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This one comes up from time to time and I was wondering whether it was worth dealing with it once and for all. The problem is that the value of
WP:MOSTIES as currently written and of having individual templates for so many purported
sub-types of English is not clear. Yes all these varieties of English (and more) exist when it comes to informal spoken English and dialect, but there are only a limited number of "types" of standard English when it comes to the formal, written language. The main distinction understood across the world is between "British" and "American" English and mostly relates to not much more than a few minor spelling, grammar and vocabulary differences, as well as date formatting (and with vocabulary, WP aims to find common ground anyway; plus the occasional presense of a "foreign" term – or local term, depending on your perspective – doesn't suddenly mean we are dealing with a whole new variety or style of English, just as the presence of the occasional technical term doesn't). The purpose of these templates should be simply to explain what style readers can expect to see and what style editors need to follow when adding content.
However, they seem to be more about declaring national ownership of topics and creating multiple walled gardens within WP than helping with the above; indeed they arguably add confusion, because on seeing them, people might wonder whether there are further differences that they are not aware of between "XX English" and a more familiar standard (per the above, invariably there are not anyway). Equally, several of them talk about the article using "XX dialect", which is completely misleading, suggesting as it does that the page should use local slang or informal terms.
In actual, practical terms, all that are really needed are the Engvar A, B, C and O templates, perhaps with a couple of additional ones and some variation to the text, eg to say probably at most three or four templates which say something like: " .. uses American-style spelling (labor, traveled etc), grammar (write me) and date formatting (mdy), and sometimes vocabulary (sidewalk etc)" and " .. uses British/Commonwealth-style spelling (labour, travelled), grammar (write to me) and date formatting (dmy), and sometimes vocabulary (pavement etc)" etc. The rest of these can probably be deleted, and
WP:ENGVAR amended accordingly, as all of them are, in effect, covered under one or other of the composite ones. I guess this might require an RFC here and a TFD debate as well but would be interested in others' thoughts first. Just to repeat, this is about the practical issues involved when it comes to formal writing, not some kind of crusade to deny the existence of other variations in English.
N-HH
talk/
edits 10:12, 31 October 2016 (UTC) Wording amended post-discussion to make point clearer for posterity, FWIW. Relying on Engvar A, B etc to make point caused distraction, not least because it's not 100% clear what they mean currently.
N-HH
talk/
edits 09:50, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
TLDR: are 20-odd different "national" templates really needed to explain to readers and contributors what spelling etc rules a page is following? N-HH talk/ edits 10:19, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
PS: If anyone thought I was making a fallacious slippery-slope argument, they'd be wrong, since we already have templates of all the sorts I just provided hypothetical examples of, including city (Hong Kong), subnational (Scottish), small island (Barbados), and unofficial ESL (Israel, which has only 2% of its population as native speakers of English, mostly recent American emigrés). For starters, any such templates used on less that 100 articles already should just be WP:TFDed as pointless. If a combined British/Commonwealth one isn't practical, they can at least be compressed regionally, e.g. Au/NZ, and the three or four African ones. Even the articles on things like Nigerian English indicate no difference from other dialects other than absorption/invention of some local vocabulary, which is true of all, even very local, dialects. WP needs to delete most of these, and consolidate the remainders in ways that discourage the creation of more territoriality-forking. A side problem we tried to resolve about 2 years ago, and got consensus for here, but then a canvassing effort derailed it later, was to combined the various different sorts of these templates into a single one for each Eng. var., and lower-key than the present huge banners which just seem to serve a "only editors from X are welcome at this article" claim-staking purpose. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 09:54, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
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The Australian government has published a style guide, Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers. Wikipedians (or anyone else) aren't required to follow it, and MoS isn't likely to be changed by it, any more than it is by The Canadian Style and other "nationalist" guides. The principal value in these is identifying spelling and vocabulary differences, not trying to derive grammatical or punctuation "rules", which are more dependent on target publishing market than anything else. Actual Australians' opinions on the merits of the government book, and their willingness to go along with it, vary widely. There are also alternatives, e.g. The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide, adapted from the UK one by its original editor, and diverging very little between these versions. I have a copy of the most recent editions (that I'm aware of) of both of these, at painful shipping expense (exceeded the cover price of the books). Nothing in them that I've seen suggests .au English is so different from .uk English in formal, written form that they're incompatible enough to warrant big template warnings about which ENGVAR is used, so that British people don't accidentally to Briticisation violence to an Australian article or vice versa. To the extent any non-vocabulary-trend differences can be identified at all, they're actually all covered by the divergences between various competing British style guides. That is, the .au ones do not seem to have hit upon anything "uniquely Australian". If they have, it's so minor and obscure it's unlikely to affect WP editing. Any fiddling with commas and such is much more likely to be either a) editorial judgement based on writing preferences that pre-date the .au govt. book, or b) MoS compliance. The important dialectal differences between Commonwealth varieties (aside from Canadian, which is a mish-mash of American and British with some French influences) are mostly a matter of regional-culture vocabulary, and most of those are colloquial. Same goes with divergence of Irish English and whatnot from English English. If any group of dialects was poised to take off in its own direction (in a formal not just colloquial register) any time soon, it was probably the South Asian cluster, since there are actual grammatical differences that seem to be evolving, though these too are widely regarded as colloquial at present (e.g. "The software allows to edit PDFs.", a dropping of the verb's object with which we're all familiar via Asian-sourced technical documentation). But a written divergence on the scale of the historical US<UK split is not likely to happen to South Asian English in our lifetimes after all. Nor is the already-wide colloquial split between British English proper and the English of the British and formerly-British Caribbean likely to transform into a clearly distinct formal Caribbean English. The Internet has not only slowed dialectal divergence, it's erasing some bits of it, and is even increasing cross-dialectal assimilation of innovations at all levels. For example, aside from noting that British slang like "gingers" for "red-haired people" sometimes becomes assimilated almost overnight into US English via easy availability of popular UK TV shows over the Internet, I've also observed a sharp increase in object-free "allows to" in American and British technical writing, inherited directly from South Asian material over just the last five years or so [the vector probably being "app markets"], though still largely confined to product documentation and marketing. But neither "gingers" nor "allows to" are encyclopedic writing matters, being too colloquial. The real ENGVAR disputes on WP are usually around mass-conversion (or proposed conversion) of American -ize / -or / -er / -ile / Dr. patterns to or from Commonwealth/British -ise / -our / -re / -ilst / Dr (or Oxford-variant -ize / -our / -re / -ilst / Dr ), and similar "you're doing it all wrong" dialect whitewashing. I think this still gives us basically three global dialect clusters we need concern ourselves about at the templating level: 1) US; 2) British/Commonwealth [ignoring the exact politico-legal definition of Commonwealth of Nations membership], with Oxford variant, and 3) Canadian, to the extent that .ca usage has finally more-or-less settled on an -ize / -our / -re / -ile / Dr. hybrid after numerous national surveys have brought about increased consistency in .ca style guides over the last generation, though not without controversy (especially over Dr. versus Dr and -ize versus -ise, but with near unanimity on how to spell colour and theatre, and no preference for whilst). |
There is a relevant style/title discussion @ Talk:Mk 14 Enhanced Battle Rifle. Primergrey ( talk) 02:16, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Source text:
Bierstadt Lake is surrounded by a thick pine forest, and is ringed by sedges that give it a very serene appearance.
Wikipedia prose:
A dense pine forest encircles Bierstadt Lake, and the lake "is ringed by sedges that give it a very serene appearance."
This MOS:LQ statement says to put the period inside: "Include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks only if it was present in the original material, and otherwise place it after the closing quotation mark."
This MOS:LQ statement says to put the period outside: "If the quotation is a full sentence and it coincides with the end of the sentence containing it, place terminal punctuation inside the closing quotation mark. If the quotation is a single word or fragment, place the terminal punctuation outside."
Give-and-take is a good thing at Wikipedia, but useful compromise does not mean creating self-contradictory guidelines. How would you go about resolving this problem? RfC? ― Mandruss ☎ 19:40, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
onlyin the first of your extracts from MOS:LQ. It does not say "Include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks if it was present in the original material". It is attempting to impose a condition, namely that only if the terminal punctuation was present in the original material should it be included within the quotation marks. It would be better to word the first extract in the negative: "Do not include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks if it was not present in the original material; if it was not, place it after the closing quotation mark."
Bierstadt Lake has been described as having "a very serene appearance".But whether this is what was intended or not is another matter! Peter coxhead ( talk) 21:48, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
Did Darla say, "There I am?"?
No, she said, "Where am I?".— Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitch Ames ( talk • contribs) 04:08, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
"I like vanilla," she wrote.
"I like vanilla", she wrote.
"I like vanilla.", she wrote.
"I like vanilla," she wrote.The comma inside the quotation marks replaces the full stop that was there in the original. Suppose instead she actually wrote "I like vanilla but not in coffee." Then, again in some versions of LQ, it's correct (although misleading as a quotation) to write
"I like vanilla", she wrote."Obsessive? Sure. Irrelevant to 99.9% of Wikipedia editors? Sure. Should we waste time arguing about it? No. It's not the issue Mandruss raised, which is lack of clarity. Peter coxhead ( talk) 10:42, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
I'd change MOS:LQ to: Include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks only if it was present in the original material and is grammatically required by the quoted text; otherwise place it after the closing quotation mark.
So I'd write:
A dense pine forest encircles Bierstadt Lake, and the lake "is ringed by sedges that give it a very serene appearance".
The full stop is outside the quotes because all though it is present in the original text it is not grammatically part of or required by the quote - the quoted text is not a full sentence, so does not require a quoted full stop. This is consistent with Keep them inside the quotation marks if they apply only to the quoted material and outside if they apply to the whole sentence.
In this case the full stop terminates the entire Wikipedia prose sentence, not "only the quoted material".
Mitch Ames (
talk) 04:24, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
putting [the period] outside suggests to me that the quoted sentence did not end there"— On the contrary, the point of LQ is that the absence of the period inside the quote does not imply anything about the original text other than what is actually quoted. The source text could have been "... and is ringed by sedges that give it a very serene appearance, reminiscent of ..." and it would not matter; the Wikipedia prose would be just as correct and have exactly the same meaning. Mitch Ames ( talk) 05:55, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
To respond to this entire thread at once:
I'll collapse-box it, so incoming peeps can focus on the proposal below
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— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:43, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
Let's not start the whole argument about LQ itself again. ( EEng is quite right to be sarcastic about the time that has been wasted on this.)
Mandruss has identified a lack of clarity in MOS:LQ. It arises for two reasons which require two changes:
Do not include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks unless it was present in the original material; if it was not, place it after the closing quotation mark.
short phraseand then add
When longer terminal parts of sentences are quoted, editorial judgement should be used.
Peter coxhead ( talk) 10:26, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
... it was present in the original material and is grammatically required by the quoted text.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitch Ames ( talk • contribs) 14:07, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
I don't understand your "will lead to editors unnecessarily including terminal punctuation" concern. Can you provide examples of that? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 12:47, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
anything ending in "just because."— OK that make sense. My main concern is that - given the option - some editors might simply put the terminating punctuation inside the quotes because it seemed clearer to them because they were used to American style. Being "clearer" might be a subjective thing. Mitch Ames ( talk) 13:12, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
I notice that some Wikipedia articles attempt to apostrophize Latin taxonomic names (e.g., "Salix alba's leaves" rather than "the leaves of Salix alba.") The latter is favored by scientific literature (e.g., Animal Diversity Web). The apostrophe creates a conflict between English and Latin syntax (alba is an adjective) and can result in absurd constructions such as Rattus osgoodi's where osgoodi is already a possessive (Osgood's rat). If there is agreement that such a guideline is desirable, where in the style manual could it be placed?
Ecol53 ( talk) 02:44, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
Source: I've pored over Scientific Style and Format (8th ed.), our go-to source off WP for scientific writing rules.
Regarding a specific example in MOS:ENDASH:
Do not change hyphens to dashes in filenames, URLs or templates like
{{ Bibleverse}}
, which formats verse ranges into URLs.
(Emphasis added.) In my experience with {{
Bibleverse}}
, en dashes have no effect on the URLs because the URLs only link to the first verse in a range. E.g., there is no effective difference between
Genesis 1:1–2 and
Genesis 1:1–2—the same URL (
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis#1:1 ) is generated in each instance. I’m not familiar with other templates, but this may also be the case elsewhere.
May we reword the example to allow en dashes with {{
Bibleverse}}
, and any other templates that are unaffected by the inclusion of en dashes? —
DocWatson42 (
talk) 05:50, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
One template that the use of an en dash does break is {{
Convert}}
, but in that case the hyphen used to indicate
a range of values is automatically (ahem) converted to an en dash in the output.—
DocWatson42 (
talk) 03:29, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
I just noticed that Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Military history is redirecting to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history. This strikes me as wholly inappropriate for something that has been designated a site-wide guideline and part of MoS. As far as I know it is the only MoS talk page to which such a thing has been done. I would propose that it be given its own actual talk page, per standard operating procedure. (An alternative would be considering the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Military history page itself to be a wikiproject advice essay and moving it to something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Style advice, but I doubt that would be a popular option. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 12:56, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
PS: The guideline also opens with the wording "The Military history WikiProject's style guide is ..." which is also inappropriate. Either it's a Wikipedia guideline, or it's a wikiproject advice essay. There is no such thing as a wikiproject-controlled page that's a guideline. Even WP:BLP, WP:BIO, and MOS:BIO are not "claim-staked" by WP:WikiProject Biography, other than having a declaration by talk-page banner that they're within that wikiproject's scope of interest. Other more topical MoS pages like MOS:JAPAN, MOS:ISLAM, etc., also make no such wikiproject " ownership" claims. [I did find one other that does, MOS:COMICS, but it has been slated for revision and cleanup for over a year, because it has naming convention stuff commingled into it, needs to split into separate MOS and NC pages, and has been the subject of a lot of back-and-forth squabbling on its talk page about its specifics, probably more so than any other topical MOS page in recent memory. The MOS:MIL page is under no such cloud of "how do we fix this thing?" turmoil.]
I would suggest that the compromise for the latter issue is to take the approach used at MOS:CUE, which begins with "This is a style guide for articles that come within the scope of WikiProject Cue sports". This clarifies the scope of the guideline, "advertises" the wikiproject to potentially interested editors, yet makes no inappropriate insinuation of special authority imbued in a particular topic interest group of editors. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 13:33, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
This is a style guide for articlesThe talk page includes a link to the WikiProject. Mitch Ames ( talk) 01:39, 8 November 2016 (UTC)that come within the scope of WikiProject Cue sportsabout cue sports.
The question: Which of the following is correct?
1. the President-elect of the United States
2. the president-elect of the United States
The discussion:
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#the P/president-elect of the United States
Please comment there. Thank you for your service. ― Mandruss ☎ 18:10, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
The article is written in British English, and that doesn't seem likely to change, so our saying here that it should be written in either British or Irish English seems inappropriate. The article does not mention Britain, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, the United Kingdom or the UK (the only instances of the word "United" are two instances of "United States"). The United Kingdom is on course to leave the EU. If the article has strong national ties to any particular English-speaking country at this point, it is Ireland, but our citing it here as an example of WP:TIES would necessitate changing the variety the article uses. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 23:16, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Comments are welcome on an RfC over at Talk:Michael Portillo (once a prominent British politician). The question concerns whether the infoboxes of politicians ought to contain predecessors and successors, in keeping with other articles, or whether the MoS doctrine of 'less is more' means that such information should be excluded from the infobox. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Specto73 ( talk) 23:38, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
I was surprised to find in an audit of my recent edits and a sampling of random pages that approximately 15% of articles contain one or more curly quotes or apostrophes. There have been previous discussions ( 2005, more 2005, 2010, 2016) on the problems with curlies. While promoting curlies has always been rejected I'd like to know how much support there is for MOS:CURLY in discouraging use of curlies or even a partial purge of curlies from mainspace.
Full disclosure: I use dial-up, 20 year old hardware and occasionally use a text-based web-browser. Just to say that editors like myself exist as an active part of the Wikipedia community. Also, I've been doing a lot of apostrophe-related typo fixes.
I would appreciate input on the following approaches:
Like most, I didn't think that curlies were too big of a problem. However, it could be pervasive, effecting some 700k articles. And it wouldn't hurt to inform the small minority of editors introducing curlies into articles. If it's agreed that there are problems with curlies, why not fix it? I'd appreciate your thoughts. - Reidgreg ( talk) 17:22, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
A somewhat related issue I came across today is AWB, as a part of general clean-up, changing ″ and ′ to ″ and ′ respectively. Since these are hard to distinguish from quotation marks visually (curly or straight, depending on the font) I wonder if AWB should be allowed to do this. Jc3s5h ( talk) 17:09, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
::I agree too. What should we make the bot do about a possible copyvio?
Phil
roc
My contribs 13:20, 7 October 2016 (UTC) Actually, I agree with @
Reidgreg: on the fact that if we use curlies as a copyvio indicator, there will be a lot of false positives.
Phil
roc
My contribs 13:25, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
<q>...</q>
has been added to my to-do list. I think it would be desirable for numerous reasons to markup up inline quotation with this element and to allow people who insist on curly quotes in their output get them. However, this won't do anything for non-quotation uses of quotation marks, e.g. "scare quotes", song titles, etc. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 07:32, 3 October 2016 (UTC)@ Reidgreg: @ EEng: @ Herostratus: @ Oknazevad: @ Mr Stephen: @ Jc3s5h: @ Mirokado: @ SMcCandlish: @ Hoary: @ Tony1: Hey, maybe we could make the bot put in this template that I made that tells people that there are curlies that need to be replaced, but also says that curlies are an indicator of a possible copyvio, and that the article needs to be checked as well. Phil roc My contribs 14:29, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
As an aside, don't forget that (if you are going to start this) there are several other glyphs that should usually be replaced. We have, in no particular order but starting with the commonest
plus at least two Arabic glyphs that look very similar, and the guillemots. Some of these come in from cut-and-paste, but some are added at the keyboard. The primes also have a valid (in the MOS sense) use, of course. Mr Stephen ( talk) 22:07, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
@ EEng: Now you have your information. So which source should we trust, my estimate from AWB or an insource search? Phil roc My contribs 12:26, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
OK, got that. I will not be at my PC until later today. I will have a look. Yes, I used the longer list but in my experience the great majority of curly quote s are the ordinary ones. Mr Stephen ( talk) 10:00, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
I've decided to download the database dump, except on a 1TB hard drive. I'll get back to you later after I search for curlies. Phil roc My contribs 21:49, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Here we go then, 25 in 200 pages, so 12.5%. Of those 25, Olia Lialina, Amer Fort and Warren Sonbert used unusual quotes, the rest looked like ordinary curlys to me. Mr Stephen ( talk) 22:24, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Create a Bot to automate the looking for and copypaste change of the curlies listed above (right single quotation mark, left single quotation mark, left double quotation mark, right double quotation mark, etc.) following the guideline MOS:CURLY.
I noticed our article on
The Wachowskis implies that Lana outed "her sister" in 2012, four years before Lilly came out. This seems problematic. The relevant section is
The Wachowskis#Lana's gender transition, and the text I'm especially concerned about is she and her sister are both generally shy qbout the news media and prefer to maintain their privacy
. The use of the present tense in an indirect quotation from 2012 is a problem in general (not the case here, but we don't know if such statements are still accurate) but its use here heavily implies that Lana referred to Lilly as "my sister" at that time.
Is this an IAR scenario, or should we just convert it to a direct quotation (perhaps with square brackets to clarify that referring to Lilly as female is Wikipedia's wording and not the wording used by her sister in 2012), or should we clarify the point here?
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 05:21, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
if it's a choice between making movies or not doing press, we decided we're not going to not make movieswas meant to be
if it's a choice between making movies or not doing press, we decided we're not going to make movies.
We have MOS:HONORIFIC and WP:PBUH, and more generally WP:RNPOV and WP:WORDS, but no guideline specifically discouraging epithets outside Islam-related topics, such as "(the) Holy Bible", "(the) Holy Rigveda", "Lord Shiva" and others, which clearly violate NPOV as they come across as quaint at best to readers who do not adhere to the religion in question. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 00:05, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
Anyone willing to weigh in on a discussion about italics vs. quotation marks at the Cougar (slang) article? See Talk:Cougar (slang)#Quotation mark or italic to denote words as words? When and how to use?. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 09:29, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
Under Capital letters/Celestial bodies, the example sentence "The Moon orbits the Earth" is given. Under the same heading on the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters main page, the same example is given as "the Moon orbits Earth". I removed "the" before "Earth" on this page so it would match the main page but my edit was undone. Seems to me they should match. To me, saying "the Earth" (Earth used as a proper name) is like saying "the Mars". Also, "the" is superfluous since it can be removed without hurting the meaning of the sentence. Just trying to keep things logical & consistent. Unknowntouncertain ( talk) 04:51, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
My issue is only with "the" before capitalized "Earth". Saying "the earth" is fine. Unknowntouncertain ( talk) 05:34, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
Or, better yet, "the moon of Earth". Unknowntouncertain ( talk) 06:46, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
WP:THE#Other cases explicitly says: "Definite and indefinite articles should generally be avoided in cases not mentioned above. For example, ... Earth, not The Earth." Mitch Ames ( talk) 06:23, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
@ EEng: Why did you do this revert? Is it controversial in some way? The linked guideline clearly states that infoboxes are neither prescribed nor proscribed. It is saying on a style guideline whether to have them or not is a style issue. Thus, it comes under the genernal proscription of not unnecessarily switching styles and belongs on the list. I saw this as merely summarising existing guidelines and entirely uncontroversial. Do you disagree?
You reverted my edit in its entirety, not just the infobox addition. Do you object to some other aspect of my edit, or is it only the infobox issue? Spinning Spark 11:14, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
In view of the history, I thought I should not be too bold, but I believe the wording
is unclear, if not incorrect. I propose changing it to
The examples already illustrate the main point:
The capitalization of proper names would normally be obvious, but probably needs to be stated explicitly because of the rules on taxonomic species names. I was trying to think of an example with a proper adjective. However, I see that dog breeds like "Old German Shepherd" are capitalized (all words), so perhaps we should leave sleeping Alsatians lie and not bother with an example. -- Boson ( talk) 20:04, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
Support syntactic rewrite, but with grammatical correction of "that part is" to "those parts are" (plurality agreement with "they" and the rest of the paragraph, about names in the plural). While "capitalized where they contain proper names" is exact ("Przewalski's horse" and "fair-maid-of-France" only have one spot each where they contain a proper name, "Przewalski" and "France", respectively), the wording is maybe a bit academic and might not be understood by everyone as having the precise meaning intended.
History: Yes, this was added because it applies to vernacular names but not specific epithets (a change that came about mid-20th century; you can actually find old sources that give things like Andrias Davidianus for Andrias davidianus). There was some concern that people would mix things up, and in fact during discussions about MOS:LIFE, there were occasional posts along the lines "Surely you don't mean it should be 'canada goose'!?!?" While that was hyperbolic posturing, just being clear on the matter nips that kind of stuff in the bud. BTW, the "where they contain proper names" has been there since the original formulation in 2007 [5].
Breed capitalization: Yes, please don't wake the sleeping "breed caps" giant. While not everyone agrees with it, on WP or in RS, capitalization is being done consistently if informally on WP for
standardized animal breeds and plant
cultivars, and nearly every regular editor of domestic animal and plant articles would oppose a change to lower-case, leading to a repeat of the "species caps" drama of 2008–2014, but magnified tenfold. The formality level has increased some, with
WP:RM routinely siding with capitalization for
WP:CONSISTENCY reasons. Maybe this makes it a slow-moving
WP:FAITACCOMPLI, but it is what it is. Downcasing would run into complications immediately, such as the fact that the
International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants requires cultivar (plant breed) names to be capitalized. The
WP:SSF argument can only be taken so far; in some cases what was a specialist usage has become the dominant one. While no such standard exists for zoological breeding, and publications like newspapers lean toward "German shepherd" not "German Shepherd", this is in flux (capitalization is increasing), and the capitalization is a de facto standard in breeder, fancier, agricultural, etc., publications. Going against it for animals would result in having an inconsistent approach to animal versus plant breeds on Wikipedia, which is highly undesirable. Another issue is that most breeds contain a proper-name element in their names, so most will be capitalized anyway, and it can take nontrivial research to figure out whether one does or does not. It's just simpler and lower-drama to capitalize them. Anyway, I have neutrally(?) analyzed the major pro/con points of that debate
here, if you want a look at how unlikely it would be for a clear consensus to emerge to downcase breeds (an idea I initially supported). Anyway, MOS:LIFE's examples are sculpted carefully to address every common sort of "group of lifeforms" (species, genus, landrace, dog and horse "type", etc.), except it studiously avoids standardized breeds/cultivars. Attempting to insert an MoS rule to capitalize them, instead of just leaving it alone, might raise a big stink, from a different quarter than and to a lesser degree than inserting a rule to lowercase them. But we may need to address this eventually; for one thing, it is the sole issue that has held up the expanded
MOS:ORGANISMS in draft state for years. Given that ArbCom just heard two or three MoS-related
WP:ARCAs back to back, I would suggest leaving it alone longer.
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 09:19, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
Hi. I recently quoted the principle of MOS:COMMONALITY on a talkpage in the Wiktionary and someone claimed that "MOS:COMMONALITY is a Wikipedia policy. This is Wiktionary." Is this correct? Thank you. Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia ( talk) 21:22, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
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This one comes up from time to time and I was wondering whether it was worth dealing with it once and for all. The problem is that the value of
WP:MOSTIES as currently written and of having individual templates for so many purported
sub-types of English is not clear. Yes all these varieties of English (and more) exist when it comes to informal spoken English and dialect, but there are only a limited number of "types" of standard English when it comes to the formal, written language. The main distinction understood across the world is between "British" and "American" English and mostly relates to not much more than a few minor spelling, grammar and vocabulary differences, as well as date formatting (and with vocabulary, WP aims to find common ground anyway; plus the occasional presense of a "foreign" term – or local term, depending on your perspective – doesn't suddenly mean we are dealing with a whole new variety or style of English, just as the presence of the occasional technical term doesn't). The purpose of these templates should be simply to explain what style readers can expect to see and what style editors need to follow when adding content.
However, they seem to be more about declaring national ownership of topics and creating multiple walled gardens within WP than helping with the above; indeed they arguably add confusion, because on seeing them, people might wonder whether there are further differences that they are not aware of between "XX English" and a more familiar standard (per the above, invariably there are not anyway). Equally, several of them talk about the article using "XX dialect", which is completely misleading, suggesting as it does that the page should use local slang or informal terms.
In actual, practical terms, all that are really needed are the Engvar A, B, C and O templates, perhaps with a couple of additional ones and some variation to the text, eg to say probably at most three or four templates which say something like: " .. uses American-style spelling (labor, traveled etc), grammar (write me) and date formatting (mdy), and sometimes vocabulary (sidewalk etc)" and " .. uses British/Commonwealth-style spelling (labour, travelled), grammar (write to me) and date formatting (dmy), and sometimes vocabulary (pavement etc)" etc. The rest of these can probably be deleted, and
WP:ENGVAR amended accordingly, as all of them are, in effect, covered under one or other of the composite ones. I guess this might require an RFC here and a TFD debate as well but would be interested in others' thoughts first. Just to repeat, this is about the practical issues involved when it comes to formal writing, not some kind of crusade to deny the existence of other variations in English.
N-HH
talk/
edits 10:12, 31 October 2016 (UTC) Wording amended post-discussion to make point clearer for posterity, FWIW. Relying on Engvar A, B etc to make point caused distraction, not least because it's not 100% clear what they mean currently.
N-HH
talk/
edits 09:50, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
TLDR: are 20-odd different "national" templates really needed to explain to readers and contributors what spelling etc rules a page is following? N-HH talk/ edits 10:19, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
PS: If anyone thought I was making a fallacious slippery-slope argument, they'd be wrong, since we already have templates of all the sorts I just provided hypothetical examples of, including city (Hong Kong), subnational (Scottish), small island (Barbados), and unofficial ESL (Israel, which has only 2% of its population as native speakers of English, mostly recent American emigrés). For starters, any such templates used on less that 100 articles already should just be WP:TFDed as pointless. If a combined British/Commonwealth one isn't practical, they can at least be compressed regionally, e.g. Au/NZ, and the three or four African ones. Even the articles on things like Nigerian English indicate no difference from other dialects other than absorption/invention of some local vocabulary, which is true of all, even very local, dialects. WP needs to delete most of these, and consolidate the remainders in ways that discourage the creation of more territoriality-forking. A side problem we tried to resolve about 2 years ago, and got consensus for here, but then a canvassing effort derailed it later, was to combined the various different sorts of these templates into a single one for each Eng. var., and lower-key than the present huge banners which just seem to serve a "only editors from X are welcome at this article" claim-staking purpose. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 09:54, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
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The Australian government has published a style guide, Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers. Wikipedians (or anyone else) aren't required to follow it, and MoS isn't likely to be changed by it, any more than it is by The Canadian Style and other "nationalist" guides. The principal value in these is identifying spelling and vocabulary differences, not trying to derive grammatical or punctuation "rules", which are more dependent on target publishing market than anything else. Actual Australians' opinions on the merits of the government book, and their willingness to go along with it, vary widely. There are also alternatives, e.g. The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide, adapted from the UK one by its original editor, and diverging very little between these versions. I have a copy of the most recent editions (that I'm aware of) of both of these, at painful shipping expense (exceeded the cover price of the books). Nothing in them that I've seen suggests .au English is so different from .uk English in formal, written form that they're incompatible enough to warrant big template warnings about which ENGVAR is used, so that British people don't accidentally to Briticisation violence to an Australian article or vice versa. To the extent any non-vocabulary-trend differences can be identified at all, they're actually all covered by the divergences between various competing British style guides. That is, the .au ones do not seem to have hit upon anything "uniquely Australian". If they have, it's so minor and obscure it's unlikely to affect WP editing. Any fiddling with commas and such is much more likely to be either a) editorial judgement based on writing preferences that pre-date the .au govt. book, or b) MoS compliance. The important dialectal differences between Commonwealth varieties (aside from Canadian, which is a mish-mash of American and British with some French influences) are mostly a matter of regional-culture vocabulary, and most of those are colloquial. Same goes with divergence of Irish English and whatnot from English English. If any group of dialects was poised to take off in its own direction (in a formal not just colloquial register) any time soon, it was probably the South Asian cluster, since there are actual grammatical differences that seem to be evolving, though these too are widely regarded as colloquial at present (e.g. "The software allows to edit PDFs.", a dropping of the verb's object with which we're all familiar via Asian-sourced technical documentation). But a written divergence on the scale of the historical US<UK split is not likely to happen to South Asian English in our lifetimes after all. Nor is the already-wide colloquial split between British English proper and the English of the British and formerly-British Caribbean likely to transform into a clearly distinct formal Caribbean English. The Internet has not only slowed dialectal divergence, it's erasing some bits of it, and is even increasing cross-dialectal assimilation of innovations at all levels. For example, aside from noting that British slang like "gingers" for "red-haired people" sometimes becomes assimilated almost overnight into US English via easy availability of popular UK TV shows over the Internet, I've also observed a sharp increase in object-free "allows to" in American and British technical writing, inherited directly from South Asian material over just the last five years or so [the vector probably being "app markets"], though still largely confined to product documentation and marketing. But neither "gingers" nor "allows to" are encyclopedic writing matters, being too colloquial. The real ENGVAR disputes on WP are usually around mass-conversion (or proposed conversion) of American -ize / -or / -er / -ile / Dr. patterns to or from Commonwealth/British -ise / -our / -re / -ilst / Dr (or Oxford-variant -ize / -our / -re / -ilst / Dr ), and similar "you're doing it all wrong" dialect whitewashing. I think this still gives us basically three global dialect clusters we need concern ourselves about at the templating level: 1) US; 2) British/Commonwealth [ignoring the exact politico-legal definition of Commonwealth of Nations membership], with Oxford variant, and 3) Canadian, to the extent that .ca usage has finally more-or-less settled on an -ize / -our / -re / -ile / Dr. hybrid after numerous national surveys have brought about increased consistency in .ca style guides over the last generation, though not without controversy (especially over Dr. versus Dr and -ize versus -ise, but with near unanimity on how to spell colour and theatre, and no preference for whilst). |
There is a relevant style/title discussion @ Talk:Mk 14 Enhanced Battle Rifle. Primergrey ( talk) 02:16, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Source text:
Bierstadt Lake is surrounded by a thick pine forest, and is ringed by sedges that give it a very serene appearance.
Wikipedia prose:
A dense pine forest encircles Bierstadt Lake, and the lake "is ringed by sedges that give it a very serene appearance."
This MOS:LQ statement says to put the period inside: "Include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks only if it was present in the original material, and otherwise place it after the closing quotation mark."
This MOS:LQ statement says to put the period outside: "If the quotation is a full sentence and it coincides with the end of the sentence containing it, place terminal punctuation inside the closing quotation mark. If the quotation is a single word or fragment, place the terminal punctuation outside."
Give-and-take is a good thing at Wikipedia, but useful compromise does not mean creating self-contradictory guidelines. How would you go about resolving this problem? RfC? ― Mandruss ☎ 19:40, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
onlyin the first of your extracts from MOS:LQ. It does not say "Include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks if it was present in the original material". It is attempting to impose a condition, namely that only if the terminal punctuation was present in the original material should it be included within the quotation marks. It would be better to word the first extract in the negative: "Do not include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks if it was not present in the original material; if it was not, place it after the closing quotation mark."
Bierstadt Lake has been described as having "a very serene appearance".But whether this is what was intended or not is another matter! Peter coxhead ( talk) 21:48, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
Did Darla say, "There I am?"?
No, she said, "Where am I?".— Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitch Ames ( talk • contribs) 04:08, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
"I like vanilla," she wrote.
"I like vanilla", she wrote.
"I like vanilla.", she wrote.
"I like vanilla," she wrote.The comma inside the quotation marks replaces the full stop that was there in the original. Suppose instead she actually wrote "I like vanilla but not in coffee." Then, again in some versions of LQ, it's correct (although misleading as a quotation) to write
"I like vanilla", she wrote."Obsessive? Sure. Irrelevant to 99.9% of Wikipedia editors? Sure. Should we waste time arguing about it? No. It's not the issue Mandruss raised, which is lack of clarity. Peter coxhead ( talk) 10:42, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
I'd change MOS:LQ to: Include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks only if it was present in the original material and is grammatically required by the quoted text; otherwise place it after the closing quotation mark.
So I'd write:
A dense pine forest encircles Bierstadt Lake, and the lake "is ringed by sedges that give it a very serene appearance".
The full stop is outside the quotes because all though it is present in the original text it is not grammatically part of or required by the quote - the quoted text is not a full sentence, so does not require a quoted full stop. This is consistent with Keep them inside the quotation marks if they apply only to the quoted material and outside if they apply to the whole sentence.
In this case the full stop terminates the entire Wikipedia prose sentence, not "only the quoted material".
Mitch Ames (
talk) 04:24, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
putting [the period] outside suggests to me that the quoted sentence did not end there"— On the contrary, the point of LQ is that the absence of the period inside the quote does not imply anything about the original text other than what is actually quoted. The source text could have been "... and is ringed by sedges that give it a very serene appearance, reminiscent of ..." and it would not matter; the Wikipedia prose would be just as correct and have exactly the same meaning. Mitch Ames ( talk) 05:55, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
To respond to this entire thread at once:
I'll collapse-box it, so incoming peeps can focus on the proposal below
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— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:43, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
Let's not start the whole argument about LQ itself again. ( EEng is quite right to be sarcastic about the time that has been wasted on this.)
Mandruss has identified a lack of clarity in MOS:LQ. It arises for two reasons which require two changes:
Do not include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks unless it was present in the original material; if it was not, place it after the closing quotation mark.
short phraseand then add
When longer terminal parts of sentences are quoted, editorial judgement should be used.
Peter coxhead ( talk) 10:26, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
... it was present in the original material and is grammatically required by the quoted text.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitch Ames ( talk • contribs) 14:07, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
I don't understand your "will lead to editors unnecessarily including terminal punctuation" concern. Can you provide examples of that? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 12:47, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
anything ending in "just because."— OK that make sense. My main concern is that - given the option - some editors might simply put the terminating punctuation inside the quotes because it seemed clearer to them because they were used to American style. Being "clearer" might be a subjective thing. Mitch Ames ( talk) 13:12, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
I notice that some Wikipedia articles attempt to apostrophize Latin taxonomic names (e.g., "Salix alba's leaves" rather than "the leaves of Salix alba.") The latter is favored by scientific literature (e.g., Animal Diversity Web). The apostrophe creates a conflict between English and Latin syntax (alba is an adjective) and can result in absurd constructions such as Rattus osgoodi's where osgoodi is already a possessive (Osgood's rat). If there is agreement that such a guideline is desirable, where in the style manual could it be placed?
Ecol53 ( talk) 02:44, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
Source: I've pored over Scientific Style and Format (8th ed.), our go-to source off WP for scientific writing rules.
Regarding a specific example in MOS:ENDASH:
Do not change hyphens to dashes in filenames, URLs or templates like
{{ Bibleverse}}
, which formats verse ranges into URLs.
(Emphasis added.) In my experience with {{
Bibleverse}}
, en dashes have no effect on the URLs because the URLs only link to the first verse in a range. E.g., there is no effective difference between
Genesis 1:1–2 and
Genesis 1:1–2—the same URL (
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis#1:1 ) is generated in each instance. I’m not familiar with other templates, but this may also be the case elsewhere.
May we reword the example to allow en dashes with {{
Bibleverse}}
, and any other templates that are unaffected by the inclusion of en dashes? —
DocWatson42 (
talk) 05:50, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
One template that the use of an en dash does break is {{
Convert}}
, but in that case the hyphen used to indicate
a range of values is automatically (ahem) converted to an en dash in the output.—
DocWatson42 (
talk) 03:29, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
I just noticed that Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Military history is redirecting to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history. This strikes me as wholly inappropriate for something that has been designated a site-wide guideline and part of MoS. As far as I know it is the only MoS talk page to which such a thing has been done. I would propose that it be given its own actual talk page, per standard operating procedure. (An alternative would be considering the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Military history page itself to be a wikiproject advice essay and moving it to something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Style advice, but I doubt that would be a popular option. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 12:56, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
PS: The guideline also opens with the wording "The Military history WikiProject's style guide is ..." which is also inappropriate. Either it's a Wikipedia guideline, or it's a wikiproject advice essay. There is no such thing as a wikiproject-controlled page that's a guideline. Even WP:BLP, WP:BIO, and MOS:BIO are not "claim-staked" by WP:WikiProject Biography, other than having a declaration by talk-page banner that they're within that wikiproject's scope of interest. Other more topical MoS pages like MOS:JAPAN, MOS:ISLAM, etc., also make no such wikiproject " ownership" claims. [I did find one other that does, MOS:COMICS, but it has been slated for revision and cleanup for over a year, because it has naming convention stuff commingled into it, needs to split into separate MOS and NC pages, and has been the subject of a lot of back-and-forth squabbling on its talk page about its specifics, probably more so than any other topical MOS page in recent memory. The MOS:MIL page is under no such cloud of "how do we fix this thing?" turmoil.]
I would suggest that the compromise for the latter issue is to take the approach used at MOS:CUE, which begins with "This is a style guide for articles that come within the scope of WikiProject Cue sports". This clarifies the scope of the guideline, "advertises" the wikiproject to potentially interested editors, yet makes no inappropriate insinuation of special authority imbued in a particular topic interest group of editors. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 13:33, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
This is a style guide for articlesThe talk page includes a link to the WikiProject. Mitch Ames ( talk) 01:39, 8 November 2016 (UTC)that come within the scope of WikiProject Cue sportsabout cue sports.
The question: Which of the following is correct?
1. the President-elect of the United States
2. the president-elect of the United States
The discussion:
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#the P/president-elect of the United States
Please comment there. Thank you for your service. ― Mandruss ☎ 18:10, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
The article is written in British English, and that doesn't seem likely to change, so our saying here that it should be written in either British or Irish English seems inappropriate. The article does not mention Britain, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, the United Kingdom or the UK (the only instances of the word "United" are two instances of "United States"). The United Kingdom is on course to leave the EU. If the article has strong national ties to any particular English-speaking country at this point, it is Ireland, but our citing it here as an example of WP:TIES would necessitate changing the variety the article uses. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 23:16, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Comments are welcome on an RfC over at Talk:Michael Portillo (once a prominent British politician). The question concerns whether the infoboxes of politicians ought to contain predecessors and successors, in keeping with other articles, or whether the MoS doctrine of 'less is more' means that such information should be excluded from the infobox. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Specto73 ( talk) 23:38, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
I was surprised to find in an audit of my recent edits and a sampling of random pages that approximately 15% of articles contain one or more curly quotes or apostrophes. There have been previous discussions ( 2005, more 2005, 2010, 2016) on the problems with curlies. While promoting curlies has always been rejected I'd like to know how much support there is for MOS:CURLY in discouraging use of curlies or even a partial purge of curlies from mainspace.
Full disclosure: I use dial-up, 20 year old hardware and occasionally use a text-based web-browser. Just to say that editors like myself exist as an active part of the Wikipedia community. Also, I've been doing a lot of apostrophe-related typo fixes.
I would appreciate input on the following approaches:
Like most, I didn't think that curlies were too big of a problem. However, it could be pervasive, effecting some 700k articles. And it wouldn't hurt to inform the small minority of editors introducing curlies into articles. If it's agreed that there are problems with curlies, why not fix it? I'd appreciate your thoughts. - Reidgreg ( talk) 17:22, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
A somewhat related issue I came across today is AWB, as a part of general clean-up, changing ″ and ′ to ″ and ′ respectively. Since these are hard to distinguish from quotation marks visually (curly or straight, depending on the font) I wonder if AWB should be allowed to do this. Jc3s5h ( talk) 17:09, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
::I agree too. What should we make the bot do about a possible copyvio?
Phil
roc
My contribs 13:20, 7 October 2016 (UTC) Actually, I agree with @
Reidgreg: on the fact that if we use curlies as a copyvio indicator, there will be a lot of false positives.
Phil
roc
My contribs 13:25, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
<q>...</q>
has been added to my to-do list. I think it would be desirable for numerous reasons to markup up inline quotation with this element and to allow people who insist on curly quotes in their output get them. However, this won't do anything for non-quotation uses of quotation marks, e.g. "scare quotes", song titles, etc. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 07:32, 3 October 2016 (UTC)@ Reidgreg: @ EEng: @ Herostratus: @ Oknazevad: @ Mr Stephen: @ Jc3s5h: @ Mirokado: @ SMcCandlish: @ Hoary: @ Tony1: Hey, maybe we could make the bot put in this template that I made that tells people that there are curlies that need to be replaced, but also says that curlies are an indicator of a possible copyvio, and that the article needs to be checked as well. Phil roc My contribs 14:29, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
As an aside, don't forget that (if you are going to start this) there are several other glyphs that should usually be replaced. We have, in no particular order but starting with the commonest
plus at least two Arabic glyphs that look very similar, and the guillemots. Some of these come in from cut-and-paste, but some are added at the keyboard. The primes also have a valid (in the MOS sense) use, of course. Mr Stephen ( talk) 22:07, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
@ EEng: Now you have your information. So which source should we trust, my estimate from AWB or an insource search? Phil roc My contribs 12:26, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
OK, got that. I will not be at my PC until later today. I will have a look. Yes, I used the longer list but in my experience the great majority of curly quote s are the ordinary ones. Mr Stephen ( talk) 10:00, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
I've decided to download the database dump, except on a 1TB hard drive. I'll get back to you later after I search for curlies. Phil roc My contribs 21:49, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Here we go then, 25 in 200 pages, so 12.5%. Of those 25, Olia Lialina, Amer Fort and Warren Sonbert used unusual quotes, the rest looked like ordinary curlys to me. Mr Stephen ( talk) 22:24, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Create a Bot to automate the looking for and copypaste change of the curlies listed above (right single quotation mark, left single quotation mark, left double quotation mark, right double quotation mark, etc.) following the guideline MOS:CURLY.
I noticed our article on
The Wachowskis implies that Lana outed "her sister" in 2012, four years before Lilly came out. This seems problematic. The relevant section is
The Wachowskis#Lana's gender transition, and the text I'm especially concerned about is she and her sister are both generally shy qbout the news media and prefer to maintain their privacy
. The use of the present tense in an indirect quotation from 2012 is a problem in general (not the case here, but we don't know if such statements are still accurate) but its use here heavily implies that Lana referred to Lilly as "my sister" at that time.
Is this an IAR scenario, or should we just convert it to a direct quotation (perhaps with square brackets to clarify that referring to Lilly as female is Wikipedia's wording and not the wording used by her sister in 2012), or should we clarify the point here?
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 05:21, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
if it's a choice between making movies or not doing press, we decided we're not going to not make movieswas meant to be
if it's a choice between making movies or not doing press, we decided we're not going to make movies.
We have MOS:HONORIFIC and WP:PBUH, and more generally WP:RNPOV and WP:WORDS, but no guideline specifically discouraging epithets outside Islam-related topics, such as "(the) Holy Bible", "(the) Holy Rigveda", "Lord Shiva" and others, which clearly violate NPOV as they come across as quaint at best to readers who do not adhere to the religion in question. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 00:05, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
Anyone willing to weigh in on a discussion about italics vs. quotation marks at the Cougar (slang) article? See Talk:Cougar (slang)#Quotation mark or italic to denote words as words? When and how to use?. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 09:29, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
Under Capital letters/Celestial bodies, the example sentence "The Moon orbits the Earth" is given. Under the same heading on the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters main page, the same example is given as "the Moon orbits Earth". I removed "the" before "Earth" on this page so it would match the main page but my edit was undone. Seems to me they should match. To me, saying "the Earth" (Earth used as a proper name) is like saying "the Mars". Also, "the" is superfluous since it can be removed without hurting the meaning of the sentence. Just trying to keep things logical & consistent. Unknowntouncertain ( talk) 04:51, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
My issue is only with "the" before capitalized "Earth". Saying "the earth" is fine. Unknowntouncertain ( talk) 05:34, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
Or, better yet, "the moon of Earth". Unknowntouncertain ( talk) 06:46, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
WP:THE#Other cases explicitly says: "Definite and indefinite articles should generally be avoided in cases not mentioned above. For example, ... Earth, not The Earth." Mitch Ames ( talk) 06:23, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
@ EEng: Why did you do this revert? Is it controversial in some way? The linked guideline clearly states that infoboxes are neither prescribed nor proscribed. It is saying on a style guideline whether to have them or not is a style issue. Thus, it comes under the genernal proscription of not unnecessarily switching styles and belongs on the list. I saw this as merely summarising existing guidelines and entirely uncontroversial. Do you disagree?
You reverted my edit in its entirety, not just the infobox addition. Do you object to some other aspect of my edit, or is it only the infobox issue? Spinning Spark 11:14, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
In view of the history, I thought I should not be too bold, but I believe the wording
is unclear, if not incorrect. I propose changing it to
The examples already illustrate the main point:
The capitalization of proper names would normally be obvious, but probably needs to be stated explicitly because of the rules on taxonomic species names. I was trying to think of an example with a proper adjective. However, I see that dog breeds like "Old German Shepherd" are capitalized (all words), so perhaps we should leave sleeping Alsatians lie and not bother with an example. -- Boson ( talk) 20:04, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
Support syntactic rewrite, but with grammatical correction of "that part is" to "those parts are" (plurality agreement with "they" and the rest of the paragraph, about names in the plural). While "capitalized where they contain proper names" is exact ("Przewalski's horse" and "fair-maid-of-France" only have one spot each where they contain a proper name, "Przewalski" and "France", respectively), the wording is maybe a bit academic and might not be understood by everyone as having the precise meaning intended.
History: Yes, this was added because it applies to vernacular names but not specific epithets (a change that came about mid-20th century; you can actually find old sources that give things like Andrias Davidianus for Andrias davidianus). There was some concern that people would mix things up, and in fact during discussions about MOS:LIFE, there were occasional posts along the lines "Surely you don't mean it should be 'canada goose'!?!?" While that was hyperbolic posturing, just being clear on the matter nips that kind of stuff in the bud. BTW, the "where they contain proper names" has been there since the original formulation in 2007 [5].
Breed capitalization: Yes, please don't wake the sleeping "breed caps" giant. While not everyone agrees with it, on WP or in RS, capitalization is being done consistently if informally on WP for
standardized animal breeds and plant
cultivars, and nearly every regular editor of domestic animal and plant articles would oppose a change to lower-case, leading to a repeat of the "species caps" drama of 2008–2014, but magnified tenfold. The formality level has increased some, with
WP:RM routinely siding with capitalization for
WP:CONSISTENCY reasons. Maybe this makes it a slow-moving
WP:FAITACCOMPLI, but it is what it is. Downcasing would run into complications immediately, such as the fact that the
International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants requires cultivar (plant breed) names to be capitalized. The
WP:SSF argument can only be taken so far; in some cases what was a specialist usage has become the dominant one. While no such standard exists for zoological breeding, and publications like newspapers lean toward "German shepherd" not "German Shepherd", this is in flux (capitalization is increasing), and the capitalization is a de facto standard in breeder, fancier, agricultural, etc., publications. Going against it for animals would result in having an inconsistent approach to animal versus plant breeds on Wikipedia, which is highly undesirable. Another issue is that most breeds contain a proper-name element in their names, so most will be capitalized anyway, and it can take nontrivial research to figure out whether one does or does not. It's just simpler and lower-drama to capitalize them. Anyway, I have neutrally(?) analyzed the major pro/con points of that debate
here, if you want a look at how unlikely it would be for a clear consensus to emerge to downcase breeds (an idea I initially supported). Anyway, MOS:LIFE's examples are sculpted carefully to address every common sort of "group of lifeforms" (species, genus, landrace, dog and horse "type", etc.), except it studiously avoids standardized breeds/cultivars. Attempting to insert an MoS rule to capitalize them, instead of just leaving it alone, might raise a big stink, from a different quarter than and to a lesser degree than inserting a rule to lowercase them. But we may need to address this eventually; for one thing, it is the sole issue that has held up the expanded
MOS:ORGANISMS in draft state for years. Given that ArbCom just heard two or three MoS-related
WP:ARCAs back to back, I would suggest leaving it alone longer.
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 09:19, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
Hi. I recently quoted the principle of MOS:COMMONALITY on a talkpage in the Wiktionary and someone claimed that "MOS:COMMONALITY is a Wikipedia policy. This is Wiktionary." Is this correct? Thank you. Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia ( talk) 21:22, 5 December 2016 (UTC)