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When an info box contains a "religion = X" parameter (displays as Religion: X") should it be in the form "Religion: Roman Catholic" or "Religion "Roman Catholicism"? "Muslim" or "Islam"? "Buddhist" or "Buddhism"?
Note that while this mostly pertains to biographies, some organizations, schools and counties have a religion listed in the infobox. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 12:41, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
I propose a change in this content at Section headings. The blank line below the section heading is currently optional. I'd like to see it changed to mandatory.
To check the defaults, go to your talk page and push the "new section" tab, make a heading, and type a couple words of content. Then save it and reopen the editing window. You'll see that there is a blank line below the heading, and even a blank space before and after the words in the heading.
Note that none of these spacings make any difference in the final appearance of the page, but they make a difference in ease of editing for many editors. If you open an article in edit mode and scan the article, looking for a particular heading, or all headings, it's much easier to find them when they don't blend together with section content, as they do when there are no blank lines below the headings. There are just a whole lot of single blank lines. This change makes headings pop out at you.
This very simple change makes the editing experience easier, and that has merit. -- BullRangifer ( talk) 05:26, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Similar to the issue of book titles is the issue of authorship. I am thinking of the works of the distinguished American economist Deirdre McCloskey, born Donald. The possible issues here include all the obvious ones discussed above, plus the question of whether to mention that a first edition was by "Donald", the second by "Deirdre". References and citations are different from mere data, these are things people actually want to look up and track down. This question would apply to publications identified in the author's WP page (where our ideal reader will know what's going on) and outside that page (where our ideal reader is not expected to know what's going on).
This looks similar to the Walter/Wendy Carlos question regarding "Switched-On Bach", but I don't think it's really the same. Or maybe it is the same, but technical authorship instead of artistic authorship skews the question in a different way. Academic literature database lookup is an essential part of modern research. Do we want to tweak Template:cite to allow for now-known-as variants?
Obviously, "D. McCloskey" will often suffice for academic citations. I'd like to know what to do when it doesn't. Choor monster ( talk) 18:35, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
The purpose of references here on Wikipedia is for
verifiability. BLP/MOS:IDENTITY does not apply to citations. We are not academia, which may have different purposes and citation styles.
Wikipedia:Citing sources#Books clears up this issue: In effect, different editions of the same work can be considered different sources
, so expanding the citation to include multiple editions (double citing) is unnecessary at best, erroneous at worst.
WP:Page numbers covers that even if a different edition is provided, it may be in a different location within that (or missing per the latter guideline), simply adding another edition wouldn't work. Lastly, the spirit of
WP:CITEVAR covers
edit-warring over edition preference, stating, Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference
. While I personally think this matter is a non-issue per what I've just stated and my comments above, if this concern is deemed something of importance: Most of the reasons other(s) list above appearing to advocate for such a guideline, apply equally to all
name changes, not just those of certain groups. Therefore, all
name changes should be treated the same.—
Godsy(
TALK
CONT)
01:37, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
As an inclusionist I like my refs to include as much detail as I can lay my hands on. I don't mind adding extra author names. Or, take it a step further and update the citation templates to: |current1=|previous1=|current2=|previous2=| Cheers! ... Checkingfax ( Talk ) 22:32, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
This is not the correct forum to discuss this. Discuss this at Wikipedia:Citing sources. Jc3s5h ( talk) 21:37, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
In Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 4, 2015, "his" is lowercased in The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland, both in the article and in every ghit I've found so far. Thoughts? - Dank ( push to talk) 20:35, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
As seen here, here, here, and here, an editor ( Cebr1979) insists on adding commas to sentences such as "Marty Saybrooke is a fictional character from the American daytime drama, One Life to Live." My argument is that such sentences should not have the comma there. This was also stated in a different discussion, where others weighed in. Opinions from editors/watchers of this guideline and talk page would be much appreciated for sorting out this grammar aspect. Flyer22 ( talk) 04:24, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Note: SMcCandlish helped out with this matter at Talk:Marty Saybrooke#Improper comma usage. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 ( talk) 20:46, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
This is just how the English language is. A comma needs to be before the name. Ex:
Cebr1979 ( talk) 23:24, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
{{ Scottish English}} has been nominated for deletion; this is a MOS template -- 70.51.44.60 ( talk) 06:53, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
1) drinking glasses 2) eyeglasses 3) sunglasses 4) hourglasses. Do you see what I mean? -- Fandelasketchup ( talk) 10:32, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Good grief, why are we spending any time discussing this whatsoever? This is exactly why we have WP:ENGVAR. In articles written in American English or British/Commonwealth English, use the appropriate word for that variety of English. Trying to force an artificially common word into all varieties of English violates the spirit, if not the letter of ENGVAR, and this is not a worthwhile use of any editor's time, as the pedants among us will now attempt to replace the disfavored word(s). After all, it's not like 95% of our readers are unable to understand the meaning of eyeglasses, glasses or spectacles from the context; and frankly, most of our readers have probably encountered all three of these words and understand their meaning perfectly, even if the particular word is not the preferred choice in their own variety of English. Leave well enough alone, and stop trying to micromanage the dynamic English language. We're not French, and MOS is not the Académie française. Vive la difference. Dirtlawyer1 ( talk) 20:14, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
The suggestion in MOS:IDENTITY that "she fathered a child" should be replaced by a gender-neutral version "she became a parent" is absurd. If jarring text is to be avoided, it's the pronoun that needs to be changed or removed, not the biological verb changed to a legal verb. If the guideline is to require the current gender in pronouns, the pronoun needs to be removed, rather than the verb neutered. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 11:56, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
A recent edit has further expanded a section that I think has a dubious claim for inclusion—at least in the already over-large MOS central. Why do we need a smattering of examples of what is a complex and elaborate skill-set and knowledge-base for translating foreign text into English? As a gnome, I encounter much more troublesome features of our translations than a few "false friends". This section should be much shorter and just link to whatever style we (should) have on translating into English. Tony (talk) 00:38, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Compared to 2 years ago, there appear to be many Wikipedians now who disagree with the status quo of how Wikipedia deals with transgender people. Any reason it's becoming common now?? Georgia guy ( talk) 14:44, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
I have a memory of advice on the use of the symbol № and other replacements for "number", as in number 4, №4, #4 etc (see e.g. Nonna Mordyukova). Whereabouts would I find it? TIA Mr Stephen ( talk) 23:45, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
According to
MOS:LIST#List naming, "the precise inclusion criterion of the list should be spelled out in the lead section".
WP:LIST#List layout says: "Don't leave readers confused over the list's inclusion criteria or have editors guessing what may be added to the list." (The noun "
criterion" has the plural form "
criteria".)
WP:MOS is a list of style guidelines, but the current version (version of
03:21, 26 October 2015 [UTC) does not specify inclusion criteria. Ideally, it would contain every guideline that every editor should know: guidelines with frequent applications. (Ideally, its size would not be daunting to an editor who wishes to study all of it.) However, sometimes editors want it to include decisions made about matters with infrequent applications. (Understandably, they want it to settle disputes on those matters, but the possibilities for inclusion are almost limitless.)
Therefore, I propose that the introduction of WP:MOS include a brief mention of one or two criteria for limiting what can be included in the main page. I perceive that deciding on one or two inclusion criteria will not be easy, inasmuch as there is a degree of subjectivity involved. However, the benefits can be worth the effort.
—
Wavelength (
talk)
16:34, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
An artificially limiting set of inclusion criteria will simply result in increased conflict, as material that MOS should cover – because doing so resolves/prevents disputes, and/or results in better article prose – starts being targeted for removal by people wikilawyering the criteria, and material that MOS does not need, because it does not serve those purposes, starts being shoehorned in because it technically fits the criteria despite being useless to us. Any major, general-public style guide has hundreds, even thousands, of line-items that MOS does not have because they're not important or even applicable here, and MOS, being about how to write WP, not a magazine article or a journal paper, has advice not found anywhere else. It can't really be any other way. For those who want a more concise overview of MOS, see MOS:SIMPLIFIED.
I certainly agree that systematic study of MOS (and its subpages, and the naming conventions) provides a more thorough understandings of style on WP, but that would be true of anything, and doesn't really relate to whether MOS, alone out of all WP guidelines, should have some kind of "you can't/must include that here" pre-emptive inclusion criteria. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 01:19, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
MOS:REGISTER could work well in theory, except that it is not complete or consistently maintained. I agree it's a helpful tool for finding some parts of some prior discussions, but that's pretty much all it is. The primary tool is simply the archive search form and doing the mental-sweat work of digging the stuff up. But frankly there is way, way too much focus on "show me exactly where there was a previous RfC on this nit-pick, or I'm going to change MoS to say what I want it to say to suit my own pet peeves" behavior. [Cf. #MOS:ELLIPSIS thread below, for example.] That is not how WP works. Consensus, especially with regard to policies and guidelines, is often strongly tied to longevity of the point in question and how integral it has become to extant content and procedures. It cannot really be any other way: Changes to these pages can have serious consequences across thousands, even millions of articles, and long-standing rules, in any WP:POLICY pages should not be deleted, much less reversed, out of any kind of "correctness" campaign. Their stability is of more value than most any of their particulars, and they exist primarily to have something to agree on so we get the work done, instead of continuing to argue about what we should establish some rules about. No one is happy with every single rule in any complex system, and no single rule in such a system has universal support within it. Pretty much ever. It's the system as a synergistic whole that matters.
When it comes to MOS, this is especially true, since most style matters are essentially arbitrary; having established a rule is the important part, not which of several options the rule selected. When they are not arbitrary, then there's an even stronger reason not to undo them – not only would a major change be disruptive across innumerable articles for no real gain, if the rule in question was there for practical reasons, it will re-problematize long-settled problems. A major showing of site-wide consensus is thus necessary for sweeping changes with serious impact. A temporal local consensus of editors to push in some peeve-based change to MoS cannot trump a decade or more of consensus to do it a particular way. This is really a basic fact of how human organizations work. The productivity cost of imposing a change that does not suit overall organizational interests almost always outweighs the benefit that might result, in a localized way, from the change, no matter how strongly some individuals in the organization feel about pushing the change through. For example, this is why so few companies, even in the high-tech world, have switched to using Linux as a desktop operating system despite the various arguments in favor of doing so; the opportunity cost is too high.
The perennial double-vs-single quotation marks thing is a case in point. While it actually is not an accurate assessment that "the rule about double quotation marks only was based on the idea that single quotation marks mess up the search function in older browsers", even if we pretend for a moment that it was, the idea that consensus for it will have "lapsed" soon when the older browsers are effectively extinct is not plausible. The consensus lies in the site-wide implementation, not in one of the various reasons it was implemented in the first place. If we decide to take a road-trip to Vegas to see a particular show (and for other reasons), once we are in Vegas the trip is not suddenly off when it turns out the show was cancelled at the last minute; we have already arrived and work with the present situation, we don't turn around and drive back home, and then take a different road trip somewhere else.
"Official" doesn't make sense in this context; there is no office, and no officials were elected. Consensus formation process works the same at MOS as it does everywhere else here. Finally, "For most pages, consensus would be established by the weighted preponderance of reliable sources" is not a factual statement; that's true only of mainspace content, not "pages" generally, and certainly is not true of our internal "Wikipedia:"-namespace documentation. "The MoS is not held to as high a standard for sources as other articles are" doesn't even logically parse. MoS is not an article, so "other articles" is not a valid construction in that sentence, and the comparison it contains is of unlike things. Directly equivalent statement: "My cat is not held to as high a standard for equestrian ability as other horses are." — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 05:40, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Lauren Lapkus#Concerning the 4 characters that have caused such a fuss. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 05:22, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
In § Guidelines within Manual of Style we state "... see the sidebar at top right of this page." However, the sidebar is invisible when viewing the page in the mobile skin ( look). (See MediaWiki:Mobile.css; the sidebar is hidden due to its CSS class "vertical-navbox", if I am interpreting correctly.)
I can think of three possible approaches:
Comments? Thanks. – Wdchk ( talk) 04:30, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
At 21:41, 4 November 2015 (UTC), an anonymous editor
revised
WP:MOS#Abbreviations, replacing "US" with "UN" (substituting "UN" for "US"). I do not remember the reason for "US" being chosen previously, but it might have been chosen as a robust example, because US citizens have a tendency to include
full stops [periods] in some places where UK citizens do not include them.
This example of an edit illustrates an advantage that comes when editing of WP:MOS is limited to a specific group of editors, and a disadvantage that comes when new editors continually appear in the edit history. Editors experienced with the history of WP:MOS are more likely to remember the reasons for previous decisions, whereas new editors might easily (and with good intentions) overturn the results of long discussions.
I propose the insertion of
hidden text identifying archive pages and sections of previous discussions which led to specific decisions. For example, if the discussion leading editors to choose "US" is in section 10 of Archive 100, then the hidden text could be "100:10" or "A100:10". The hidden text could be placed immediately after the relevant passage in WP:MOS.
—
Wavelength (
talk)
03:39, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
Re: "This ... illustrates an advantage that comes when editing ... is limited to a specific group of editors, and a disadvantage that comes when new editors continually appear.... Editors experienced with the history of [the topic] are more likely to remember the reasons for previous decisions, whereas new editors might easily (and with good intentions) overturn the results of long discussions."
That's true of every conceivable topic, in or out of mainspace, and is not an MoS issue.
US and UN: Yes, the "US" example was put there for a reason, and surely the "UN" one put in its place in a well-meaning gesture of internationalization. Not a big deal, but proper to revers, as the examples do not illustrate the same thing. As for the underlying issue behind the "US" example, it's not really true that "US citizens have a tendency to include full stops [periods] in some places where UK citizens do not include them"
; rather US-based people steeped professionally in "U.S." as a conventional style (i.e. the U.S. government and fields directly tied to it, like the U.S. military and the American legal profession) have a tendency to use it even outside contexts in which is it actually conventional (i.e, irrespective of
register of use, and simply out of habit), while most other Americans, and most non-Americans, don't do it at all, especially in the post-IM / post-SMS world in which punctuation is increasingly eschewed when not necessary for clarity. Within a single generation, you can expect to see "U.S." being viewed as archaic as "to-day" and "coöperate", through exactly the same process that has rendered "A.T.M." and "U.N.E.S.C.O." obsolete renderings of "ATM" and "UNESCO". —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
07:46, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Today, the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage has mostly abandoned this, yet still insists on "U.S." for the United States any time it is abbreviated (except in longer initialisms like "USAF"), and does likewise for a handful of other "intrinsically American" initialisms like " G.O.P.", which competing style guides like that of the Los Angeles Times have been rendering "GOP" since the 1970s. The new edition of the NYT guide, the first in years, came out a couple of months ago and still says this, demonstrating its conservative approach to typography and language. Meanwhile, the more efficient and populist Associated Press Stylebook abandoned even "U.S." in headlines, several years ago, permitting it only in running prose. The combination of slipping usage in the AP Stylebook (the dominant journalism style book in the US by a very wide margin) and the no-dots style in virtually all non-US publications, and the overwhelming use of "US" in headlines and abstracts, as well as in running prose outside American newspapers and legal/regulatory material, has lead to "US" dominating in online sources that are not tied directly to traditional US newspaper publishers. (See August threads here for some external sourcing on that, for those who care.) Virtually no one writes "U.N." any more, or "U.A.E."; to the extent the style survives at all it's limited to "U.S." in certain American publishing contexts.
The now-obsolete 15th ed. (2003) is what MoS's own rule is based on, and is wishy-washy like ours, recommending "UK", "GDR", etc., consistently, except saying (in part) "U.S. traditionally appears with periods ... [which] may nonetheless be omitted in most contexts. Writers and editors need to weigh tradition against consistency."
This is a good illustration, BTW, of why MoS should not be explicitly based on external style guides vs. our own determinations through consensus (often considering multiple external style books, giving more weight to the reasoning and context behind their rules rather than their wording), arriving at an internal WP finding of what makes best sense for our context and readership. Paper style guides change randomly from edition to edition, for reasons that have nothing to do with WP's needs or audience, but primarily based on pressure from the editorial staff at big-name publishing companies in a particular market. As argued in a thread above, MoS should not be changing randomly to suit off-WP whims. If we were nuts enough to establish rules like "MoS punctuates following the recommendations of the CMoS", we'd be in a world of metaphoric fecal matter, having to change millions of lines of wikicode every few years simply to match what some essentially irrelevant off-WP book said.
If MoS changes to eschew "U.S.", it should be on the basis of an WP-internal rationale. Arriving at one is not challenging:
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 07:46, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Is there a way to access an automated list of sub pages? For example:
The ones I saw so far are informative and would like to read them all or have easy access to know which content types have them. Like for example does MOS for TV episodes match films regarding them being primary sources for themself? 64.228.90.179 ( talk) 01:37, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
MOS:NUMBERSIGN gives as its first Correct example: "Her album reached number 1 in the UK album charts." I don't think that's correct. If "number" is used then the numeral should be spelled out as well (one). But, I think that the other example: "Her album reached No. 1 in the UK album charts." is preferred, so it should be listed first. -- Musdan77 ( talk) 20:47, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
At 21:57, 19 August 2015 (UTC), Voidxor removed several shortcuts, using this edit summary.
At 16:35, 10 November 2015 (UTC), Danhash added three shortcuts to the subsection "Quotation marks", which already had one shortcut, using this edit summary.
Wikipedia:Shortcut#Link boxes (shortcut: WP:2SHORTCUTS) has this guideline.
— Wavelength ( talk) 18:02, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
I was just wondering, why is "WP:Manual of Style" title case? Per
WP:TITLEFORMAT, shouldn't it technically be sentence case? (I.e. "WP:Manual of style".) I apologize if this isn't the place for this type of question, or if there is already an explanation on the topic. Main reason I ask is because I'm helping craft a MOS guideline at a Wikia community, and was wondering if there's a reason Manual of Style is title case. Thanks,
User:Jacedc (
talk)
21:26, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
User:Jacedc (
talk)
23:55, 12 November 2015 (UTC)There is a dispute as to whether we should say "Donald Trump is a politician", "Ben Carson is a politician", and "Carly Fiorina is a politician". One side argues that anyone seeking office is a politician, while the other side cites common usage -- all three of the names listed above have multiple reliable sources that say they are "not a politician". Does the MOS give us guidance on this question? -- Guy Macon ( talk) 04:28, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
I created a disambiguation page at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Religion, indexing all the non-trivial MoS coverage of religion/faith/philosophy/scripture that I could easily locate, since people are apt to wonder where to find that stuff, and it is a bit scattered. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 19:18, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/New religious movements#Requested move 15 November 2015. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:35, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
As of November 2015 [update], the MOS states WP:MOS#Ellipses states "Pre-composed ellipsis character (…) generated with the … character entity or as a literal "…". This is harder to input and edit and too small in some fonts. Not recommended." Automated edits are being made that convert ellipsis (…) into sequences of three full-stops. This loses semantic information, and appears to do so on the basis of
For the latter, input mechanisms have moved on a lot eg. ISO 14755 entry. For the the former fonts provide a very carefully spaced ellipsis glyph (nb. normally wider, not small-er than a row of full-stops). Thus, the basis for preferring rows of full-stops over the correct semantic form seems doubly flawed. If there are no objections, I would proposed the following adjustment:
(This would remove the flawed/distracting perceptions about fonts and input mechanisms from the policy text). — Sladen ( talk) 21:54, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
…
have to be converted to three full stops, if this passes?
epic genius (
talk)
01:30, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
I've gone back through the history to try and track down where the additions of the Recommended/Not recommended came from. In October 2007 there was a replacement of ellipsis characters in the MoS itself with full-stops by an editor [4]. The same editor then replaced the (at the time) short/clear ellipsis policy with a longer version with significantly changed meaning. [5]. Some of the more extreme aspects were immediately reverted [6] by SMcCandlish in subsequent edits with some pretty strong words "That's just wrong…". There is reference to apparent discussion, which from the timeline is probably Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Ellipses revisited, but which does not appear to mention alleged problems with fonts, nor input mechanisms, nor most of the rest. Andreas Toth, [7] Goffrie [8] made further small corrections. Subsequently Andyvphil and atakdoug also expressed concern at some of what had changed in Wikipedia talk:Manual of Styl#Ellipses .E2.80.93 Proposal to expand_the treatment thereof. In the latter jacobolus expressed concern over "flimsy" arguments, [9] [10] and mms was around too. To those pinged here, are any of you able to shed any more light on this? Was it continued elsewhere— SMcCandlish does at one point note about taking an apparent dispute with the editor in question off privately, but I don't know if there was further discussion that wasn't documented. — Sladen ( talk) 21:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
If you have evidence that that rationales for the rule against the (for me, nearly impossible to make out) unicode ellipsis character are faulty, then present that evidence. It's a waste of time to try to "re-litigate" an eight-year-old consensus discussion on the merits of the arguments 8 years ago. If nothing else, it's a WP:DGAF matter. No one cares whether the arguments were good 8 years ago. We care what MoS should say now, based on arguments that make sense now. I see no case really presented for the benefit of using that character today. It's hard to read, hard to type, and may well still present font problems on some systems. Even if that last point is no longer true, it is not the only (present-day) rationale against that character. This is part of a wider-ranging set of issues, e.g. about using Unicode fraction characters and so on. Just because a character exists does not mean it is the ideal representation of something in an encyclopedia.
PS: The idea of a "leave-it-as-is" rule, like we have for spaced en-dash vs. unspaced em-dash, doesn't track. We have that rule because they're both universally recognized style approaches, well documented in most style guides; this isn't true of "…" vs. "..."; they're a different coding approach to what is intended to be parsed by the reader as the same thing; it has more in common with he choice of whether to use a "fi" ligature (fi) or not for kerning purposes. [Interestingly, it does not in fact render as a ligature in all fonts, and Google tells us that there may be accessibility concerns with those, too [11].] — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:55, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
[I moved a bit of this comment of mine to new sub-thread below. -SMcC.]'.........'
) is not the same as three ellipses ('………'
). Endashes ('—') and emdashes ('–') have semantic meanings different to rows of hyphens ('-'), and so their own distinct codepoints too. Not everyone can see the difference with every configuration, but we do do our best to get them encoded appropriately so that it is possible, and would likely discourage any bot trying to replaces emdashes with trigraphs of three hyphens ('---
') or endashes with digraphs of two hyphens ('--
'). I'm hopefully with a minimal wording change such as that suggested by
epic genius above we can reach a wording where the directly/correctly encoded form, or entity, does not appear to be prejudiced to the point that AWB/bot operators are tempted to try easy one-way conversions. Part of this may stem from the example style being different to the rest of the MoS, where instead of Good: …example/Bad: …example, whilst the ellipsis section presently has bold-face Recommended/Not recommended at the end of the line; with the bold-face appearing to overshadow the example itself. —
Sladen (
talk)
23:29, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
External searching brings up probably-relevant results: [12] [13] [14].
A similar issue came up very recently (August?) with regard to use of the hair space character,  
(rendered here between two em-dashes: — —, vs. two consecutive em-dashes: — —, and a thin-space between em-dashes: — —), which seems like a no-brainer for fonts to support, but many do not. I.e., it's unwise to make assumptions that a particular character is supported it if's not among the most used (–
, •
, etc.)
If someone actually wanted to test support of the ellipsis character, to do it adequately they'd need to set up virtual machines for at least Windows XP through 10, and MacOS X in various versions, plus various flavors of Unix, and NetBSD, just for starters, and check rendering of a webpage containing that character in various stock fonts in each OS. Doesn't seem like a practical use of anyone's time. Even if you already had all of these VMs handy, it would take many hours. I would hope that someone somewhere has already done some kind of Unicode font support tables for common "Web fonts" across multiple platforms, and by OS version. Hopefully something in this search is what we need.
The fact that reliable sources tell us that Unicode support for non-common characters is spotty and that their use can present accessibility problems should be sufficient for us to remain skeptical and exercise caution. No one is going to suffer any problem at all if their preferred "…" character gets replaced with "...", but the opposite may not be true.
The argument that the character conveys
semantic meaning, if I bought it, could make me philosophically inclined to support it, on principle (see parallel discussion among Drupal developers
[15]), but only if it's known to not be problematic at the font level, and only if it were done with a template wrapper that applies a CSS class so that those of use with crap vision can make it more legible with a slight font size or character width (transform-scale
[16]) increase. (And I don't buy the semantic argument, anyway; see above.) My earlier comment "Just because a character exists does not mean it is the ideal representation of something in an encyclopedia" is particularly salient in this regard. The use of WP as some kind of typography showcase has to take a distant back seat to getting information across to as many people as possible. The hint of semantic information allegedly lost in the translation from "Pi is 3.14159265…" with Unicode ellipsis to "Pi is 3.14159265..." with three dots is much less significant than the loss of parseability information ("this digit continues") in the failed rendering of "Pi is 3.14159265…" as something like "Pi is 3.14159265□" or "Pi is 3.14159265?" (depending on how the OS handles unknown characters). The actual output of the Unicode ellipsis is wildly inconsistent. In many of the fonts I use, it is almost indistinguishable from an underscore (_) with my eyesight, especially in a monospaced or narrow font, but in one I just tested, it's actually wider than three dots. This means that a template wrapper should not force a font-size increase, just apply a class people can adjust to suit their browser's usual font, and their eyes. It's also notable that the use of Unicode fractions actually interferes with many things, including templated math operations and the ability to copy-paste (or otherwise get at) the numbers in a way that can be operated on by external tools, (e.g. pasting into a calculator app, or exporting a WP table to a spreadsheet), so we devised {{
Frac}}
to do something visually like this but more functional. I.e., avoidance of Unicode can sometimes increase semantic value. An over-generalized approach of "Unicode can do this now, so we must do it with Unicode" is not valid. It's always going to be case-by-case. A strong argument can be made, for example, for using "–
", not the bare character "–" in wikicode, because in many fonts (especially monospaced ones in the editing window) it's impossible to tell the difference between "–" and "-". It's unfortunate that the "–" button in the editing tools cannot be configured (and isn't configured by default) to insert the character entity code instead of the bare symbol (especially since this may also interfere with editability on some Unix/Linux platforms when in a text browser, not that this comes up too often, I guess). —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
00:22, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
This is regarding a naming dispute at WP:VIDEOGAMES and the individual in question is a Swedish professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player for Ninjas in Pyjamas. Possible variations of an article title as seen in reliable and unreliable sources include:
-- Prisencolin ( talk) 15:15, 24 November 2015
![]() | 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 170 | ← | Archive 172 | Archive 173 | Archive 174 | Archive 175 | Archive 176 | → | Archive 180 |
When an info box contains a "religion = X" parameter (displays as Religion: X") should it be in the form "Religion: Roman Catholic" or "Religion "Roman Catholicism"? "Muslim" or "Islam"? "Buddhist" or "Buddhism"?
Note that while this mostly pertains to biographies, some organizations, schools and counties have a religion listed in the infobox. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 12:41, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
I propose a change in this content at Section headings. The blank line below the section heading is currently optional. I'd like to see it changed to mandatory.
To check the defaults, go to your talk page and push the "new section" tab, make a heading, and type a couple words of content. Then save it and reopen the editing window. You'll see that there is a blank line below the heading, and even a blank space before and after the words in the heading.
Note that none of these spacings make any difference in the final appearance of the page, but they make a difference in ease of editing for many editors. If you open an article in edit mode and scan the article, looking for a particular heading, or all headings, it's much easier to find them when they don't blend together with section content, as they do when there are no blank lines below the headings. There are just a whole lot of single blank lines. This change makes headings pop out at you.
This very simple change makes the editing experience easier, and that has merit. -- BullRangifer ( talk) 05:26, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Similar to the issue of book titles is the issue of authorship. I am thinking of the works of the distinguished American economist Deirdre McCloskey, born Donald. The possible issues here include all the obvious ones discussed above, plus the question of whether to mention that a first edition was by "Donald", the second by "Deirdre". References and citations are different from mere data, these are things people actually want to look up and track down. This question would apply to publications identified in the author's WP page (where our ideal reader will know what's going on) and outside that page (where our ideal reader is not expected to know what's going on).
This looks similar to the Walter/Wendy Carlos question regarding "Switched-On Bach", but I don't think it's really the same. Or maybe it is the same, but technical authorship instead of artistic authorship skews the question in a different way. Academic literature database lookup is an essential part of modern research. Do we want to tweak Template:cite to allow for now-known-as variants?
Obviously, "D. McCloskey" will often suffice for academic citations. I'd like to know what to do when it doesn't. Choor monster ( talk) 18:35, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
The purpose of references here on Wikipedia is for
verifiability. BLP/MOS:IDENTITY does not apply to citations. We are not academia, which may have different purposes and citation styles.
Wikipedia:Citing sources#Books clears up this issue: In effect, different editions of the same work can be considered different sources
, so expanding the citation to include multiple editions (double citing) is unnecessary at best, erroneous at worst.
WP:Page numbers covers that even if a different edition is provided, it may be in a different location within that (or missing per the latter guideline), simply adding another edition wouldn't work. Lastly, the spirit of
WP:CITEVAR covers
edit-warring over edition preference, stating, Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference
. While I personally think this matter is a non-issue per what I've just stated and my comments above, if this concern is deemed something of importance: Most of the reasons other(s) list above appearing to advocate for such a guideline, apply equally to all
name changes, not just those of certain groups. Therefore, all
name changes should be treated the same.—
Godsy(
TALK
CONT)
01:37, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
As an inclusionist I like my refs to include as much detail as I can lay my hands on. I don't mind adding extra author names. Or, take it a step further and update the citation templates to: |current1=|previous1=|current2=|previous2=| Cheers! ... Checkingfax ( Talk ) 22:32, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
This is not the correct forum to discuss this. Discuss this at Wikipedia:Citing sources. Jc3s5h ( talk) 21:37, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
In Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 4, 2015, "his" is lowercased in The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland, both in the article and in every ghit I've found so far. Thoughts? - Dank ( push to talk) 20:35, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
As seen here, here, here, and here, an editor ( Cebr1979) insists on adding commas to sentences such as "Marty Saybrooke is a fictional character from the American daytime drama, One Life to Live." My argument is that such sentences should not have the comma there. This was also stated in a different discussion, where others weighed in. Opinions from editors/watchers of this guideline and talk page would be much appreciated for sorting out this grammar aspect. Flyer22 ( talk) 04:24, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Note: SMcCandlish helped out with this matter at Talk:Marty Saybrooke#Improper comma usage. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 ( talk) 20:46, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
This is just how the English language is. A comma needs to be before the name. Ex:
Cebr1979 ( talk) 23:24, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
{{ Scottish English}} has been nominated for deletion; this is a MOS template -- 70.51.44.60 ( talk) 06:53, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
1) drinking glasses 2) eyeglasses 3) sunglasses 4) hourglasses. Do you see what I mean? -- Fandelasketchup ( talk) 10:32, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Good grief, why are we spending any time discussing this whatsoever? This is exactly why we have WP:ENGVAR. In articles written in American English or British/Commonwealth English, use the appropriate word for that variety of English. Trying to force an artificially common word into all varieties of English violates the spirit, if not the letter of ENGVAR, and this is not a worthwhile use of any editor's time, as the pedants among us will now attempt to replace the disfavored word(s). After all, it's not like 95% of our readers are unable to understand the meaning of eyeglasses, glasses or spectacles from the context; and frankly, most of our readers have probably encountered all three of these words and understand their meaning perfectly, even if the particular word is not the preferred choice in their own variety of English. Leave well enough alone, and stop trying to micromanage the dynamic English language. We're not French, and MOS is not the Académie française. Vive la difference. Dirtlawyer1 ( talk) 20:14, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
The suggestion in MOS:IDENTITY that "she fathered a child" should be replaced by a gender-neutral version "she became a parent" is absurd. If jarring text is to be avoided, it's the pronoun that needs to be changed or removed, not the biological verb changed to a legal verb. If the guideline is to require the current gender in pronouns, the pronoun needs to be removed, rather than the verb neutered. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 11:56, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
A recent edit has further expanded a section that I think has a dubious claim for inclusion—at least in the already over-large MOS central. Why do we need a smattering of examples of what is a complex and elaborate skill-set and knowledge-base for translating foreign text into English? As a gnome, I encounter much more troublesome features of our translations than a few "false friends". This section should be much shorter and just link to whatever style we (should) have on translating into English. Tony (talk) 00:38, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Compared to 2 years ago, there appear to be many Wikipedians now who disagree with the status quo of how Wikipedia deals with transgender people. Any reason it's becoming common now?? Georgia guy ( talk) 14:44, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
I have a memory of advice on the use of the symbol № and other replacements for "number", as in number 4, №4, #4 etc (see e.g. Nonna Mordyukova). Whereabouts would I find it? TIA Mr Stephen ( talk) 23:45, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
According to
MOS:LIST#List naming, "the precise inclusion criterion of the list should be spelled out in the lead section".
WP:LIST#List layout says: "Don't leave readers confused over the list's inclusion criteria or have editors guessing what may be added to the list." (The noun "
criterion" has the plural form "
criteria".)
WP:MOS is a list of style guidelines, but the current version (version of
03:21, 26 October 2015 [UTC) does not specify inclusion criteria. Ideally, it would contain every guideline that every editor should know: guidelines with frequent applications. (Ideally, its size would not be daunting to an editor who wishes to study all of it.) However, sometimes editors want it to include decisions made about matters with infrequent applications. (Understandably, they want it to settle disputes on those matters, but the possibilities for inclusion are almost limitless.)
Therefore, I propose that the introduction of WP:MOS include a brief mention of one or two criteria for limiting what can be included in the main page. I perceive that deciding on one or two inclusion criteria will not be easy, inasmuch as there is a degree of subjectivity involved. However, the benefits can be worth the effort.
—
Wavelength (
talk)
16:34, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
An artificially limiting set of inclusion criteria will simply result in increased conflict, as material that MOS should cover – because doing so resolves/prevents disputes, and/or results in better article prose – starts being targeted for removal by people wikilawyering the criteria, and material that MOS does not need, because it does not serve those purposes, starts being shoehorned in because it technically fits the criteria despite being useless to us. Any major, general-public style guide has hundreds, even thousands, of line-items that MOS does not have because they're not important or even applicable here, and MOS, being about how to write WP, not a magazine article or a journal paper, has advice not found anywhere else. It can't really be any other way. For those who want a more concise overview of MOS, see MOS:SIMPLIFIED.
I certainly agree that systematic study of MOS (and its subpages, and the naming conventions) provides a more thorough understandings of style on WP, but that would be true of anything, and doesn't really relate to whether MOS, alone out of all WP guidelines, should have some kind of "you can't/must include that here" pre-emptive inclusion criteria. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 01:19, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
MOS:REGISTER could work well in theory, except that it is not complete or consistently maintained. I agree it's a helpful tool for finding some parts of some prior discussions, but that's pretty much all it is. The primary tool is simply the archive search form and doing the mental-sweat work of digging the stuff up. But frankly there is way, way too much focus on "show me exactly where there was a previous RfC on this nit-pick, or I'm going to change MoS to say what I want it to say to suit my own pet peeves" behavior. [Cf. #MOS:ELLIPSIS thread below, for example.] That is not how WP works. Consensus, especially with regard to policies and guidelines, is often strongly tied to longevity of the point in question and how integral it has become to extant content and procedures. It cannot really be any other way: Changes to these pages can have serious consequences across thousands, even millions of articles, and long-standing rules, in any WP:POLICY pages should not be deleted, much less reversed, out of any kind of "correctness" campaign. Their stability is of more value than most any of their particulars, and they exist primarily to have something to agree on so we get the work done, instead of continuing to argue about what we should establish some rules about. No one is happy with every single rule in any complex system, and no single rule in such a system has universal support within it. Pretty much ever. It's the system as a synergistic whole that matters.
When it comes to MOS, this is especially true, since most style matters are essentially arbitrary; having established a rule is the important part, not which of several options the rule selected. When they are not arbitrary, then there's an even stronger reason not to undo them – not only would a major change be disruptive across innumerable articles for no real gain, if the rule in question was there for practical reasons, it will re-problematize long-settled problems. A major showing of site-wide consensus is thus necessary for sweeping changes with serious impact. A temporal local consensus of editors to push in some peeve-based change to MoS cannot trump a decade or more of consensus to do it a particular way. This is really a basic fact of how human organizations work. The productivity cost of imposing a change that does not suit overall organizational interests almost always outweighs the benefit that might result, in a localized way, from the change, no matter how strongly some individuals in the organization feel about pushing the change through. For example, this is why so few companies, even in the high-tech world, have switched to using Linux as a desktop operating system despite the various arguments in favor of doing so; the opportunity cost is too high.
The perennial double-vs-single quotation marks thing is a case in point. While it actually is not an accurate assessment that "the rule about double quotation marks only was based on the idea that single quotation marks mess up the search function in older browsers", even if we pretend for a moment that it was, the idea that consensus for it will have "lapsed" soon when the older browsers are effectively extinct is not plausible. The consensus lies in the site-wide implementation, not in one of the various reasons it was implemented in the first place. If we decide to take a road-trip to Vegas to see a particular show (and for other reasons), once we are in Vegas the trip is not suddenly off when it turns out the show was cancelled at the last minute; we have already arrived and work with the present situation, we don't turn around and drive back home, and then take a different road trip somewhere else.
"Official" doesn't make sense in this context; there is no office, and no officials were elected. Consensus formation process works the same at MOS as it does everywhere else here. Finally, "For most pages, consensus would be established by the weighted preponderance of reliable sources" is not a factual statement; that's true only of mainspace content, not "pages" generally, and certainly is not true of our internal "Wikipedia:"-namespace documentation. "The MoS is not held to as high a standard for sources as other articles are" doesn't even logically parse. MoS is not an article, so "other articles" is not a valid construction in that sentence, and the comparison it contains is of unlike things. Directly equivalent statement: "My cat is not held to as high a standard for equestrian ability as other horses are." — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 05:40, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Lauren Lapkus#Concerning the 4 characters that have caused such a fuss. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 05:22, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
In § Guidelines within Manual of Style we state "... see the sidebar at top right of this page." However, the sidebar is invisible when viewing the page in the mobile skin ( look). (See MediaWiki:Mobile.css; the sidebar is hidden due to its CSS class "vertical-navbox", if I am interpreting correctly.)
I can think of three possible approaches:
Comments? Thanks. – Wdchk ( talk) 04:30, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
At 21:41, 4 November 2015 (UTC), an anonymous editor
revised
WP:MOS#Abbreviations, replacing "US" with "UN" (substituting "UN" for "US"). I do not remember the reason for "US" being chosen previously, but it might have been chosen as a robust example, because US citizens have a tendency to include
full stops [periods] in some places where UK citizens do not include them.
This example of an edit illustrates an advantage that comes when editing of WP:MOS is limited to a specific group of editors, and a disadvantage that comes when new editors continually appear in the edit history. Editors experienced with the history of WP:MOS are more likely to remember the reasons for previous decisions, whereas new editors might easily (and with good intentions) overturn the results of long discussions.
I propose the insertion of
hidden text identifying archive pages and sections of previous discussions which led to specific decisions. For example, if the discussion leading editors to choose "US" is in section 10 of Archive 100, then the hidden text could be "100:10" or "A100:10". The hidden text could be placed immediately after the relevant passage in WP:MOS.
—
Wavelength (
talk)
03:39, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
Re: "This ... illustrates an advantage that comes when editing ... is limited to a specific group of editors, and a disadvantage that comes when new editors continually appear.... Editors experienced with the history of [the topic] are more likely to remember the reasons for previous decisions, whereas new editors might easily (and with good intentions) overturn the results of long discussions."
That's true of every conceivable topic, in or out of mainspace, and is not an MoS issue.
US and UN: Yes, the "US" example was put there for a reason, and surely the "UN" one put in its place in a well-meaning gesture of internationalization. Not a big deal, but proper to revers, as the examples do not illustrate the same thing. As for the underlying issue behind the "US" example, it's not really true that "US citizens have a tendency to include full stops [periods] in some places where UK citizens do not include them"
; rather US-based people steeped professionally in "U.S." as a conventional style (i.e. the U.S. government and fields directly tied to it, like the U.S. military and the American legal profession) have a tendency to use it even outside contexts in which is it actually conventional (i.e, irrespective of
register of use, and simply out of habit), while most other Americans, and most non-Americans, don't do it at all, especially in the post-IM / post-SMS world in which punctuation is increasingly eschewed when not necessary for clarity. Within a single generation, you can expect to see "U.S." being viewed as archaic as "to-day" and "coöperate", through exactly the same process that has rendered "A.T.M." and "U.N.E.S.C.O." obsolete renderings of "ATM" and "UNESCO". —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
07:46, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Today, the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage has mostly abandoned this, yet still insists on "U.S." for the United States any time it is abbreviated (except in longer initialisms like "USAF"), and does likewise for a handful of other "intrinsically American" initialisms like " G.O.P.", which competing style guides like that of the Los Angeles Times have been rendering "GOP" since the 1970s. The new edition of the NYT guide, the first in years, came out a couple of months ago and still says this, demonstrating its conservative approach to typography and language. Meanwhile, the more efficient and populist Associated Press Stylebook abandoned even "U.S." in headlines, several years ago, permitting it only in running prose. The combination of slipping usage in the AP Stylebook (the dominant journalism style book in the US by a very wide margin) and the no-dots style in virtually all non-US publications, and the overwhelming use of "US" in headlines and abstracts, as well as in running prose outside American newspapers and legal/regulatory material, has lead to "US" dominating in online sources that are not tied directly to traditional US newspaper publishers. (See August threads here for some external sourcing on that, for those who care.) Virtually no one writes "U.N." any more, or "U.A.E."; to the extent the style survives at all it's limited to "U.S." in certain American publishing contexts.
The now-obsolete 15th ed. (2003) is what MoS's own rule is based on, and is wishy-washy like ours, recommending "UK", "GDR", etc., consistently, except saying (in part) "U.S. traditionally appears with periods ... [which] may nonetheless be omitted in most contexts. Writers and editors need to weigh tradition against consistency."
This is a good illustration, BTW, of why MoS should not be explicitly based on external style guides vs. our own determinations through consensus (often considering multiple external style books, giving more weight to the reasoning and context behind their rules rather than their wording), arriving at an internal WP finding of what makes best sense for our context and readership. Paper style guides change randomly from edition to edition, for reasons that have nothing to do with WP's needs or audience, but primarily based on pressure from the editorial staff at big-name publishing companies in a particular market. As argued in a thread above, MoS should not be changing randomly to suit off-WP whims. If we were nuts enough to establish rules like "MoS punctuates following the recommendations of the CMoS", we'd be in a world of metaphoric fecal matter, having to change millions of lines of wikicode every few years simply to match what some essentially irrelevant off-WP book said.
If MoS changes to eschew "U.S.", it should be on the basis of an WP-internal rationale. Arriving at one is not challenging:
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 07:46, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Is there a way to access an automated list of sub pages? For example:
The ones I saw so far are informative and would like to read them all or have easy access to know which content types have them. Like for example does MOS for TV episodes match films regarding them being primary sources for themself? 64.228.90.179 ( talk) 01:37, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
MOS:NUMBERSIGN gives as its first Correct example: "Her album reached number 1 in the UK album charts." I don't think that's correct. If "number" is used then the numeral should be spelled out as well (one). But, I think that the other example: "Her album reached No. 1 in the UK album charts." is preferred, so it should be listed first. -- Musdan77 ( talk) 20:47, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
At 21:57, 19 August 2015 (UTC), Voidxor removed several shortcuts, using this edit summary.
At 16:35, 10 November 2015 (UTC), Danhash added three shortcuts to the subsection "Quotation marks", which already had one shortcut, using this edit summary.
Wikipedia:Shortcut#Link boxes (shortcut: WP:2SHORTCUTS) has this guideline.
— Wavelength ( talk) 18:02, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
I was just wondering, why is "WP:Manual of Style" title case? Per
WP:TITLEFORMAT, shouldn't it technically be sentence case? (I.e. "WP:Manual of style".) I apologize if this isn't the place for this type of question, or if there is already an explanation on the topic. Main reason I ask is because I'm helping craft a MOS guideline at a Wikia community, and was wondering if there's a reason Manual of Style is title case. Thanks,
User:Jacedc (
talk)
21:26, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
User:Jacedc (
talk)
23:55, 12 November 2015 (UTC)There is a dispute as to whether we should say "Donald Trump is a politician", "Ben Carson is a politician", and "Carly Fiorina is a politician". One side argues that anyone seeking office is a politician, while the other side cites common usage -- all three of the names listed above have multiple reliable sources that say they are "not a politician". Does the MOS give us guidance on this question? -- Guy Macon ( talk) 04:28, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
I created a disambiguation page at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Religion, indexing all the non-trivial MoS coverage of religion/faith/philosophy/scripture that I could easily locate, since people are apt to wonder where to find that stuff, and it is a bit scattered. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 19:18, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/New religious movements#Requested move 15 November 2015. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:35, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
As of November 2015 [update], the MOS states WP:MOS#Ellipses states "Pre-composed ellipsis character (…) generated with the … character entity or as a literal "…". This is harder to input and edit and too small in some fonts. Not recommended." Automated edits are being made that convert ellipsis (…) into sequences of three full-stops. This loses semantic information, and appears to do so on the basis of
For the latter, input mechanisms have moved on a lot eg. ISO 14755 entry. For the the former fonts provide a very carefully spaced ellipsis glyph (nb. normally wider, not small-er than a row of full-stops). Thus, the basis for preferring rows of full-stops over the correct semantic form seems doubly flawed. If there are no objections, I would proposed the following adjustment:
(This would remove the flawed/distracting perceptions about fonts and input mechanisms from the policy text). — Sladen ( talk) 21:54, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
…
have to be converted to three full stops, if this passes?
epic genius (
talk)
01:30, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
I've gone back through the history to try and track down where the additions of the Recommended/Not recommended came from. In October 2007 there was a replacement of ellipsis characters in the MoS itself with full-stops by an editor [4]. The same editor then replaced the (at the time) short/clear ellipsis policy with a longer version with significantly changed meaning. [5]. Some of the more extreme aspects were immediately reverted [6] by SMcCandlish in subsequent edits with some pretty strong words "That's just wrong…". There is reference to apparent discussion, which from the timeline is probably Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Ellipses revisited, but which does not appear to mention alleged problems with fonts, nor input mechanisms, nor most of the rest. Andreas Toth, [7] Goffrie [8] made further small corrections. Subsequently Andyvphil and atakdoug also expressed concern at some of what had changed in Wikipedia talk:Manual of Styl#Ellipses .E2.80.93 Proposal to expand_the treatment thereof. In the latter jacobolus expressed concern over "flimsy" arguments, [9] [10] and mms was around too. To those pinged here, are any of you able to shed any more light on this? Was it continued elsewhere— SMcCandlish does at one point note about taking an apparent dispute with the editor in question off privately, but I don't know if there was further discussion that wasn't documented. — Sladen ( talk) 21:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
If you have evidence that that rationales for the rule against the (for me, nearly impossible to make out) unicode ellipsis character are faulty, then present that evidence. It's a waste of time to try to "re-litigate" an eight-year-old consensus discussion on the merits of the arguments 8 years ago. If nothing else, it's a WP:DGAF matter. No one cares whether the arguments were good 8 years ago. We care what MoS should say now, based on arguments that make sense now. I see no case really presented for the benefit of using that character today. It's hard to read, hard to type, and may well still present font problems on some systems. Even if that last point is no longer true, it is not the only (present-day) rationale against that character. This is part of a wider-ranging set of issues, e.g. about using Unicode fraction characters and so on. Just because a character exists does not mean it is the ideal representation of something in an encyclopedia.
PS: The idea of a "leave-it-as-is" rule, like we have for spaced en-dash vs. unspaced em-dash, doesn't track. We have that rule because they're both universally recognized style approaches, well documented in most style guides; this isn't true of "…" vs. "..."; they're a different coding approach to what is intended to be parsed by the reader as the same thing; it has more in common with he choice of whether to use a "fi" ligature (fi) or not for kerning purposes. [Interestingly, it does not in fact render as a ligature in all fonts, and Google tells us that there may be accessibility concerns with those, too [11].] — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:55, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
[I moved a bit of this comment of mine to new sub-thread below. -SMcC.]'.........'
) is not the same as three ellipses ('………'
). Endashes ('—') and emdashes ('–') have semantic meanings different to rows of hyphens ('-'), and so their own distinct codepoints too. Not everyone can see the difference with every configuration, but we do do our best to get them encoded appropriately so that it is possible, and would likely discourage any bot trying to replaces emdashes with trigraphs of three hyphens ('---
') or endashes with digraphs of two hyphens ('--
'). I'm hopefully with a minimal wording change such as that suggested by
epic genius above we can reach a wording where the directly/correctly encoded form, or entity, does not appear to be prejudiced to the point that AWB/bot operators are tempted to try easy one-way conversions. Part of this may stem from the example style being different to the rest of the MoS, where instead of Good: …example/Bad: …example, whilst the ellipsis section presently has bold-face Recommended/Not recommended at the end of the line; with the bold-face appearing to overshadow the example itself. —
Sladen (
talk)
23:29, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
External searching brings up probably-relevant results: [12] [13] [14].
A similar issue came up very recently (August?) with regard to use of the hair space character,  
(rendered here between two em-dashes: — —, vs. two consecutive em-dashes: — —, and a thin-space between em-dashes: — —), which seems like a no-brainer for fonts to support, but many do not. I.e., it's unwise to make assumptions that a particular character is supported it if's not among the most used (–
, •
, etc.)
If someone actually wanted to test support of the ellipsis character, to do it adequately they'd need to set up virtual machines for at least Windows XP through 10, and MacOS X in various versions, plus various flavors of Unix, and NetBSD, just for starters, and check rendering of a webpage containing that character in various stock fonts in each OS. Doesn't seem like a practical use of anyone's time. Even if you already had all of these VMs handy, it would take many hours. I would hope that someone somewhere has already done some kind of Unicode font support tables for common "Web fonts" across multiple platforms, and by OS version. Hopefully something in this search is what we need.
The fact that reliable sources tell us that Unicode support for non-common characters is spotty and that their use can present accessibility problems should be sufficient for us to remain skeptical and exercise caution. No one is going to suffer any problem at all if their preferred "…" character gets replaced with "...", but the opposite may not be true.
The argument that the character conveys
semantic meaning, if I bought it, could make me philosophically inclined to support it, on principle (see parallel discussion among Drupal developers
[15]), but only if it's known to not be problematic at the font level, and only if it were done with a template wrapper that applies a CSS class so that those of use with crap vision can make it more legible with a slight font size or character width (transform-scale
[16]) increase. (And I don't buy the semantic argument, anyway; see above.) My earlier comment "Just because a character exists does not mean it is the ideal representation of something in an encyclopedia" is particularly salient in this regard. The use of WP as some kind of typography showcase has to take a distant back seat to getting information across to as many people as possible. The hint of semantic information allegedly lost in the translation from "Pi is 3.14159265…" with Unicode ellipsis to "Pi is 3.14159265..." with three dots is much less significant than the loss of parseability information ("this digit continues") in the failed rendering of "Pi is 3.14159265…" as something like "Pi is 3.14159265□" or "Pi is 3.14159265?" (depending on how the OS handles unknown characters). The actual output of the Unicode ellipsis is wildly inconsistent. In many of the fonts I use, it is almost indistinguishable from an underscore (_) with my eyesight, especially in a monospaced or narrow font, but in one I just tested, it's actually wider than three dots. This means that a template wrapper should not force a font-size increase, just apply a class people can adjust to suit their browser's usual font, and their eyes. It's also notable that the use of Unicode fractions actually interferes with many things, including templated math operations and the ability to copy-paste (or otherwise get at) the numbers in a way that can be operated on by external tools, (e.g. pasting into a calculator app, or exporting a WP table to a spreadsheet), so we devised {{
Frac}}
to do something visually like this but more functional. I.e., avoidance of Unicode can sometimes increase semantic value. An over-generalized approach of "Unicode can do this now, so we must do it with Unicode" is not valid. It's always going to be case-by-case. A strong argument can be made, for example, for using "–
", not the bare character "–" in wikicode, because in many fonts (especially monospaced ones in the editing window) it's impossible to tell the difference between "–" and "-". It's unfortunate that the "–" button in the editing tools cannot be configured (and isn't configured by default) to insert the character entity code instead of the bare symbol (especially since this may also interfere with editability on some Unix/Linux platforms when in a text browser, not that this comes up too often, I guess). —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
00:22, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
This is regarding a naming dispute at WP:VIDEOGAMES and the individual in question is a Swedish professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player for Ninjas in Pyjamas. Possible variations of an article title as seen in reliable and unreliable sources include:
-- Prisencolin ( talk) 15:15, 24 November 2015