines, and FAC and other review and collaboration processes. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 19:50, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
It has been suggested that there is a special case when the following WP:HEAD guideline may be ignored:
The particular exception is when the name higher in the heirarchy is a sub-component of a proper name. As an example, the star Sirius consists of two sub-components, "Sirius A" and "Sirius B". Hence these sections repeat the article name, yet represent separate entities. Would it be appropriate to list that exception on the MoS, as it occurs quite often in astronomy for example?— RJH ( talk) 21:52, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
←It has certain merit, but I'd prefer a shorter text. How about: "Since headers normally refer to the subject of the article, they should not mention that subject explicitly unless there is a clear reason to do so." Tony (talk) 15:31, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Allrighty then. Thanks to Tony's monthly updates, I came over to see why we lost key wording about not restating wording from a higher level in the hierarchy of headings. I see RJHall's dilemma, but unfortunately, the baby got thrown out with the bath water, and we entirely lost the important concept of not repeating wording in headings, in order to accomodate proper nouns. Can we fix it, please? RJHall was asking for an exception based on proper nouns, yet the entire meaning was discarded.
This text:
was changed to:
Repeating words from higher sections is a very common issue in section headings (and the really bad examples of this that come up are far worse than a repeat of his, here's a sample), and the new version is diluted and not more clear. We need wordings that addresses RJHall's specific example of proper nouns, while returning the baby that got thrown out with the bath water. Can't you just exempt proper nouns? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 05:50, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
""Years of birth and death should not be used in a page title to distinguish between people of the same name." What should be done with James Barry? What is the proper way to distinguish the various Irish MPs? Thanks, Enigma message 00:49, 25 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to add a sentence to Wikipedia:MOS#Bulleted and numbered lists to discourage the addition of blank lines between bulleted items. It makes editing ugly, and I think it's most often done by inexperienced editors who worry that the list won't be formatted as separate items otherwise. (Of course, if you do this in a numbered list, then all the items are numbered 1.) I was thinking of simply adding:
to the end of the existing section, but there may be a more helpful approach. Any suggestions? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:48, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
True it is that WP:LIST is the place for this. As for breaking up long list, this is desireable if & only if it can be done with some logic behind the breaks. Lists organised into sublists are good, lists with arbitary breaks are not what we want. JIMp talk· cont 22:26, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
I uphold SandyGeorge's proposal. Blank spaces in addition to being unnecessary as stated above, also disrupts the Wikicode to XHTML conversion process. The software, in effect, believes that lists in which its entries are separated by blanks spaces are infact separated lists themselves rather. Here is an example (correct method, Wikicode):
* Unordered list entry 1 * Unordered list entry 2 * Unordered list entry 3
Resulting XHTML; note that unordered listed begin and end with the tags <ol> and </ol>. List data entries begin and end with <li> and </li>.
<ul> <li>Unordered list entry 1</li> <li>Unordered list entry 2</li> <li>Unordered list entry 3</li> </ul>
However when spaces are introduced into the code, the software believes that the example above is three lists (with one entry) rather than one list with three entries:
* Unordered list entry 1 * Unordered list entry 2 * Unordered list entry 3
XHTML result:
<ul> <li>Unordered list entry 1</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Unordered list entry 2</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Unordered list entry 3</li> </ul>
If larger spaces are sought in between list entries, the issue belongs in the technical village pump where it may be proposed to increase the list margin. To verify, if using Firefox, simply press ctrl+u to see the page source, for IE7 right click the page and select "view source". Here is a draft we may implement:
== Hyphens in values and units, and the shortcut [[WP:UNITS]] == [[WP:HYPHEN]]: "Values and units used as compound adjectives are hyphenated only where the unit is given as a whole word." Aside from the fact that the sentence isn't written well enough for the average reader who doesn't understand what a compound adjective is, is there a limit on the size of the unit when this is no longer used? It says both "9-millimetre gap" and "12-hour shift" are correct. Are the following correct at such large sizes and units? :* "6,000,000-foot gap" :* "8,611-metre gap" :* "5,543,235-mile gap" :* "40,075.02-kilometre circumference" :* "54-century shift" Further down the MOS, at [[WP:MOS#Conversions]] it says "a pipe 100 millimetres (4 in) in diameter and 16 kilometres (10 mi) long or a pipe 4 inches (100 mm) in diameter and 10 miles (16 km) long." Shouldn't this be "a pipe 100 millimetres (4 in) in diameter and 16-kilometres (10 mi) long or a pipe 4 inches (100 mm) in diameter and 10-miles (16 km) long."? Slightly related to this is that the shortcut [[WP:UNITS]] points to [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Units of measurement]]. So why is the shortcut also at [[WP:MOS#Units of measurement]] when it doesn't point there and the contents are different. [[User:Matthew Edwards|Matthew Edwards]] ([[User talk:Matthew Edwards|talk]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Contributions/Matthewedwards|contribs]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Emailuser/Matthewedwards|email]]) 07:52, 9 August 2008 (UTC) :Matthew, yes, the five bulleted examples are all correctly hyphenated; the size of unit and value are irrelevant to the use of hyphenation. We happen to follow ISO in not hyphenating where a symbol (incl. abbreviation) is used, so "40,075.02 km circumference"—but it's not the easiest construction whether hyphenated or not, so you have the option of recasting thus: "a circumference of 40,075.02 kilometres/km". Much easier on the eyes. [[User:Tony1|<font color="darkgreen">'''Tony'''</font >]] [[User talk:Tony1|<font color="darkgreen">(talk)</font >]] 08:11, 9 August 2008 (UTC) ::Your issue with the examples at CONVERSIONS is to do with that "compound adjectives" issue. In the phrase ''pipe of 4-inch diameter'', there is a compound adjective (''4-inch''), describing the noun, ''diameter''. However, when we speak of a ''pipe with a diameter of 4 inches'', then the simple, numerical adjective ''4'' qualifies the noun ''inch(es)''. [[User:Kevin McE|Kevin McE]] ([[User talk:Kevin McE|talk]]) 09:43, 9 August 2008 (UTC) == When this is not the famous person of the same name == I hate it when we are not allowed to directly mention that e.g., the Gene Wilder mentioned is not [[Gene Wilder]], see [[Fear of Music (album)#Additional_personnel|Exhibit A]]. Why is there a stigma against saying it explicitly? This avoidance of mentioning A != B assumes one has heard of B. If not, then later when you do there is a danger of thinking they are the same. Please set a clear best policy ruling for cases like these, and fix the page accordingly. Thank you. [[User:Jidanni|Jidanni]] ([[User talk:Jidanni|talk]]) 18:32, 10 August 2008 (UTC) == Bulleted and numbered lists == {{see also|Help:List|Wikipedia:Lists}} * Do not use lists if a passage reads easily using plain paragraphs. * Do not place blanks spaces in between list entries since it is interpreted as multiple lists by the wiki software. * Use numbers rather than bullets only if: ** there is a need to refer to the elements by number; ** the sequence of the items is critical; or ** the numbering has value of its own, for example in a track listing. * All elements in a list should use the same grammatical form and should be consistently either complete sentences or sentence fragments. ** When the elements are complete sentences, they are formatted using sentence case and a final period. ** When the elements are sentence fragments, they are typically introduced by a lead fragment ending with a colon, are formatted using consistently either sentence or lower case, and finish with a final semicolon or no punctuation, except that the last element typically finishes with a final period.
I hope this helps. ChyranandChloe ( talk) 01:30, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
Anderson, we can do without your continual bleating against MOS ("this indiscriminate mass of information"); it's becoming plain rude. We got the message a long time ago, and by harping on about your pet peeves, you make yourself look unpleasant and, in interpersonal terms, incompetent. We don't harp on about the indiscriminate mass of words you sometimes insert into styleguides. Add this to your dirt-file of what you like to call "personal attacks", please.
Sandy is proposing nothing to which these "objections" you're cooking up could be relevant. But you may be satisfied with this: "Leave blank lines between items in a bulleted or numbered list only where is a reason to do so". This will cover the problem in which some editors think they have to do so by default, and avoids going into messy details. Tony (talk) 08:45, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
I hate teasers like
[[Image:Water Flash.JPG|thumb|right|Water reflecting light in [[Crissy Field]]]]
in an article like Water, causing people to have to click to find out where in the world "Crissy Field" is.
There ought to be a law/policy/encouragement saying that no fair "place name dropping" like that without also mentioning more of an anchoring location, e.g., Crissy Field, England, etc. Jidanni ( talk) 18:19, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
Many people read Wikipedia offline on various devices, or print articles for others to read.
The feeling is the same as when one reads a newspaper article with such "teasers"... one is left outside the "in(the knowledge) club". The problem could easily be avoided with a few more bytes, many less than the image or ALT="" description string. Jidanni ( talk) 18:37, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
Yes, but it's better than nothing. As to a hard rule of what "tier", and what "first tier" geographical units constitutes them, U.S. states + other leading brand countries, I'll leave that up to the experts. Jidanni ( talk) 18:40, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
I see we have a guideline that says:
My question is, have the diacritic-free versions of words like cafe, role, and premiere (both noun and verb) become generally accepted in English? My answer would be: Yes, definitely. The versions with diacritics are rapidly dying out, although they still put in an occasional appearance. Others seem to disagree. I’m having a conversation with an editor at the moment about this: he prefers to use the diacritics, on the basis that that’s the way it’s always (and he stressed always) done in his part of the world (USA). Yet, that’s not my experience at all. Look at any published report of an American movie, play or musical work and they’ll almost always talk about "It premiered in … on …", not "it premièred in …". And a quick google search supports this. That’s American sources. The experience is similar for the UK, Australia and most other parts of the anglophone world (although I could understand if English-speaking eastern Canada keeps the accent). Given the general American propensity for changing the spellings of existing English words (let alone foreign ones) to more ... user-friendly versions, my friend's insistence on using the grave in the case of "première" seems to be running somewhat counter to his own national trend.
My friend also claims the OED does not record the unaccented word "premiere" at all – about which claim I am profoundly dubious, but I don't have access to it to check that out.
My take on all this is that premiere, cafe and role (and many others) have all become fully-fledged English words and deserve a diacritic-free existence. Premiere, in particular, isn’t even the same part of speech as the French original; that was an adjective, meaning “first” (f.), but we use this group of letters as a noun meaning “the first performance” or a verb meaning “to introduce” (trans.) or "to be performed for the first time" (intrans.) - which afaik is not a meaning a French person could get from the single word première; to my mind this is even more reason to not use the diacritics in an English-language context.
I don't want to make this a question of right/wrong, but I would like some guidance on how to counter my friend's argument. Apologies if this has been thrashed out previously, but navigating the archives is ... well, let's just say life is too short. -- JackofOz ( talk) 08:17, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
A participant in the discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/NRHP renaming proposals says that using dashes in titles would be contrary to the WP:MOS. Some of the suggested titles are:
After reading the MOS, I'm not completely convinced that these would be in violation. (Background:We are convinced that the phrase "Registered Historic Places" is incorrect and many article titles and categories need to be renamed.) Opinions about dashes in titles?-- Appraiser ( talk) 17:55, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
I've been involved in discussion about this same subject, involving Olympics articles such as the ones in Category:Archery events at the 2008 Summer Olympics (and there are lots and lots more: for each event type and each installment of the Olympics). Instead of dashes, colons could be used, but I felt that hyphens were inacceptable (and up until now, everyone has agreed). We decided to move them all to using spaced en dashes instead of hyphens, which seems to be endorsed by the MOS, after the Olympics have ended, to avoid any inconvenience. Oliphaunt ( talk) 13:00, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
There is a bot leaving notices in the policy Village Pump whenever a {{ guideline}} or {{ policy}} tag is added to, or removed from, a page. On the opportunity of the bot's updating (there were issues with the categorisation of guidelines), there are thoughts of doing the same thing for MoS pages here. The thread is this—nothing has happened yet, but I thought an early notice was in order. Waltham, The Duke of 08:51, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
We need to say that after a colon there must be lower case letters, not capitals, as the Chicago manual says. NerdyNSK ( talk) 01:52, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
What type of dash, if any, should be used in a table cell to indicate the absence of corresponding information? Or would it be preferable to leave the cell empty or write "N/A"? See e.g. the table at Judo_at_the_2008_Summer_Olympics#Qualification. Cheers, Oliphaunt ( talk) 13:30, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
Hyphens should never be used in tables, and I agree that emdashes are unsightly, prefer endashes. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 03:22, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Not specified here. Wikipedia:PUNCT#Italics I know I've seen it both ways in various articles (or both in same article!) but don't see a specific policy here. Would help!! Thanks. Carol Moore 12:07, 13 August 2008 (UTC) Carolmooredc {talk}
Stated clearly at WP:ITALICS
Why is this page at odds, and why does this page repeat text from that page? We should work on reducing text repeated on more than one MoS page. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 03:21, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Please take a look at Wikipedia:Lead section TT text and post any comments on its talk page. Butwhatdoiknow ( talk) 19:56, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
I thought the MOS and MOS:NUM used to say don't do links such as "The Beijing Olympics were held in August 2008". Where did that sentence go? It was handy to quote. Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 18:03, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
I am having a problem with another user about Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest. He insists that since it was a different country in 1992, than another page Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest must be made for that year. I informed him that the EBU, who puts on the contest makes considers them both to be Yugoslavia so there should only be one page with a note that it was a different country using the Yugoslavia name. He tells me that we should ignore what the EBU says because it isnt right and they are not the same country. Is there a mos guideline that would deal with something like this? Shouldn't we go by how the contest refers to it. We already use FYR Macedonia, this isn't any different. Grk1011 ( talk) 22:23, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Would someone care to draft a style guide for appropriate pronoun usage for transgender persons? I suggest taking a survey of style guides from leading periodicals in hopes they agree. I suspect most (or all) of them adopt the individual's gender identity as opposed to genetics, but I haven't done the legwork to demonstrate this as the case. I bring this up because of a bit of a tiff on Ina Fried's article (notability notwithstanding). A clear policy would cut such discussions short. Rklawton ( talk) 18:34, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
Please see the lively discussion regarding the display of infoboxes and other tabular data. This discussion now includes a proposal which may result in major changes to the way text and supporting images are supplemented with tabular data in a variety of venues. The overriding concerns are elegance of presentation, ease of use for casual readers, ease of editorial fact and vandalism monitoring and compactness of information display. Sswonk ( talk) 18:32, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps this is too specific for an MOS, but I'm concerned about the placement of etymologies in wikipedia articles. I'm currently planning to revive Wikiproject Etymology and would appreciate it if there were some consensus here about style, before I try to recruit people to write new etymologies for wiki.
There seem to be four variants;- (1) The etymology is placed after the bolded title of the entry. (e.g. nephrology) (2) The etymology is included in a footnote to the bolded title of the entry (e.g. law) (3) The etymology is included in a footnote to the first sentence of the article (e.g. torts) (4) The etymology is included in an independent section of the article (e.g. theology) Does anyone else feel that there should be a standard here?
I can certainly understand that there may be disputed etymologies for some words, which require an independent section (i.e. '4' should always be a possibility). However, it just seems slipshod to me if we allow (1), (2) and (3) as possible variants. My preference is (1), as it seems standard for almost all print encyclopedias that contain etymological information. Calypygian ( talk) 02:49, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
Scottish island articles, where the name may involve four languages, would minimally have an infobox with one or two derivations for the name and a simple Gaelic alternative in the lead sentence e.g. Raasay. This sometimes leads to very cluttered openings I don't like at all, e.g. Islay where there is a Gaelic spelling and pronunciation and an alternative in both English and Gaelic. When things get this complex I prefer a separate Etymology section e.g. Dubh Artach, St Kilda. I don't like the footnote solution myself but I can't see any reason for this page to concern itself with such a varied and complex subject. Ben Mac Dui 16:40, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
One of todays "Did you know" articles starts like this:
This initial sentence is terrible. But it is required by Wikipedia's rules, which forbid links in the bolded title phrase. One is not allowed to write:
If the article is called "Battle of X", one must not write "The Battle of X was fought on February 32nd, 2050." Instead one must write "The Battle of X was a battle..." etc. Michael Hardy ( talk) 12:05, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia:Lead section#Bold title: "If the topic of an article has no commonly accepted name, and the title is simply descriptive [...] the title does not need to appear verbatim in the main text; if it does happen to appear, it should not be in boldface." -- NE2 18:19, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
I have been asked to track MOS pages with VeblenBot, the same way that policy and guideline pages are tracked. Please comment at Wikipedia:VPP#Updating_VeblenBot. Thanks, — Carl ( CBM · talk) 19:06, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
I took a wikibreak before my previous dispute on this matter got resolved, so I'm brining it up again. The present wording on the handling of transgendered persons is, well, nuts. It's totally unworkable and will do nothing but confuse readers or make them think that WP editors are all smoking dope. At the very least, it will lead to "typo fix" editwarring and rancorous debate (this already happening) on article after article after article.
Jane Emily Smith was born January 1, 2001, in Hoboken New York. He attended the St. Mary's School for Girls, and..."
See the problem? It is completely irrational to use the transgendered pronoun outside the scope of the transgendered portion of the article subject's life.
NB: I'm fully supportive of using the transgendered pronoun for the transgendered life phase, provided there is reasonable evidence it is what is/was favored by the subject. That caveat is more important than it sounds. When I lived in San Francisco, I met plenty of TGs, and not one but two of them (both M-to-F) went by "he", on the basis that until they got their sex-change surgery they didn't feel right using "she". While not a common attitude, it exists, and automatically applying "she"/"her"/"hers" to the M-to-F (or vice versa) transgendered, without sources, is both POV-pushing and original research.
PS: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (identity) for a proposal that still needs a lot of work. I've cleaned it up some, but it still really reeks of self-consciously hipsterish " p.-c."
— SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 21:43, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
It has been determined at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 August 6#Template:Nobel icon and at Template talk:Nobel icon (currently viewable only by admins) that these type of small icons representing that the subject won the award, are not appropriate for use in infoboxes. Take a look at those pages for the rationale behind that assertion.
I propose that the Manual of Style adopt a guideline stating that these icons, including but not limited to: nobel prizes, grammy awards, and pulitzer prizes, are not appropriate. « Diligent Terrier [talk] 20:50, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
There's been extensive discussion since then on this, including the deletion of the template. I believe that since the template was deleted, the MOS should adopt a guideline that follows the consensus. Otherwise, we'll just see the addition of the icon used outside of the template, meaning the addition of the image manually, which will mean there was no point to the TfD discussion. « Diligent Terrier [talk] 21:12, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
(unindent)I agree also. Such icons etc clutter up infoboxes and are too POV.-- Xp54321 ( Hello! • Contribs) 21:23, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
The only thing worse than infoboxes are cluttered infoboxes. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 03:16, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
The issues have largely already been covered, in a much more general way, at WP:FLAG. I will recommend there that it include a paragraph about medal icons and the like as well. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:16, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
I understand the concerns about using a difficult-to-see image such as the Nobel peace prize medal in icon size, but what do people think of icons that are simply stylized representations of plain text? For example, instead of the number "1" within lists such as Cycling at the 2008 Summer Olympics - Men's Keirin#Finals, or instead of "WR" in results lists? — Andrwsc ( talk · contribs) 18:54, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Thoughts on a page move I've talked about above can be expressed at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (flags). « Diligent Terrier [talk] 22:22, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
There is discussion here of a video of a Wikimania address by researcher Dr Bill Wedemeyer, Faculty of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University, who conducted an extensive study of the quality of (mainly) scientific articles on WP. I recommend starting at around 8 minutes (the opening is typical conference fluff). The MoS gets a mention at 36 minutes; I don't quite agree with his stance on the role of MoS at FAC. Tony (talk) 10:51, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
This might sound stupid, but do level 2 headers have three "===" or two "=="? D.M.N. ( talk) 16:51, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
So, does my original question have a clear answer or not? Does a level 2 header have two or three equal signs? D.M.N. ( talk) 17:39, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
MOS:IMAGES also says "It is often preferable to place images of faces so that the face or eyes look toward the text." So if a picture is at the beginning of a === section, whether or not the eyes are looking into the text is irrelevant, and it should be on the right anyway? For an example see Degrassi: The Next Generation#Concept Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 18:57, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
The problematic sentence has persisted on the page and continued to cause confusion. I have taken the above discussion as consensus to change the phrasing to Mr Cunningham's version. Waltham, The Duke of 07:06, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
I couldn't find anywhere that explains this. Does anyone know which version should be used in an article's title? Craigy ( talk) 11:02, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
I don't know which policy/guideline applies but my experience of this is that 'saint' is generally not used in the title at all. See for example Category:Italian saints or Category:English saints. Ben Mac Dui 12:48, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
← AP Stylebook does lean a little bit, but not much, in favor of shorter forms, to make newspaper journalists happy. This is more like giving a snappy, all-purpose answer to save writers the trouble of looking up sources as you just did...which is obviously better, for our purposes. I get 1.3M ghits for "St Paul MN" and 5M ghits for "Saint Paul MN". The WT:NCGN people are the go-to guys for place names, but if someone forced me to guess based on your research, I'd say go with Saint Paul, despite AP Stylebook. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 19:52, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Apparently we need to add another line to WP:MSH to promote good writing and to document current standards at FAC:
It might be possible to roll this in with the "Section names should not explicitly refer to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings" item, but I think it will be simpler to just add it separately. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 06:25, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Can I place a left-aligned image in such a way this it displaces a heading or subheading (first, second, third, fourth-level headings...) to the right? This should be indicated in the MoS. -- Phenylalanine ( talk) 12:04, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
<div style="clear:both;" />
and introduce a little whitespace after the image than to allow it to interfere with headings. See
Five-pins#Strategy for appropriate use of left-aligned image. —
SMcCandlish [
talk] [
cont] ‹(-¿-)›
13:14, 27 August 2008 (UTC)I don't really care if it's on the left or right, but if Image X is relevant to Section Y, then it should be right under the header, not above it as used here. Reywas92 Talk 19:40, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Please take a look at Talk:The_Beatles/Archive_19#reliable_sources_using_"the_Beatles"_or_"The_Beatles". Thank you, Espoo ( talk) 08:54, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
This issue was decided on that talk page on the basis of an opinion poll, not use in reliable sources. Is MoS committed to following most common usage in reliable sources or does WP:VERIFY (WP:RS) only apply to the content of Wikipedia articles? It's quite amazing that MoS doesn't say anything about this WP policy or, in fact, anything about how MoS has been or is supposed to be compiled.
Most WP editors consider decisions about capitalisation, spelling, punctuation, etc. to be trivial, and the professional copyeditors trying to make WP articles follow basic standards used in encyclopedias and all professionally edited material are regularly discouraged by being called nitpickers when they try to make Wikipedia look at least a bit less amateurish. -- Espoo ( talk) 17:41, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Aug 1 – Aug 24 updates for CAT:GEN are at WT:UPDATES; I did them a week early so people can complain if they see something they don't like, and we can work it out before the Sept 1 monthly updates. I'll probably keep doing these a week early. Everyone is welcome to participate, of course. I err on the side of including anything that anyone might think is important; Tony distills the talk page for WP:UPDATES, and does other pages as well.
Sandy would like for someone to start keeping track of WP:ACCESS. It's not in the style cat now, but I wouldn't mind throwing it into that cat and CAT:GEN too, if someone is willing to say that they're pretty sure that nothing in it contradicts current style and image guidelines.
Most of the pages in Category:Wikipedia style guidelines are associated with one or a few wikiprojects, and cover particular article topics, such as math. If someone finds something wrong in one of these "targeted" style guidelines, it would probably work out better to show respect for the relevant wikiprojects by asking their input on the style guideline talk page before making changes. I didn't put any of these pages in CAT:GEN, nor any of the pages in Category: Wikipedia image help.
There are 7 4 other pages in the style cat that I didn't put in
CAT:GEN, because the discussions on the talk pages involve a lot more than just style guidelines. There's a pretty heavy overlap with discussions at
WT:NPOV,
WT:V,
WT:N, and similar pages. I think the same thing could be said for most pages in
Category:Wikipedia editing guidelines, so if you guys want to add some cat to distinguish these important style guidelines pages from the wikiproject-specific and article-topic-specific ones, maybe we could add the editing cat to the style cat:
WP:Citing sources,
WP:External links,
WP:Footnotes, and
WP:Layout.
- Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 02:55, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Some details on how to disambiguate human names have moved from Wikipedia:Disambiguation to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people), and changed in the process, to permit things like Joe Schmoe (baseball) instead of Joe Schmoe (baseball player). The exact wording of the passage may still be in dispute/flux. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 13:11, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
New page created
here.
Tony
(talk)
07:57, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Why never link section titles? I agree that when, as usual, the link can be included in text without loss, it should be. But this can be said without prohibiting the practice, in peerage articles, of linking the date of creation in the section title.
There can hardly be a technical problem; it's done routinely on talk pages.
If there is a reason, it should be given. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:40, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Currently it says "section headings should not normally contain links". Not a complete prohibition; it sounds about right to me, unless someone can formulate some specific exceptions to make things clearer.-- Kotniski ( talk) 08:48, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
The following edit, on one of our more obscure subpages, reveals a fascinating mindset:
(I intentionally omit the signature; the personal issue that preceded it should be dealt with in another forum.) My question here is whether indeed compulsion is the whole idea of the MoS, as this seems to say.
For contrast, I have presented the idea that there are five approaches to MOS, of which compulsion is only one (and rarely the most effective) on my user page. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:21, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I don't think that compulsion is really an option, and especially not on enwiki. The sheer variety of articles – both current and future – makes it nigh on impossible to have useful prescriptive rules which cover all of them. Nor could such rules be enforced across all articles, and all revisions… That doesn't mean that MOS is useless either: it is a collection of "best practice", a standard to aim for, but there will always be occasions (even at FA) where it is not applicable. Physchim62 (talk) 23:50, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
This seems to be a fossil from a time before Wikipedia reformatted date links according to user preferences. Nowadays, the minimal repetition practice just doesn't work - it'll just give either "5 January–7" for half our users or "5–January 7" for the other half. The standard should therefore be changed to favour each end of the range being given as both day and month.
The spaced en dashes also cause a problem for year pages. I've always done them as
since, if the dash has spaces around it, then it becomes too similar to that used between the date and the event description, hence hard on the eyes to identify it as an event covering a range of dates:
Making this a spaced en-dash actually makes the problem worse, since an en-dash implies a higher-level division than a simple hyphen used as a dash. An unspaced en-dash makes it a little better, but even if this is done, we ought to standardise on at least an en-dash between the date and the event.
OK, so this bit of the discussion is probably better suited to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years rather than here. And it's actually OK to use plain hyphens in the meantime under the "except where common sense and the occasional exception will improve an article" provision. But my first point, about the dates of the year being given in full, is certainly no exception, as dates will nearly always be linked in practice. -- Smjg ( talk) 21:29, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
First of all, I am somewhat surprised that the MoS gives no hint as to when should we use quotations. A usage of a lengthy and non completely neutral quotation is being discussed at Talk:Sejny_Uprising#Same_old_business_again; comments would be very much appreciated as at this point we only have two deadlocked editors there.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 22:33, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I often contribute to articles that incorporate references to both flora and different animal taxa. Consistent presentation of the species names with respect to capitalisation is a challenge. I therefore propose the following change to be added at the end of this section:
This has been used in various FA's and GA's ( St Kilda, Scotland, Fauna of Scotland, Black Moshannon State Park, Geography of Newfoundland and Labrador, River Torrens, Fauna of Australia) without any complaint. A short essay on the reasoning behind the proposal is available here. Ben Mac Dui 11:33, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
I don't doubt that this is an important topic, nor do I doubt that it will be controversial. I'd like to provide some context that some other editors might not have considered: In many groups of organisms, and in many countries, there is no necessary connection between a common name and a species. The American Robin is Turdus migratorius, and no other, but although "brittlebush" can be applied to Encelia farinosa, there are other plants to which it is also applied. Ornithologists (and evidently lepidoperologists) worldwide, and most -ologists in a number of countries, have found value in designating a more-or-less one-to-one correspondence between species and certain names in the local language, but this practice is not universal. For plants in the US, it generally only applies to those species given formal governmental protection.
Thus, of the following statements,
only number 4 would be correct according to the proposal (brittlebush not being precisely a species), but it would require some amount of additional knowledge of the organisms to make this determination. And it seems that one of the purposes of this proposal would be to make the extra work of such careful determinations unnecessary.
A quick look at Black Moshannon State Park suggests that the careful determination may not have always been made; some uncapitalized names may refer in that specific area to only a single species.-- Curtis Clark ( talk) 18:42, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
It looks like this is destined to be discussed here. Personally, I support the MoS recommending consistent presentation of taxa within an article; but I think you are overspecifying how such consistency should be achieved. The correct way to achieve consistency depends on the context and should be an editorial decision.
There is also a related issue which has been overlooked: the order of presentation of common and scientific names. In flora articles, names are generally presented as " Eucalyptus diversicolor (Karri)". In fauna articles, they are presented as Quokka (Setonix brachyurus). In articles that make use of both, there should be consistency, but whether this should be achieved as
or
or
or
should be an editorial decision per article, not a MoS rule.
Therefore I propose the insertion of something like:
and then, to get to the nub of the matter:
Responses to the above:
Several questions seem to be emerging:
It may be too early for formal expressions of support, but at this stage mine would be: Yes, Yes, Yes and (in order of decreasing preference) 4a and 4b. (3) may need a little more definition – River Torrens for example may be a body of mostly fresh water, but that does not make it an article about freshwater fish.
Once these general questions are dealt with, the issue of which system to use and how it should be agreed upon, becomes germane. Ben Mac Dui 15:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
An ideal system is only precluded if members of WP:TOL and its sub-braches put the interests of their specialisations before those of the encyclopaedia as a whole. Who gets to be the judge of what is in the best interests of the encyclopedia as a whole? If every ornithologist in the world capitalises their common names, then WP:BIRDS are entitled to argue that following that convention for birds is in the interests of the encyclopedia as a whole, since not following would make us look silly to ornithologists.
The use of common names in geographical etc. articles is, by convention, always preferred. I dispute this. I have written a number of articles on geographic regions, e.g. Houtman Abrolhos, Warren (biogeographic region); and I certainly haven't encountered or followed any such convention. By 2), I hope you're talking about putting common name first, not using common name only. If you are advocating the use of common name only, then I'm afraid my response would be "absolutely no fucking way".
But more generally, I come back to the view that there is no broadly accepted convention in the real world, so any attempt to impose such a convention here is pointless, artificial, and doomed to fail. I've tried to offer you something something less ambitious, that you might have some hope of getting past the TOL people; why you would persist with something that you have zero chance of getting approved is beyond me.
Hesperian 23:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
P.S. I must say I find it slightly amusing that this proposal would see me put common names first at Houtman Abrolhos#Flora, but scientific names first at Flora of the Houtman Abrolhos. And all in the name of imposing consistency!
Let me be more explicit about the analogies to WP:ENGVAR. I've listed its subheadings below and discussed how a capitalization scheme similar to Hesperian's would equate.
It's either "American Robin" and "Brittlebush" or "American robin" and "brittlebush".
A "taxonomic tie" could dictate capitalization (the bird sanctuary example given above), as could a national tie (it is my impression that in the UK plants have "official" capitalized common names, something that does not prevail in the US). This would inform the start of an article, and the items above and below would control subsequent edits.
Once a capitalization scheme is chosen, subsequent editors will adhere to it.
Like WP:ENGVAR, this has the advantage of easy application. Also like WP:ENGVAR, it will result in some readers being surprised by the article, but at least there's a reason. Frankly, I find it an ugly solution, but an effective one.-- Curtis Clark ( talk) 12:50, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
A few more replies. "any attempt to impose such a convention here is pointless, artificial, and doomed to fail." Why? This seems to me to be a quite ordinary idea that simply requires a little compromise for the sake of a better encyclopedia and to avoid endless quibbling. I am not implacably opposed to the use of scientific names, but there use seems to me to be unnecessary in geography articles as it is both hard to read, especially for general readers, and the suggested use is not consistent either. Currently there is clearly a lack of consensus here at least. I am not unduly concerned - I honestly doubt there are many such articles, but I really don't know. Thirdly, I notice the tendency to continually leap to alternate solutions without discussing the principles. Using the above questions I think we currently have.
My apologies if I am either omitting or misrepresenting anyone's views. Just trying to make a start and see where there is and isn't agreement. It seems pointless discussing the details if we are at odds over the principles.
Finally, I don't grok the ENGVAR analogy or how it fits into these questions. I will have to re-read the above. Ben Mac Dui 16:32, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
First, I strongly disagree that scientific names are "hard to read, especially for general readers"—nine-year-old boys don't have much issue with dinosaur names.
Second, my whole point in reframing was to show that there were disagreements over the principles. Ben MacDui and Hesperian have both presented proposals (I discount mine as unworkable), and the evident situation that they are not being directly compared suggests that we are all at some level still trying to solve different issues.
Third, I'll try again with ENGVAR: This was an intractable problem at a global level. No one (save perhaps Jimbo) was ever going to be able to dictate a single variety of English for all of Wikipedia. The solution was to let it be decided on an article-by-article basis. Hesperian has suggested much the same for common name capitalization. (Btw, User:MPF might disagree about UK capitalization)-- Curtis Clark ( talk) 13:34, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
I am pretty much in agreement with
Curtis Clark's comments above (17:44, 16 August 2008). How about adding the following guidance at the end of the section:
You'll note that it attempts to make suggestions (which I think are broadly in line with chunks of the discussion above), but is not proscriptive. Ben Mac Dui 19:50, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
Done - thanks for your patience folks. Ben Mac Dui 07:17, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, your rant boils down to:
Your logic is sound, and your first premise is a trival fact of grammar, but unfortunately your second premise is merely your opinion, and easily disputed. At the risk of oversimplification, proper nouns refer to unique entities whereas common nouns describe a class of entities. When I say "American Robins are birds", I am using "American Robins" as a common noun. But our articles don't say that; they say "The American Robin is a species of bird", in which case American Robin refers to a unique species by its recognised title. In such contexts it is arguably a proper noun. The situation is certainly not so clearcut as you are making it out to be. Hesperian 11:30, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
WP:SG redirects here, so there should be a hatnote to Wikipedia:WikiProject Singapore, and the Singaporean notice board. 70.55.86.69 ( talk) 08:50, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
There seems to be some disagreement as to what proportion of possessive take an extra <s> after /s/ or /z/ and how frequently they do so. Swamilive called for reliable references to prove the claim that most forms take the extra <s>. Dominus gives us The Chicago Manual of Style. I'd be interested to see exactly what the CMOS says but as far as I'm aware, being a manual of style, it prescribes not describes. WP:MOS is not based on any external manual of style but on consensus. So what do we want? JIMp talk· cont 08:36, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
From WP:MOS#Posessives
Proper nouns that end with s: There is tension in English over whether just an apostrophe, or an apostrophe and the letter s, should be added to such proper nouns (James' house or James's house, but be consistent within an article). Some forms almost always take an extra s (Ross's father); some usually do not (Socrates' wife; Moses' ascent of Sinai; Jesus' last words).
I was always taught in school (and after double-checking with my mother, an English language professor at a university) that with proper names ending in s, an apostrophe and the letter s should not be added if it creates too much of an ess sound, repeats the ess sound more than twice, or results in more than two ses in sucession.
James's is okay because the s in James is a (soft) z sound, and it should be Jesus', not Jesus's and Moses', not Moses's (results in three esses). However, the MoS offer that Ross's is correct – AFAIK it should be Ross' because that creates three sucessive ses and looks ugly to read.
Is this supported by what other people have learned, or am I way off base? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 08:06, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks#RFC on page title and comma - We need outside opinions on what the appropriate grammar is here. Should the page title and the article start out with "September 11, 2001 attacks" (no comma) or "September 11, 2001, attacks"? A third option is to rename the page to something like "September 11 attacks". We would appreciate comments on the article talk page. Thanks. -- Aude ( talk) 20:13, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't make sense to me that this text is buried in WP:CITE, when references are only one example. Doesn't it belong here?
SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 00:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
No responses, so I'll try again. Does anyone disagree that the text, currently located at WP:CITE, but pertaining to all portions of the article:
belongs here at MOS rather than buried at cite, since it's a global issue? Scrolling lists are creeping into articles, and they don't mirror, print, et al. An example (since corrected) was at Washington,_D._C.#Demographics (see the version before it was corrected here. The old version doesn't show a scroll bar on my laptop, but did on my other computer, not sure what that's about, but the nominator solved it by converting to a vertical template.) At any rate, I am increasingly seeing scroll bars in the text of articles, there have been many others. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 04:03, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm restoring this section from the miserable archiving system on this page after it took me ten minutes to locate it. The issue was never fully dealt with. The text added here was the same as what was at cite. The question is whether we should have scroll boxes at all, including hidden text, within prose. Since no one else has addressed it, I will go edit the page myself, although my mangled prose will probably need fixing. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 01:14, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
Where should links to portals within articles go?? (i.e. see Shannara....there is a link to a portal at the top right. Should it go there, or at the bottom of the article? the_ed 17 21:58, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
I can't find any MOS page that discusses the use of the ampersand (&) in place of the word "and". Is there no preference? — Andrwsc ( talk · contribs) 22:27, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
Persons A and B worked on the script together, and persons C and D worked on the script together, but they didn't all work together as a team. In this case, "and" and "&" have slightly different meanings. Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 00:44, 20 August 2008 (UTC)Written by: Person A & Person B and Person C & Person D.
I've left this topic alone for some time here, and on returning I see nothing new that addresses the arguments I've raised, only partial rationales that can't get past "but [sic] isn't a reference citation", ignoring the bigger picture, nor any solid rationales for why this change would be a good idea (as opposed to why not changing it is a bad one), with the only argument seeming to be "well, that's how it's done on paper". Arguments that do little but defend against that with which they disagree are weak and don't provide anything substantive with which to work. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 23:58, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
I cannot possibly comment on typographic conventions and the like, as I am anything but an expert in the field. However, I have an observation to make: grouping dispute and cleanup tags with sic tags is something I find unintuitive, considering that they have a fundamental difference of purpose. Dispute and cleanup tags are of essentially temporary nature and are not supposed to exist in the finished form of an article. They are notes for the editors—and perhaps, to an extent, for the readers—so that a problem with the quotation can be known and ultimately dealt with. Sic tags, on the other hand, are permanent and are meant to be read by all readers or confusion might arise; this applies always and in every stage of the article, including the finished product. I don't see why the two cases should be treated identically. Waltham, The Duke of 23:25, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
Several of us have problems with WP:WEASEL. It seems to cover things already covered on policy pages (and their talk pages) such as WP:V and WP:NPOV, and it seems to me that people never really settled on whether the page is supposed to be about "some people say", or about something much broader. I don't like the name of the page, either. On the content side, many people have raised issues, including Silly Rabbit and Johnbod, recently. Feel free to jump in. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 18:10, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
Several 2008-09-01 discussions concern the use of dashes in categories involving a range of years. It has been asserted that WP:DASH does not apply to categories. But surely an article and a category about the same topic should use the same type of dash, no? — CharlotteWebb 22:45, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
←Quick recap on current consensus on DASH issues as I understand it: people are willing to re-discuss DASH issues, but not constantly (we're arguing over fractions of millimeters here, and very few editors and almost no readers even notice). A date of January has been mentioned for the next drag-out knock-down fight (I'm joking). There are supposed to be bots that will automatically create a redirect any time a page or category with an en-dash in the title is created, so that you never have to type an en-dash to get to a page or cat. Have those bots died, or were you guys talking about different bots? - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 19:38, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
There has been some opposition to the use of en-dash in category names (not explicitly addressed in WP:DASH). It seems to me that these should be agree with article names (eg Arab–Israeli conflict and Category:Arab–Israeli conflict rather than Arab-Israeli conflict presently under cfd along with many other such.) Occuli ( talk) 12:59, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
There is a question in FAC as to whether or not the MoS has any conclusion about the use of #1 vs. No. 1 in prose (versus in tables). Quick background: college football and basketball (among others) use poll rankings as a barometer of team success and, in the case of highest level college football, determine a champion. In the current scheduling table, the default is "#". The sports media uses a mix of both, however I've noticed that The New York Times, the bastion of prim-and-proper, conservative writing uses "No." ( example). I couldn't seem to find the answer in the archive. -- Bobak ( talk) 20:06, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
The broader question (per the previous discussion) is whether this was ever addressed in MoS? If not, the article complies with WP:WIAFA and is promotable; we're tying to find out if it complies with MoS. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 21:26, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
So, striking "#", it seems were now discussing "No." versus "number": we're seeing the AP Style (from the previous discussion, thanks Dank55) favoring "No.", do the English use that as well? Using "number" for ever instance (and there are many in a college football season article) might throw off American readers. -- Bobak ( talk) 23:04, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
Note: This stuff is still important to me, but I'm putting off worrying about style guidelines until the Version 0.7 DVD is out the door.] There are a bunch of things going on with style guidelines at the moment making me groan. They're deep issues requiring buy-in by large numbers of people from all over Wikipedia. There are several ways to try to get people to buy in who haven't been inclined to do it; the surest way is to give them a person or people to complain to that they perceive as honest broker(s) who will give them all the previous discussions on any subject they're interested in and let them decide for themselves. This requires that the person or people have a track record of not spending all their time in any one place (FAC, GAN, a particular wikiproject), and have a track record of supporting different people for different reasons on different issues. The position I think would be ideal involves no pay, long hours, wide experience with style guides and with all relevant project and talk pages, and a willingness to muzzle oneself and serve mostly as an errand boy/girl, fetching all previous relevant discussions, so that others can make the decisions. Not your dream job. I'm willing to collaborate this week with any volunteers who would like to figure out whether this will work and what it entails.
Here are some of the areas where we need people to start participating more than they have. There's a current discussion at WT:GAN about how oppressive the style guidelines are, and how GANs should be clearer about not caring about any of them except the 6 that WP:WIAGA specifically mentions. As McCandlish mentions above, the number of wikiprojects who are trying to "opt out" has been growing steadily. Figuring out whether WP:WEASEL or any other page should be a guideline requires getting everyone to agree to some kind of criteria that people aren't close to agreeing on, yet. There are complaints all over the place that the guidelines need to be indexed and more accessible. I just found out today that, before he left, BeBestBe created a new guideline category and stuck 82 wikiproject style pages in it; I'm SO looking forward to seeing what happens when we try to explain to people that pages that not a lot of people have seen probably shouldn't be in a guidelines cat.
The biggest problem on the horizon is Wikipedia 0.7, which has deadlines coming up in a few days, and may go on sale as a DVD in Walmart in October. For instance, there are 33 robotics articles on the DVD, and I haven't finished copyediting the first one yet. The articles will be checked for recent vandalism and any obvious errors by a few people for 3 or 4 days, and then the results will be sent off to the publisher. The main problem from my perspective is that there hasn't even been a way to talk with the wikiprojects about copyediting for this project; no two wikiprojects have the same set of standards, and I personally don't know anyone who doesn't spend a lot of time at FAC who even knows all the style guidelines, much less cares. I find copyediting at FAC to be relatively easy, because the "buy-in" level is high, but I find copyediting for the typical B-class article to be really difficult, especially if it's for a wikiproject that doesn't care much for style guidelines ... everything is a new issue, everything is a potential fight. I think the reaction to Wikipedia 0.7 may be a little embarrassing. If we're going to fix things in time for the next version, Wikipedia 1.0, we need to find a way to get a lot of people in the same boat and rowing in the same direction.
So ... I welcome ideas. Anyone who wants to jump on board, please do. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 22:41, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
Dank55, you seem to be very sensible. I agree with virtually everything you said at the beginning of this thread. I would add that the Manual of Style should explicitly be a policy, not a mere guideline, and that people who want it to continue to be a mere guideline not argue that the guideline-policy distinction doesn't exist whenever that argument is most advantageous to their objectives. Tennis expert ( talk) 21:06, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (text formatting) serves no purpose at all, as it is simply rehash of WP:MOS (and in one place WP:MOSNUM). To the extent it may say anything distinctive that point should be added to MOS/MOSNUM, but otherwise this is just a blank-and-redirect. See also the closely related discussion at WT:MOSNUM#Text formatting math section merge proposal. The merge-from page is inconsistent on many points with both target pages, and its talk page is evidence of a great deal of confusion being sown among editors as a result of this break-away "guideline"'s existence. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 05:30, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
PS: I have edited a few bits of it to comply better with MOS/MOSNUM, but much of it is still messed up. There are probably a few points in it not presently in either of the controlling guidelines (which is why I suggested merges instead of just wiping it).
PPS: We should probably also go over Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters) to ensure it hasn't diverged off into Nonsense Land, too, though it is clearly too large and detailed to merge into MOS. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 06:32, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
And me.-- Kotniski ( talk) 07:35, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
I also support the merge. Teemu Leisti ( talk) 06:07, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, but I don't see it. Summarize and link, but (for example) the long list of things that should be italicized will be useful to some people, and should be somewhere, but not here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:03, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
Now that we've gotten a reprieve on the deadlines for the WP Version 0.7 DVD, I'm trying to whip up support for every single article to be skimmed by at least one person who defines themselves as a copyeditor (and many of these will come from the wikiprojects, and all the articles have already been eyeballed by someone, experienced or not) in the version that's going on the DVD. Currently we're estimating 30000 articles on the DVD, but if good copyeditors are willing to make the case that we need more time or fewer articles to get the job done that needs doing, the Version 0.7 folks are listening (now). Volunteers and comments are welcome at WT:1.0#Copyediting_minifesto. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 15:56, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
←Huah. My understanding is that I'm now the copyediting director (a minor functionary) for the Version 1.0 project. Long hours, no pay, lots of pressure: my dream job. I understand that we can't review all the articles, but my understanding from Martin is that not issuing the Version 0.7 DVD is not an option. Both the German project and Wikipedia 0.5 have been deemed to be a success, and 0.7 is a done deal. However, I believe I have gotten us something like a two-month reprieve and flexibility in the article selection, but only if that's going to get us something: we need to ask some copyeditors who normally might do only GA and FA to look at some of the B-class articles on the DVD, or at least help wikiproject people to identify potential problems so that they can flag us about which articles need special attention. If we can't get some significant help, then there's no reason to hold up the DVD. There's no sign-up sheet; just do something if you're interested. Maybe give your favorite wikiproject a checklist of things to watch out for and volunteer your services if they flag articles for extra attention. The current selection list is here. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 17:23, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
←I apologize in advance for violating WP:TLDR. This is a topic that hasn't been on some people's radar screens (including mine) at all. We can discuss further at WT:1 if you like. I wish I had more time to investigate, but I've got to give 100% of my time to quality control. I'll tell you what I know.
I see that the MoS is changed to say that sic (in quotes) should be written using Template:Sic. This renders "[sic]" in superscript, which is a practice that I'm not familiar with. I can't find any discussion about this and I am tempted to revert. So, what is the reason for using superscript? (Thanks to Dan (Dank55) for the updates, which brought this to my attention.) -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 21:48, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Surely the term [ sic] should not be superscripted, precisely to distinguish it from references. The fact that the MoS recommends that it be wikilinked is an indication that not all readers would understand its significance. And heaven forbid that you have to use it more than once in an article! Physchim62 (talk) 23:46, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
We should be doing what people do in the real world. I've never seen [sic] superscripted out there. Ever. Hesperian 01:50, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
sic
". Even
sic doesn't say it should be superscripted.
Matthewedwards (
talk •
contribs •
email)
02:48, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
It isn't about inline editorial insertions; it is about editorial insertions that indicate the reader must look at the bottom of the page, or the end of the work, to find the insertion, vs. insertions that are self-contained. Asterisks (in almost all publications) and footnote numbers (in many but not all publications) are superscripted, letting the reader know the insertion will be found somewhere else. Sic is self-contained and never superscripted. Mathematical superscripts derive from a different tradition and are not comparable to footnotes, sic, or astrisks. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 20:02, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
This important change seems to have been made by an anon user, and I cannot find any discussion endorsing it. Is this an oversight, or have I just missed the discussion? Without wishing to go over old ground, I would strongly oppose the change - several units in the UK are usually expressed in imperial (e.g. pints of milk/beer etc, miles on roads, etc.) Any comments? — Tivedshambo ( t/ c) (logged on as Pek) 08:59, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
There's probably a crossed wire here. I am not attempting to defend the anon's change to metric only, but rather query the change to this (apparently) wholly new wording. Ben Mac Dui 16:39, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Images says, "Start an article with a right-aligned lead image. This image is often resized to about 300px." but Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#Displayed_image_size says, "Images should generally not be set to a fixed size". These two statements seem to contradict. What is the recommended best practice for a typical lead image (assuming no other constraint such as an infobox)? -- Ed Brey ( talk) 17:38, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
While reviewing MILHIST articles for A-Class, I came across a usage of N/A for the casualty count of a battle. As I lost a great uncle in world war II and 11 cousins, once removed, in Vietnam , I find this offensive and think that others with ties to the military would also find the usage of not applicable to be offensive, as it denigrates the sacrifice of soldiers. I am therefore proposing a new Manual of Style providing that where casualty counts can not be ascertained, the word unknown should be used. Geoff Plourde ( talk) 21:59, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd just like to point out that "N/A" doesn't always mean "not applicable". Sometimes it means "not available". I suggest that this is probably the intended meaning here. -- Trovatore ( talk) 22:11, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
Certainly this would have been an oversight. I suggest you mention it on the talk page for Template:Infobox Military Conflict. The template documentation should make a note of this in the instructions for the relevant fields, so that editors are reminded of the significance of these figures. — Michael Z. 2008-09-15 06:15 z
I present here an example of a serious conflict that flew under the radar: Wikipedia:Sister projects, being elevated to a guideline, while in conflict with WP:EL and WP:LAYOUT. This is exactly the sort of thing a WikiProject needs to identify, putting guidelines in place so that our pages will be in sync. See my posts at the two pages, here and here. By what process did Wikipedia:Sister projects become a guideline, and why was it allowed to become a guideline when it was in conflict with other guidelines, and how can we identify and catalog the conflicts, contradictions and redundancies that exist across all guideline pages? We need a process to manage the process by which pages become guidelines. This page elevates non-reliable content that we wouldn't even allow in most cases as External links to a place within the body of our articles, against WP:EL and WP:LAYOUT (not to mention reliable sources), and opens the door for editors to get content into our articles that our policies would normally disallow (see the Stuttering FAR for an example of advert, COI, non-RS text that simply moved to WikiBooks so it could try to be linked in our Stuttering article). SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 01:30, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
Is there a precedent for having mini-MOS's set up by editors with an interest in a topic to create their own MOS for this area? User:MSJapan/Freemasonry MOS is an attempt. I'm concerned on two areas, firstly this is being done in secret and secondly that this will effectively give a small number of interested editors a way of imposing an agenda (for example they call their type of freemasonry "mainstream" and they try to preclude articles on other types of freemasonry). JASpencer ( talk) 21:46, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
So are there any other project guidelines that go under the name "Manual of Style". JASpencer ( talk) 18:05, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
OK I've just looked and the Mormons do it. So is the freemasonry wikiproject mature enough to enforce standards across the project? JASpencer ( talk) 18:19, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Would it be too much to ask that any other MoS style proposals are politely requested to either (1) leave a notification here; and/or (2) transclude the discussion here; and/or (3) hold the discussion at a subpage here; or (4) something similar? It's no extra effort, the discussion and guide formulation can still take place, but everyone has then had a fair chance of getting involved and any decisions could be said to be more representative of the community as a whole. Easier than judging Wikiprojects' maturity is giving everyone the largest number of people possible chance to get involved.
Knepflerle (
talk)
22:44, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to remove this from WP:JARGON, on the grounds that I have rarely seen glossaries in article-space. Does anyone feel strongly enough about glossaries to keep this in?
If it is convenient to bundle all terms and their definitions in a list, the list should use the appropriate definition list markup: Instead of
*'''term''': definition
use
; term : definition
If a glossary is provided, any jargon used in the article should be hyperlinked to the glossary. Be careful to explain any jargon used in the glossary, until you've reached terms that ordinary educated people should understand. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 14:22, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
<dt>
and <dd>
. I'm a big fan of semantic markup. Making a change like this could be complicated for something like
Glossary of cue sports terms which has been using === headings. Something CSSy could probably be done to implement it with <dt> but preserve more of the look of the original (if that were desired).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 100 | Archive 101 | Archive 102 | Archive 103 | Archive 104 | Archive 105 |
Gonzo_fan2007 ( talk) has move protected this page and WP:NAME to prevent move vandals. See User talk:Livitup#RE:Protection_of_MOS_and_NAME. If nobody cares, I'll drop it, but it seemed unnecessary to me so I thought I'd bring it up. Am I being over sensitive? Livitup ( talk) 14:48, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
See User talk:Gonzo fan2007#Wikipedia:Naming conventions I think this needs further discussion at a central place as it effects a lot of pages. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 16:13, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
The question of the title used for "Criticism" sections was raised on the village pump. Is there a style guideline on this anywhere? I couldn't find one. My stance is that "Criticism" is too connotative of "negative criticism", as this is the sense in which the word is most often used. User:Gadget850 mentions that many film articles use "Critical reception" or "Reception"; that might not work well for articles about non-artistic subjects, but perhaps there are some other suggested titles we can come up with? -- tiny plastic Grey Knight ⊖ 08:23, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
The blah was blah blah blah blah blah blah, and blah did blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Comma, no comma, doesn't matter? I like the comma. NYTM says keep the comma unless the clauses are "exceptionally short". - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 20:43, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
In American English (again...sorry, that's all I know), the 3 most commonly used style guides are in agreement when you have a conjunction joining two clauses that could stand as sentences on their own. I would tend to trust Tony's sense and the sense of some of the regulars at FAC that you have a little more leeway on other continents. NYTM says use a comma unless the two clauses are "exceptionally short": "Nero fiddled and Rome burned." AP Stylebook says: "The comma may be dropped if two clauses with expressly stated subjects are short. In general, however, favor use of a comma unless a particular literary effect is desired or if it would distort the sense of a sentence." TCMOS says "...a comma usually precedes the conjunction. If the clauses are very short and closely connected, the comma may be omitted", and gives examples of "The bus never came, so we took a taxi" [long enough to demand a comma], but "Timothy played the guitar and Betty sang". - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 03:50, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes — in American English, a comma almost always comes before a conjunction between two independent clauses (except in rare cases). Without the conjunction, it's a comma splice. Commas are key to clear prose, especially in the concise world of business writing. They are very rarely detrimental to the prose, but some people seem to think that they slow the reader down — I think that's only the case if the audience consists of speedreaders. Semicolons and transitional phrases can be fun for longer sentences, but it's usually best to just use the comma/conjunction, semicolon, or full stop...unless you're in high school, in which case you'll want to impress the teachers with your command of the language :)— Deckill er 04:30, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
WP:MOSQUOTE recommends using <p>...</p> paragraph tags around each paragraph in a block quotation. An easier workaround is to nest a single div, then wikitext respects the line breaks correctly. So the example becomes:
<blockquote><div> And bring us a lot of horilka, but not of that fancy kind with raisins, or with any other such things—bring us horilka of the purest kind, give us that demon drink that makes us merry, playful and wild! — Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba </div></blockquote>
Result:
And bring us a lot of horilka, but not of that fancy kind with raisins, or with any other such things—bring us horilka of the purest kind, give us that demon drink that makes us merry, playful and wild!
— Michael Z. 2008-06-12 04:33 z
I've just come across "he is a Professor of Biology". Should this be "he is a professor of biology" or "he is a professor of Biology"? Itsmejudith ( talk) 12:52, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
In the (apparently largely overlooked) guideline entitled "How to copy-edit", it is suggested that "when not at the end of a sentence, constructions such as London, England, call for a comma after the second element". Example: "He was born in London, England, during the Great Fire." From what I have noticed, this is applied more often than not, but there is a certain inconsistency; as the Manual of Style makes no mention of such instances, the inconsistency is unlikely to cease.
A more debatable suggestion is the follow-up: "Similarly, dates written in the American style demand a comma after the year unless the date falls at the end of the sentence." Example: "She was active between September 29, 1967, and February 10, 1992." (Off the top of my head; the one on the page is not good, because the "On this date" clause at the beginning of the sentence should be followed by a comma anyway.) This is not applied with any consistency, and I have the impression that American usage actually favours omitting the comma. Up to now, the almost ubiquitous auto-formatting made such usage impossible, and the discussion thereof unnecessary. Now, however, with the changing trends on the matter of date linking, I feel that we need to settle this issue as early as possible.
So, what is the honourable colleagues' opinion on both these questions, and on the potential inclusion in the Manual of a clause encouraging towards one on the other direction? The two appear somewhat distinct, but I think that, whichever way we go, we might benefit from some consistency. Waltham, The Duke of 15:16, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
My taste, for what it's worth, is for no commas after years in such examples, but for a comma after such things as London, England. I think it's because I'm so used to seeing dates written like that, my brain doesn't look for any other interpretation of the comma. I can understand, though, that American brains (which are constantly dealing with "Town, State" combinations) might treat the comma in London, England as similarly unambiguous.-- Kotniski ( talk) 17:55, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Is there a recommendation to use single and double primes in order to label minutes and seconds (or other units) instead of using apostrophes and quotation marks? I can't find one, but I do think there should be one. –– Bender235 ( talk) 18:23, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
″
(or ′
for single prime).Jim is 6'1" and ran a mile in 3'21".
as "Jim is six-one quote and ran a mile in three twenty one unquote." ––
Bender235 (
talk)
21:06, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't see the difference, and I favor the symbols that are actually on my keyboard. Call it lazy, I guess, but it's a lot easier and makes almost no difference. Nosleep ( talk) 09:42, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Hey folks - you'd think someone would have come up with this before, but have a look at {{[[Template:''|'']]}}. Problem solved? (sadly this can't be done for single prime.) Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:36, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Anderson's attempts to impose his own ideas on this section, and his usual smoke-bomb, the posting of a dispute tag, are evident both here and at MOSNUM. We need to talk through the issues and harmonise the texts at both pages, which have been out of kilter for a while.
Please participate at MOSNUM talk. Tony (talk) 06:20, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm still not quite following this, but it seems logical that MOS should contain either identical text to the relevant section of MOSNUM, or nothing but a link to the MOSNUM section, or (most consistently with the rest of MOS) a summary of the MOSNUM section. Having two "alternative" texts seems quite untenable. Maybe we should temporarily reduce the section here to one sentence and a link to MOSNUM, and then work on the wording over at MOSNUM; then when that's done, work on a shortened form of that wording for here. -- Kotniski ( talk) 08:59, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
Do we make an exact copy of the page name we are citing in a ref, or do we follow the MOS? For instance, if a page used for referencing is titled "PLAGIARIZM ON THE INTERNET -- HOW STUDENTS ARE PASSING EXAMS", do we type it in capital letters, or change it to lower case? And if it's the latter, do we use initial capital letters for all words that are not coordinating conjunctions, prepositions and articles, correct the double-hyphen and correct the spelling error, or leave it exactly as it is? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 04:11, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
I've hit this very unexpected bump here, and I need some advice on how best to deal with this before changing anything (assumimg we determine that anything needs to be changed).
At the moment I have Iowa class battleship up at FAR, in part becuase the last time the article was there was in 2005/2006, and as was expected things have changes at FAC since then. When I rebuilt the article back in march 07 I added a section discussing the class' reactivation potential, including two rquote from people on the opposite end of the debate. I now have word that the qutes are a little big for the rquote template, and ought to be transfered to blockquotes, but my concern is that by switching Rquote for blockquote I may end up bumping against both WP:NPOV and to a greater degree WP:POINT; block quote extends quotes across the whole page and can not be shortened to fit into the context of the materail like rquote. I am concerned that adding block quotes to the article may invite edit warring here over the issue. It is in light of the concerns that I am asking for a ruling from those who frequent this page for a more proffessional opinion on the issue before reformatting the quotes. I am also open to alternatives to both rquote and blockquote, if anyone would like to suggest something else. TomStar81 ( Talk) 22:57, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
Bots that correct MoS issues often come up at WP:BRFA and denied every time. A single bot to correct all errors that can be done safely has been suggested. It would only edit when three or more MoS issues are found (unless it is major) to reduce small edits. I'm willing to do the coding if it has supports. BJ Talk 20:49, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
--
) into an em dash ( —
), utilizing en dashes ( –
) for empty table cells, non-breaking spaces for numbers and their units ( either or utilizing the template {{nowrap}} ; e.g. 17 kg
), and so on. Be sure to check if there is not a bot that already preforms this task. You have my support.
ChyranandChloe (
talk)
00:35, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
Be careful with replacing -- with em dashes. Many computer programming languages use -- as an operator. -- Itub ( talk) 05:21, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't make sense to me that this text is buried in WP:CITE, when references are only one example. Doesn't it belong here?
SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 00:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
No responses, so I'll try again. Does anyone disagree that the text, currently located at WP:CITE, but pertaining to all portions of the article:
belongs here at MOS rather than buried at cite, since it's a global issue? Scrolling lists are creeping into articles, and they don't mirror, print, et al. An example (since corrected) was at Washington,_D._C.#Demographics (see the version before it was corrected here. The old version doesn't show a scroll bar on my laptop, but did on my other computer, not sure what that's about, but the nominator solved it by converting to a vertical template.) At any rate, I am increasingly seeing scroll bars in the text of articles, there have been many others. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 04:03, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
Is the placement of the closing quotation mark proper: Seeking to bring Africans into the established political processes, and hoping they would shun the recently formed African National Congress (ANC) parties, Welensky hit out at what he saw as the poor Colonial Office practice of making the situation "[consist] of two opposed policies, black rule and white rule. They naturally prefer to aim for black rule and hope they will experience this, which they regard as the apotheosis of Colonial Office policy". -- Efe ( talk) 11:21, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
The phrase "It was announced that" is rapidly becoming my greatest bête noir on Wikipedia. Typical instances might be
Either it was announced by a reliable source, in which case we simply state it as a fact, giving the appropriate citation, or it came from a dubious source, in which case it has no place in an encyclopaedic project. It is the fact of something happening, not the announcement of that fact, that comprises encyclopaedic content. Occasionally, the circulation of a rumour is worth reporting, but if the phrase is widespread, it ceases to serve as a warning that the press may have been muck-spreading, and simply diminishes the apparent confidence of an encyclopaedia in its facts. Am I right? If so, is there any way that this can be raised to the status of part of the MoS, so that we can free ourselves of this feeling of being uncertain and denying responsibility for what is posted on so many statements? Kevin McE ( talk) 14:46, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
This article apparently uses left-aligned images. I was wondering if such layout is allowed? -- BorgQueen ( talk) 15:32, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Archive 101 recently wrapped up, so I've added links to the section headings in the archive. Text searching the main archive page is a good way to find past discussions. Also, I archived the top section, which wasn't archiving on its own for some reason. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 15:38, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
When dealing with articles that have a global scope, is the term metre or meter (AE) preferred for article name titles? For example 40 meters, 80 meters? I note the SI spelling is "metre". =Nichalp «Talk»= 17:26, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
The earliest recorded use of the word metre in English was in 1797, although metric units should really be known as SI units. The SI stands for Système Internationale because the system was invented by the French. It can be called the MKS system (for metre/kilometre/second). This is why the British spell metre and litre in the French way. -- andreasegde ( talk) 11:27, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
What this all points out is that we need two different wikis for the two different languages that are American English and British English. If Norwegian gets two wikis, why doesn't English? Caerwine Caer’s whines 05:16, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
As long as there is a viable community of editors, why shouldn't there be a Wikipedia for each variety of English? Or at least some manner of dealing with English varoeties. While somewhat inconvenient for editors, it could be handled via appropriately coded templates and CSS in the skins to handle most cases seamlessly for readers. Something like {{engvar|cheque|US=check}}
or {{engvar|check|UK=cheque}}
, or redundantly,
{{engvar|cheque|US=check|UK=cheque}}
, with appropriate template coding could easily handle the two main varieties. Additional varieties could be supported with additional parameters that if not present would cause one of the two main ones chosen to be selected. Assuming the absence of a Canadian parameter would cause a user who wanted Canadian English to see the British English spelling, one could for example use {{engvar|tire|UK=tyre|CA=tire}}
to get the appropriate spelling for Canadian English. Systematic differences could be handled with parameterless templates so that one could get the correct spelling of "colo(u)r" with hon{{engvar -o(u)r}}
while leaving the template to figure things out for the less commonly known varieties instead of individual editors.
Possibly a more elegant solution than templates that would require changes to the MediaWiki software could be made, but I'm doubtful that such a change would be without side-effects, and it would need someone to code it. So what exactly would this kludge of a solution need?
.engvar-us , .engvar-uk {display:none}
(with one additional selector for each English variety supported)If we wished to get really fancy, using domain name/IP sniffing to have this also work for many readers who don't have an account, though I suspect that would require some hefty changes to the MediaWiki software.
Such a solution would be very easy for readers, not as easy for editors. Making it easier for editors would either require changes to the MediaWiki code (not likely to ever happen as any editor-friendly code-based solution likely would be at least as much of a resource hog as such rejected facilities as a built-in spell checker) or to have separate Wikis (perhaps just separate namespaces) as that would require no templates to be used at all. Such a solution has the problem of synchronizing the content of the various English language wikis. However, as long as the main English Wiki continued to function, that problem would be no worse than synchronizing between the different languages. Indeed, it should be easier, as most editors would be capable of "translating" between English varieties.
I'll admit there is no obvious easy solution to the problem of English varieties. If there were, it would likely have been adopted already. But if we wish Wikipedia to be judged as professionally competent, especially for the offline versions, Wikipedia needs to deal with the elephant of English varieties in some manner and stop pretending that it isn't in the room. Caerwine Caer’s whines 07:34, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
Have you ever merged a single article? Do you know how much time and effort it takes to merge two articles on a single topic? Or are you proposing that we simply branch and divide editors? Does a reader need to read both articles in order to get the available information?--after all, he can understand both, because it is the same language--Should every editor double every edit? Why would we only have two English-dialect Wikipedias, when the basis for having two applies equally well to having separate Wikipedias for various American dialects, or Wikipedias to represent the increasing variety in worldwide English usage with non-native speakers? This brainless scheme is a non-starter; it has been discussed and rejected before, and continuing this discussion would be a waste of time. If you care so much about seeing the Right s's and re's, you can simply write a skin that replaces words for you; it will be sometimes inaccurate, but we do not need to up-end Wikipedia in order to address them for you. — Centrx→ talk • 03:01, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
User:Bkonrad (AKA older != wiser) is making the case here that our guidance on bolding should be changed so that bolding is also used to indicate redirects to subheadings. Bkonrad has concerns about what they call the "FAC cabal", so to avoid the appear of cabal-ism, I've taken the discussion to WP:VPP#Bolding; please weigh in there. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 13:55, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
The bigger question implicated by this discussion on bolding is, "So what if that's the style guideline?" I'm bringing up the question at Village Pump#The bigger picture. I'm optimistic; I think we can learn some things from the nay-sayers, and I think the nay-sayers will be surprised and impressed at how many people are basically supportive of the style guidelines, and FAC and other review and collaboration processes. - Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 19:50, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
It has been suggested that there is a special case when the following WP:HEAD guideline may be ignored:
The particular exception is when the name higher in the heirarchy is a sub-component of a proper name. As an example, the star Sirius consists of two sub-components, "Sirius A" and "Sirius B". Hence these sections repeat the article name, yet represent separate entities. Would it be appropriate to list that exception on the MoS, as it occurs quite often in astronomy for example?— RJH ( talk) 21:52, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
←It has certain merit, but I'd prefer a shorter text. How about: "Since headers normally refer to the subject of the article, they should not mention that subject explicitly unless there is a clear reason to do so." Tony (talk) 15:31, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Allrighty then. Thanks to Tony's monthly updates, I came over to see why we lost key wording about not restating wording from a higher level in the hierarchy of headings. I see RJHall's dilemma, but unfortunately, the baby got thrown out with the bath water, and we entirely lost the important concept of not repeating wording in headings, in order to accomodate proper nouns. Can we fix it, please? RJHall was asking for an exception based on proper nouns, yet the entire meaning was discarded.
This text:
was changed to:
Repeating words from higher sections is a very common issue in section headings (and the really bad examples of this that come up are far worse than a repeat of his, here's a sample), and the new version is diluted and not more clear. We need wordings that addresses RJHall's specific example of proper nouns, while returning the baby that got thrown out with the bath water. Can't you just exempt proper nouns? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 05:50, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
""Years of birth and death should not be used in a page title to distinguish between people of the same name." What should be done with James Barry? What is the proper way to distinguish the various Irish MPs? Thanks, Enigma message 00:49, 25 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to add a sentence to Wikipedia:MOS#Bulleted and numbered lists to discourage the addition of blank lines between bulleted items. It makes editing ugly, and I think it's most often done by inexperienced editors who worry that the list won't be formatted as separate items otherwise. (Of course, if you do this in a numbered list, then all the items are numbered 1.) I was thinking of simply adding:
to the end of the existing section, but there may be a more helpful approach. Any suggestions? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:48, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
True it is that WP:LIST is the place for this. As for breaking up long list, this is desireable if & only if it can be done with some logic behind the breaks. Lists organised into sublists are good, lists with arbitary breaks are not what we want. JIMp talk· cont 22:26, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
I uphold SandyGeorge's proposal. Blank spaces in addition to being unnecessary as stated above, also disrupts the Wikicode to XHTML conversion process. The software, in effect, believes that lists in which its entries are separated by blanks spaces are infact separated lists themselves rather. Here is an example (correct method, Wikicode):
* Unordered list entry 1 * Unordered list entry 2 * Unordered list entry 3
Resulting XHTML; note that unordered listed begin and end with the tags <ol> and </ol>. List data entries begin and end with <li> and </li>.
<ul> <li>Unordered list entry 1</li> <li>Unordered list entry 2</li> <li>Unordered list entry 3</li> </ul>
However when spaces are introduced into the code, the software believes that the example above is three lists (with one entry) rather than one list with three entries:
* Unordered list entry 1 * Unordered list entry 2 * Unordered list entry 3
XHTML result:
<ul> <li>Unordered list entry 1</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Unordered list entry 2</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Unordered list entry 3</li> </ul>
If larger spaces are sought in between list entries, the issue belongs in the technical village pump where it may be proposed to increase the list margin. To verify, if using Firefox, simply press ctrl+u to see the page source, for IE7 right click the page and select "view source". Here is a draft we may implement:
== Hyphens in values and units, and the shortcut [[WP:UNITS]] == [[WP:HYPHEN]]: "Values and units used as compound adjectives are hyphenated only where the unit is given as a whole word." Aside from the fact that the sentence isn't written well enough for the average reader who doesn't understand what a compound adjective is, is there a limit on the size of the unit when this is no longer used? It says both "9-millimetre gap" and "12-hour shift" are correct. Are the following correct at such large sizes and units? :* "6,000,000-foot gap" :* "8,611-metre gap" :* "5,543,235-mile gap" :* "40,075.02-kilometre circumference" :* "54-century shift" Further down the MOS, at [[WP:MOS#Conversions]] it says "a pipe 100 millimetres (4 in) in diameter and 16 kilometres (10 mi) long or a pipe 4 inches (100 mm) in diameter and 10 miles (16 km) long." Shouldn't this be "a pipe 100 millimetres (4 in) in diameter and 16-kilometres (10 mi) long or a pipe 4 inches (100 mm) in diameter and 10-miles (16 km) long."? Slightly related to this is that the shortcut [[WP:UNITS]] points to [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Units of measurement]]. So why is the shortcut also at [[WP:MOS#Units of measurement]] when it doesn't point there and the contents are different. [[User:Matthew Edwards|Matthew Edwards]] ([[User talk:Matthew Edwards|talk]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Contributions/Matthewedwards|contribs]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Emailuser/Matthewedwards|email]]) 07:52, 9 August 2008 (UTC) :Matthew, yes, the five bulleted examples are all correctly hyphenated; the size of unit and value are irrelevant to the use of hyphenation. We happen to follow ISO in not hyphenating where a symbol (incl. abbreviation) is used, so "40,075.02 km circumference"—but it's not the easiest construction whether hyphenated or not, so you have the option of recasting thus: "a circumference of 40,075.02 kilometres/km". Much easier on the eyes. [[User:Tony1|<font color="darkgreen">'''Tony'''</font >]] [[User talk:Tony1|<font color="darkgreen">(talk)</font >]] 08:11, 9 August 2008 (UTC) ::Your issue with the examples at CONVERSIONS is to do with that "compound adjectives" issue. In the phrase ''pipe of 4-inch diameter'', there is a compound adjective (''4-inch''), describing the noun, ''diameter''. However, when we speak of a ''pipe with a diameter of 4 inches'', then the simple, numerical adjective ''4'' qualifies the noun ''inch(es)''. [[User:Kevin McE|Kevin McE]] ([[User talk:Kevin McE|talk]]) 09:43, 9 August 2008 (UTC) == When this is not the famous person of the same name == I hate it when we are not allowed to directly mention that e.g., the Gene Wilder mentioned is not [[Gene Wilder]], see [[Fear of Music (album)#Additional_personnel|Exhibit A]]. Why is there a stigma against saying it explicitly? This avoidance of mentioning A != B assumes one has heard of B. If not, then later when you do there is a danger of thinking they are the same. Please set a clear best policy ruling for cases like these, and fix the page accordingly. Thank you. [[User:Jidanni|Jidanni]] ([[User talk:Jidanni|talk]]) 18:32, 10 August 2008 (UTC) == Bulleted and numbered lists == {{see also|Help:List|Wikipedia:Lists}} * Do not use lists if a passage reads easily using plain paragraphs. * Do not place blanks spaces in between list entries since it is interpreted as multiple lists by the wiki software. * Use numbers rather than bullets only if: ** there is a need to refer to the elements by number; ** the sequence of the items is critical; or ** the numbering has value of its own, for example in a track listing. * All elements in a list should use the same grammatical form and should be consistently either complete sentences or sentence fragments. ** When the elements are complete sentences, they are formatted using sentence case and a final period. ** When the elements are sentence fragments, they are typically introduced by a lead fragment ending with a colon, are formatted using consistently either sentence or lower case, and finish with a final semicolon or no punctuation, except that the last element typically finishes with a final period.
I hope this helps. ChyranandChloe ( talk) 01:30, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
Anderson, we can do without your continual bleating against MOS ("this indiscriminate mass of information"); it's becoming plain rude. We got the message a long time ago, and by harping on about your pet peeves, you make yourself look unpleasant and, in interpersonal terms, incompetent. We don't harp on about the indiscriminate mass of words you sometimes insert into styleguides. Add this to your dirt-file of what you like to call "personal attacks", please.
Sandy is proposing nothing to which these "objections" you're cooking up could be relevant. But you may be satisfied with this: "Leave blank lines between items in a bulleted or numbered list only where is a reason to do so". This will cover the problem in which some editors think they have to do so by default, and avoids going into messy details. Tony (talk) 08:45, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
I hate teasers like
[[Image:Water Flash.JPG|thumb|right|Water reflecting light in [[Crissy Field]]]]
in an article like Water, causing people to have to click to find out where in the world "Crissy Field" is.
There ought to be a law/policy/encouragement saying that no fair "place name dropping" like that without also mentioning more of an anchoring location, e.g., Crissy Field, England, etc. Jidanni ( talk) 18:19, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
Many people read Wikipedia offline on various devices, or print articles for others to read.
The feeling is the same as when one reads a newspaper article with such "teasers"... one is left outside the "in(the knowledge) club". The problem could easily be avoided with a few more bytes, many less than the image or ALT="" description string. Jidanni ( talk) 18:37, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
Yes, but it's better than nothing. As to a hard rule of what "tier", and what "first tier" geographical units constitutes them, U.S. states + other leading brand countries, I'll leave that up to the experts. Jidanni ( talk) 18:40, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
I see we have a guideline that says:
My question is, have the diacritic-free versions of words like cafe, role, and premiere (both noun and verb) become generally accepted in English? My answer would be: Yes, definitely. The versions with diacritics are rapidly dying out, although they still put in an occasional appearance. Others seem to disagree. I’m having a conversation with an editor at the moment about this: he prefers to use the diacritics, on the basis that that’s the way it’s always (and he stressed always) done in his part of the world (USA). Yet, that’s not my experience at all. Look at any published report of an American movie, play or musical work and they’ll almost always talk about "It premiered in … on …", not "it premièred in …". And a quick google search supports this. That’s American sources. The experience is similar for the UK, Australia and most other parts of the anglophone world (although I could understand if English-speaking eastern Canada keeps the accent). Given the general American propensity for changing the spellings of existing English words (let alone foreign ones) to more ... user-friendly versions, my friend's insistence on using the grave in the case of "première" seems to be running somewhat counter to his own national trend.
My friend also claims the OED does not record the unaccented word "premiere" at all – about which claim I am profoundly dubious, but I don't have access to it to check that out.
My take on all this is that premiere, cafe and role (and many others) have all become fully-fledged English words and deserve a diacritic-free existence. Premiere, in particular, isn’t even the same part of speech as the French original; that was an adjective, meaning “first” (f.), but we use this group of letters as a noun meaning “the first performance” or a verb meaning “to introduce” (trans.) or "to be performed for the first time" (intrans.) - which afaik is not a meaning a French person could get from the single word première; to my mind this is even more reason to not use the diacritics in an English-language context.
I don't want to make this a question of right/wrong, but I would like some guidance on how to counter my friend's argument. Apologies if this has been thrashed out previously, but navigating the archives is ... well, let's just say life is too short. -- JackofOz ( talk) 08:17, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
A participant in the discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/NRHP renaming proposals says that using dashes in titles would be contrary to the WP:MOS. Some of the suggested titles are:
After reading the MOS, I'm not completely convinced that these would be in violation. (Background:We are convinced that the phrase "Registered Historic Places" is incorrect and many article titles and categories need to be renamed.) Opinions about dashes in titles?-- Appraiser ( talk) 17:55, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
I've been involved in discussion about this same subject, involving Olympics articles such as the ones in Category:Archery events at the 2008 Summer Olympics (and there are lots and lots more: for each event type and each installment of the Olympics). Instead of dashes, colons could be used, but I felt that hyphens were inacceptable (and up until now, everyone has agreed). We decided to move them all to using spaced en dashes instead of hyphens, which seems to be endorsed by the MOS, after the Olympics have ended, to avoid any inconvenience. Oliphaunt ( talk) 13:00, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
There is a bot leaving notices in the policy Village Pump whenever a {{ guideline}} or {{ policy}} tag is added to, or removed from, a page. On the opportunity of the bot's updating (there were issues with the categorisation of guidelines), there are thoughts of doing the same thing for MoS pages here. The thread is this—nothing has happened yet, but I thought an early notice was in order. Waltham, The Duke of 08:51, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
We need to say that after a colon there must be lower case letters, not capitals, as the Chicago manual says. NerdyNSK ( talk) 01:52, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
What type of dash, if any, should be used in a table cell to indicate the absence of corresponding information? Or would it be preferable to leave the cell empty or write "N/A"? See e.g. the table at Judo_at_the_2008_Summer_Olympics#Qualification. Cheers, Oliphaunt ( talk) 13:30, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
Hyphens should never be used in tables, and I agree that emdashes are unsightly, prefer endashes. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 03:22, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Not specified here. Wikipedia:PUNCT#Italics I know I've seen it both ways in various articles (or both in same article!) but don't see a specific policy here. Would help!! Thanks. Carol Moore 12:07, 13 August 2008 (UTC) Carolmooredc {talk}
Stated clearly at WP:ITALICS
Why is this page at odds, and why does this page repeat text from that page? We should work on reducing text repeated on more than one MoS page. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 03:21, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Please take a look at Wikipedia:Lead section TT text and post any comments on its talk page. Butwhatdoiknow ( talk) 19:56, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
I thought the MOS and MOS:NUM used to say don't do links such as "The Beijing Olympics were held in August 2008". Where did that sentence go? It was handy to quote. Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 18:03, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
I am having a problem with another user about Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest. He insists that since it was a different country in 1992, than another page Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest must be made for that year. I informed him that the EBU, who puts on the contest makes considers them both to be Yugoslavia so there should only be one page with a note that it was a different country using the Yugoslavia name. He tells me that we should ignore what the EBU says because it isnt right and they are not the same country. Is there a mos guideline that would deal with something like this? Shouldn't we go by how the contest refers to it. We already use FYR Macedonia, this isn't any different. Grk1011 ( talk) 22:23, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Would someone care to draft a style guide for appropriate pronoun usage for transgender persons? I suggest taking a survey of style guides from leading periodicals in hopes they agree. I suspect most (or all) of them adopt the individual's gender identity as opposed to genetics, but I haven't done the legwork to demonstrate this as the case. I bring this up because of a bit of a tiff on Ina Fried's article (notability notwithstanding). A clear policy would cut such discussions short. Rklawton ( talk) 18:34, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
Please see the lively discussion regarding the display of infoboxes and other tabular data. This discussion now includes a proposal which may result in major changes to the way text and supporting images are supplemented with tabular data in a variety of venues. The overriding concerns are elegance of presentation, ease of use for casual readers, ease of editorial fact and vandalism monitoring and compactness of information display. Sswonk ( talk) 18:32, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps this is too specific for an MOS, but I'm concerned about the placement of etymologies in wikipedia articles. I'm currently planning to revive Wikiproject Etymology and would appreciate it if there were some consensus here about style, before I try to recruit people to write new etymologies for wiki.
There seem to be four variants;- (1) The etymology is placed after the bolded title of the entry. (e.g. nephrology) (2) The etymology is included in a footnote to the bolded title of the entry (e.g. law) (3) The etymology is included in a footnote to the first sentence of the article (e.g. torts) (4) The etymology is included in an independent section of the article (e.g. theology) Does anyone else feel that there should be a standard here?
I can certainly understand that there may be disputed etymologies for some words, which require an independent section (i.e. '4' should always be a possibility). However, it just seems slipshod to me if we allow (1), (2) and (3) as possible variants. My preference is (1), as it seems standard for almost all print encyclopedias that contain etymological information. Calypygian ( talk) 02:49, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
Scottish island articles, where the name may involve four languages, would minimally have an infobox with one or two derivations for the name and a simple Gaelic alternative in the lead sentence e.g. Raasay. This sometimes leads to very cluttered openings I don't like at all, e.g. Islay where there is a Gaelic spelling and pronunciation and an alternative in both English and Gaelic. When things get this complex I prefer a separate Etymology section e.g. Dubh Artach, St Kilda. I don't like the footnote solution myself but I can't see any reason for this page to concern itself with such a varied and complex subject. Ben Mac Dui 16:40, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
One of todays "Did you know" articles starts like this:
This initial sentence is terrible. But it is required by Wikipedia's rules, which forbid links in the bolded title phrase. One is not allowed to write:
If the article is called "Battle of X", one must not write "The Battle of X was fought on February 32nd, 2050." Instead one must write "The Battle of X was a battle..." etc. Michael Hardy ( talk) 12:05, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia:Lead section#Bold title: "If the topic of an article has no commonly accepted name, and the title is simply descriptive [...] the title does not need to appear verbatim in the main text; if it does happen to appear, it should not be in boldface." -- NE2 18:19, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
I have been asked to track MOS pages with VeblenBot, the same way that policy and guideline pages are tracked. Please comment at Wikipedia:VPP#Updating_VeblenBot. Thanks, — Carl ( CBM · talk) 19:06, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
I took a wikibreak before my previous dispute on this matter got resolved, so I'm brining it up again. The present wording on the handling of transgendered persons is, well, nuts. It's totally unworkable and will do nothing but confuse readers or make them think that WP editors are all smoking dope. At the very least, it will lead to "typo fix" editwarring and rancorous debate (this already happening) on article after article after article.
Jane Emily Smith was born January 1, 2001, in Hoboken New York. He attended the St. Mary's School for Girls, and..."
See the problem? It is completely irrational to use the transgendered pronoun outside the scope of the transgendered portion of the article subject's life.
NB: I'm fully supportive of using the transgendered pronoun for the transgendered life phase, provided there is reasonable evidence it is what is/was favored by the subject. That caveat is more important than it sounds. When I lived in San Francisco, I met plenty of TGs, and not one but two of them (both M-to-F) went by "he", on the basis that until they got their sex-change surgery they didn't feel right using "she". While not a common attitude, it exists, and automatically applying "she"/"her"/"hers" to the M-to-F (or vice versa) transgendered, without sources, is both POV-pushing and original research.
PS: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (identity) for a proposal that still needs a lot of work. I've cleaned it up some, but it still really reeks of self-consciously hipsterish " p.-c."
— SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 21:43, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
It has been determined at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 August 6#Template:Nobel icon and at Template talk:Nobel icon (currently viewable only by admins) that these type of small icons representing that the subject won the award, are not appropriate for use in infoboxes. Take a look at those pages for the rationale behind that assertion.
I propose that the Manual of Style adopt a guideline stating that these icons, including but not limited to: nobel prizes, grammy awards, and pulitzer prizes, are not appropriate. « Diligent Terrier [talk] 20:50, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
There's been extensive discussion since then on this, including the deletion of the template. I believe that since the template was deleted, the MOS should adopt a guideline that follows the consensus. Otherwise, we'll just see the addition of the icon used outside of the template, meaning the addition of the image manually, which will mean there was no point to the TfD discussion. « Diligent Terrier [talk] 21:12, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
(unindent)I agree also. Such icons etc clutter up infoboxes and are too POV.-- Xp54321 ( Hello! • Contribs) 21:23, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
The only thing worse than infoboxes are cluttered infoboxes. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 03:16, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
The issues have largely already been covered, in a much more general way, at WP:FLAG. I will recommend there that it include a paragraph about medal icons and the like as well. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:16, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
I understand the concerns about using a difficult-to-see image such as the Nobel peace prize medal in icon size, but what do people think of icons that are simply stylized representations of plain text? For example, instead of the number "1" within lists such as Cycling at the 2008 Summer Olympics - Men's Keirin#Finals, or instead of "WR" in results lists? — Andrwsc ( talk · contribs) 18:54, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Thoughts on a page move I've talked about above can be expressed at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (flags). « Diligent Terrier [talk] 22:22, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
There is discussion here of a video of a Wikimania address by researcher Dr Bill Wedemeyer, Faculty of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University, who conducted an extensive study of the quality of (mainly) scientific articles on WP. I recommend starting at around 8 minutes (the opening is typical conference fluff). The MoS gets a mention at 36 minutes; I don't quite agree with his stance on the role of MoS at FAC. Tony (talk) 10:51, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
This might sound stupid, but do level 2 headers have three "===" or two "=="? D.M.N. ( talk) 16:51, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
So, does my original question have a clear answer or not? Does a level 2 header have two or three equal signs? D.M.N. ( talk) 17:39, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
MOS:IMAGES also says "It is often preferable to place images of faces so that the face or eyes look toward the text." So if a picture is at the beginning of a === section, whether or not the eyes are looking into the text is irrelevant, and it should be on the right anyway? For an example see Degrassi: The Next Generation#Concept Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 18:57, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
The problematic sentence has persisted on the page and continued to cause confusion. I have taken the above discussion as consensus to change the phrasing to Mr Cunningham's version. Waltham, The Duke of 07:06, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
I couldn't find anywhere that explains this. Does anyone know which version should be used in an article's title? Craigy ( talk) 11:02, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
I don't know which policy/guideline applies but my experience of this is that 'saint' is generally not used in the title at all. See for example Category:Italian saints or Category:English saints. Ben Mac Dui 12:48, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
← AP Stylebook does lean a little bit, but not much, in favor of shorter forms, to make newspaper journalists happy. This is more like giving a snappy, all-purpose answer to save writers the trouble of looking up sources as you just did...which is obviously better, for our purposes. I get 1.3M ghits for "St Paul MN" and 5M ghits for "Saint Paul MN". The WT:NCGN people are the go-to guys for place names, but if someone forced me to guess based on your research, I'd say go with Saint Paul, despite AP Stylebook. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 19:52, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Apparently we need to add another line to WP:MSH to promote good writing and to document current standards at FAC:
It might be possible to roll this in with the "Section names should not explicitly refer to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings" item, but I think it will be simpler to just add it separately. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 06:25, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Can I place a left-aligned image in such a way this it displaces a heading or subheading (first, second, third, fourth-level headings...) to the right? This should be indicated in the MoS. -- Phenylalanine ( talk) 12:04, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
<div style="clear:both;" />
and introduce a little whitespace after the image than to allow it to interfere with headings. See
Five-pins#Strategy for appropriate use of left-aligned image. —
SMcCandlish [
talk] [
cont] ‹(-¿-)›
13:14, 27 August 2008 (UTC)I don't really care if it's on the left or right, but if Image X is relevant to Section Y, then it should be right under the header, not above it as used here. Reywas92 Talk 19:40, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Please take a look at Talk:The_Beatles/Archive_19#reliable_sources_using_"the_Beatles"_or_"The_Beatles". Thank you, Espoo ( talk) 08:54, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
This issue was decided on that talk page on the basis of an opinion poll, not use in reliable sources. Is MoS committed to following most common usage in reliable sources or does WP:VERIFY (WP:RS) only apply to the content of Wikipedia articles? It's quite amazing that MoS doesn't say anything about this WP policy or, in fact, anything about how MoS has been or is supposed to be compiled.
Most WP editors consider decisions about capitalisation, spelling, punctuation, etc. to be trivial, and the professional copyeditors trying to make WP articles follow basic standards used in encyclopedias and all professionally edited material are regularly discouraged by being called nitpickers when they try to make Wikipedia look at least a bit less amateurish. -- Espoo ( talk) 17:41, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Aug 1 – Aug 24 updates for CAT:GEN are at WT:UPDATES; I did them a week early so people can complain if they see something they don't like, and we can work it out before the Sept 1 monthly updates. I'll probably keep doing these a week early. Everyone is welcome to participate, of course. I err on the side of including anything that anyone might think is important; Tony distills the talk page for WP:UPDATES, and does other pages as well.
Sandy would like for someone to start keeping track of WP:ACCESS. It's not in the style cat now, but I wouldn't mind throwing it into that cat and CAT:GEN too, if someone is willing to say that they're pretty sure that nothing in it contradicts current style and image guidelines.
Most of the pages in Category:Wikipedia style guidelines are associated with one or a few wikiprojects, and cover particular article topics, such as math. If someone finds something wrong in one of these "targeted" style guidelines, it would probably work out better to show respect for the relevant wikiprojects by asking their input on the style guideline talk page before making changes. I didn't put any of these pages in CAT:GEN, nor any of the pages in Category: Wikipedia image help.
There are 7 4 other pages in the style cat that I didn't put in
CAT:GEN, because the discussions on the talk pages involve a lot more than just style guidelines. There's a pretty heavy overlap with discussions at
WT:NPOV,
WT:V,
WT:N, and similar pages. I think the same thing could be said for most pages in
Category:Wikipedia editing guidelines, so if you guys want to add some cat to distinguish these important style guidelines pages from the wikiproject-specific and article-topic-specific ones, maybe we could add the editing cat to the style cat:
WP:Citing sources,
WP:External links,
WP:Footnotes, and
WP:Layout.
- Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 02:55, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Some details on how to disambiguate human names have moved from Wikipedia:Disambiguation to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people), and changed in the process, to permit things like Joe Schmoe (baseball) instead of Joe Schmoe (baseball player). The exact wording of the passage may still be in dispute/flux. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 13:11, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
New page created
here.
Tony
(talk)
07:57, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Why never link section titles? I agree that when, as usual, the link can be included in text without loss, it should be. But this can be said without prohibiting the practice, in peerage articles, of linking the date of creation in the section title.
There can hardly be a technical problem; it's done routinely on talk pages.
If there is a reason, it should be given. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:40, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Currently it says "section headings should not normally contain links". Not a complete prohibition; it sounds about right to me, unless someone can formulate some specific exceptions to make things clearer.-- Kotniski ( talk) 08:48, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
The following edit, on one of our more obscure subpages, reveals a fascinating mindset:
(I intentionally omit the signature; the personal issue that preceded it should be dealt with in another forum.) My question here is whether indeed compulsion is the whole idea of the MoS, as this seems to say.
For contrast, I have presented the idea that there are five approaches to MOS, of which compulsion is only one (and rarely the most effective) on my user page. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:21, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I don't think that compulsion is really an option, and especially not on enwiki. The sheer variety of articles – both current and future – makes it nigh on impossible to have useful prescriptive rules which cover all of them. Nor could such rules be enforced across all articles, and all revisions… That doesn't mean that MOS is useless either: it is a collection of "best practice", a standard to aim for, but there will always be occasions (even at FA) where it is not applicable. Physchim62 (talk) 23:50, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
This seems to be a fossil from a time before Wikipedia reformatted date links according to user preferences. Nowadays, the minimal repetition practice just doesn't work - it'll just give either "5 January–7" for half our users or "5–January 7" for the other half. The standard should therefore be changed to favour each end of the range being given as both day and month.
The spaced en dashes also cause a problem for year pages. I've always done them as
since, if the dash has spaces around it, then it becomes too similar to that used between the date and the event description, hence hard on the eyes to identify it as an event covering a range of dates:
Making this a spaced en-dash actually makes the problem worse, since an en-dash implies a higher-level division than a simple hyphen used as a dash. An unspaced en-dash makes it a little better, but even if this is done, we ought to standardise on at least an en-dash between the date and the event.
OK, so this bit of the discussion is probably better suited to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years rather than here. And it's actually OK to use plain hyphens in the meantime under the "except where common sense and the occasional exception will improve an article" provision. But my first point, about the dates of the year being given in full, is certainly no exception, as dates will nearly always be linked in practice. -- Smjg ( talk) 21:29, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
First of all, I am somewhat surprised that the MoS gives no hint as to when should we use quotations. A usage of a lengthy and non completely neutral quotation is being discussed at Talk:Sejny_Uprising#Same_old_business_again; comments would be very much appreciated as at this point we only have two deadlocked editors there.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 22:33, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I often contribute to articles that incorporate references to both flora and different animal taxa. Consistent presentation of the species names with respect to capitalisation is a challenge. I therefore propose the following change to be added at the end of this section:
This has been used in various FA's and GA's ( St Kilda, Scotland, Fauna of Scotland, Black Moshannon State Park, Geography of Newfoundland and Labrador, River Torrens, Fauna of Australia) without any complaint. A short essay on the reasoning behind the proposal is available here. Ben Mac Dui 11:33, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
I don't doubt that this is an important topic, nor do I doubt that it will be controversial. I'd like to provide some context that some other editors might not have considered: In many groups of organisms, and in many countries, there is no necessary connection between a common name and a species. The American Robin is Turdus migratorius, and no other, but although "brittlebush" can be applied to Encelia farinosa, there are other plants to which it is also applied. Ornithologists (and evidently lepidoperologists) worldwide, and most -ologists in a number of countries, have found value in designating a more-or-less one-to-one correspondence between species and certain names in the local language, but this practice is not universal. For plants in the US, it generally only applies to those species given formal governmental protection.
Thus, of the following statements,
only number 4 would be correct according to the proposal (brittlebush not being precisely a species), but it would require some amount of additional knowledge of the organisms to make this determination. And it seems that one of the purposes of this proposal would be to make the extra work of such careful determinations unnecessary.
A quick look at Black Moshannon State Park suggests that the careful determination may not have always been made; some uncapitalized names may refer in that specific area to only a single species.-- Curtis Clark ( talk) 18:42, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
It looks like this is destined to be discussed here. Personally, I support the MoS recommending consistent presentation of taxa within an article; but I think you are overspecifying how such consistency should be achieved. The correct way to achieve consistency depends on the context and should be an editorial decision.
There is also a related issue which has been overlooked: the order of presentation of common and scientific names. In flora articles, names are generally presented as " Eucalyptus diversicolor (Karri)". In fauna articles, they are presented as Quokka (Setonix brachyurus). In articles that make use of both, there should be consistency, but whether this should be achieved as
or
or
or
should be an editorial decision per article, not a MoS rule.
Therefore I propose the insertion of something like:
and then, to get to the nub of the matter:
Responses to the above:
Several questions seem to be emerging:
It may be too early for formal expressions of support, but at this stage mine would be: Yes, Yes, Yes and (in order of decreasing preference) 4a and 4b. (3) may need a little more definition – River Torrens for example may be a body of mostly fresh water, but that does not make it an article about freshwater fish.
Once these general questions are dealt with, the issue of which system to use and how it should be agreed upon, becomes germane. Ben Mac Dui 15:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
An ideal system is only precluded if members of WP:TOL and its sub-braches put the interests of their specialisations before those of the encyclopaedia as a whole. Who gets to be the judge of what is in the best interests of the encyclopedia as a whole? If every ornithologist in the world capitalises their common names, then WP:BIRDS are entitled to argue that following that convention for birds is in the interests of the encyclopedia as a whole, since not following would make us look silly to ornithologists.
The use of common names in geographical etc. articles is, by convention, always preferred. I dispute this. I have written a number of articles on geographic regions, e.g. Houtman Abrolhos, Warren (biogeographic region); and I certainly haven't encountered or followed any such convention. By 2), I hope you're talking about putting common name first, not using common name only. If you are advocating the use of common name only, then I'm afraid my response would be "absolutely no fucking way".
But more generally, I come back to the view that there is no broadly accepted convention in the real world, so any attempt to impose such a convention here is pointless, artificial, and doomed to fail. I've tried to offer you something something less ambitious, that you might have some hope of getting past the TOL people; why you would persist with something that you have zero chance of getting approved is beyond me.
Hesperian 23:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
P.S. I must say I find it slightly amusing that this proposal would see me put common names first at Houtman Abrolhos#Flora, but scientific names first at Flora of the Houtman Abrolhos. And all in the name of imposing consistency!
Let me be more explicit about the analogies to WP:ENGVAR. I've listed its subheadings below and discussed how a capitalization scheme similar to Hesperian's would equate.
It's either "American Robin" and "Brittlebush" or "American robin" and "brittlebush".
A "taxonomic tie" could dictate capitalization (the bird sanctuary example given above), as could a national tie (it is my impression that in the UK plants have "official" capitalized common names, something that does not prevail in the US). This would inform the start of an article, and the items above and below would control subsequent edits.
Once a capitalization scheme is chosen, subsequent editors will adhere to it.
Like WP:ENGVAR, this has the advantage of easy application. Also like WP:ENGVAR, it will result in some readers being surprised by the article, but at least there's a reason. Frankly, I find it an ugly solution, but an effective one.-- Curtis Clark ( talk) 12:50, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
A few more replies. "any attempt to impose such a convention here is pointless, artificial, and doomed to fail." Why? This seems to me to be a quite ordinary idea that simply requires a little compromise for the sake of a better encyclopedia and to avoid endless quibbling. I am not implacably opposed to the use of scientific names, but there use seems to me to be unnecessary in geography articles as it is both hard to read, especially for general readers, and the suggested use is not consistent either. Currently there is clearly a lack of consensus here at least. I am not unduly concerned - I honestly doubt there are many such articles, but I really don't know. Thirdly, I notice the tendency to continually leap to alternate solutions without discussing the principles. Using the above questions I think we currently have.
My apologies if I am either omitting or misrepresenting anyone's views. Just trying to make a start and see where there is and isn't agreement. It seems pointless discussing the details if we are at odds over the principles.
Finally, I don't grok the ENGVAR analogy or how it fits into these questions. I will have to re-read the above. Ben Mac Dui 16:32, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
First, I strongly disagree that scientific names are "hard to read, especially for general readers"—nine-year-old boys don't have much issue with dinosaur names.
Second, my whole point in reframing was to show that there were disagreements over the principles. Ben MacDui and Hesperian have both presented proposals (I discount mine as unworkable), and the evident situation that they are not being directly compared suggests that we are all at some level still trying to solve different issues.
Third, I'll try again with ENGVAR: This was an intractable problem at a global level. No one (save perhaps Jimbo) was ever going to be able to dictate a single variety of English for all of Wikipedia. The solution was to let it be decided on an article-by-article basis. Hesperian has suggested much the same for common name capitalization. (Btw, User:MPF might disagree about UK capitalization)-- Curtis Clark ( talk) 13:34, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
I am pretty much in agreement with
Curtis Clark's comments above (17:44, 16 August 2008). How about adding the following guidance at the end of the section:
You'll note that it attempts to make suggestions (which I think are broadly in line with chunks of the discussion above), but is not proscriptive. Ben Mac Dui 19:50, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
Done - thanks for your patience folks. Ben Mac Dui 07:17, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, your rant boils down to:
Your logic is sound, and your first premise is a trival fact of grammar, but unfortunately your second premise is merely your opinion, and easily disputed. At the risk of oversimplification, proper nouns refer to unique entities whereas common nouns describe a class of entities. When I say "American Robins are birds", I am using "American Robins" as a common noun. But our articles don't say that; they say "The American Robin is a species of bird", in which case American Robin refers to a unique species by its recognised title. In such contexts it is arguably a proper noun. The situation is certainly not so clearcut as you are making it out to be. Hesperian 11:30, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
WP:SG redirects here, so there should be a hatnote to Wikipedia:WikiProject Singapore, and the Singaporean notice board. 70.55.86.69 ( talk) 08:50, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
There seems to be some disagreement as to what proportion of possessive take an extra <s> after /s/ or /z/ and how frequently they do so. Swamilive called for reliable references to prove the claim that most forms take the extra <s>. Dominus gives us The Chicago Manual of Style. I'd be interested to see exactly what the CMOS says but as far as I'm aware, being a manual of style, it prescribes not describes. WP:MOS is not based on any external manual of style but on consensus. So what do we want? JIMp talk· cont 08:36, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
From WP:MOS#Posessives
Proper nouns that end with s: There is tension in English over whether just an apostrophe, or an apostrophe and the letter s, should be added to such proper nouns (James' house or James's house, but be consistent within an article). Some forms almost always take an extra s (Ross's father); some usually do not (Socrates' wife; Moses' ascent of Sinai; Jesus' last words).
I was always taught in school (and after double-checking with my mother, an English language professor at a university) that with proper names ending in s, an apostrophe and the letter s should not be added if it creates too much of an ess sound, repeats the ess sound more than twice, or results in more than two ses in sucession.
James's is okay because the s in James is a (soft) z sound, and it should be Jesus', not Jesus's and Moses', not Moses's (results in three esses). However, the MoS offer that Ross's is correct – AFAIK it should be Ross' because that creates three sucessive ses and looks ugly to read.
Is this supported by what other people have learned, or am I way off base? Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 08:06, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks#RFC on page title and comma - We need outside opinions on what the appropriate grammar is here. Should the page title and the article start out with "September 11, 2001 attacks" (no comma) or "September 11, 2001, attacks"? A third option is to rename the page to something like "September 11 attacks". We would appreciate comments on the article talk page. Thanks. -- Aude ( talk) 20:13, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't make sense to me that this text is buried in WP:CITE, when references are only one example. Doesn't it belong here?
SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 00:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
No responses, so I'll try again. Does anyone disagree that the text, currently located at WP:CITE, but pertaining to all portions of the article:
belongs here at MOS rather than buried at cite, since it's a global issue? Scrolling lists are creeping into articles, and they don't mirror, print, et al. An example (since corrected) was at Washington,_D._C.#Demographics (see the version before it was corrected here. The old version doesn't show a scroll bar on my laptop, but did on my other computer, not sure what that's about, but the nominator solved it by converting to a vertical template.) At any rate, I am increasingly seeing scroll bars in the text of articles, there have been many others. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 04:03, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm restoring this section from the miserable archiving system on this page after it took me ten minutes to locate it. The issue was never fully dealt with. The text added here was the same as what was at cite. The question is whether we should have scroll boxes at all, including hidden text, within prose. Since no one else has addressed it, I will go edit the page myself, although my mangled prose will probably need fixing. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 01:14, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
Where should links to portals within articles go?? (i.e. see Shannara....there is a link to a portal at the top right. Should it go there, or at the bottom of the article? the_ed 17 21:58, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
I can't find any MOS page that discusses the use of the ampersand (&) in place of the word "and". Is there no preference? — Andrwsc ( talk · contribs) 22:27, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
Persons A and B worked on the script together, and persons C and D worked on the script together, but they didn't all work together as a team. In this case, "and" and "&" have slightly different meanings. Matthewedwards ( talk • contribs • email) 00:44, 20 August 2008 (UTC)Written by: Person A & Person B and Person C & Person D.
I've left this topic alone for some time here, and on returning I see nothing new that addresses the arguments I've raised, only partial rationales that can't get past "but [sic] isn't a reference citation", ignoring the bigger picture, nor any solid rationales for why this change would be a good idea (as opposed to why not changing it is a bad one), with the only argument seeming to be "well, that's how it's done on paper". Arguments that do little but defend against that with which they disagree are weak and don't provide anything substantive with which to work. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 23:58, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
I cannot possibly comment on typographic conventions and the like, as I am anything but an expert in the field. However, I have an observation to make: grouping dispute and cleanup tags with sic tags is something I find unintuitive, considering that they have a fundamental difference of purpose. Dispute and cleanup tags are of essentially temporary nature and are not supposed to exist in the finished form of an article. They are notes for the editors—and perhaps, to an extent, for the readers—so that a problem with the quotation can be known and ultimately dealt with. Sic tags, on the other hand, are permanent and are meant to be read by all readers or confusion might arise; this applies always and in every stage of the article, including the finished product. I don't see why the two cases should be treated identically. Waltham, The Duke of 23:25, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
Several of us have problems with WP:WEASEL. It seems to cover things already covered on policy pages (and their talk pages) such as WP:V and WP:NPOV, and it seems to me that people never really settled on whether the page is supposed to be about "some people say", or about something much broader. I don't like the name of the page, either. On the content side, many people have raised issues, including Silly Rabbit and Johnbod, recently. Feel free to jump in. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 18:10, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
Several 2008-09-01 discussions concern the use of dashes in categories involving a range of years. It has been asserted that WP:DASH does not apply to categories. But surely an article and a category about the same topic should use the same type of dash, no? — CharlotteWebb 22:45, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
←Quick recap on current consensus on DASH issues as I understand it: people are willing to re-discuss DASH issues, but not constantly (we're arguing over fractions of millimeters here, and very few editors and almost no readers even notice). A date of January has been mentioned for the next drag-out knock-down fight (I'm joking). There are supposed to be bots that will automatically create a redirect any time a page or category with an en-dash in the title is created, so that you never have to type an en-dash to get to a page or cat. Have those bots died, or were you guys talking about different bots? - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 19:38, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
There has been some opposition to the use of en-dash in category names (not explicitly addressed in WP:DASH). It seems to me that these should be agree with article names (eg Arab–Israeli conflict and Category:Arab–Israeli conflict rather than Arab-Israeli conflict presently under cfd along with many other such.) Occuli ( talk) 12:59, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
There is a question in FAC as to whether or not the MoS has any conclusion about the use of #1 vs. No. 1 in prose (versus in tables). Quick background: college football and basketball (among others) use poll rankings as a barometer of team success and, in the case of highest level college football, determine a champion. In the current scheduling table, the default is "#". The sports media uses a mix of both, however I've noticed that The New York Times, the bastion of prim-and-proper, conservative writing uses "No." ( example). I couldn't seem to find the answer in the archive. -- Bobak ( talk) 20:06, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
The broader question (per the previous discussion) is whether this was ever addressed in MoS? If not, the article complies with WP:WIAFA and is promotable; we're tying to find out if it complies with MoS. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 21:26, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
So, striking "#", it seems were now discussing "No." versus "number": we're seeing the AP Style (from the previous discussion, thanks Dank55) favoring "No.", do the English use that as well? Using "number" for ever instance (and there are many in a college football season article) might throw off American readers. -- Bobak ( talk) 23:04, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
Note: This stuff is still important to me, but I'm putting off worrying about style guidelines until the Version 0.7 DVD is out the door.] There are a bunch of things going on with style guidelines at the moment making me groan. They're deep issues requiring buy-in by large numbers of people from all over Wikipedia. There are several ways to try to get people to buy in who haven't been inclined to do it; the surest way is to give them a person or people to complain to that they perceive as honest broker(s) who will give them all the previous discussions on any subject they're interested in and let them decide for themselves. This requires that the person or people have a track record of not spending all their time in any one place (FAC, GAN, a particular wikiproject), and have a track record of supporting different people for different reasons on different issues. The position I think would be ideal involves no pay, long hours, wide experience with style guides and with all relevant project and talk pages, and a willingness to muzzle oneself and serve mostly as an errand boy/girl, fetching all previous relevant discussions, so that others can make the decisions. Not your dream job. I'm willing to collaborate this week with any volunteers who would like to figure out whether this will work and what it entails.
Here are some of the areas where we need people to start participating more than they have. There's a current discussion at WT:GAN about how oppressive the style guidelines are, and how GANs should be clearer about not caring about any of them except the 6 that WP:WIAGA specifically mentions. As McCandlish mentions above, the number of wikiprojects who are trying to "opt out" has been growing steadily. Figuring out whether WP:WEASEL or any other page should be a guideline requires getting everyone to agree to some kind of criteria that people aren't close to agreeing on, yet. There are complaints all over the place that the guidelines need to be indexed and more accessible. I just found out today that, before he left, BeBestBe created a new guideline category and stuck 82 wikiproject style pages in it; I'm SO looking forward to seeing what happens when we try to explain to people that pages that not a lot of people have seen probably shouldn't be in a guidelines cat.
The biggest problem on the horizon is Wikipedia 0.7, which has deadlines coming up in a few days, and may go on sale as a DVD in Walmart in October. For instance, there are 33 robotics articles on the DVD, and I haven't finished copyediting the first one yet. The articles will be checked for recent vandalism and any obvious errors by a few people for 3 or 4 days, and then the results will be sent off to the publisher. The main problem from my perspective is that there hasn't even been a way to talk with the wikiprojects about copyediting for this project; no two wikiprojects have the same set of standards, and I personally don't know anyone who doesn't spend a lot of time at FAC who even knows all the style guidelines, much less cares. I find copyediting at FAC to be relatively easy, because the "buy-in" level is high, but I find copyediting for the typical B-class article to be really difficult, especially if it's for a wikiproject that doesn't care much for style guidelines ... everything is a new issue, everything is a potential fight. I think the reaction to Wikipedia 0.7 may be a little embarrassing. If we're going to fix things in time for the next version, Wikipedia 1.0, we need to find a way to get a lot of people in the same boat and rowing in the same direction.
So ... I welcome ideas. Anyone who wants to jump on board, please do. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 22:41, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
Dank55, you seem to be very sensible. I agree with virtually everything you said at the beginning of this thread. I would add that the Manual of Style should explicitly be a policy, not a mere guideline, and that people who want it to continue to be a mere guideline not argue that the guideline-policy distinction doesn't exist whenever that argument is most advantageous to their objectives. Tennis expert ( talk) 21:06, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (text formatting) serves no purpose at all, as it is simply rehash of WP:MOS (and in one place WP:MOSNUM). To the extent it may say anything distinctive that point should be added to MOS/MOSNUM, but otherwise this is just a blank-and-redirect. See also the closely related discussion at WT:MOSNUM#Text formatting math section merge proposal. The merge-from page is inconsistent on many points with both target pages, and its talk page is evidence of a great deal of confusion being sown among editors as a result of this break-away "guideline"'s existence. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 05:30, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
PS: I have edited a few bits of it to comply better with MOS/MOSNUM, but much of it is still messed up. There are probably a few points in it not presently in either of the controlling guidelines (which is why I suggested merges instead of just wiping it).
PPS: We should probably also go over Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters) to ensure it hasn't diverged off into Nonsense Land, too, though it is clearly too large and detailed to merge into MOS. — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 06:32, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
And me.-- Kotniski ( talk) 07:35, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
I also support the merge. Teemu Leisti ( talk) 06:07, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, but I don't see it. Summarize and link, but (for example) the long list of things that should be italicized will be useful to some people, and should be somewhere, but not here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:03, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
Now that we've gotten a reprieve on the deadlines for the WP Version 0.7 DVD, I'm trying to whip up support for every single article to be skimmed by at least one person who defines themselves as a copyeditor (and many of these will come from the wikiprojects, and all the articles have already been eyeballed by someone, experienced or not) in the version that's going on the DVD. Currently we're estimating 30000 articles on the DVD, but if good copyeditors are willing to make the case that we need more time or fewer articles to get the job done that needs doing, the Version 0.7 folks are listening (now). Volunteers and comments are welcome at WT:1.0#Copyediting_minifesto. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 15:56, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
←Huah. My understanding is that I'm now the copyediting director (a minor functionary) for the Version 1.0 project. Long hours, no pay, lots of pressure: my dream job. I understand that we can't review all the articles, but my understanding from Martin is that not issuing the Version 0.7 DVD is not an option. Both the German project and Wikipedia 0.5 have been deemed to be a success, and 0.7 is a done deal. However, I believe I have gotten us something like a two-month reprieve and flexibility in the article selection, but only if that's going to get us something: we need to ask some copyeditors who normally might do only GA and FA to look at some of the B-class articles on the DVD, or at least help wikiproject people to identify potential problems so that they can flag us about which articles need special attention. If we can't get some significant help, then there's no reason to hold up the DVD. There's no sign-up sheet; just do something if you're interested. Maybe give your favorite wikiproject a checklist of things to watch out for and volunteer your services if they flag articles for extra attention. The current selection list is here. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 17:23, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
←I apologize in advance for violating WP:TLDR. This is a topic that hasn't been on some people's radar screens (including mine) at all. We can discuss further at WT:1 if you like. I wish I had more time to investigate, but I've got to give 100% of my time to quality control. I'll tell you what I know.
I see that the MoS is changed to say that sic (in quotes) should be written using Template:Sic. This renders "[sic]" in superscript, which is a practice that I'm not familiar with. I can't find any discussion about this and I am tempted to revert. So, what is the reason for using superscript? (Thanks to Dan (Dank55) for the updates, which brought this to my attention.) -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 21:48, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Surely the term [ sic] should not be superscripted, precisely to distinguish it from references. The fact that the MoS recommends that it be wikilinked is an indication that not all readers would understand its significance. And heaven forbid that you have to use it more than once in an article! Physchim62 (talk) 23:46, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
We should be doing what people do in the real world. I've never seen [sic] superscripted out there. Ever. Hesperian 01:50, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
sic
". Even
sic doesn't say it should be superscripted.
Matthewedwards (
talk •
contribs •
email)
02:48, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
It isn't about inline editorial insertions; it is about editorial insertions that indicate the reader must look at the bottom of the page, or the end of the work, to find the insertion, vs. insertions that are self-contained. Asterisks (in almost all publications) and footnote numbers (in many but not all publications) are superscripted, letting the reader know the insertion will be found somewhere else. Sic is self-contained and never superscripted. Mathematical superscripts derive from a different tradition and are not comparable to footnotes, sic, or astrisks. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 20:02, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
This important change seems to have been made by an anon user, and I cannot find any discussion endorsing it. Is this an oversight, or have I just missed the discussion? Without wishing to go over old ground, I would strongly oppose the change - several units in the UK are usually expressed in imperial (e.g. pints of milk/beer etc, miles on roads, etc.) Any comments? — Tivedshambo ( t/ c) (logged on as Pek) 08:59, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
There's probably a crossed wire here. I am not attempting to defend the anon's change to metric only, but rather query the change to this (apparently) wholly new wording. Ben Mac Dui 16:39, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Images says, "Start an article with a right-aligned lead image. This image is often resized to about 300px." but Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#Displayed_image_size says, "Images should generally not be set to a fixed size". These two statements seem to contradict. What is the recommended best practice for a typical lead image (assuming no other constraint such as an infobox)? -- Ed Brey ( talk) 17:38, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
While reviewing MILHIST articles for A-Class, I came across a usage of N/A for the casualty count of a battle. As I lost a great uncle in world war II and 11 cousins, once removed, in Vietnam , I find this offensive and think that others with ties to the military would also find the usage of not applicable to be offensive, as it denigrates the sacrifice of soldiers. I am therefore proposing a new Manual of Style providing that where casualty counts can not be ascertained, the word unknown should be used. Geoff Plourde ( talk) 21:59, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd just like to point out that "N/A" doesn't always mean "not applicable". Sometimes it means "not available". I suggest that this is probably the intended meaning here. -- Trovatore ( talk) 22:11, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
Certainly this would have been an oversight. I suggest you mention it on the talk page for Template:Infobox Military Conflict. The template documentation should make a note of this in the instructions for the relevant fields, so that editors are reminded of the significance of these figures. — Michael Z. 2008-09-15 06:15 z
I present here an example of a serious conflict that flew under the radar: Wikipedia:Sister projects, being elevated to a guideline, while in conflict with WP:EL and WP:LAYOUT. This is exactly the sort of thing a WikiProject needs to identify, putting guidelines in place so that our pages will be in sync. See my posts at the two pages, here and here. By what process did Wikipedia:Sister projects become a guideline, and why was it allowed to become a guideline when it was in conflict with other guidelines, and how can we identify and catalog the conflicts, contradictions and redundancies that exist across all guideline pages? We need a process to manage the process by which pages become guidelines. This page elevates non-reliable content that we wouldn't even allow in most cases as External links to a place within the body of our articles, against WP:EL and WP:LAYOUT (not to mention reliable sources), and opens the door for editors to get content into our articles that our policies would normally disallow (see the Stuttering FAR for an example of advert, COI, non-RS text that simply moved to WikiBooks so it could try to be linked in our Stuttering article). SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 01:30, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
Is there a precedent for having mini-MOS's set up by editors with an interest in a topic to create their own MOS for this area? User:MSJapan/Freemasonry MOS is an attempt. I'm concerned on two areas, firstly this is being done in secret and secondly that this will effectively give a small number of interested editors a way of imposing an agenda (for example they call their type of freemasonry "mainstream" and they try to preclude articles on other types of freemasonry). JASpencer ( talk) 21:46, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
So are there any other project guidelines that go under the name "Manual of Style". JASpencer ( talk) 18:05, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
OK I've just looked and the Mormons do it. So is the freemasonry wikiproject mature enough to enforce standards across the project? JASpencer ( talk) 18:19, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Would it be too much to ask that any other MoS style proposals are politely requested to either (1) leave a notification here; and/or (2) transclude the discussion here; and/or (3) hold the discussion at a subpage here; or (4) something similar? It's no extra effort, the discussion and guide formulation can still take place, but everyone has then had a fair chance of getting involved and any decisions could be said to be more representative of the community as a whole. Easier than judging Wikiprojects' maturity is giving everyone the largest number of people possible chance to get involved.
Knepflerle (
talk)
22:44, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to remove this from WP:JARGON, on the grounds that I have rarely seen glossaries in article-space. Does anyone feel strongly enough about glossaries to keep this in?
If it is convenient to bundle all terms and their definitions in a list, the list should use the appropriate definition list markup: Instead of
*'''term''': definition
use
; term : definition
If a glossary is provided, any jargon used in the article should be hyperlinked to the glossary. Be careful to explain any jargon used in the glossary, until you've reached terms that ordinary educated people should understand. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 14:22, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
<dt>
and <dd>
. I'm a big fan of semantic markup. Making a change like this could be complicated for something like
Glossary of cue sports terms which has been using === headings. Something CSSy could probably be done to implement it with <dt> but preserve more of the look of the original (if that were desired).