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The exact reason for this policy remains unclear. LakeKayak ( talk) 22:16, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
@ Johnuniq: Then can you explain why that specific policy is in effect? I am still waiting for an answer. LakeKayak ( talk) 16:49, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
There's something very unpleasant about your demand that everyone else drop everything to satisfy your curiosity. You go search the 200 pages of WPT:MOS archivesdid you not understand? E Eng 18:46, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
If we were to change any advice relating to this at all, it would be to deprecate "U.S." in favor of "US". Several years ago here I presented evidence of a declining use of the dots, and this decline has increased since then. That style is also used very inconsistently when used at all: Some publishers use it only in headlines, not in regular prose; some never; some always; and many leave it up to individual writers/editors and are not consistent about it across their publication. The only real rationale for it is that "US" and "us" are hard to distinguish in all-caps headlines. WP does not use all-caps, so we have no reason to use "U.S.", when we avoid the periods/stops in all other acronyms and initialisms. Use of the dots version frequently produces inconsistent results in our prose, e.g. "a summit attended by representatives of France, the U.S., and the UK". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 03:07, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
@ Martin of Sheffield:: So, this is my first time participating in a community discussion here, and I didn't think it'd be possible to deeply offend someone by sharing an opinion on punctuation. No need for the snark, telling me to "stop and think" before I join the conversation, even if you figure my contribution is "thoughtless ignorance." That's awfully WP:UNCIVIL. If you feel I'm "implying anyone over 50 was archaic from generations ago," well that's on you. You're reading way too deep and have extracted an interpretation so far out of left field, I had to double-check and see if you were actually replying to me. I'm not slighting an age group, I'm simply saying dropping periods between capital letters is a holdover from the past and has become increasingly aberrant in modern writing. And while we're offering anecdotes, I'll add that I received all of my formal education in the US, and dot-free is my normal. @ Sb2001: Didn't have an issue understanding. I appreciate you filling in the gaps for me. — GS ⋙ ☎ 08:32, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
While this is up for discussion, I've been having concerns regarding sports results. There's an exception in the guideline for FIFA codes, and I understand that if the article is actually discussing the FIFA codes themselves. However, I see USA being frequently used in tables giving results of international athletic competitions, where it seems to me that US should be used. (Results are given by country, not team name, so it isn't referring to Team USA. Wikipedia prefers US, so it shouldn't matter if results are reported in sources as USA.) It's possible this might be the result of local consensus among sports editors, but I haven't found any record of discussion on talk page archives. I've also been wondering about the validity of USA being output from some of the {{ flag}} templates. I'd appreciate any clarification, especially if anyone is aware of past discussion on this. – Reidgreg ( talk) 16:07, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
This is lengthy, and may not be of interest to everyone. Recycled discussion about "eg" has been directed here from
WT:MOSABBR.
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Sb2001 above raised a side point about abbreviations of Latin expressions not being treated consistently with acronyms like UK. They're not treated consistently with such acronyms by any style guides, because they are fundamentally dissimilar, with a history predating the more general abbreviation and acronym-formation trend by centuries. The Latin group (which includes dozens more such abbreviations) are symbols (as we'll see below), not acronyms or initialisms in the sense under discussion, which are capitalized. Many of these Latinisms – etc., c. or ca., fl., id. and ibid., op. cit., cf. and so on – are contractions or truncations, not acronyms/initialisms of any kind at all. Acronyms and initialisms (a distinction some sources do not draw, or may draw inconsistently) usually refer to proper nouns – US, UK, NASA, etc. There are many exceptions, especially in jargon – AIDS, DNA, TRO, APB, NAT, OS – which are capitalized but actually refer to common-noun phrases, as it's become the norm to apply the ABC not A.B.C. or a.b.c. or abc style to new ones, whether common or proper. There are also proper-name exceptions to the fully-capped rule – Amway, Amtrak, Nabisco – by convention, i.e. by the attestation of the majority of source usage. Most of those include partial words not just initials, are usually trademarks, and often involve camel case rather than sentence case (ECMAScript, ConAgra). Acronyms which have been re-assimilated as words, like laser, take all-lowercase. No one writes ETC and EG for etc. and e.g. (even if they would write AMTRAK!); this category of abbreviated Latinisms are a different class of convention, though the truncation and contraction means of their derivation may be similar, and some of them technically are initialisms (q.v., i.e., e.g.). They've also not been assimilated as words; no one pronounces i.e. as something like "ee" or "ay", nor e.g. as if it were the word egg, nor etc. as "ehtk". [Aside: Same goes for the non-Latinism a.k.a. or AKA, as you prefer, which should never be written as aka on Wikipedia; it has not been assimilated as a word pronounced "ahkah" or "acka".] Some more evidence these Latinisms are a different class – a more symbolic one – of convention is that those that take pluralization usually do so by a special letter-doubling practice (which dates back to Latin manuscripts and isn't an English imposition); it doesn't actually correspond to doubling of the abbreviated word, or to the spelling of an abbreviated word: q.v. = quod vide, plural qq.v. (sometimes written q.q.v.) = quae vide not "quod-quod vide"). This is also used in pp. which is actually a symbol for Latin paginis (singular pagina, symbol: p.) not English pages, much less "page-page"; pp. is used in other languages than English. See also mss. for "manuscripts"; again, it is used outside English, and is actually a symbol for the Latin plural manuscripta, singular manuscriptum (symbol: ms.). The doubling convention evolved by analogy from the Roman numeral system (X = 10, XX = 20). Clearly, this entire class of primarily literary Latinisms are symbols which (like various mathematical, chemical element, unit, and other symbols) sometimes incidentally look exactly like English abbreviations and sometimes do not; they are not just normal abbreviations. This is even clearer when one remembers that etc. was formerly commonly given in the more symbolic form &c., and that & itself is a symbolicized Latin et formed by fusing and bending the Latin letters. Similarly, what we represent in ASCII as No. for numero does not correspond (having an extraneous capitalization) to the word spelling; more to the point, in offline typography it's conventionally given with a raised, underlined o – № – not with a normal lower-case "o" and period/point. So, it's clearly not a regular abbreviation. See also the prescription symbol, which in ASCII is often miscalled the "Rx" symbol, from Latin recipe, 'you take': ℞ (it has no x in it, and is actually a crosshatch added to the R, which again does not correspond case-wise to the r in the word). There are others, including the paragraph symbol or pilcrow: ¶; it derives from adding vertical marks to the c of the Latin abbreviation for capitulum and has nothing in origin to do with anything starting with p. Next, see the section sign, §, which derives from Latin signum sectionis (and which is also doubled, §§, to pluralize for 'sections'). Once in a while, such a Latinism is conventionally given in all-caps, as is QED in mathematical and logical proofs, though outside that context it's often given as q.e.d, and appears as Q.E.D. in older maths works. It's essentially just accidental that some of the symbolic compressions of stock Latinisms have remained essentially plain-text abbreviations and subject to some-but-not-all rules for abbreviations in our language (mostly having instead become fixed in style since the 19th century when orthography was first normalized to any real extent), while others have become less-alphabetically symbolic, to the point of obscuring their origins. The same is true of various unit and mathematical symbols. Current English orthography rules about modern acronyms and initialisms of the usual sort don't really apply. It doesn't matter that if i.e. were a brand new acronym we'd spell it IE; it doesn't matter, for the same reason that we don't re-spell the unit symbol dB as DB, or rewrite the mathematical sum sign, ∑ (majuscule sigma, the Greek capital S) as a big English-alphabet s to match the word sum: Convention simply has not evolved in that "super-conformity" direction, and likely never will. We intuitively understand that these are symbols, not expediency abbreviations like Prof. for Professor or Dr[.] for Doctor before someone's name, or shortening Tuesday to Tues. If anyone is looking for perfect consistency and logic in the use and form of a natural language, they will be disappointed everywhere they look. The simple fact is that most English-language style guides call for UK and NATO, for scuba and radar, and for i.e., e.g., and etc., and for cm and ft, so MoS does too, absent a WP-specific reason not to. Clarity, along with reader expectations of formal prose, are WP-specific reasons to do so, and to avoid clarity-reducing and inconsistently applied fads, like willy-nilly dropping of punctuation marks without a convention or standard requiring their absence. "Follow the sources" and "go with the flow" are sufficient reasoning for us to keep going in this direction instead of trying to act as language change advocates in favor of the hyper-simplification proffered by some British news publishers (or the "keep writing like it's 1920" hyper-traditionalism of some American publishers, like the New York Times on certain style points, such as prepending "Mr.", "Mrs.", or "Ms" before any parties mentioned by surname). We have a strong disincentive (even aside from WP:NOR, WP:NPOV and WP:SOAPBOX policies) to pursue such change activism when it would actually negatively impact WP's own output for its readers. The desire to drop the dots from i.e. and etc. is a habit picked up from British journalism, which drops a lot of punctuation (including commas) for expediency reasons at the expense of clarity, and does so in ways that violate the norms of mainstream British punctuation. For abbreviations, those well-sourced norms are to drop the point (period) from, and only from, acronyms like UK and NATO and abbreviations which begin and end with the same letters as the full word, thus St for Saint or Street, but Prof. for Professor. You'll find these conventions in Hart's Rules and its successors, and Fowler's [Dictionary of] Modern English Usage in successive editions, and other British style guides that are not the house stylebooks of specific newspapers, which are all wildly inconsistent with each other on innumerable points, and have little to do with an encyclopedic register of writing. A supposed trend toward rewriting pronounceable "word acronyms" (just "acronyms" in the nomenclature system that distinguishes acronyms from initialisms) like NATO and AIDS as if they were words, Nato and Aids (which is already an unrelated word), is not well-evidenced outside of British journalism either, and by no means are all British news publishers in favor of it. It's the lowest-common-denominator publications like The Guardian doing it; the style books of higher-end publications like The Economist [1] call for NATO and AIDS, as do the more academic style guides like Fowler's and New Hart's in the Commonwealth English sphere, along with virtually all North American style guides. The down-casing is, honestly, a patently stupid practice – an intentional reduction of communication effectiveness by people trying to communicate – since it results in obvious understandability problems; when The Guardian writes about ISIS (more properly IS or ISIL) as "Isis", it appears they're referring to an Egyptian mythological figure, or perhaps a modern band or actress by this monicker; no one unfamiliar with the topic (or familiar with it as ISIL or IS, as many non-native English speakers will be) will understand that an acronym is meant. (The practice originated in broadcast journalism, as a cue for pronunciation on teleprompters, and spread by reuse of material for broadcast and print release without bothering to reformat for the latter.) A trend toward expediency over precision has long existed in news writing, due to deadline pressure both for writers and for actual typesetting in the pre-digital era, and has become exacerbated by the Internet for an unrelated reason: people used to peruse the paper over coffee and on the bus at a fairly leisurely pace, and had few TV channels to choose from; but now a news organization has only seconds to grab a reader's attention on their mobile device, and less likelihood of retaining it very long on such devices or when we have hundreds of TV channels to change to. None of these expediency pressures apply to encyclopedia writing or reading. We are a long-term reference work, not an ephemeral, click-bait infotainment source. We have a duty to write clearly and precisely (including for children, ESL learners, screen readers, and easy machine translation), and there is a reader expectation that we will do so. We fail to do so when we drop conventional punctuation and/or capitalization that helps distinguish between regular words and abbreviations (of whatever kind, other than unit symbols that have been formally standardized without them). Finally, as a matter of policy, WP is not written in news style, so we really just DGaF what British (or American, or whatever) news publishers are doing with words and names anyway. Digression, to forestall any "what about...?" objections: An exception to that DGaF is for uncommonly fast-moving matters (like pronouns and the transgendered) that have been evolving slightly too quickly for the slow publication cycles of academic style guides, but are addressed consistently in more frequently updated journalism ones, if they actually reflect common practice outside newspapers as well. It's difficult to remember any example other than the TG one, where sources like the AP Stylebook were in fact useful in the
MOS:IDENTITY debates. A conceivable additional example would be terminology should some country split and generate new nationality-indicating adjectives; news stylebooks would be updated within the year to account for it. Another exception, outside the MoS sphere, is that newspapers are often key sources for
WP:COMMONNAME determination (which
is not a style question), though academic book sources are preferred, when available, as higher-quality sources. For example, we can rely entirely on news coverage to determine that most reliable sources refer to The Oatmeal cartoonist
Matthew Inman by that name, even though he actually signs the cartoons as "The Oatmeal". While his real name presently redirects to the article on the cartoon, if a proper
WP:BLP article were split from it (and this could arguably be done, since he's also published several books and is notable for some other things, like saving the Nikola Tesla Museum project) it would be at
Matthew Inman not
The Oatmeal (cartoonist) or
Oatmeal (cartoonist), on the strength of journalistic sources alone, since he's too recent a public figure to be mentioned in many if any books. I will say thank you for your response. You raise some good points. I am slightly disturbed by the inclusion of the phrase 'It's the lowest-common-denominator publications like The Guardian': The Guardian is a very well respected publication. I myself purchase it several times a week on my way to studying English Language and English Literature at an educational establishment. I will note that here you are advised to drop much of the punctuation for abbreviations, acronyms, etc (including page references 'p' and 'pp'). This leads me onto the issue of 'We have a duty to write clearly and precisely ... for children': today's youth are exposed to all sorts of styles. I can say with complete confidence, what they are taught at school/college/university is what is followed in the vast majority of cases. The Classics Department at the establishment I attend generally avoids using full stops to show initials/abbreviations. I am not always keen on pronounceable acronyms' capitals being dropped, unless they either do not need to be recognised as a series of contracted words, or are such common knowledge that it is not necessary to keep the caps. I am somewhat pleased to see British media is having such an influence on the way people write rather than American. It worries me to see people writing a colon to separate hours and minutes in 12-hour time, but that is another matter. Whilst you may not see British media influence as a positive, I most certainly do. Going back to the 'lowest-common-denominator' point you raised earlier, I carry with me a copy of the Guardian style guide and the University of Oxford style guide. I do not think the latter can be described so dismissively. Its English Department is fantastic. Change is important in language, as it is in everything else. When it becomes clear that general language is swinging against the well-established versions we see in use at any one moment, we should be the ones to change. Whether that be me accepting that some people will write a colon instead of a full stop to separate hours and minutes, or you accepting that some people prefer non-dotted abbreviations. Those versions that we prefer do not have to become obsolete and unseen, but should not stay as law and the only correct version of something. - Sb2001 ( talk) 23:48, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Here's an abbreviation: TLDR. Seriously, Wikipedia talk pages aren't your personal blog, SMc, and not the place for your personal analysis and judgement. Even so, some of your analysis is based on misunderstanding of the reason behind usage (for example, dB would never be written with a capital d because it's a metric prefix for "deci", and an international standard regardless of language). oknazevad ( talk) 02:14, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
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"Sir" is an honorific prefix, not a forename. As such, it belongs in the honorific prefix section of an infobox, not immediately precedent to and on the same line as the article subject's name. It functions exactly as other honorific prefixes — "Mr", "Mrs", "Ms", "Dr", "Rev.", and so on.
-- Vabadus91 ( talk) 00:37, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Is this an ENGVAR issue? Specifically, Thronecast is a British programme discussing an American programme, and each "series" of the former coincides with a "season" on the latter.
I think For the third series [of Thronecast], Thronecast became a 15-minute on-air show that [followed] each episode of the third season [of Game of Thrones
looks particularly weird, because if the British terminology was changed to American or vice versa, it would read like the third series was the same thing as the third season; it appears that the different terms are being used to disambiguate inline.
I'm actually not sure if this is a problem, though, as I have heard Americans (specifically Chuck Sonnenburg) use the word "series" when describing British shows like Red Dwarf and Doctor Who, which leads me to believe that the "terminology" is mutually intelligible, but it still seems weird...
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 01:07, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
I'm not sure this is really significant enough, but I can't think where would be better to ask. Periodically I see articles which say "Fred McSubject is a Roman Catholic". I usually alter this to say " Catholic", given that the word "Roman" seems entirely redundant. I appreciate that - well, essentially, the stuff in the lead of Catholicism is so - but AFAIK in ordinary usage the word "Catholic" alone is always interpreted as referring to the Catholic Church, and as such "Roman" doesn't alleviate any actual confusion on the part of the reader. Comments? Pinkbeast ( talk) 16:57, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
This article is about Eastern churches in full communion with the Catholic ChurchThe Eastern churches that are in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church form part of what they call the "Catholic Church"; to say they are in communion with the "Catholic Church" is to say they are in communion with themselves.
I'm afraid I don't quite agree with the replies above. The salient point about the "attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to appropriate the term "Catholic"" is that it has been entirely successful. In every context save discussion about flavours of Christianity, "Catholic" is clearly and unambiguously understood to mean Roman Catholic. It has been for hundreds of years (eg Pepys and his contemporaries write about "Catholiques", when they don't write about "Papists") and it is today.
There's no issue of precision or clarity. If you read "X is a Catholic" there is no actual doubt as to what is meant. Wikipedia is already littered with unqualified "Catholics" none of which produces the slightest confusion in the reader. Pinkbeast ( talk) 14:18, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
Agree with Peter. "Roman Catholic" is a member of the group "catholic", so the two are not interchangeable in an encyclopaedia. This is complicated, though, by the existence of our article Catholic Church. Now there's a can of worms (or is it "diet"?). Still, I don't see that it's necessary to address that in order to do this in the right way. Formerip ( talk) 20:59, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
The Vatican itself uses "Roman Catholic". [2] Kablammo ( talk) 21:12, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
This -- the use of "Louis' father", etc. in the
Louis XIV of France article -- seems like a violation of
MOS:POSS. Specifically Add 's if the possessive has an additional /ᵻz/ at the end
. But it's been a long time since I read any professional work on French history in English, so I may be missing some way in which it could be covered under the following Some possessives have two possible pronunciations
.
Thoughts?
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 08:33, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
{{
Use X English}}
) and use the approproiate possessive for that flavour. —
Stanning (
talk)
10:16, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
The usual pronunciations, English-wide, of Louis in reference to a French monarch, are /Loo-EE/ or /LOO-ee/ depending on French familiarity. The possessive is Louis's, here and in most other styles. (Chicago Manual of Style tried switching to Louis' in the 15th ed. for unknown reasons, and after getting slammed for it, switched back in the 16th and current edition, with an almost apologetic note.) Other major, modern style guides back this, including New Hart's.
But there's no WP-related rationale to use Louis' in the possessive of St. Louis - /LOO-iss/ – Missouri, either, or similar constructions like Kanasas's, Marx's, showbiz's. The various and contradictory "punctuate based on the sound of the word/name where you grew up" approaches are a [bad] joke, abandoned by more style guides as time goes on. It's untenable except in local-to-regional publishing, because pronunciations change from area to area, and there is a lot of dialectal variation in the UK, US, Canada, Ireland, etc.
I firmly predict that the "huge pile of style guides" sourcing run I've started will show that there's an overall preference in academic and general-audience guides for "Jones's" style as a consistent approach to all the "what if it ends with ...?" questions; that in journalism, marketing, and business stylesheets there's a preference for "Jones'" as yet another typical, niggling big of compression for its own sake from that sector; and that newer works are less apt to try to justify complicated exceptions. MoS almost always lands on the academic-through-general side of this broad rift in English style. I'm doing the source research mainly for Apostrophe#Usage in English, which isn't bare, but has too few sources, is missing obvious major ones, uses some old and unreliable ones, and has clear original research, like unsupportable generalizations about English usage from nothing but a single newspaper's internal house style sheet.
MoS's main sources, CMoS and New Hart's Rules, both back an apostrophe-s standard, the first explicitly and the second by default. NHR is more permissive of optional exception-making (for persnickety reasons no one is ever going to remember, about multisyllabic stress which only matters for reading out loud – precisely the irrelevant, editor-unfriendly
WP:CREEP stuff we avoid here). Fowler's is even worse for our purposes in this regard; but both mostly treat their declared exceptions as optional. CMoS no longer goes there at all; since 2010, it sticks with apostrophe-s, including for Jesus's and Camus's, and explicitly declares in two places that it is overruling previous editions on these matters, for increased consistency and logic. Plus ça change ...
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
09:27, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
Somewhere I thought we were already addressing this, but I don't find it in MOS:MAIN, MOS:CAPS, or MOS:PN. We really should address this. The Internet and the Web (short for the World Wide Web, which no one says any more) are proper names; they are specific, unique things like the Pacific Ocean and the language French. Journalism style guides ( Wikipedia is not written in news style) have been pushing hard to lowercase these, but they're factually wrong to do so when the do it to the Internet and the Web.
Lower-case internet as a noun means "a (i.e. any) network of networks". Various internets combined to form the Internet, and there are internets that were not and still are not part of it (though various internets are also part of the Internet today). Due to ambiguity, internetwork or inter-network – or more recently a completely different term, wide-area network – has usually been used instead.
Lower-case web as a noun is something a spider makes, with various metaphoric applications of the word ("a web of trust", etc.).
Lower-case as adjectives, both words refer to technologies (protocols, standards, applications, etc.) that can be used for intranets as well as the Internet. These are thus properly lower-cased most of the time; it is hard to think of any such technology that cannot be used for an intranet. Both can also be capitalized as adjectives when used to refer specifically to the Internet or the Web ("he had no Internet access while on the island").
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SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
03:31, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
But the "distinction" argument isn't even necessary; "the Internet" is a proper name/proper noun in both the philosophy and linguistic senses, so it's capitalized per our style guide (which is not NYT's or The Guardian's), no different from the Pacific Coast Highway and the International Space Station – unique, monolithic human creations. I chose these examples carefully, because there's more than one major thoroughfare on the US Pacific Coast and more than one orbital habitat/lab created through multinational cooperation. "A Pacific Coast highway" and "an international space station" are valid expressions, referring to real categorizations, just like "an internet" (or internetwork or WAN). The PCH, the ISS, and the Internet all are the most notable but not exclusives entries in their respective categories.
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SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
10:01, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
Hello, as I think I might be interpreting MOS:SCROLL incorrectly, could somebody tell me if the usage I have made here (the six images) is acceptable or not? Without it, the last image overflows outside of the white frame and into the gray space. I would've put them into a gallery, but the fact that they are templates doesn't let me do that easily. — Anakimi talk 18:44, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
See
Real_Madrid_C.F./sandbox for a robust approach that should work regardless of OS and browser. On a big monitor, the images are all on one line. They'll auto wrap and re-center as needed on smaller devices, the way <gallery>...</gallery>
works. I've applied this fix to both sets of field (pitch) layouts, and to the uniform (home kit) material. The CSS can be put into templates; you need a wrapper div with text-align: center
; created that as {{
Gallery layout}}
, since this isn't really footy-specific. The image templates themselves can be edited to have a parameter to use display: inline-block
for such layouts. That would probably save time in implementing this solution on other articles. PS: I also fixed a typo and an venue infobox parameter error.
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SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
22:29, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
display: inline-block
into templates, let me know. It should work regardless what the surrounding element of the template is, so for some templates it can just be passed in a |style=
or |css=
parameter to a parent template. For templates that aren't meta-templated, the template's own code may need to be changed to be wrapped in a <span>...</span>
or <div>...</div>
to which this CSS is applied when requested, e.g. by a |gallery=y
being passed to the template. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
19:14, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
{{
Gallery layout content}}
. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
02:48, 16 July 2017 (UTC)There's an editor at Futurama that believes that when talking a possessive of the show's title (eg Futurama's setting is a backdrop..., that the 's should fall within the italics eg Futurama's, but best I've seen that standard practice is to keep those out of the italacs implicitly set by the docs for {{ '}} and friends Futurama's. But the MOS does not lay out this type of case. The style guides that I can see online agree with the latter but I think if we don't have that already we should spell it out. As well as the case to avoid possessive forms of quoted titles (which the style guides also agree on). -- MASEM ( t) 05:46, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
a titular item: Tony, you're not channeling Neelix, are you? FBDB E Eng 10:18, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
Presently we have text in WP:MOS that says "write volume two, number seven or Vol. 2, No. 7." This appears to conflict with common practice, and with MOS:CAPS. Under no other circumstance would we permit capitalization of a common noun simply because it's abbreviated (and "no." is an abbreviation, of Latin numero, which is not written Numero; see also "etc.", "cf.", "e.g.", and a zillion other Latinisms in English, which are uniformly lowercased). I would suggest that this be changed to "vol. 2, no. 7".
Regardless, this section should probably also be moved to MOS:NUM, and only summarized here in compressed form. MOS:NUM doesn't have anything on this, but it is the obvious place to look, and we're trying to move nit-picks out of the main MOS to the, well, nit-pick pages. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:06, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
I would always favour 'No' and 'Vol'. Caps seems to be well-established, and recommended by most style guides I see. I am not sure of the reasoning, though. Maybe it has something to do with their origins in titles. There is possibly an argument for dropping them (as well as the full stops!).- Sb2001 ( talk) 22:22, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
Unproductive circular debate about whether evidence is needed
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@
Martinevans123: An "I'm dismissive of style guides" argument equates to "I don't have an argument" here, since what MoS says is largely based on what other style guides are doing (with priority generally in decreasing order from academic through general-audience to journalism and marketing guides). @
Sb2001: You wrote: "Caps seems to be ... recommended by most style guides I see". Really? I've cited plenty that don't. I ask the same of both of you, again: Please provide sources in favor of "Vol[.]" and "No[.], not inside a title or subtitle, not after a full stop (period), and not just in formatted citations, but in mid-sentence in running text. Let's count them and compare both their number and their reputability to what I've cited already and continue to cite below. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
22:00, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
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{{cite magazine |title=Title |magazine=Magazine |volume=75 |issue=11}}
{{citation |title=Title |magazine=Magazine |volume=75 |issue=11}}
{{cite magazine |title=Title |magazine=Magazine |volume=75 |issue=11 |page=93}}
" becomes ""Title". Magazine. Vol. 75, no. 11. p. 93."? —
BarrelProof (
talk)
02:30, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
Digression that is mostly miscommunication
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Most are in favor of "vol." and "no.", but there are a few exceptions:
|
---|
References
|
Again, this would not lowercase either abbreviation in a) the title of a work or b) a citation in a format that capitalizes either or both. These are the concerns the Mixed comments above have in mind. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:00, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Just use №. — Jon C. ॐ 10:21, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
Some side issues: Despite MOS and WP:MOSABBR discouraging dropping of dots (points, periods, stops) from abbreviations except where utterly conventional and non-ambiguous (e.g., "Dr Smith" and "St Stephen" in British ENGVAR), I keep running into "No 1" in various articles (e.g. here). This is intolerably ambiguous, especially for users of screen readers, though it produces confusing gibberish for everyone, like "No of discs" in infoboxes [5]. Worst of all (so far): table header labeled "No" [6]. Also saw a "No total" in one of these. We need to explicitly state that No. (whether we keep that capitalized or not) must retain the dot and is not an ENGVAR matter (sourcing above demonstrates this; both New Hart's and Fowler's retain the dots).
Second, neither vol. nor no. appear at MOS:ABBR but of course should be listed, since we use them frequently. I'll wait until the discussion above concludes before adding them, so that what gets added doesn't have to be changed later. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 02:55, 11 July 2017 (UTC) PS: Ha ha, I rickrolled Wikipedia.
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Infoboxes#RfC: Red links in infoboxes. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 09:31, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
Users Adûnâi and Dank are in disagreement with me over how MOS:COMMA should be applied.
It started when I pointed out an error (my opinion) on the Main Page, adding this remark:
Adûnâi disagreed, writing:
Dank agreed with Adûnâi:
User Khajidha agreed with me:
The discussion was removed as a new day arrived.
I then contacted both editors on their talkpages, but was unable to convince them, despite pointing out the explicit "Burke and Wills" example:
Incorrect: | Burke and Wills, fed by locals (on beans, fish, and ngardu) survived for a few months. |
Correct: | Burke and Wills, fed by locals (on beans, fish, and ngardu), survived for a few months. |
Adûnâi claimed this was "a completely unrelated example", while Dank re-iterated that "a comma separates each element and follows the last element unless followed by other punctuation", ignoring the explicit part I had pointed out: "Do not be fooled by other punctuation, which can distract from the need for a comma, especially when it collides with a bracket or parenthesis, as in this example (which appears above the "Burke and Wills" example).
Let's look at another example:
In it, "and her mother, Gwen, was a homemaker" is interrupted by the parenthetical expression "(née Jennings)", resulting in the above sentence. Do Adûnâi and/or Dank mean that the comma after "Gwen" should be removed? I don't know. I have not understood how either of them explains why the comma shouldn't be there, which is why I'm starting this discussion.
Could someone please clarify this?
Thanks.
HandsomeFella ( talk) 12:12, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
I'm going to guess from the lack of response that people are happy with our understanding of the MOS guideline. Please ping me if not. - Dank ( push to talk) 21:11, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
That comma rule is overridden by comma conventions that avoid a comma both before and after those parentheses.
@ Dank, Adûnâi, and HandsomeFella: The comma does not belong this time. Yes, we have a rule for "July 1, 1867, ..." with two commas (so do other style guides). Commas that serve a parenthetical purpose are always in pairs, unless replaced by:
I.e. we don't use pointless double punctuation, like a comma before a period/stop or a dash.
Much of the above has been red-herring discussion. Yes, this case differs from the guideline's and the Kopechne article's examples. The beginning of "(now celebrated as Canada Day)" is a "(" introducing another parenthetical, which applies to the subject, not to the year, so it cancels the need for a comma to balance the first one in ", 1867". Without the date, this would read "The British North America Act (now celebrated as Canada Day) united the colonies of ...", with no commas. Contrast the other examples: "her mother, Gwen (née Jennings)," has a parenthetical that applies to the material in another parenthetical (the ", Gwen ...," structure) and is part of it, all of it ultimately referring to "her mother". Without the second parenthetical, it would read "her mother, Gwen, ..." with both commas. Without the first parenthetical, it is a non-sequitur: "her mother (née Jennings)"; makes little sense without the first name also included. "Burke and Wills, fed by locals (on beans, fish, and ngardu), survived for a few months" is essentially the same as the mother example, and would read "Burke and Willis, fed by locals, survived ..." without the second parenthetical clause, which pertains to the feeding not to B&W. Without the first parenthetical, it is again broken: "Burke and willis (on beans, fish, and ngardu) survived ...". Both are broken when their first parentheticals are removed because the second parenthetical is an internal reference to the first, not to the subject directly. [Aside: Both could be unbroken with a rewrite if information was genuinely missing: "her mother, née Jennings, first name unknown," and "Burke and Willis survived for a few months on beans, etc., but it is not known if they locals provided this food or they gathered it themselves."] In the case at issue, the holiday name pertains to the entire subject, not to the "1867" fragment, and it works regardless what you do to it, because the parentheticals are independent of each other: "The British North America Act of July 1, 1867, united ...; and "The British North America Act (now celebrated as Canada Day) united ...".
Another way of putting it: The Canada thing could very reasonably be rewritten as "The British North America Act of July 1, 1867 – now celebrated as Canada Day – united ...". But no sane writer would do "... her mother, Gwen – née Jennings ...", or "Burke and Wills, fed by locals – on beans, fish, and ngardu ...". They're a different kind of structure from the Canada case.
PS: Technically, the "1867" is not a parenthetical, but is conventionally formatted as one. The nature of this kind of confusion/dispute is one of the reasons (source: Garner's Modern American Usage) that another pseudo-parenthetical, the "Firstname Lastname, Jr, ..." style, has gone out of fashion, in favor of "Firstname Lastname Jr ...". It's also probably (my speculation) got something to do with why "July 1, 1867, ..." date formatting has been abandoned in most of the world, when it was neck-and-neck with "1 July 1867" style in the 19th century (source: Google N-Grams).
05:04, 28 July 2017 (UTC) — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
SMcCandlish (
talk •
contribs)
Hello everyone, I stumbled across Special:Contributions/5.107.140.121, who has made numerous edits of this form [7]. Am I correct in reverting these, or am I missing something? @ 5.107.140.121:. Tazerdadog ( talk) 19:12, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
The above redirect points to a very short section here. That section seems to be missing links to where we would otherwise use non-breaking spaces (at least a reference to MOSNUM). Maybe it would be a good idea to add some pointer links? -- Izno ( talk) 11:56, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
The MoS asks for a space before per cent/percent, but does not make clear whether this should be non-breaking. Do you know? – Sb2001 talk page 14:07, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
x per cent
or x{{nbsp}}per cent
. (IMHO a nbsp might be a good idea.) —
Stanning (
talk)
17:11, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
Write 3%, three percent, or three per cent, but not 3 % (with a space) or three %. "Percent" is American usage, and "per cent" is British usage (see § National varieties of English, above). In ranges of percentages written with an en dash, write only a single percent sign: 3–14%.AHeneen ( talk) 17:14, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
5 kilogramsbut nbsp in
5 kg. See the table at WP:Manual_of_Style/Dates_and_numbers#Unit_names_and_symbols, in the section of the table labeled Numeric values. E Eng 17:30, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
) between a number and a unit symbol, or use {{
nowrap}}".
MOS:NBSP says "It is desirable to prevent line breaks where breaking across lines might be confusing or awkward. ... Whether a non-breaking space is appropriate depends on context: whereas it is appropriate to use 12{{
nbsp}}MB
in prose, it may be counterproductive in a table (where horizontal space is precious) and unnecessary in a short parameter value in an infobox (where a break would never occur anyway)." I think usage of an NBSP before percent or per cent should follow that guideline. I don't have time right now, but talk page archives should be checked to make sure this issue hasn't been discussed before.
AHeneen (
talk)
18:09, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
15{{nbsp}}per{{nbsp}}cent
creates an overlong unbreakable string.
E
Eng
19:37, 22 July 2017 (UTC)29 newton-meters
.
E
Eng
04:57, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
Should the names of blogs be italicised? Most of the articles for entries on List of blogs do not have italic titles (although some do). I was about to italicise the title of a blog article but was quite surprised to find this was not the general practice. Spinning Spark 17:17, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
Website titles may or may not be italicized depending on the type of site and what kind of content it features. Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized ( Salon or HuffPost). Online encyclopedias and dictionaries should also be italicized ( Scholarpedia or Merriam-Webster Online). Other types of websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
|work=
or |website=
or |journal=
parameter value, so deciding on your own not to use italics is going to cause a conflicting style in the same article. If you're dealing with something like a newspaper's official blog, use |work=Newspaper Title
|at="Blog Title" (official blog)
|title=Article title
; resulting in a cite like: Persson, J. Randome (27 July 2017). "How I Survived a Vicious Salamander Attack". Newspaper Title. "Blog Title" (official blog). {{
cite web}}
: Missing or empty |url=
(
help) Publications get italics except when referred to as a business (use the company name), or a computer system (no styling, use domain name): "He writes for Salon"; "She took over as the CEO of Salon Media Group"; "The DDoS attack also affected www.salon.com for two hours." For online publications that use their domain name as their title, complete with the ".com" (or whatever), it still goes in italics when discussed as a publication rather than a legal entity or a stack of hardware. This, too, is what our cite system will do, so just deal with it and don't introduce a conflict style, please. :-) PS: Abusing parameters of the cite templates to get an alternative style (e.g. using |at=
for the work title) will emit incorrect COinS metadata and is to be avoided. Anyone may revert/fix that on sight. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
05:12, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
I thought that we have an existing rule about this, but cannot find it.
Is "A UART or "An UART" correct? Likewise with HTML, ATM, etc? What is the general rule? -- Guy Macon ( talk) 19:59, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
Intrinsic-Harmony.jpg If you combined an op amp with a UART, would it be op art? – E Eng
Based on the feedback above, I am going to use "a UART" from now on. The interesting aspect here is determining how most people pronounce an acronym/initialism. I can look around me and see that most people I talk to pronounce "FAQ" as "fack" and not "eff-ay-cue" and that most people I talk to pronounce "RfC" as "Arr-Eff-Cee" and not "Refsee", but is this universal among English dialects? I recently worked with some Australians, and when they read something like "E-Z-Off" they read it as "Eee-Zed-Off". And what pronunciation should I assume for "FUQ (Frequently Unanswered Questions"? -- Guy Macon ( talk) 13:37, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
I recently started placing nbsps after 'p.' and before the number. It then became clear that the citation insert tool does not do this. Other editors do not, either. Is it A/ bad/something to go back to undo, B/ something which is harmless, but unnecessary or C/ something which we should all be doing? – Sb2001 talk page 11:40, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
if the reference is in the cite ref format with curly brackets (but
EEng commented recently that the template {{
nbsp}} should not mess up even that kind of citation), and no one has ever said it messes up anything. –
Corinne (
talk)
13:33, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
|page=
instead of |pages=
if you want p. instead of pp.) If you're formatting citations yourself instead of using a template, I would go somewhere between C and B: I think it's preferable to use a non-breaking space, but not actually harmful not to. —
David Eppstein (
talk)
21:29, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
character between the prefix and the first page number. It has been this way for a very long time.|page=p. ...
or |pages=pp. ...
in the cs1|2 templates that render page numbers with a colon prefix, {{
cite journal}}
and {{
citation}}
(when |journal=
is set), then you should stop doing that. Typical professional, academic, or scientific journals usually do not use p. or pp. prefixes so {{cite journal}}
and {{citation}}
follow that style.<ref>...</ref>
format"; most uses of the citation templates are inside <ref>...</ref>
; they're only not when people are using the separate-refs-and-bibliography-sections system, which is mostly at longer articles, especially those repeatedly citing the same sources at different pages. Anyway, I agree with the gist above: The templates already handle this. For non-templated citations, C is probably the ideal answer, but B is fine, too (see elsewhere on this page for consternation about non-breaking spaces; not everyone agrees that the end result, for the reader, of using them is worth the instruction creep of inserting rules about them into MoS). It's generally a safe bet to include one, in regular (non-templated) text any time you don't want a number or other tiny string to separate from something else. As noted in the other thread, we don't actually have a rule to use, e.g., 47 metres
, just 47 m
, but many of us do the former as well for the same rationale, even in absence of it being demanded by MoS. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
23:22, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
Whenever I see 'No.' or 'No' (now you have all brainwashed me into meticulously eradicating all non-MoS styles of writing), I place the {abbr|No.|number} tag on it, for clarity. I understand that both versions, ie dotted and non-dotted may seem slightly confusing. Although, I maintain that most instances of it in the UK drop the full stop (or, full point as the MoS now likes to use). My question is whether this is actually worthwhile: very few editors seem to bother doing this outside infoboxes, which makes me wonder whether I should be doing it at all. If it is advisable, why does the MoS not require editors to add the abbr tag? It is the same with circa. I always tag that if I see it (and – as much as it hurts – put the full point on the end). The MoS is, as usual, rather ambiguous on this matter. – Sb2001 talk page 11:37, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
<abbr>...</abbr>
markup and a wikilink, in the sense that a string has been marked up such that doing something with it with the pointer leads to additional contextual content; one goes to another page, the other results in a tooltip. Sso does <span title="Tooltip text here.">...</span>
(or same on some other element that doesn't have a reserved use for title=
). I mention that last bit, because I keep running into cases of people abusing <abbr>...</abbr>
to generate tooltips for things that are not abbreviations, which is an HTML spec violation (a well-formedness rather than validation error, in the extended definition of "well-formed" which includes "follows all the syntactic rules"). —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
23:57, 30 July 2017 (UTC)I'ld like to ask if there is a guideline on using diacritics in commonly used words like naïve and café. The reason I ask is that someone just did this: [13], and I'm not sure whether that's appropriate or not. LK ( talk) 08:16, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
General rule of thumb: check some dictionaries, and use the spelling that is listed first by the majority of them. In your cases, the results are "café" but "naive". Regardless of the answer on the latter, the diacritic would be retained in non-assimilated words (e.g. naîf) and in a foreign word that has an English non-diacritic equivalent: "naîvete" but "naivety". The very existence of "naivety", "naiver", "naivest", and other derived forms, which never have the umlaut, discourages "naïve" in English. Zero dictionaries of the eight or so I checked listed "naïve" as preferred, and three did not list it at all, only "naive". All of them preferred "café" over "cafe". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 06:49, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
In the interest of the wider community, and by the solemn Wikipedia accord to endlessly fork around, I'd like to draw your attention to the following discussion. Regards, nagual design 00:13, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Hmm. Its already in
MOS:QUOTE, as examples under "Typographic conformity", which has been quoted in that discussion. The
specialized-style fallacy is rearing its ugly head, with someone unhappily suggesting that the MoS is "bad" on this and should be changed, so he/she can continue capitalizing "Endangered". I explained why that can't happen. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
08:06, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
A few more commenters on this issue would be much appreciated. nagual design 23:31, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone have any pertinent information or strong preferences on whether the labels for the various earthquake magnitude scales should be italicized (like this ML, Mw, MS, mB, mb, mbLg, etc.) or not (like this ML, Mw, MS, mB, mb, mbLg)?
It might be noted that this is entirely a matter of style, not nomenclature, and that some seismological authorities italicize, and some do not. Also: these terms are not variables: they are labels, analogous to "F" and "C" for temperature scales. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 21:43, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
The article list of medical ethics cases has a mix of past and current tenses in the summaries of the cases. (Example of present tense: "A teenaged woman is declared brain-dead and her family wishes to maintain her body on mechanical ventilation perpetually.") I think the summaries should use past tense, since these all occurred in the past, and it reads better to me. At the same time, using the present tense makes sense because it describes the particular ethical dilemma at the time it was a dilemma. The article creator Bluerasberry prefers present tense but doesn't have a particularly strong opinion about it, so I thought I would ask here whether or not there is a specific guideline in place (or if one could be made). Either way the summaries should consistently use the same tense. —Мандичка YO 😜 23:10, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
I have started an RFC at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Abbreviations# RFC: Periods in abbreviations for degrees. Anyone interested in this issue should comment there, please. DES (talk) DESiegel Contribs 22:20, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
In my opinion, MOS:ISLAM is missing a line about honorifics in non-Muhammad religious figures. Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles#Prophets other than Muhammad. -- HyperGaruda ( talk) 11:49, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
Please take part in the following discussion at the MoS Trademarks talk page; Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Trademarks#MOS:TMRULES – Sb2001 talk page 23:15, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
I happened across this article, and tried to change the infobox, to remove the spaces either side of the en rule/dash, as per MOS:DASH. I was shocked to find that the template actually includes the spaces on its own. This means that it is very difficult to remove these unnecessary spaces. Does anyone know how it is done, and how the template can be amended to fix the clear error? – Sb2001 talk page 19:39, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
E Eng 01:27, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
The en dash in a range is always unspaced, except when either or both elements of the range include at least one space.In the example you quote, the elements bounding the range are "May" and "July". isaacl ( talk) 15:01, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
The example is attempting to show ambiguity. Chaning it to "The author thanked Sinéad O'Connor, Bob Marley, and her parents" is unambiguous unless you posit that Bob Marley was female. The comment "did she thank her own parents, or O'Connor's parents?" indicates that the writer of this example did in fact mean "The author thanked Bob Marley, Sinéad O'Connor, and her parents".
The next paragraph develops the theme: "The author thanked her mother, Bob Marley, and Sinéad O'Connor".
Personally I think the whole section needs a good going over, particularly the interaction of serial commas with appositives. Martin of Sheffield ( talk) 13:45, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Mary Kay Letourneau#Use of "Fualaau". A permalink for it is here. The discussion concerns whether or not to use "Letourneau" for some parts of the article and "Fualaau" for other parts of the article. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 18:57, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
Okay, what is it that you guys don't understand about how the correction I'm trying to make to #3 usage of hyphens is to correct a self-contradiction? #3 says never to use a hyphen in a proper name, but #1 already said to use a hyphen in a personal name if it was designed that way, and personal names are proper names/proper nouns. So why should we supposedly not clarify the exception using a wording like I tried to use?
2600:100E:B149:8DAB:F80C:D7D2:437F:F3BC ( talk) 15:41, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
insertsuggests to anyone with a basic understanding of English that it is an alteration. Come back with a draft of a more sensible edit, ie fix the hash issue, and we will consider allowing you to apply it. – Sb2001 talk page 16:09, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
never insert a hyphen into a proper name-->
never add a hyphen to a proper name. Some intuition tells me that add a bit more connotes "putting one in where there wasn't one before" than does insert (though the denotation is the same).
( edit conflict) I think some of the comments here are an example of biting the newbies. The original poster (OP), IP 2006, may not have known that many editors watch the Manual of Style, are cautious about accepting changes, and prefer that things be discussed on the talk page first. S/He may not even have known there was a talk page. S/He may have been confused by the hash/pound sign/number symbol that appears in edit mode but creates a bullet. S/He may have become frustrated when, seeing what appeared to be an obvious contradiction, others did not see it – a normal reaction. If someone had invited or directed this editor to discuss the proposed change on the talk page, perhaps feelings would not have been ruffled. I happen to agree with the OP that some readers may see a contradiction in MOS:HYPHEN:
Hyphens (-) indicate conjunction. There are three main uses:
In hyphenated personal names: John Lennard-Jones.
and the second sentence in the first bulleted item in 3.:
But never insert a hyphen into a proper name (Middle Eastern cuisine, not Middle-Eastern cuisine).
However, I think the OP's suggested wording is wordy and unclear. I'm not even sure we need either "insert" or "add". I suggest the following wording for item 3:
– Corinne ( talk) 21:00, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
Yeah, this article again. Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Mary Kay Letourneau#Regarding "illicit". A permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 14:49, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 190 | Archive 191 | Archive 192 | Archive 193 | Archive 194 | Archive 195 | → | Archive 200 |
The exact reason for this policy remains unclear. LakeKayak ( talk) 22:16, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
@ Johnuniq: Then can you explain why that specific policy is in effect? I am still waiting for an answer. LakeKayak ( talk) 16:49, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
There's something very unpleasant about your demand that everyone else drop everything to satisfy your curiosity. You go search the 200 pages of WPT:MOS archivesdid you not understand? E Eng 18:46, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
If we were to change any advice relating to this at all, it would be to deprecate "U.S." in favor of "US". Several years ago here I presented evidence of a declining use of the dots, and this decline has increased since then. That style is also used very inconsistently when used at all: Some publishers use it only in headlines, not in regular prose; some never; some always; and many leave it up to individual writers/editors and are not consistent about it across their publication. The only real rationale for it is that "US" and "us" are hard to distinguish in all-caps headlines. WP does not use all-caps, so we have no reason to use "U.S.", when we avoid the periods/stops in all other acronyms and initialisms. Use of the dots version frequently produces inconsistent results in our prose, e.g. "a summit attended by representatives of France, the U.S., and the UK". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 03:07, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
@ Martin of Sheffield:: So, this is my first time participating in a community discussion here, and I didn't think it'd be possible to deeply offend someone by sharing an opinion on punctuation. No need for the snark, telling me to "stop and think" before I join the conversation, even if you figure my contribution is "thoughtless ignorance." That's awfully WP:UNCIVIL. If you feel I'm "implying anyone over 50 was archaic from generations ago," well that's on you. You're reading way too deep and have extracted an interpretation so far out of left field, I had to double-check and see if you were actually replying to me. I'm not slighting an age group, I'm simply saying dropping periods between capital letters is a holdover from the past and has become increasingly aberrant in modern writing. And while we're offering anecdotes, I'll add that I received all of my formal education in the US, and dot-free is my normal. @ Sb2001: Didn't have an issue understanding. I appreciate you filling in the gaps for me. — GS ⋙ ☎ 08:32, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
While this is up for discussion, I've been having concerns regarding sports results. There's an exception in the guideline for FIFA codes, and I understand that if the article is actually discussing the FIFA codes themselves. However, I see USA being frequently used in tables giving results of international athletic competitions, where it seems to me that US should be used. (Results are given by country, not team name, so it isn't referring to Team USA. Wikipedia prefers US, so it shouldn't matter if results are reported in sources as USA.) It's possible this might be the result of local consensus among sports editors, but I haven't found any record of discussion on talk page archives. I've also been wondering about the validity of USA being output from some of the {{ flag}} templates. I'd appreciate any clarification, especially if anyone is aware of past discussion on this. – Reidgreg ( talk) 16:07, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
This is lengthy, and may not be of interest to everyone. Recycled discussion about "eg" has been directed here from
WT:MOSABBR.
|
---|
Sb2001 above raised a side point about abbreviations of Latin expressions not being treated consistently with acronyms like UK. They're not treated consistently with such acronyms by any style guides, because they are fundamentally dissimilar, with a history predating the more general abbreviation and acronym-formation trend by centuries. The Latin group (which includes dozens more such abbreviations) are symbols (as we'll see below), not acronyms or initialisms in the sense under discussion, which are capitalized. Many of these Latinisms – etc., c. or ca., fl., id. and ibid., op. cit., cf. and so on – are contractions or truncations, not acronyms/initialisms of any kind at all. Acronyms and initialisms (a distinction some sources do not draw, or may draw inconsistently) usually refer to proper nouns – US, UK, NASA, etc. There are many exceptions, especially in jargon – AIDS, DNA, TRO, APB, NAT, OS – which are capitalized but actually refer to common-noun phrases, as it's become the norm to apply the ABC not A.B.C. or a.b.c. or abc style to new ones, whether common or proper. There are also proper-name exceptions to the fully-capped rule – Amway, Amtrak, Nabisco – by convention, i.e. by the attestation of the majority of source usage. Most of those include partial words not just initials, are usually trademarks, and often involve camel case rather than sentence case (ECMAScript, ConAgra). Acronyms which have been re-assimilated as words, like laser, take all-lowercase. No one writes ETC and EG for etc. and e.g. (even if they would write AMTRAK!); this category of abbreviated Latinisms are a different class of convention, though the truncation and contraction means of their derivation may be similar, and some of them technically are initialisms (q.v., i.e., e.g.). They've also not been assimilated as words; no one pronounces i.e. as something like "ee" or "ay", nor e.g. as if it were the word egg, nor etc. as "ehtk". [Aside: Same goes for the non-Latinism a.k.a. or AKA, as you prefer, which should never be written as aka on Wikipedia; it has not been assimilated as a word pronounced "ahkah" or "acka".] Some more evidence these Latinisms are a different class – a more symbolic one – of convention is that those that take pluralization usually do so by a special letter-doubling practice (which dates back to Latin manuscripts and isn't an English imposition); it doesn't actually correspond to doubling of the abbreviated word, or to the spelling of an abbreviated word: q.v. = quod vide, plural qq.v. (sometimes written q.q.v.) = quae vide not "quod-quod vide"). This is also used in pp. which is actually a symbol for Latin paginis (singular pagina, symbol: p.) not English pages, much less "page-page"; pp. is used in other languages than English. See also mss. for "manuscripts"; again, it is used outside English, and is actually a symbol for the Latin plural manuscripta, singular manuscriptum (symbol: ms.). The doubling convention evolved by analogy from the Roman numeral system (X = 10, XX = 20). Clearly, this entire class of primarily literary Latinisms are symbols which (like various mathematical, chemical element, unit, and other symbols) sometimes incidentally look exactly like English abbreviations and sometimes do not; they are not just normal abbreviations. This is even clearer when one remembers that etc. was formerly commonly given in the more symbolic form &c., and that & itself is a symbolicized Latin et formed by fusing and bending the Latin letters. Similarly, what we represent in ASCII as No. for numero does not correspond (having an extraneous capitalization) to the word spelling; more to the point, in offline typography it's conventionally given with a raised, underlined o – № – not with a normal lower-case "o" and period/point. So, it's clearly not a regular abbreviation. See also the prescription symbol, which in ASCII is often miscalled the "Rx" symbol, from Latin recipe, 'you take': ℞ (it has no x in it, and is actually a crosshatch added to the R, which again does not correspond case-wise to the r in the word). There are others, including the paragraph symbol or pilcrow: ¶; it derives from adding vertical marks to the c of the Latin abbreviation for capitulum and has nothing in origin to do with anything starting with p. Next, see the section sign, §, which derives from Latin signum sectionis (and which is also doubled, §§, to pluralize for 'sections'). Once in a while, such a Latinism is conventionally given in all-caps, as is QED in mathematical and logical proofs, though outside that context it's often given as q.e.d, and appears as Q.E.D. in older maths works. It's essentially just accidental that some of the symbolic compressions of stock Latinisms have remained essentially plain-text abbreviations and subject to some-but-not-all rules for abbreviations in our language (mostly having instead become fixed in style since the 19th century when orthography was first normalized to any real extent), while others have become less-alphabetically symbolic, to the point of obscuring their origins. The same is true of various unit and mathematical symbols. Current English orthography rules about modern acronyms and initialisms of the usual sort don't really apply. It doesn't matter that if i.e. were a brand new acronym we'd spell it IE; it doesn't matter, for the same reason that we don't re-spell the unit symbol dB as DB, or rewrite the mathematical sum sign, ∑ (majuscule sigma, the Greek capital S) as a big English-alphabet s to match the word sum: Convention simply has not evolved in that "super-conformity" direction, and likely never will. We intuitively understand that these are symbols, not expediency abbreviations like Prof. for Professor or Dr[.] for Doctor before someone's name, or shortening Tuesday to Tues. If anyone is looking for perfect consistency and logic in the use and form of a natural language, they will be disappointed everywhere they look. The simple fact is that most English-language style guides call for UK and NATO, for scuba and radar, and for i.e., e.g., and etc., and for cm and ft, so MoS does too, absent a WP-specific reason not to. Clarity, along with reader expectations of formal prose, are WP-specific reasons to do so, and to avoid clarity-reducing and inconsistently applied fads, like willy-nilly dropping of punctuation marks without a convention or standard requiring their absence. "Follow the sources" and "go with the flow" are sufficient reasoning for us to keep going in this direction instead of trying to act as language change advocates in favor of the hyper-simplification proffered by some British news publishers (or the "keep writing like it's 1920" hyper-traditionalism of some American publishers, like the New York Times on certain style points, such as prepending "Mr.", "Mrs.", or "Ms" before any parties mentioned by surname). We have a strong disincentive (even aside from WP:NOR, WP:NPOV and WP:SOAPBOX policies) to pursue such change activism when it would actually negatively impact WP's own output for its readers. The desire to drop the dots from i.e. and etc. is a habit picked up from British journalism, which drops a lot of punctuation (including commas) for expediency reasons at the expense of clarity, and does so in ways that violate the norms of mainstream British punctuation. For abbreviations, those well-sourced norms are to drop the point (period) from, and only from, acronyms like UK and NATO and abbreviations which begin and end with the same letters as the full word, thus St for Saint or Street, but Prof. for Professor. You'll find these conventions in Hart's Rules and its successors, and Fowler's [Dictionary of] Modern English Usage in successive editions, and other British style guides that are not the house stylebooks of specific newspapers, which are all wildly inconsistent with each other on innumerable points, and have little to do with an encyclopedic register of writing. A supposed trend toward rewriting pronounceable "word acronyms" (just "acronyms" in the nomenclature system that distinguishes acronyms from initialisms) like NATO and AIDS as if they were words, Nato and Aids (which is already an unrelated word), is not well-evidenced outside of British journalism either, and by no means are all British news publishers in favor of it. It's the lowest-common-denominator publications like The Guardian doing it; the style books of higher-end publications like The Economist [1] call for NATO and AIDS, as do the more academic style guides like Fowler's and New Hart's in the Commonwealth English sphere, along with virtually all North American style guides. The down-casing is, honestly, a patently stupid practice – an intentional reduction of communication effectiveness by people trying to communicate – since it results in obvious understandability problems; when The Guardian writes about ISIS (more properly IS or ISIL) as "Isis", it appears they're referring to an Egyptian mythological figure, or perhaps a modern band or actress by this monicker; no one unfamiliar with the topic (or familiar with it as ISIL or IS, as many non-native English speakers will be) will understand that an acronym is meant. (The practice originated in broadcast journalism, as a cue for pronunciation on teleprompters, and spread by reuse of material for broadcast and print release without bothering to reformat for the latter.) A trend toward expediency over precision has long existed in news writing, due to deadline pressure both for writers and for actual typesetting in the pre-digital era, and has become exacerbated by the Internet for an unrelated reason: people used to peruse the paper over coffee and on the bus at a fairly leisurely pace, and had few TV channels to choose from; but now a news organization has only seconds to grab a reader's attention on their mobile device, and less likelihood of retaining it very long on such devices or when we have hundreds of TV channels to change to. None of these expediency pressures apply to encyclopedia writing or reading. We are a long-term reference work, not an ephemeral, click-bait infotainment source. We have a duty to write clearly and precisely (including for children, ESL learners, screen readers, and easy machine translation), and there is a reader expectation that we will do so. We fail to do so when we drop conventional punctuation and/or capitalization that helps distinguish between regular words and abbreviations (of whatever kind, other than unit symbols that have been formally standardized without them). Finally, as a matter of policy, WP is not written in news style, so we really just DGaF what British (or American, or whatever) news publishers are doing with words and names anyway. Digression, to forestall any "what about...?" objections: An exception to that DGaF is for uncommonly fast-moving matters (like pronouns and the transgendered) that have been evolving slightly too quickly for the slow publication cycles of academic style guides, but are addressed consistently in more frequently updated journalism ones, if they actually reflect common practice outside newspapers as well. It's difficult to remember any example other than the TG one, where sources like the AP Stylebook were in fact useful in the
MOS:IDENTITY debates. A conceivable additional example would be terminology should some country split and generate new nationality-indicating adjectives; news stylebooks would be updated within the year to account for it. Another exception, outside the MoS sphere, is that newspapers are often key sources for
WP:COMMONNAME determination (which
is not a style question), though academic book sources are preferred, when available, as higher-quality sources. For example, we can rely entirely on news coverage to determine that most reliable sources refer to The Oatmeal cartoonist
Matthew Inman by that name, even though he actually signs the cartoons as "The Oatmeal". While his real name presently redirects to the article on the cartoon, if a proper
WP:BLP article were split from it (and this could arguably be done, since he's also published several books and is notable for some other things, like saving the Nikola Tesla Museum project) it would be at
Matthew Inman not
The Oatmeal (cartoonist) or
Oatmeal (cartoonist), on the strength of journalistic sources alone, since he's too recent a public figure to be mentioned in many if any books. I will say thank you for your response. You raise some good points. I am slightly disturbed by the inclusion of the phrase 'It's the lowest-common-denominator publications like The Guardian': The Guardian is a very well respected publication. I myself purchase it several times a week on my way to studying English Language and English Literature at an educational establishment. I will note that here you are advised to drop much of the punctuation for abbreviations, acronyms, etc (including page references 'p' and 'pp'). This leads me onto the issue of 'We have a duty to write clearly and precisely ... for children': today's youth are exposed to all sorts of styles. I can say with complete confidence, what they are taught at school/college/university is what is followed in the vast majority of cases. The Classics Department at the establishment I attend generally avoids using full stops to show initials/abbreviations. I am not always keen on pronounceable acronyms' capitals being dropped, unless they either do not need to be recognised as a series of contracted words, or are such common knowledge that it is not necessary to keep the caps. I am somewhat pleased to see British media is having such an influence on the way people write rather than American. It worries me to see people writing a colon to separate hours and minutes in 12-hour time, but that is another matter. Whilst you may not see British media influence as a positive, I most certainly do. Going back to the 'lowest-common-denominator' point you raised earlier, I carry with me a copy of the Guardian style guide and the University of Oxford style guide. I do not think the latter can be described so dismissively. Its English Department is fantastic. Change is important in language, as it is in everything else. When it becomes clear that general language is swinging against the well-established versions we see in use at any one moment, we should be the ones to change. Whether that be me accepting that some people will write a colon instead of a full stop to separate hours and minutes, or you accepting that some people prefer non-dotted abbreviations. Those versions that we prefer do not have to become obsolete and unseen, but should not stay as law and the only correct version of something. - Sb2001 ( talk) 23:48, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Here's an abbreviation: TLDR. Seriously, Wikipedia talk pages aren't your personal blog, SMc, and not the place for your personal analysis and judgement. Even so, some of your analysis is based on misunderstanding of the reason behind usage (for example, dB would never be written with a capital d because it's a metric prefix for "deci", and an international standard regardless of language). oknazevad ( talk) 02:14, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
|
"Sir" is an honorific prefix, not a forename. As such, it belongs in the honorific prefix section of an infobox, not immediately precedent to and on the same line as the article subject's name. It functions exactly as other honorific prefixes — "Mr", "Mrs", "Ms", "Dr", "Rev.", and so on.
-- Vabadus91 ( talk) 00:37, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Is this an ENGVAR issue? Specifically, Thronecast is a British programme discussing an American programme, and each "series" of the former coincides with a "season" on the latter.
I think For the third series [of Thronecast], Thronecast became a 15-minute on-air show that [followed] each episode of the third season [of Game of Thrones
looks particularly weird, because if the British terminology was changed to American or vice versa, it would read like the third series was the same thing as the third season; it appears that the different terms are being used to disambiguate inline.
I'm actually not sure if this is a problem, though, as I have heard Americans (specifically Chuck Sonnenburg) use the word "series" when describing British shows like Red Dwarf and Doctor Who, which leads me to believe that the "terminology" is mutually intelligible, but it still seems weird...
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 01:07, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
I'm not sure this is really significant enough, but I can't think where would be better to ask. Periodically I see articles which say "Fred McSubject is a Roman Catholic". I usually alter this to say " Catholic", given that the word "Roman" seems entirely redundant. I appreciate that - well, essentially, the stuff in the lead of Catholicism is so - but AFAIK in ordinary usage the word "Catholic" alone is always interpreted as referring to the Catholic Church, and as such "Roman" doesn't alleviate any actual confusion on the part of the reader. Comments? Pinkbeast ( talk) 16:57, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
This article is about Eastern churches in full communion with the Catholic ChurchThe Eastern churches that are in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church form part of what they call the "Catholic Church"; to say they are in communion with the "Catholic Church" is to say they are in communion with themselves.
I'm afraid I don't quite agree with the replies above. The salient point about the "attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to appropriate the term "Catholic"" is that it has been entirely successful. In every context save discussion about flavours of Christianity, "Catholic" is clearly and unambiguously understood to mean Roman Catholic. It has been for hundreds of years (eg Pepys and his contemporaries write about "Catholiques", when they don't write about "Papists") and it is today.
There's no issue of precision or clarity. If you read "X is a Catholic" there is no actual doubt as to what is meant. Wikipedia is already littered with unqualified "Catholics" none of which produces the slightest confusion in the reader. Pinkbeast ( talk) 14:18, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
Agree with Peter. "Roman Catholic" is a member of the group "catholic", so the two are not interchangeable in an encyclopaedia. This is complicated, though, by the existence of our article Catholic Church. Now there's a can of worms (or is it "diet"?). Still, I don't see that it's necessary to address that in order to do this in the right way. Formerip ( talk) 20:59, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
The Vatican itself uses "Roman Catholic". [2] Kablammo ( talk) 21:12, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
This -- the use of "Louis' father", etc. in the
Louis XIV of France article -- seems like a violation of
MOS:POSS. Specifically Add 's if the possessive has an additional /ᵻz/ at the end
. But it's been a long time since I read any professional work on French history in English, so I may be missing some way in which it could be covered under the following Some possessives have two possible pronunciations
.
Thoughts?
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 08:33, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
{{
Use X English}}
) and use the approproiate possessive for that flavour. —
Stanning (
talk)
10:16, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
The usual pronunciations, English-wide, of Louis in reference to a French monarch, are /Loo-EE/ or /LOO-ee/ depending on French familiarity. The possessive is Louis's, here and in most other styles. (Chicago Manual of Style tried switching to Louis' in the 15th ed. for unknown reasons, and after getting slammed for it, switched back in the 16th and current edition, with an almost apologetic note.) Other major, modern style guides back this, including New Hart's.
But there's no WP-related rationale to use Louis' in the possessive of St. Louis - /LOO-iss/ – Missouri, either, or similar constructions like Kanasas's, Marx's, showbiz's. The various and contradictory "punctuate based on the sound of the word/name where you grew up" approaches are a [bad] joke, abandoned by more style guides as time goes on. It's untenable except in local-to-regional publishing, because pronunciations change from area to area, and there is a lot of dialectal variation in the UK, US, Canada, Ireland, etc.
I firmly predict that the "huge pile of style guides" sourcing run I've started will show that there's an overall preference in academic and general-audience guides for "Jones's" style as a consistent approach to all the "what if it ends with ...?" questions; that in journalism, marketing, and business stylesheets there's a preference for "Jones'" as yet another typical, niggling big of compression for its own sake from that sector; and that newer works are less apt to try to justify complicated exceptions. MoS almost always lands on the academic-through-general side of this broad rift in English style. I'm doing the source research mainly for Apostrophe#Usage in English, which isn't bare, but has too few sources, is missing obvious major ones, uses some old and unreliable ones, and has clear original research, like unsupportable generalizations about English usage from nothing but a single newspaper's internal house style sheet.
MoS's main sources, CMoS and New Hart's Rules, both back an apostrophe-s standard, the first explicitly and the second by default. NHR is more permissive of optional exception-making (for persnickety reasons no one is ever going to remember, about multisyllabic stress which only matters for reading out loud – precisely the irrelevant, editor-unfriendly
WP:CREEP stuff we avoid here). Fowler's is even worse for our purposes in this regard; but both mostly treat their declared exceptions as optional. CMoS no longer goes there at all; since 2010, it sticks with apostrophe-s, including for Jesus's and Camus's, and explicitly declares in two places that it is overruling previous editions on these matters, for increased consistency and logic. Plus ça change ...
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
09:27, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
Somewhere I thought we were already addressing this, but I don't find it in MOS:MAIN, MOS:CAPS, or MOS:PN. We really should address this. The Internet and the Web (short for the World Wide Web, which no one says any more) are proper names; they are specific, unique things like the Pacific Ocean and the language French. Journalism style guides ( Wikipedia is not written in news style) have been pushing hard to lowercase these, but they're factually wrong to do so when the do it to the Internet and the Web.
Lower-case internet as a noun means "a (i.e. any) network of networks". Various internets combined to form the Internet, and there are internets that were not and still are not part of it (though various internets are also part of the Internet today). Due to ambiguity, internetwork or inter-network – or more recently a completely different term, wide-area network – has usually been used instead.
Lower-case web as a noun is something a spider makes, with various metaphoric applications of the word ("a web of trust", etc.).
Lower-case as adjectives, both words refer to technologies (protocols, standards, applications, etc.) that can be used for intranets as well as the Internet. These are thus properly lower-cased most of the time; it is hard to think of any such technology that cannot be used for an intranet. Both can also be capitalized as adjectives when used to refer specifically to the Internet or the Web ("he had no Internet access while on the island").
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
03:31, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
But the "distinction" argument isn't even necessary; "the Internet" is a proper name/proper noun in both the philosophy and linguistic senses, so it's capitalized per our style guide (which is not NYT's or The Guardian's), no different from the Pacific Coast Highway and the International Space Station – unique, monolithic human creations. I chose these examples carefully, because there's more than one major thoroughfare on the US Pacific Coast and more than one orbital habitat/lab created through multinational cooperation. "A Pacific Coast highway" and "an international space station" are valid expressions, referring to real categorizations, just like "an internet" (or internetwork or WAN). The PCH, the ISS, and the Internet all are the most notable but not exclusives entries in their respective categories.
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
10:01, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
Hello, as I think I might be interpreting MOS:SCROLL incorrectly, could somebody tell me if the usage I have made here (the six images) is acceptable or not? Without it, the last image overflows outside of the white frame and into the gray space. I would've put them into a gallery, but the fact that they are templates doesn't let me do that easily. — Anakimi talk 18:44, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
See
Real_Madrid_C.F./sandbox for a robust approach that should work regardless of OS and browser. On a big monitor, the images are all on one line. They'll auto wrap and re-center as needed on smaller devices, the way <gallery>...</gallery>
works. I've applied this fix to both sets of field (pitch) layouts, and to the uniform (home kit) material. The CSS can be put into templates; you need a wrapper div with text-align: center
; created that as {{
Gallery layout}}
, since this isn't really footy-specific. The image templates themselves can be edited to have a parameter to use display: inline-block
for such layouts. That would probably save time in implementing this solution on other articles. PS: I also fixed a typo and an venue infobox parameter error.
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
22:29, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
display: inline-block
into templates, let me know. It should work regardless what the surrounding element of the template is, so for some templates it can just be passed in a |style=
or |css=
parameter to a parent template. For templates that aren't meta-templated, the template's own code may need to be changed to be wrapped in a <span>...</span>
or <div>...</div>
to which this CSS is applied when requested, e.g. by a |gallery=y
being passed to the template. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
19:14, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
{{
Gallery layout content}}
. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
02:48, 16 July 2017 (UTC)There's an editor at Futurama that believes that when talking a possessive of the show's title (eg Futurama's setting is a backdrop..., that the 's should fall within the italics eg Futurama's, but best I've seen that standard practice is to keep those out of the italacs implicitly set by the docs for {{ '}} and friends Futurama's. But the MOS does not lay out this type of case. The style guides that I can see online agree with the latter but I think if we don't have that already we should spell it out. As well as the case to avoid possessive forms of quoted titles (which the style guides also agree on). -- MASEM ( t) 05:46, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
a titular item: Tony, you're not channeling Neelix, are you? FBDB E Eng 10:18, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
Presently we have text in WP:MOS that says "write volume two, number seven or Vol. 2, No. 7." This appears to conflict with common practice, and with MOS:CAPS. Under no other circumstance would we permit capitalization of a common noun simply because it's abbreviated (and "no." is an abbreviation, of Latin numero, which is not written Numero; see also "etc.", "cf.", "e.g.", and a zillion other Latinisms in English, which are uniformly lowercased). I would suggest that this be changed to "vol. 2, no. 7".
Regardless, this section should probably also be moved to MOS:NUM, and only summarized here in compressed form. MOS:NUM doesn't have anything on this, but it is the obvious place to look, and we're trying to move nit-picks out of the main MOS to the, well, nit-pick pages. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:06, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
I would always favour 'No' and 'Vol'. Caps seems to be well-established, and recommended by most style guides I see. I am not sure of the reasoning, though. Maybe it has something to do with their origins in titles. There is possibly an argument for dropping them (as well as the full stops!).- Sb2001 ( talk) 22:22, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
Unproductive circular debate about whether evidence is needed
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---|
@
Martinevans123: An "I'm dismissive of style guides" argument equates to "I don't have an argument" here, since what MoS says is largely based on what other style guides are doing (with priority generally in decreasing order from academic through general-audience to journalism and marketing guides). @
Sb2001: You wrote: "Caps seems to be ... recommended by most style guides I see". Really? I've cited plenty that don't. I ask the same of both of you, again: Please provide sources in favor of "Vol[.]" and "No[.], not inside a title or subtitle, not after a full stop (period), and not just in formatted citations, but in mid-sentence in running text. Let's count them and compare both their number and their reputability to what I've cited already and continue to cite below. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
22:00, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
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{{cite magazine |title=Title |magazine=Magazine |volume=75 |issue=11}}
{{citation |title=Title |magazine=Magazine |volume=75 |issue=11}}
{{cite magazine |title=Title |magazine=Magazine |volume=75 |issue=11 |page=93}}
" becomes ""Title". Magazine. Vol. 75, no. 11. p. 93."? —
BarrelProof (
talk)
02:30, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
Digression that is mostly miscommunication
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Most are in favor of "vol." and "no.", but there are a few exceptions:
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References
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Again, this would not lowercase either abbreviation in a) the title of a work or b) a citation in a format that capitalizes either or both. These are the concerns the Mixed comments above have in mind. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:00, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Just use №. — Jon C. ॐ 10:21, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
Some side issues: Despite MOS and WP:MOSABBR discouraging dropping of dots (points, periods, stops) from abbreviations except where utterly conventional and non-ambiguous (e.g., "Dr Smith" and "St Stephen" in British ENGVAR), I keep running into "No 1" in various articles (e.g. here). This is intolerably ambiguous, especially for users of screen readers, though it produces confusing gibberish for everyone, like "No of discs" in infoboxes [5]. Worst of all (so far): table header labeled "No" [6]. Also saw a "No total" in one of these. We need to explicitly state that No. (whether we keep that capitalized or not) must retain the dot and is not an ENGVAR matter (sourcing above demonstrates this; both New Hart's and Fowler's retain the dots).
Second, neither vol. nor no. appear at MOS:ABBR but of course should be listed, since we use them frequently. I'll wait until the discussion above concludes before adding them, so that what gets added doesn't have to be changed later. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 02:55, 11 July 2017 (UTC) PS: Ha ha, I rickrolled Wikipedia.
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Infoboxes#RfC: Red links in infoboxes. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 09:31, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
Users Adûnâi and Dank are in disagreement with me over how MOS:COMMA should be applied.
It started when I pointed out an error (my opinion) on the Main Page, adding this remark:
Adûnâi disagreed, writing:
Dank agreed with Adûnâi:
User Khajidha agreed with me:
The discussion was removed as a new day arrived.
I then contacted both editors on their talkpages, but was unable to convince them, despite pointing out the explicit "Burke and Wills" example:
Incorrect: | Burke and Wills, fed by locals (on beans, fish, and ngardu) survived for a few months. |
Correct: | Burke and Wills, fed by locals (on beans, fish, and ngardu), survived for a few months. |
Adûnâi claimed this was "a completely unrelated example", while Dank re-iterated that "a comma separates each element and follows the last element unless followed by other punctuation", ignoring the explicit part I had pointed out: "Do not be fooled by other punctuation, which can distract from the need for a comma, especially when it collides with a bracket or parenthesis, as in this example (which appears above the "Burke and Wills" example).
Let's look at another example:
In it, "and her mother, Gwen, was a homemaker" is interrupted by the parenthetical expression "(née Jennings)", resulting in the above sentence. Do Adûnâi and/or Dank mean that the comma after "Gwen" should be removed? I don't know. I have not understood how either of them explains why the comma shouldn't be there, which is why I'm starting this discussion.
Could someone please clarify this?
Thanks.
HandsomeFella ( talk) 12:12, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
I'm going to guess from the lack of response that people are happy with our understanding of the MOS guideline. Please ping me if not. - Dank ( push to talk) 21:11, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
That comma rule is overridden by comma conventions that avoid a comma both before and after those parentheses.
@ Dank, Adûnâi, and HandsomeFella: The comma does not belong this time. Yes, we have a rule for "July 1, 1867, ..." with two commas (so do other style guides). Commas that serve a parenthetical purpose are always in pairs, unless replaced by:
I.e. we don't use pointless double punctuation, like a comma before a period/stop or a dash.
Much of the above has been red-herring discussion. Yes, this case differs from the guideline's and the Kopechne article's examples. The beginning of "(now celebrated as Canada Day)" is a "(" introducing another parenthetical, which applies to the subject, not to the year, so it cancels the need for a comma to balance the first one in ", 1867". Without the date, this would read "The British North America Act (now celebrated as Canada Day) united the colonies of ...", with no commas. Contrast the other examples: "her mother, Gwen (née Jennings)," has a parenthetical that applies to the material in another parenthetical (the ", Gwen ...," structure) and is part of it, all of it ultimately referring to "her mother". Without the second parenthetical, it would read "her mother, Gwen, ..." with both commas. Without the first parenthetical, it is a non-sequitur: "her mother (née Jennings)"; makes little sense without the first name also included. "Burke and Wills, fed by locals (on beans, fish, and ngardu), survived for a few months" is essentially the same as the mother example, and would read "Burke and Willis, fed by locals, survived ..." without the second parenthetical clause, which pertains to the feeding not to B&W. Without the first parenthetical, it is again broken: "Burke and willis (on beans, fish, and ngardu) survived ...". Both are broken when their first parentheticals are removed because the second parenthetical is an internal reference to the first, not to the subject directly. [Aside: Both could be unbroken with a rewrite if information was genuinely missing: "her mother, née Jennings, first name unknown," and "Burke and Willis survived for a few months on beans, etc., but it is not known if they locals provided this food or they gathered it themselves."] In the case at issue, the holiday name pertains to the entire subject, not to the "1867" fragment, and it works regardless what you do to it, because the parentheticals are independent of each other: "The British North America Act of July 1, 1867, united ...; and "The British North America Act (now celebrated as Canada Day) united ...".
Another way of putting it: The Canada thing could very reasonably be rewritten as "The British North America Act of July 1, 1867 – now celebrated as Canada Day – united ...". But no sane writer would do "... her mother, Gwen – née Jennings ...", or "Burke and Wills, fed by locals – on beans, fish, and ngardu ...". They're a different kind of structure from the Canada case.
PS: Technically, the "1867" is not a parenthetical, but is conventionally formatted as one. The nature of this kind of confusion/dispute is one of the reasons (source: Garner's Modern American Usage) that another pseudo-parenthetical, the "Firstname Lastname, Jr, ..." style, has gone out of fashion, in favor of "Firstname Lastname Jr ...". It's also probably (my speculation) got something to do with why "July 1, 1867, ..." date formatting has been abandoned in most of the world, when it was neck-and-neck with "1 July 1867" style in the 19th century (source: Google N-Grams).
05:04, 28 July 2017 (UTC) — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
SMcCandlish (
talk •
contribs)
Hello everyone, I stumbled across Special:Contributions/5.107.140.121, who has made numerous edits of this form [7]. Am I correct in reverting these, or am I missing something? @ 5.107.140.121:. Tazerdadog ( talk) 19:12, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
The above redirect points to a very short section here. That section seems to be missing links to where we would otherwise use non-breaking spaces (at least a reference to MOSNUM). Maybe it would be a good idea to add some pointer links? -- Izno ( talk) 11:56, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
The MoS asks for a space before per cent/percent, but does not make clear whether this should be non-breaking. Do you know? – Sb2001 talk page 14:07, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
x per cent
or x{{nbsp}}per cent
. (IMHO a nbsp might be a good idea.) —
Stanning (
talk)
17:11, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
Write 3%, three percent, or three per cent, but not 3 % (with a space) or three %. "Percent" is American usage, and "per cent" is British usage (see § National varieties of English, above). In ranges of percentages written with an en dash, write only a single percent sign: 3–14%.AHeneen ( talk) 17:14, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
5 kilogramsbut nbsp in
5 kg. See the table at WP:Manual_of_Style/Dates_and_numbers#Unit_names_and_symbols, in the section of the table labeled Numeric values. E Eng 17:30, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
) between a number and a unit symbol, or use {{
nowrap}}".
MOS:NBSP says "It is desirable to prevent line breaks where breaking across lines might be confusing or awkward. ... Whether a non-breaking space is appropriate depends on context: whereas it is appropriate to use 12{{
nbsp}}MB
in prose, it may be counterproductive in a table (where horizontal space is precious) and unnecessary in a short parameter value in an infobox (where a break would never occur anyway)." I think usage of an NBSP before percent or per cent should follow that guideline. I don't have time right now, but talk page archives should be checked to make sure this issue hasn't been discussed before.
AHeneen (
talk)
18:09, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
15{{nbsp}}per{{nbsp}}cent
creates an overlong unbreakable string.
E
Eng
19:37, 22 July 2017 (UTC)29 newton-meters
.
E
Eng
04:57, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
Should the names of blogs be italicised? Most of the articles for entries on List of blogs do not have italic titles (although some do). I was about to italicise the title of a blog article but was quite surprised to find this was not the general practice. Spinning Spark 17:17, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
Website titles may or may not be italicized depending on the type of site and what kind of content it features. Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized ( Salon or HuffPost). Online encyclopedias and dictionaries should also be italicized ( Scholarpedia or Merriam-Webster Online). Other types of websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
|work=
or |website=
or |journal=
parameter value, so deciding on your own not to use italics is going to cause a conflicting style in the same article. If you're dealing with something like a newspaper's official blog, use |work=Newspaper Title
|at="Blog Title" (official blog)
|title=Article title
; resulting in a cite like: Persson, J. Randome (27 July 2017). "How I Survived a Vicious Salamander Attack". Newspaper Title. "Blog Title" (official blog). {{
cite web}}
: Missing or empty |url=
(
help) Publications get italics except when referred to as a business (use the company name), or a computer system (no styling, use domain name): "He writes for Salon"; "She took over as the CEO of Salon Media Group"; "The DDoS attack also affected www.salon.com for two hours." For online publications that use their domain name as their title, complete with the ".com" (or whatever), it still goes in italics when discussed as a publication rather than a legal entity or a stack of hardware. This, too, is what our cite system will do, so just deal with it and don't introduce a conflict style, please. :-) PS: Abusing parameters of the cite templates to get an alternative style (e.g. using |at=
for the work title) will emit incorrect COinS metadata and is to be avoided. Anyone may revert/fix that on sight. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
05:12, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
I thought that we have an existing rule about this, but cannot find it.
Is "A UART or "An UART" correct? Likewise with HTML, ATM, etc? What is the general rule? -- Guy Macon ( talk) 19:59, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
Intrinsic-Harmony.jpg If you combined an op amp with a UART, would it be op art? – E Eng
Based on the feedback above, I am going to use "a UART" from now on. The interesting aspect here is determining how most people pronounce an acronym/initialism. I can look around me and see that most people I talk to pronounce "FAQ" as "fack" and not "eff-ay-cue" and that most people I talk to pronounce "RfC" as "Arr-Eff-Cee" and not "Refsee", but is this universal among English dialects? I recently worked with some Australians, and when they read something like "E-Z-Off" they read it as "Eee-Zed-Off". And what pronunciation should I assume for "FUQ (Frequently Unanswered Questions"? -- Guy Macon ( talk) 13:37, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
I recently started placing nbsps after 'p.' and before the number. It then became clear that the citation insert tool does not do this. Other editors do not, either. Is it A/ bad/something to go back to undo, B/ something which is harmless, but unnecessary or C/ something which we should all be doing? – Sb2001 talk page 11:40, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
if the reference is in the cite ref format with curly brackets (but
EEng commented recently that the template {{
nbsp}} should not mess up even that kind of citation), and no one has ever said it messes up anything. –
Corinne (
talk)
13:33, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
|page=
instead of |pages=
if you want p. instead of pp.) If you're formatting citations yourself instead of using a template, I would go somewhere between C and B: I think it's preferable to use a non-breaking space, but not actually harmful not to. —
David Eppstein (
talk)
21:29, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
character between the prefix and the first page number. It has been this way for a very long time.|page=p. ...
or |pages=pp. ...
in the cs1|2 templates that render page numbers with a colon prefix, {{
cite journal}}
and {{
citation}}
(when |journal=
is set), then you should stop doing that. Typical professional, academic, or scientific journals usually do not use p. or pp. prefixes so {{cite journal}}
and {{citation}}
follow that style.<ref>...</ref>
format"; most uses of the citation templates are inside <ref>...</ref>
; they're only not when people are using the separate-refs-and-bibliography-sections system, which is mostly at longer articles, especially those repeatedly citing the same sources at different pages. Anyway, I agree with the gist above: The templates already handle this. For non-templated citations, C is probably the ideal answer, but B is fine, too (see elsewhere on this page for consternation about non-breaking spaces; not everyone agrees that the end result, for the reader, of using them is worth the instruction creep of inserting rules about them into MoS). It's generally a safe bet to include one, in regular (non-templated) text any time you don't want a number or other tiny string to separate from something else. As noted in the other thread, we don't actually have a rule to use, e.g., 47 metres
, just 47 m
, but many of us do the former as well for the same rationale, even in absence of it being demanded by MoS. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
23:22, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
Whenever I see 'No.' or 'No' (now you have all brainwashed me into meticulously eradicating all non-MoS styles of writing), I place the {abbr|No.|number} tag on it, for clarity. I understand that both versions, ie dotted and non-dotted may seem slightly confusing. Although, I maintain that most instances of it in the UK drop the full stop (or, full point as the MoS now likes to use). My question is whether this is actually worthwhile: very few editors seem to bother doing this outside infoboxes, which makes me wonder whether I should be doing it at all. If it is advisable, why does the MoS not require editors to add the abbr tag? It is the same with circa. I always tag that if I see it (and – as much as it hurts – put the full point on the end). The MoS is, as usual, rather ambiguous on this matter. – Sb2001 talk page 11:37, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
<abbr>...</abbr>
markup and a wikilink, in the sense that a string has been marked up such that doing something with it with the pointer leads to additional contextual content; one goes to another page, the other results in a tooltip. Sso does <span title="Tooltip text here.">...</span>
(or same on some other element that doesn't have a reserved use for title=
). I mention that last bit, because I keep running into cases of people abusing <abbr>...</abbr>
to generate tooltips for things that are not abbreviations, which is an HTML spec violation (a well-formedness rather than validation error, in the extended definition of "well-formed" which includes "follows all the syntactic rules"). —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
23:57, 30 July 2017 (UTC)I'ld like to ask if there is a guideline on using diacritics in commonly used words like naïve and café. The reason I ask is that someone just did this: [13], and I'm not sure whether that's appropriate or not. LK ( talk) 08:16, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
General rule of thumb: check some dictionaries, and use the spelling that is listed first by the majority of them. In your cases, the results are "café" but "naive". Regardless of the answer on the latter, the diacritic would be retained in non-assimilated words (e.g. naîf) and in a foreign word that has an English non-diacritic equivalent: "naîvete" but "naivety". The very existence of "naivety", "naiver", "naivest", and other derived forms, which never have the umlaut, discourages "naïve" in English. Zero dictionaries of the eight or so I checked listed "naïve" as preferred, and three did not list it at all, only "naive". All of them preferred "café" over "cafe". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 06:49, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
In the interest of the wider community, and by the solemn Wikipedia accord to endlessly fork around, I'd like to draw your attention to the following discussion. Regards, nagual design 00:13, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Hmm. Its already in
MOS:QUOTE, as examples under "Typographic conformity", which has been quoted in that discussion. The
specialized-style fallacy is rearing its ugly head, with someone unhappily suggesting that the MoS is "bad" on this and should be changed, so he/she can continue capitalizing "Endangered". I explained why that can't happen. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
08:06, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
A few more commenters on this issue would be much appreciated. nagual design 23:31, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone have any pertinent information or strong preferences on whether the labels for the various earthquake magnitude scales should be italicized (like this ML, Mw, MS, mB, mb, mbLg, etc.) or not (like this ML, Mw, MS, mB, mb, mbLg)?
It might be noted that this is entirely a matter of style, not nomenclature, and that some seismological authorities italicize, and some do not. Also: these terms are not variables: they are labels, analogous to "F" and "C" for temperature scales. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 21:43, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
The article list of medical ethics cases has a mix of past and current tenses in the summaries of the cases. (Example of present tense: "A teenaged woman is declared brain-dead and her family wishes to maintain her body on mechanical ventilation perpetually.") I think the summaries should use past tense, since these all occurred in the past, and it reads better to me. At the same time, using the present tense makes sense because it describes the particular ethical dilemma at the time it was a dilemma. The article creator Bluerasberry prefers present tense but doesn't have a particularly strong opinion about it, so I thought I would ask here whether or not there is a specific guideline in place (or if one could be made). Either way the summaries should consistently use the same tense. —Мандичка YO 😜 23:10, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
I have started an RFC at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Abbreviations# RFC: Periods in abbreviations for degrees. Anyone interested in this issue should comment there, please. DES (talk) DESiegel Contribs 22:20, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
In my opinion, MOS:ISLAM is missing a line about honorifics in non-Muhammad religious figures. Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles#Prophets other than Muhammad. -- HyperGaruda ( talk) 11:49, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
Please take part in the following discussion at the MoS Trademarks talk page; Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Trademarks#MOS:TMRULES – Sb2001 talk page 23:15, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
I happened across this article, and tried to change the infobox, to remove the spaces either side of the en rule/dash, as per MOS:DASH. I was shocked to find that the template actually includes the spaces on its own. This means that it is very difficult to remove these unnecessary spaces. Does anyone know how it is done, and how the template can be amended to fix the clear error? – Sb2001 talk page 19:39, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
E Eng 01:27, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
The en dash in a range is always unspaced, except when either or both elements of the range include at least one space.In the example you quote, the elements bounding the range are "May" and "July". isaacl ( talk) 15:01, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
The example is attempting to show ambiguity. Chaning it to "The author thanked Sinéad O'Connor, Bob Marley, and her parents" is unambiguous unless you posit that Bob Marley was female. The comment "did she thank her own parents, or O'Connor's parents?" indicates that the writer of this example did in fact mean "The author thanked Bob Marley, Sinéad O'Connor, and her parents".
The next paragraph develops the theme: "The author thanked her mother, Bob Marley, and Sinéad O'Connor".
Personally I think the whole section needs a good going over, particularly the interaction of serial commas with appositives. Martin of Sheffield ( talk) 13:45, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Mary Kay Letourneau#Use of "Fualaau". A permalink for it is here. The discussion concerns whether or not to use "Letourneau" for some parts of the article and "Fualaau" for other parts of the article. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 18:57, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
Okay, what is it that you guys don't understand about how the correction I'm trying to make to #3 usage of hyphens is to correct a self-contradiction? #3 says never to use a hyphen in a proper name, but #1 already said to use a hyphen in a personal name if it was designed that way, and personal names are proper names/proper nouns. So why should we supposedly not clarify the exception using a wording like I tried to use?
2600:100E:B149:8DAB:F80C:D7D2:437F:F3BC ( talk) 15:41, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
insertsuggests to anyone with a basic understanding of English that it is an alteration. Come back with a draft of a more sensible edit, ie fix the hash issue, and we will consider allowing you to apply it. – Sb2001 talk page 16:09, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
never insert a hyphen into a proper name-->
never add a hyphen to a proper name. Some intuition tells me that add a bit more connotes "putting one in where there wasn't one before" than does insert (though the denotation is the same).
( edit conflict) I think some of the comments here are an example of biting the newbies. The original poster (OP), IP 2006, may not have known that many editors watch the Manual of Style, are cautious about accepting changes, and prefer that things be discussed on the talk page first. S/He may not even have known there was a talk page. S/He may have been confused by the hash/pound sign/number symbol that appears in edit mode but creates a bullet. S/He may have become frustrated when, seeing what appeared to be an obvious contradiction, others did not see it – a normal reaction. If someone had invited or directed this editor to discuss the proposed change on the talk page, perhaps feelings would not have been ruffled. I happen to agree with the OP that some readers may see a contradiction in MOS:HYPHEN:
Hyphens (-) indicate conjunction. There are three main uses:
In hyphenated personal names: John Lennard-Jones.
and the second sentence in the first bulleted item in 3.:
But never insert a hyphen into a proper name (Middle Eastern cuisine, not Middle-Eastern cuisine).
However, I think the OP's suggested wording is wordy and unclear. I'm not even sure we need either "insert" or "add". I suggest the following wording for item 3:
– Corinne ( talk) 21:00, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
Yeah, this article again. Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Mary Kay Letourneau#Regarding "illicit". A permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 14:49, 21 August 2017 (UTC)