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Aren't we covering this somewhere? I don't find it at any "likely suspect" places including MOS:PERSON, MOS:GNL, MOS:IDENTITY, MOS:BIO, or MOS:WTW. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 12:25, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
I'm actually way more concerned about neologistms like zie and s/him. At least one article is now riddled with this stuff. WP using it is no different from us trying to mimic the font and color effects of logos. We're not here to promote individual parties' attempts at using customization of wording to stand apart, especially when it interferes in any way whatsoever with communication with our readers. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 20:08, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
Joke that someone took seriously.
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The evolution on this has been toward more acceptance, over time. Apparently there is more resistance to it in AE than BE, which I did not know, but both are moving in the same direction. Some specifics:
Mathglot ( talk) 02:40, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
References
1. as nominative pl. of the 3d personal pronoun, sometimes wihtout an antecedent, and sometimes with a singular antecedent, as nobody, everybody.
Jolif and glad they went unto here [their] rest. Chaucer.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness. Matt. v. 6
{{
cite book}}
: |access-date=
requires |url=
(
help)
Despite the apparent grammatical disagreement between a singular antecedent like someone and the plural pronoun them, the construction is so widespread both in print and in speech that it often passes unnoticed. There are several reasons for its appeal. Forms of they are useful as gender-neutral substitutes for generic he and for coordinate forms like his/her or his or her (which can sound clumsy when repeated). Nevertheless, the clash in number can be jarring to writers and readers, and many people dislike they with a singular antecedent. This includes much of the Usage Panel, though their resistance has declined over time. ... by 2008, a majority of the Panel accepted such sentences as If anyone calls, tell them I can't come to the phone (56 percent) and Everyone returned to their seats (59 percent).
- 'Anyone can set themselves up as an acupuncturist...' Sarah Lonsdale, "Sharp Practice Pricks Reputation of Acupuncture," Observer Sunday", 15 Dec 1991, at 4.
- 'A starting point could be to give more support to the company secretary. They are, or should be, privy to the confidential deliberations and secrets of the board and the company.' Ronald Severn, "Protecting the Secretary Bird" Fin. Times, 6 Jan 1992, at 8.
- 'Under new rules to be announced tomorrow, it will be illegal for anyone to donate an organ to their wife...' Ballantyne, "Transplant Jury to Vet Live Donors," Sunday Times (London), 25 Mar. 1990, at A3.
In the late 20th century, as the traditional use of he to refer to a person of either sex came under scrutiny on the grounds of sexism, this use of they has become more common. It is now generally accepted in contexts where it follows an indefinite pronoun, such as anyone, no one, someone, or a person: anyone can join if they are a resident; each to their own. In other contexts, coming after singular nouns, the use of they is now common, although less widely accepted, esp. in formal contexts. Sentences such as ask a friend if they could help are still criticized for being ungrammatical. Nevertheless, in view of the growing acceptance of they and its obvious practical advantages, they is used in this dictionary in many cases where he would have been used formerly.
him is "wrong" on a gut levelis a personal assumption/experience that doesn't generalize. The more one writes (practices) encyclopedic text, the more natural it is to keep preposition and antecedent subject in agreement, and thus the more naturally one detects the potential interpretational or preferential conflict on the fly and rewrites to eliminate it. May also have something to do with individual, even temporary (mood/mode) sentence-formation process; e.g. in the last sentence I started with something like "one practices, naturally rewrites" as the central mental idea to put flesh on, and built it out from there in a few seconds without much conscious thought about the word order and punctuation, just the significant words and meanings. I could have started with a more conversational or debatory kernel and produced a radically different statement in tone and content, and it would not have involved any marked "noticing that I did". (I wish I did "notice that I did" more often; I would get in fewer arguments!).
Anyway, I totally agree on the history. This has been amply proven, since people have been researching this for generations; the singular they debate is one of the longest-running in English. There's been a spike in favo[u]r toward singular they in recent years out of sexism and gender-neutrality concerns, but the usage very definitely did not evolve for that reason, and is just a natural feature of the language back to at least
Early Modern English. That said, the fact that people have added anti-sexism as a rationale for using it isn't a reason to oppose it, despite the socio-political tendency of some to react that way. While I'm a
radical centrist who finds excessive "political correction" obnoxious, genuinely progressive shifts aren't something to resist. I just wonder how far we can go in adopting a "re-nascent" shift that's not demonstrated to be universally acceptable in formal writing. It may come down to whether it irritates fewer readers and editors than the alternatives. My point in opening the thread was that MoS is just dead silent on it, and this seems like bad idea, whether we say it's fine, it's not fine, or just that people shouldn't editwar about it, because in the current political climate an increase in fights over it seems inevitable.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
11:36, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
I opened up an RFC on proposed changes to the Film:MOS regarding proposed guidelines for production sections. You can vote on it here Thanks.-- Deathawk ( talk) 06:04, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
All these RfCs are concurrent.
There are also some related Requested Move discussions:
Please see Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Title case?. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 17:52, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
In case some editors missed the previous posting: In response to repeated discussions about policies and whether they hold for articles on Buddhism, I have drafted a project page/policy proposal at User:Farang Rak Tham/Buddhism-related articles to append to the Manual of Style for Wikipedia articles about Buddhism. The proposal does not actually include much new policy, but rather attempts to apply policy to articles on Buddhism in an understandable way, similar to MOS:ISLAM. Content is based on discussions held on Buddhist articles, as listed on the talk page. Comments are welcome.-- Farang Rak Tham ( talk) 22:03, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
In response to repeated discussions about policies and whether they hold for articles on Buddhism, I have drafted a policy proposal to include into the Manual of Style for Wikipedia articles about Buddhism. The proposal does not actually include much new policy, but rather attempts to apply policy to articles on Buddhism in an understandable way, similar to MOS:ISLAM. Content is based on discussions held on Buddhist articles, as listed on the talk page. Comments are welcome.-- Farang Rak Tham ( talk) 13:48, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
We should consider merging all this stuff to a MOS:RELIGIONS page. This would have several beneficial effects:
I haven't pored over the draft text in any detail yet, though the stated approach is the right one to take. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 14:18, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, so what do you think we could merge into a MOS:RELIGIONS page? Looking at the link list at MOS:RELIGIONS now, it seems to me we could consider merging the links at the "Religion- or culture-specific" section, as well as the three essays below there, to whatever extent that is necessary. We are going to have to get the Islam, Mormon and cult article editors involved if we are considering to merge.-- Farang Rak Tham ( talk) 00:02, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
However, it's possible this material is too convoluted to merge it into one page. It might be better to try to extrapolate generalities from all of them into a short guideline on religio-spiritual topics, and have that be the top half of WP:Manual of Style/Religion, with its present content (a bunch of links) being a big "See also" section for details, to the extent it's not directly integrated. Not sure I care either way. I care most about not having conflicting advice on Islam and Judaism and etc.
We have a similar problem with sports-related MoS pages, almost entirely authored as insular PROJPAGEs; we need a general sport MoS, then branching out to sections or, if really necessary, separate subpages only as needed. I actually meant to tackle this a long time ago, since various provisions in various sports MoSes are actually generally applicable, but often found only in the MoS page for a specific sport. Similar case with all the fiction/media projects. They keep trying to independently develop things like guidelines for production sections, when this should really be consolidated in at
MOS:FICT, with a summary of the shared provisions in the genre/medium-specific MoS pages.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
00:19, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Anyway, does WikiProject Buddhism have a style PROJPAGE? That would likely be the place to start for a Buddhism MoS, especially if such a page has been around for a long time and people actually use it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 00:21, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
Draft proposal}}
on it, and inviting input from
WT:MOS and relevant wikiprojects (Buddhism, Religion, India, Japan, China, etc., Philosophy, whatever else comes to mind) for a re-drafting. Then do a formal {{
proposal}}
later at Village Pump. It's extremely unlikely that a one-author, first-draft proposal would be accepted as a guideline. Pretty much unheard of. Please don't propose a merge as part of any of that; we'll need to have a larger discussion about what to do with the redundancy and conflict between different religion-related MoSes. One thing on your part that would help would be to read all of them and adopt the sensible advice in them into your own draft, to increase consistency a little between them. This will also help extract the points in common for an overall short-form MOS:RELIGIONS, which we need whether the religion specific pages are ever merged or not (the more I look at them, the less likely I think that is). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
12:21, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
I have already posted to several WikiProject pages, inluding some of those you suggested. I linked the draft from the start, but I will also post it as a separate section. Thanks.-- Farang Rak Tham ( talk) 21:51, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
Re: "only an idiot would put a space at end of paragraph, and it's harmless if they do; but I'll go you one better: do people REALLY need to be told that a space is usually needed after a comma, colon, etc?" [1] Idiots do in fact edit here, and more to the point, so do people who are simply inexperienced or poorly educated, or careless, or not entirely familiar with punctuation in English in particular. A very frequent error is mishandling of punctuation of the colon and semicolon (both in the "foo : bar" pattern and the "foo:bar" pattern). Maybe removing the material you removed will have no effect, or maybe it will increase this problem and even enable poor editors to feel empowered to edit-war to preserve non-standard punctuation "because there's no rule saying I can't", a frequent excuse people use in writing bad English of various sorts here and then fighting about it tendentiously. PS: I'm detecting a pattern of increasing one-upmanship in edits like the one I just diffed, and it's getting tedious and WP:POINTy. Let's not. If people disagree with changes (especially deletions) you're making to the guideline, the solution is to discuss it, not to delete even more material as an escalation tactic. The wording in question needed to be compressed but it was in there for a reason. Even not putting spaces at the end of paragraph was good advice, because people keep doing it and other people keep removing it, which is annoying trivial editing that does nothing useful in the output, and just triggers people's watchlists for no good reason. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 22:12, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
I have created an article on Cavenham - Icklingham Heaths, which is a British Site of Special Scientific Interest, and copied the spacing in the article title from the source. I have also listed the site in List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Suffolk, which I have submitted to FLC, and a reviewer has said that the title should not have spaces. I am not clear that the MOS covers this, so can anyone advise? Dudley Miles ( talk) 22:54, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
A question on a particular bit of formatting currently in MOS: section
Retaining existing styles currently has editors should not change an article from one styling to another without "substantial reason"
. Sounds okay, but why do we have "substantial reason" in quotes? It tends to read like
WP:SCAREQUOTES, mocking the idea of having a substantial reason. Is it an actual quote of something (which should be linked)? Or was it meant for emphasis somehow (which should be done in words rather than text formatting)? --
A D Monroe III(
talk)
17:32, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
See Talk:Singlish vocabulary#Needs an overhaul to comply with the Manual of Style. There's so much work to do (even aside from OR and RS concerns, and the general NOTDICT problem) that it's downright daunting. I think a proper article on this, including an encyclopedic glossary, could probably be constructed, but damn. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 21:12, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
Is there a Wikipedia guideline or policy concerning the use of contractions outside quotations? For example, cannot versus can't etc.-- Nevé – selbert 19:12, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
I've finally started merging the badly scattered and redundant material on titles of works into the main MOS:TITLES page. This was proposed and approved a couple of years ago here, but I never got around to it until now. The material's been marked for merging since May 2014.
I've started by merging MOS:CT from MOS:CAPS into MOS:TITLES#Capital letters, and leaving behind a little WP:SUMMARY at MOS:CAPS#Titles of works. Shortcuts have been updated to point to the consolidated location. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 22:52, 23 November 2017 (UTC); revised: 23:50, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
See also:
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 00:22, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
Throughout various MoS pages we advise rewriting to avoid starting a sentence with something other than a capital letter (i.e. with a lower-case letter, a numeral, or other character). This doesn't appear to have been addressed WP:SUMMARY-style in the main MoS page. I suggest the following, including a clarification that this doesn't apply to the lead sentence or other contexts with low potential for confusion:
Sentences should normally begin with a capital letter; avoid beginning sentences in running text with a lower-case letter, a numeral, or another symbol. In most cases, it is easy to recast the sentence to avoid this:
When a rewording would be awkward and the sentence would start with a lower-case letter, upper-case the first letter, e.g. K.d. lang's third album. However, do not spell out numerals in proper names, as in ThreeM's general offices are located in Maplewood, Minnesota.
The above do not apply to the lead sentence of an article or to non-sentences that are normally given on Wikipedia in sentence case (image captions, table headings, list items, etc.):
[[File:2010 Opening Ceremonies - KD Lang.jpg |thumb |k.d. lang performing at the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies]]
We could probably even compress the advice about this on various MoS sub-pages and just cross-reference them to this section. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 09:14, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
Please see Talk:The Players Championship#Requested move 23 November 2017. At issue is whether a capitalized "The" should be retained in the title and in running prose when one is favored by many (perhaps a majority) of specialized (in this case golf) sources, but not reflected across reliable sources more generally. Various pro and con arguments are presented including traditionalism versus WP:THE, disambiguation, consistency, whether special rules for publication titles and band names (subject to distinct guidelines) can be extrapolated to other topics, what is and isn't a "proper name", and most of the other stuff we come to expect of one of the louder rows at WP:RM. The outcome of this RM will probably affect two other golf event articles with similar "The" names. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 08:41, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
I quote from Chicago Manual of Style:
"6.93: 2-em dash"
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I find that the double em dash much cleaner than the ugly "n/a", especially in tables where n/a causes clutter. Please also note that the double em dash does not have the same meaning as ellipses. I quote again from the Chicago Manual of Style:
"3.67: Empty cells"
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I therefor propose that something similar to the following be included in the Wikipedia Manual of Style:
A 2-em dash (—— typed as ——
) represents a missing word or part of a word, either omitted to disguise a name (or occasionally an expletive) or else missing from or illegible in quoted or reprinted material. When a whole word is missing, space appears on both sides of the dash. When only part of a word is missing, no space appears between the dash and the existing part (or parts) of the word; when the dash represents the end of a word, a space follows it (unless a period or other punctuation immediately follows). See also 7.66, 13.59.
See also ellipsis for silent words...
If a column head does not apply to one of the entries in the stub, the cell should be filled in by an em-dash. (— typed as—
) (for not applicable a blank cell shall be used in preference of n/a.)— Preceding unsigned comment added by Skvery ( talk • contribs) 07:59, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Even before you (Skvery) get into that: In online typography, a two-em dash does not consist of two em dashes back to back, which have a gap between them in most fonts. It's a separate Unicode character ⸺
(⸺
or ⸺
)
[3]. Next, we already use a spaced ...
for a missing word or words ("one, two, three, ... ten"), and unspaced ...
for a missing part of a word ("anticipa..."). So, there is no gap to fill by using this awkward character. WP virtually never has any need to write something like "Admiral N⸺ and Lady R⸺", and MoS does not cover things that WP doesn't need on a regular basis. Such a usage is permissible already, since there's no rule against it or prescribing something else for "hiding" of details (something we generally don't do, per
WP:NOTCENSORED). Next, "See also ellipsis for silent words..." doesn't have a clear meaning, and we would never end a sentence with an ellipsis like that. Finally, in tables there's no firm rule that "n/a" must be used; more often than not a simple en dash, em dash, hyphen, or a blank are used, so again there is no missing usage to address on Wikipedia. If you don't like "n/a" in a particular case, don't use it (or get talk page consensus to change it if already in use). There are probably circumstances where people will prefer "n/a" for clarity (and it can sometimes have a different contextual meaning that a blank or dash), but there might not be that many of them.
I could see adding a note that the em dash or en dash can be used in this way, as can "n/a" or an empty cell value, but we shouldn't prescribe a specific one, since contextual needs vary. This would probably be covered as
MOS:TABLES rather than in the main MoS. Not every single use of dashes is covered at
MOS:DASH; e.g. many are specified in
MOS:NUM. The main MoS page is just an overview of the commonly needed stuff. MOS:TABLES doesn't seem to offer any advice at all about blank/empty table cells, and that might properly be regarded as (pun intended) a gap to fill.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
09:13, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Some recent changes have been made at WP:Manual of Style/Biographies regarding pseudonyms, stage names, nicknames, hypocorisms, and common names. If anyone wants to support, challenge, or simply discuss the changes, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biographies#Substantive revision of "Pseudonyms, stage names, nicknames, hypocorisms, and common names". A permalink for the matter is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 01:59, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Some recent changes have been made at WP:Manual of Style/Biographies regarding pseudonyms, stage names, nicknames, hypocorisms, and common names. If anyone wants to support, challenge, or simply discuss the changes, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biographies#Substantive revision of "Pseudonyms, stage names, nicknames, hypocorisms, and common names". A permalink for the matter is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 01:59, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
There are many mistakes made by various people and by CLUE BOT especially on religious articles during editing specifically regarding Islam on e.g. wudu, Hazrat Abu Bakr(R.A). Such mistakes are undoubtly unacceptable to all muslims such as removing S.A.W and R.A which is written after Hazrat Muhammad(S.A.W) and his companions respectivelyin order to respect them. Therefore , it is suggested to edit all Islamic articles on wikipedia under various true Islamic scholars and protect these pages to prevent any vandalism. I surely believe that my suggestions would obviously be considered as a priority and would be implemented. As it is not just for me it is for the muslims all over the world. Why should we spread unauthentic information especially on the matters of religion to the people who are unaware of such precious matters? why should we give such people a chance to spread the wrong information in order to fool others. I hope my suggestions would be considered. Muhammad25199907 ( talk) 01:44, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
But still some wrong information is also edited in such articles which is completely unauthentic.Please if you could look onto them such as in "Abu Bakr". And Thankyou for your response.☺ Muhammad25199907 ( talk) 02:10, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Please, after the name of Holy Prophet S.A.W write S.A.W Danfarid133 ( talk) 19:55, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Please see:
Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Accessibility versus convenience in indentation
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
13:38, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Talk:2014–15 A-League National Youth League#Pseudo-headings. --
Marchjuly (
talk)
07:21, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
I've created an RfC at Talk:Monopoly (game)#RfC about the use of singular they seeking comments on whether the article should be edited to avoid the use of "singular they", such as by changing "When a player lands on Free Parking, they may take the money" to "When players land on Free Parking, they may take the money". Strawberry4Ever ( talk) 15:51, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
Does MOS:TV mean to imply that a comma in an on-screen credit means we need to use the comma, even when most news outlets and such do not? See Talk:Game Shakers#MOS:JR. Dicklyon ( talk) 00:44, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
All names should be referred to as credited, or by common name supported by a reliable source. Of course that is the point of this discussion as to whether or not a MOS:BIO style preference overrides an MOS:TV one when they conflict. If it is decided that MOS:TV is subordinate in this area it should be made clear there that it is. Geraldo Perez ( talk) 17:25, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
I've been doing some minor copy-editing on
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (in response to what I feel is an overly superficial GA review of an unstable article, but I don't wanna get into that...), and I was wondering about the following: Gunn "refused to [end the film with Yondu's death] for a long time...But, at the end of the day, I knew that's where it needed to go ... This is a story about a father's love for his son, his ultimate love, so much love that he sacrifices himself for that, and that's what Yondu is. He is 100 percent Peter Quill's father" despite Ego being Quill's biological father.
If I was writing it, I probably wouldn't include such a long quote to begin with, but even I did I probably would have used square brackets instead of incorporating a first-person statement into a Wikipedia-voice sentence. Am I wrong? I'm certain this has come up before, so if any MOS vets could link me to the previous discussion that would be much appreciated. Cheers,
Hijiri 88 (
聖
やや)
12:01, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
About the decision to end the film with Yondu's death, Gun has stated: {{blockquote|I refused to do it for a long time ...}}
... [I'm guessing at the original wording here]. And the ellipsis after "time" should be spaced; "time" is not a cut-off word fragment. The one after "go" should be "...." because the sentence ends. A quote that long isn't needed; this could be trimmed with another ellipsis: "This is a story about a father's love for his son ... despite Ego being Quill's biological father." —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
12:38, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
MOS:POSTABBR is now advising the use of postal abbreviation like (TX, Calif., Hants., ONT, etc.) in source citations. I think this is another WP:POLICYFORK inserted by "keep trying to drive a wedge between MoS and citations" people, and that is should be removed as non-consensus. In my 12 years here I have fixed postal abbreviations on sight in any citation in which I encounter them, and have never been reverted on it, not even once. The idea that there's a consensus in favor of using cryptic (for everyone but residents of the country in question) codes in place of plain English just because they're in citations is a fantasy. The entire point of citations is that they're to be used to verify our content. So: a) don't do it in a way that makes the information harder to use (i.e. defeating the purpose), and b) we don't include publisher locations anyway except when necessary, e.g. for obscure or ambiguously named publishers, where a citation style requires it, where location of publisher may be pertinent e.g. because the topic is something like France–Germany hostilities and most of the sources are French or German and may be biased, etc.
I've brought this up here because this page is way more watchlisted than WT:MOSABBR. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 09:59, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
Are we discouraging use of "WP:" now? I ask because a few editors have been trading out "WP:" for "MOS:" in our policies and guidelines. We can see SMcCandlish recently did it at the WP:Lead guideline. Given how common "WP:" still is on Wikipedia, why should we remove all mention of it as a shortcut in our policies and guidelines? I still prefer "WP:" in most cases, and I see that most editors still use it over the "MOS:" alternative. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:01, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
Shortcut}}
block, defeats the mnemonic purpose of shortcuts by providing too many to remember, lacks the helpful distinction between MoS guidelines and other stuff (e.g., you know that any MOS:FOO is a guideline not a policy, essay, naming conventions guideline, wikiproject page, or whatever), and so on. "Some people use the WP:FOO version" is immaterial. The point of the {{
Shortcut}}
block is to provide one or two shortcuts for the section, and sometimes a couple of others that are to important anchors within the section; not to list every shortcut that goes there. Some sections have 20+ shortcuts that lead to them! We really don't care which one someone uses. (The sole probable exception is that people should stop using both
MOS:LEDE and
WP:LEDE, because
WP:Manual of Style/Lead section is going to some pains to distinguish between WP leads (abstract of all the notable information) and journalistic
ledes (teasers with the gist but suppressing details in a way that entices further reading). One of the reason we have so many shitey lead sections is people keep writing them like news articles, and use of "lede" as if WP jargon perpetuates that problem. I would love to replace both those shortcuts with
soft redirects. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
05:21, 29 November 2017 (UTC)SMcCandlish did retain "WP:LEAD" at the top of the aforementioned edited guideline, though. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:05, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
shortcut|MOS:ENGVAR|WP:ENGVAR}}
in mid-page; it's just clutter, and inspires creation of more unneeded "WP:" shortcuts to MoS subsections and anchors. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
10:36, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
shortcut|MOS:ARTCON|MOS:ART1VAR}}
. Really, who is going to use that second option? I know that I personally don't like having to type extra letters if I don't need to. And to mix in a number with the letters? Easier to just type type "
WP:ARTCON" instead of "MOS:ART1VAR." Look at {{
shortcut|MOS:TIES|MOS:STRONGNAT}}
. No way that I'm using "MOS:STRONGNAT." My fingers will type "
WP:TIES" instead. I also think that seeing "WP:" and "MOS:" confuses newbies, although they will eventually learn that "MOS:" specifically points to guidelines. Still, some of the "MOS:" shortcuts are confusing even to old-timers. The aforementioned "MOS:NICKNAME" and "WP:NICKNAME," which point to two different pages, is one example.
Flyer22 Reborn (
talk)
17:38, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
I think it's useful that the reader be able to spot, on sight, that a given link is to MOS. E Eng 21:54, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
MOS pages are just MOS pages (and NOT policies or guidelines.)Erm ... the box at the top of Wikipedia:Manual of Style prominently calls it a guideline. If MOS is NOT a set of guidelines, that seems a bit misleading. (Having been around Wikipedia for a while, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are two Wikipedia definitions for the word "guideline", however.) ― Mandruss ☎ 20:37, 1 December 2017 (UTC)
{{
Guideline}}
before. Whether there are too many P&G pages and/or shortcuts to them is a philosophical question that isn't really relevant. This isn't about whether our shortcut system or our policy system should be scrapped, but about practical navigation within the system we have. What's weird to me is why, after years (5? 6?) of us replacing WP:FOO shortcuts in MoS pages with MOS:FOO shortcuts is someone suddenly having some kind of not really articulable issue with it? This is not news, or a change from current practice, or anything else different, it's just more routine, incremental cleanup we've been doing slowly (because it's uninteresting even for gnome cleanup work). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
04:59, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
Any reason that we shouldn't open an RfC on changing all the shortcut boxes on MOS pages from WP: to MOS: -- and then do it? E Eng 05:08, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
Do I have to turn the hose on you two? In answer to your question, Flyer, there are a bunch of shortuts in MOSNUM which are still WP:. I don't know about elsewhere. I don't see why we don't just systematically run around and change WP: to MOS: (on MOS pages, of course). E Eng 19:48, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
If the editors who put it together think the
MOS:POSS explanation for "the possessive of singular nouns ending with just one s" is cloudless ... well, I'm here to say that it could use a little tweaking. Having recently dealt with an editor that changed the apostrophe on a surname ending with s from s' to s's — when pronouncing the name with /s's/ made it sound like a bee had stung the name — I really think a little better 'splaining for the not-as cerebral would be helpful. Oxford states in 'Personal names that end in –s': "
With personal names that end in -s but are not spoken with an extra s: just add an apostrophe after the -s: The court dismissed Bridges' appeal. Connors' finest performance was in 1991." The University of Sussex guideline states: "
...a name ending in s takes only an apostrophe if the possessive form is not pronounced with an extra s. Hence: Socrates' philosophy, Saint Saens' music, Ulysses' companions, Aristophanes' plays." Bradeis University AP Style Guide states: '
For singular proper names ending in s, use only an apostrophe: Brandeis’ mission. Grammar and Style in British English states: "
Where possessive nouns ending in s make a harsh ziz sound, the option is available of using an apostrophe without an additional s. Thus – Jones’s house is the one at the end of the street may instead be written – Jones’ house is the one at the end of the street." Heck, even English Grammar for Dummies states: "
If the name of a singular owner ends in the letter s, you may add only an apostrophe, not an apostrophe and another s. But if you like hissing and spitting, feel free to add an apostrophe and an s. Both versions are acceptable."
Any chance that the current
could be rewritten with the directness and simplicity of, say, Oxford's? Pyxis Solitary talk 10:43, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
The Chicago Manual of Style is now recommending a consistent [except as noted below] 's
, regardless of etymology or pronunciation. Some quoted examples (17th ed. §§ 7.16–7.19): "a bass's stripes", "Kansas's legislature", "Marx's theories", "Jesus's adherents", "Berlioz's works", "Tacitus's Histories", "Borges's library", "Dickens's novels", "Malraux's masterpiece", "the Lincolns' marriage" (plural), "the Williamses' new house" (plural), "Descartes's three dreams", "the marquis's mother", "Albert Camus's novel", "Euripides's tragedies", "the Ganges's source", and so on. It makes a strange exception I've not seen anywhere else (§7.20): "Possessive of nouns plural in form, singular in meaning. When the singular form of a noun ending in s is the same as the plural (i.e., the plural is uninflected), the possessives of both are formed by the addition of an apostrophe only. If ambiguity threatens, use of to avoid the possessive. politics' true meaning, economics' forerunners, this species' first record (or, better, the first record of this species)". Less strange: "The same rule applies when the name of a place or an organization or a publication (or the last element in the name is a plural form ending in s ...) even though the entity is singular: the United State's role ..., Highland Hills' late mayor", etc. This codicil seems unnecessary, since we'd automatically use '
not 's
because the word being modified is plural. It has another exception (§7.21) I've seen in some form in two other style guides: In a formulaic for ... sake cliché, use just '
: for goodness' sake, for righteousness' sake, but use 's
for non-stock variants, like for expedience's sake, for Jesus's sake. The obviously problem with this is that "for Jesus's sake" is common and formulaic, while "for righteousness'[s] sake" is neither frequent not a stock phrase, so the CMoS editors were drunk or something when they wrote that part. >;-) Beyond this, CMoS simply observes that the "just use '
after s" system exists, but specifically deprecates it (§7.22).
The simple "stop fighting about it" rule is to always use 's
. We have no need of CMoS's iffy exceptions. It's the only unambiguous option, is recognizable to everyone even if not everyone's favorite, and it avoids the serious problem in an international encyclopedia that there is no guarantee how the end of a name will be pronounced from one dialect to another. Various English (including multiple British) variants tend to shift a final /s/ to /z/ ("Are you going with uz to the circuz", etc.) or less commonly vice versa (found in the American Southwest, parts of India, etc.). There isn't even consistency in how "Jesus'" / "Jesus's" or "Jones's" / "Jones'" are pronounced syllabically, even aside from the /s/ and /z/ issue. In one area it'll be /Jee-zus/ or /Jee-zuz/ and /Jōnz/, and in another /Jee-zus-uz/ or /Jee-zuz-uz/ and /Jōnz-uz/. So, the pronunciation-based "rules" (which seem come to us ultimately from broadcast journalism – what to put on teleprompters – thence to print journalism) are useless rules to try to use here, guaranteed to cause dispute.
We've been over this before and no solid consensus ever seems to emerge. The current MoS wording ("Hodges'" and "Moses'"), however, is useless for the reason I just gave: plenty of people would read aloud /Hoj-uz-uz/ and /Mō-zuz-uz/, rather than using /Hoj-uz/ and /Mō-zuz/ as if the possessive were absent. The extra syllable is pronounced by many to avoid the obvious ambiguity. (Plus, Hodge is a real name, so "Hodge's" is a legit singular possessive). There also the logic problem than anyone really clear on what possessives do and are for is apt to object to a singular possessive like "Williams'" as implying two+ people with a surname of William (which does exist as a surname). The traditionalists who like that spelling are always going to want to compress "Williams's" to that unclear variant, however, unless directed not to. So, continuing to lack a "just use 's
rule" is a recipe for having to have this same debate every few months for as long as Wikipedia exists.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
11:58, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
'
exception for Jesus only, for biblical figures generally, or for "classical antiquity" people more broadly, because the
King James version of the Bible does it, and it's the most-used edition in English. But it's written in slightly post-Elizabethan English, and WP isn't (last I looked, we use hungry not an hungred, and use astonished or stunned, not stonied). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
14:00, 10 December 2017 (UTC)For the possessive of singular nouns, including proper names and words ending with an s (sounded as /s/ or /z/, or silent), add 's: my niece's wedding, James's house, Cortez's men, Glass's books, Illinois's largest employer, Descartes's philosophy. If a name already ends in s or z and would be difficult to pronounce if ’s were added to the end, consider rearranging the phrase to avoid the difficulty: Jesus’s teachings or the teachings of Jesus.
I might work up an RFC on a definite proposal or two. Probably more centralized than here would be best; WP:VPPOL? Please advise if you want to help, or have options you want to see included besides the obvious "status quo" and "also add the s". Dicklyon ( talk) 22:30, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
OK, RFC is now posted and listed: WP:VPPOL#RFC on forming possessive form of singular names, MOS advice simplification. Dicklyon ( talk) 05:12, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
MOS:HEAD is quite clear that image files should not be used in section heading. I am wondering if or how this may apply to templates which reproduce an image in the section heading. For example, Italy at the 1960 Summer Olympics#Medals. The subsection headings in that section use {{ Gold medal}}, {{ Silver medal}} and {{ Bronze medal}} in lieu of simple text. This causes the TOC to show the sections listed as "01 ! Gold", "02 ! Silver" and "03 ! Bronze" respecitively, but otherwise seems to not affect the heading itself. The template pages say the file's are for use in tables, etc., but I am wondering if they are something also not permitted under MOS:HEAD. If this is the case, then maybe something should be added to the relevsant section. -- Marchjuly ( talk) 05:22, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
Please see
Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Russian railway line article titles.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
04:31, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
I've made some conforming and consolidation edits across
MOS:INDENT (in MOS),
MOS:INDENTGAP (at
MOS:ACCESS), and
MOS:DLIST (at
MOS:LISTS). They've all been in agreement for years (other than the third of these was recommending a now-obsolete template), but were not cross-referenced and there thus wasn't a clear picture what the total MoS advice on the matter was. This material, though it was a bit scattered, has been stable and uncontroversial for years, and is provably correct (e.g. with validation tools). I did correct a technical fault at MOS:ACCESS (one validation error that applied several years ago no longer does, due to changes in MW's HTML output, though one validation error still happens with misuse of :
by itself for visual indentation).
However, a huge pile of drama has erupted at
WT:MOSMATH#Indenting for no explicable reason.
MOS:MATHS#Using LaTeX markup continues to effectively require the misuse of :
markup for indentation in articles (we don't really care about talk pages, which are outside MoS's scope, and it's a lost cause until WMF provides us with functional discussion-threading software that properly handles MediaWiki code samples, unlike
WP:Flow). My attempts to get MOS:MATHS to agree with the other three guidelines (including MoS itself, which trumps it as a matter of
WP:CONLEVEL policy) were reverted with confusion and hostility, followed by a false alert at WikiProject Mathematics that the RfC about the matter was "proposing to forbid articles to use colons to indent displayed mathematics"
[7]. It doesn't have anything to do with mathematics but about showing people how to use accessible and valid code to indent (anything). Even
MOS:ACCESS doesn't "forbid" colon indentation (not that a guideline can forbid anything at all). The RfC was of course derailed by a panicked bloc vote of maths editors mislead by that canvassing.
I'm inclined to just let the matter cool off, then re-RfC it again at a later date, with WT:MOSMATH and WT:MATHS and WT:ACCESS and so on neutrally and accurately notified of the discussion. I think the tempers are running too hot right now for any attempt to re-address this pseudo-conflict in the short term to be effective. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 13:17, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
Hi, I thought it best to start a discussion with regards to tense usage in a tv article, as I am fairly certain that another editor (who insists on an incorrect usage of verb tenses) won't initiate discussion here. The section currently going back and forth:
The same editor arguing for past tense usage has made the same argument before, without consensus. I think some discussion about how we use tense in Wikipedia would be helpful to all parties concerned. - Jack Sebastian ( talk) 02:51, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
There is a discussion at Hong Chau about using actor vs. actress. Please see the discussion here. Erik ( talk | contrib) ( ping me) 13:32, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
Propose merging WP:Manual of Style/Proper names#Diacritics into the related material in WP:Manual of Style#Spelling and romanization ( MOS:DIACRITICS), perhaps with some wording from WP:Naming conventions (use English)#Modified letters ( WP:DIACRITICS), compressed into something concise and clear. The material is scattered around and not consistently worded. Most of the rest of WP:Manual of Style/Proper names ( MOS:PN) is slated for merging into MOS:CAPS, as MOS:PN is a redundant "guideline stub" that is not maintained.
After the diacritics merge, cross-references can be used at
MOS:BIO, etc., as needed, and the
WP:DIACRITICS wording can also be probably be reduced to
WP:SUMMARY-style. To make it easier to find in the main MoS page, I would actually split the diacritics paragraph of § Spelling and romanization to a § Diacritics immediately below it, so it shows up in the ToC.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
23:24, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
While we mention not linking things like New York City or Berlin without good reason, we're missing key advice about over-linking geographical name parts, and when including them at all is helpful.
I propose adding a concise section on all the basics of geographical names, referencing the material at
WP:Manual of Style/Linking#What generally should not be linked, and cross-referencing other existing advice as needed. This also includes the "Balanced commas ..." point from
WP:Naming conventions (geographic names). Below is the draft [there will a revised one later], which is for a new section which other pages can link to with {{
Main}}
:
Geographical names are capitalized following the same conventions as other proper nouns. When in doubt about how to capitalize a place name, use the style that constistently dominates in modern, English-language, reliable sources.
Avoid over-linking of such names. Places with which most readers are familiar usually need not be linked unless it is contextually important to do so.
When a place is linked, do not individually link jurisdictional components:
[[Buffalo, New York]]
, not [[Buffalo, New York|Buffalo]], [[New York (state)|New York]]
.[[Brill, Buckinghamshire]]
, or [[Brill, England]]
; not [[Brill, Buckinghamshire|Brill]]
, etc. (and beware ambiguity: "Brill, UK" is ambiguous since
Brill, Cornwall is also in the UK).Familiarity and context:
Do not depend upon sub-national jurisdictions unfamiliar to most English speakers:
It is presumed that most of our readers are familiar with the names of US states, UK counties (administrative and traditional), and Canadian provinces and territories; these need neither links nor the nation name in most contexts. A country's name should be included otherwise, unless already obvious from the context. Remember that Wikipedia content is free to reuse, including offline and without links; the material should make sense as stand-alone text.
|nationality=
parameter. The country name or an abbreviation thereof is also typical in presentations of tabular data where selective omission for one country might be confusingly inconsistent with other entries.Disambiguation: A sub-jurisdiction can be included for disambiguation when a large jurisdiction includes multiple places with the same name:
Be mindful of ambiguities, such as that between Georgia (U.S. state) and Georgia (country), as well as Washington, DC and Washington (state). Another example: various different places have been named Albania historically.
Postal abbreviations: These
are not used, except in tables when space is very tight (
markup the first occurrence with {{
abbr}}
).
[end of proposed section]
Rationale: MoS is very close to "feature complete" after 16+ years, but this is one of the most glaring omissions (not found at MOS:LINKS or elsewhere), since this material is actually among site-wide best practices, as reflected in what we consistently do at FAs, GAs, and most other articles. Its absence from the MoS guidelines is causing real problems, like WP:POLICYFORKing of advice into inconsistent patterns on a national basis. For example, there's an ongoing and rather confused debate at WT:MOSCANADA about making up a special "in articles about a strictly Canadian topic" pseudo-rule, among other such conflicts. This draft has not attempted to resolve the sporadic issue of some editors wanting to use parenthetical disambiguation, since that primarily affects article titles and is not really an MoS issue (i.e., no one seems to be writing things like "London (Ontario)" or "London (Canada)" in our articles with any frequency).
If any of the proposed material is already mentioned piecemeal in other MoS pages, it can be replaced with a cross-reference to this section (or a WP:SUMMARY-style contextual abstract and a cross-ref for the details). This was originally drafted as a section for MOS:LINKS, but a few of the points are not really link-related, so the main MOS page seems the proper location. Cross-refs to other MoS pages have been done as piped links to reduce verbiage. The cross-ref to WP:Naming conventions (geographic names) opens further cross-refs to more specific topical pages, which already cover things like how to refer geographically to rivers that cross multiple jurisdictions, and so on. This MoS page need not be bogged down with any micro-topical detail. PS: The presumption of reader familiarity with US, Canadian, and UK sub-national divisions may be optimistic, but it fits the general pattern of how our articles are actually written.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 20:25, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
The presumption of reader familiarity with US, Canadian, and UK sub-national divisions may be optimistic". I think that is overoptimistic. I don't think the majority of my fellow Americans know the Canadian provinces and wouldn't know most English counties from any place else foreign, let alone differentiate between the Northern Territory, the Northwest Territory or the Northwest Territories. I think that for an international audience there's nothing wrong with including a country with all sub-national subdivisions. To do otherwise feels like ugly Americanism, even if we share with some of our fellow Anglophones. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 07:09, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
If a portion of a writing is given as quoted text, does the principle of minimal change allow written numbers like "three thousand" to be transcribed as 3,000? I do not see this as a minor correction, as neither is incorrect. I see it as needlessly favoring one style over another, and believe it exceeds the liberty intended by this principle. I'd like to know how others feel about this. Thank you.-- John Cline ( talk) 18:38, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
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Archive 195 | Archive 196 | Archive 197 | Archive 198 | Archive 199 | Archive 200 | → | Archive 205 |
Aren't we covering this somewhere? I don't find it at any "likely suspect" places including MOS:PERSON, MOS:GNL, MOS:IDENTITY, MOS:BIO, or MOS:WTW. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 12:25, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
I'm actually way more concerned about neologistms like zie and s/him. At least one article is now riddled with this stuff. WP using it is no different from us trying to mimic the font and color effects of logos. We're not here to promote individual parties' attempts at using customization of wording to stand apart, especially when it interferes in any way whatsoever with communication with our readers. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 20:08, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
Joke that someone took seriously.
|
---|
|
The evolution on this has been toward more acceptance, over time. Apparently there is more resistance to it in AE than BE, which I did not know, but both are moving in the same direction. Some specifics:
Mathglot ( talk) 02:40, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
References
1. as nominative pl. of the 3d personal pronoun, sometimes wihtout an antecedent, and sometimes with a singular antecedent, as nobody, everybody.
Jolif and glad they went unto here [their] rest. Chaucer.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness. Matt. v. 6
{{
cite book}}
: |access-date=
requires |url=
(
help)
Despite the apparent grammatical disagreement between a singular antecedent like someone and the plural pronoun them, the construction is so widespread both in print and in speech that it often passes unnoticed. There are several reasons for its appeal. Forms of they are useful as gender-neutral substitutes for generic he and for coordinate forms like his/her or his or her (which can sound clumsy when repeated). Nevertheless, the clash in number can be jarring to writers and readers, and many people dislike they with a singular antecedent. This includes much of the Usage Panel, though their resistance has declined over time. ... by 2008, a majority of the Panel accepted such sentences as If anyone calls, tell them I can't come to the phone (56 percent) and Everyone returned to their seats (59 percent).
- 'Anyone can set themselves up as an acupuncturist...' Sarah Lonsdale, "Sharp Practice Pricks Reputation of Acupuncture," Observer Sunday", 15 Dec 1991, at 4.
- 'A starting point could be to give more support to the company secretary. They are, or should be, privy to the confidential deliberations and secrets of the board and the company.' Ronald Severn, "Protecting the Secretary Bird" Fin. Times, 6 Jan 1992, at 8.
- 'Under new rules to be announced tomorrow, it will be illegal for anyone to donate an organ to their wife...' Ballantyne, "Transplant Jury to Vet Live Donors," Sunday Times (London), 25 Mar. 1990, at A3.
In the late 20th century, as the traditional use of he to refer to a person of either sex came under scrutiny on the grounds of sexism, this use of they has become more common. It is now generally accepted in contexts where it follows an indefinite pronoun, such as anyone, no one, someone, or a person: anyone can join if they are a resident; each to their own. In other contexts, coming after singular nouns, the use of they is now common, although less widely accepted, esp. in formal contexts. Sentences such as ask a friend if they could help are still criticized for being ungrammatical. Nevertheless, in view of the growing acceptance of they and its obvious practical advantages, they is used in this dictionary in many cases where he would have been used formerly.
him is "wrong" on a gut levelis a personal assumption/experience that doesn't generalize. The more one writes (practices) encyclopedic text, the more natural it is to keep preposition and antecedent subject in agreement, and thus the more naturally one detects the potential interpretational or preferential conflict on the fly and rewrites to eliminate it. May also have something to do with individual, even temporary (mood/mode) sentence-formation process; e.g. in the last sentence I started with something like "one practices, naturally rewrites" as the central mental idea to put flesh on, and built it out from there in a few seconds without much conscious thought about the word order and punctuation, just the significant words and meanings. I could have started with a more conversational or debatory kernel and produced a radically different statement in tone and content, and it would not have involved any marked "noticing that I did". (I wish I did "notice that I did" more often; I would get in fewer arguments!).
Anyway, I totally agree on the history. This has been amply proven, since people have been researching this for generations; the singular they debate is one of the longest-running in English. There's been a spike in favo[u]r toward singular they in recent years out of sexism and gender-neutrality concerns, but the usage very definitely did not evolve for that reason, and is just a natural feature of the language back to at least
Early Modern English. That said, the fact that people have added anti-sexism as a rationale for using it isn't a reason to oppose it, despite the socio-political tendency of some to react that way. While I'm a
radical centrist who finds excessive "political correction" obnoxious, genuinely progressive shifts aren't something to resist. I just wonder how far we can go in adopting a "re-nascent" shift that's not demonstrated to be universally acceptable in formal writing. It may come down to whether it irritates fewer readers and editors than the alternatives. My point in opening the thread was that MoS is just dead silent on it, and this seems like bad idea, whether we say it's fine, it's not fine, or just that people shouldn't editwar about it, because in the current political climate an increase in fights over it seems inevitable.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
11:36, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
I opened up an RFC on proposed changes to the Film:MOS regarding proposed guidelines for production sections. You can vote on it here Thanks.-- Deathawk ( talk) 06:04, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
All these RfCs are concurrent.
There are also some related Requested Move discussions:
Please see Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Title case?. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 17:52, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
In case some editors missed the previous posting: In response to repeated discussions about policies and whether they hold for articles on Buddhism, I have drafted a project page/policy proposal at User:Farang Rak Tham/Buddhism-related articles to append to the Manual of Style for Wikipedia articles about Buddhism. The proposal does not actually include much new policy, but rather attempts to apply policy to articles on Buddhism in an understandable way, similar to MOS:ISLAM. Content is based on discussions held on Buddhist articles, as listed on the talk page. Comments are welcome.-- Farang Rak Tham ( talk) 22:03, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
In response to repeated discussions about policies and whether they hold for articles on Buddhism, I have drafted a policy proposal to include into the Manual of Style for Wikipedia articles about Buddhism. The proposal does not actually include much new policy, but rather attempts to apply policy to articles on Buddhism in an understandable way, similar to MOS:ISLAM. Content is based on discussions held on Buddhist articles, as listed on the talk page. Comments are welcome.-- Farang Rak Tham ( talk) 13:48, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
We should consider merging all this stuff to a MOS:RELIGIONS page. This would have several beneficial effects:
I haven't pored over the draft text in any detail yet, though the stated approach is the right one to take. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 14:18, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, so what do you think we could merge into a MOS:RELIGIONS page? Looking at the link list at MOS:RELIGIONS now, it seems to me we could consider merging the links at the "Religion- or culture-specific" section, as well as the three essays below there, to whatever extent that is necessary. We are going to have to get the Islam, Mormon and cult article editors involved if we are considering to merge.-- Farang Rak Tham ( talk) 00:02, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
However, it's possible this material is too convoluted to merge it into one page. It might be better to try to extrapolate generalities from all of them into a short guideline on religio-spiritual topics, and have that be the top half of WP:Manual of Style/Religion, with its present content (a bunch of links) being a big "See also" section for details, to the extent it's not directly integrated. Not sure I care either way. I care most about not having conflicting advice on Islam and Judaism and etc.
We have a similar problem with sports-related MoS pages, almost entirely authored as insular PROJPAGEs; we need a general sport MoS, then branching out to sections or, if really necessary, separate subpages only as needed. I actually meant to tackle this a long time ago, since various provisions in various sports MoSes are actually generally applicable, but often found only in the MoS page for a specific sport. Similar case with all the fiction/media projects. They keep trying to independently develop things like guidelines for production sections, when this should really be consolidated in at
MOS:FICT, with a summary of the shared provisions in the genre/medium-specific MoS pages.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
00:19, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Anyway, does WikiProject Buddhism have a style PROJPAGE? That would likely be the place to start for a Buddhism MoS, especially if such a page has been around for a long time and people actually use it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 00:21, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
Draft proposal}}
on it, and inviting input from
WT:MOS and relevant wikiprojects (Buddhism, Religion, India, Japan, China, etc., Philosophy, whatever else comes to mind) for a re-drafting. Then do a formal {{
proposal}}
later at Village Pump. It's extremely unlikely that a one-author, first-draft proposal would be accepted as a guideline. Pretty much unheard of. Please don't propose a merge as part of any of that; we'll need to have a larger discussion about what to do with the redundancy and conflict between different religion-related MoSes. One thing on your part that would help would be to read all of them and adopt the sensible advice in them into your own draft, to increase consistency a little between them. This will also help extract the points in common for an overall short-form MOS:RELIGIONS, which we need whether the religion specific pages are ever merged or not (the more I look at them, the less likely I think that is). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
12:21, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
I have already posted to several WikiProject pages, inluding some of those you suggested. I linked the draft from the start, but I will also post it as a separate section. Thanks.-- Farang Rak Tham ( talk) 21:51, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
Re: "only an idiot would put a space at end of paragraph, and it's harmless if they do; but I'll go you one better: do people REALLY need to be told that a space is usually needed after a comma, colon, etc?" [1] Idiots do in fact edit here, and more to the point, so do people who are simply inexperienced or poorly educated, or careless, or not entirely familiar with punctuation in English in particular. A very frequent error is mishandling of punctuation of the colon and semicolon (both in the "foo : bar" pattern and the "foo:bar" pattern). Maybe removing the material you removed will have no effect, or maybe it will increase this problem and even enable poor editors to feel empowered to edit-war to preserve non-standard punctuation "because there's no rule saying I can't", a frequent excuse people use in writing bad English of various sorts here and then fighting about it tendentiously. PS: I'm detecting a pattern of increasing one-upmanship in edits like the one I just diffed, and it's getting tedious and WP:POINTy. Let's not. If people disagree with changes (especially deletions) you're making to the guideline, the solution is to discuss it, not to delete even more material as an escalation tactic. The wording in question needed to be compressed but it was in there for a reason. Even not putting spaces at the end of paragraph was good advice, because people keep doing it and other people keep removing it, which is annoying trivial editing that does nothing useful in the output, and just triggers people's watchlists for no good reason. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 22:12, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
I have created an article on Cavenham - Icklingham Heaths, which is a British Site of Special Scientific Interest, and copied the spacing in the article title from the source. I have also listed the site in List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Suffolk, which I have submitted to FLC, and a reviewer has said that the title should not have spaces. I am not clear that the MOS covers this, so can anyone advise? Dudley Miles ( talk) 22:54, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
A question on a particular bit of formatting currently in MOS: section
Retaining existing styles currently has editors should not change an article from one styling to another without "substantial reason"
. Sounds okay, but why do we have "substantial reason" in quotes? It tends to read like
WP:SCAREQUOTES, mocking the idea of having a substantial reason. Is it an actual quote of something (which should be linked)? Or was it meant for emphasis somehow (which should be done in words rather than text formatting)? --
A D Monroe III(
talk)
17:32, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
See Talk:Singlish vocabulary#Needs an overhaul to comply with the Manual of Style. There's so much work to do (even aside from OR and RS concerns, and the general NOTDICT problem) that it's downright daunting. I think a proper article on this, including an encyclopedic glossary, could probably be constructed, but damn. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 21:12, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
Is there a Wikipedia guideline or policy concerning the use of contractions outside quotations? For example, cannot versus can't etc.-- Nevé – selbert 19:12, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
I've finally started merging the badly scattered and redundant material on titles of works into the main MOS:TITLES page. This was proposed and approved a couple of years ago here, but I never got around to it until now. The material's been marked for merging since May 2014.
I've started by merging MOS:CT from MOS:CAPS into MOS:TITLES#Capital letters, and leaving behind a little WP:SUMMARY at MOS:CAPS#Titles of works. Shortcuts have been updated to point to the consolidated location. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 22:52, 23 November 2017 (UTC); revised: 23:50, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
See also:
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 00:22, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
Throughout various MoS pages we advise rewriting to avoid starting a sentence with something other than a capital letter (i.e. with a lower-case letter, a numeral, or other character). This doesn't appear to have been addressed WP:SUMMARY-style in the main MoS page. I suggest the following, including a clarification that this doesn't apply to the lead sentence or other contexts with low potential for confusion:
Sentences should normally begin with a capital letter; avoid beginning sentences in running text with a lower-case letter, a numeral, or another symbol. In most cases, it is easy to recast the sentence to avoid this:
When a rewording would be awkward and the sentence would start with a lower-case letter, upper-case the first letter, e.g. K.d. lang's third album. However, do not spell out numerals in proper names, as in ThreeM's general offices are located in Maplewood, Minnesota.
The above do not apply to the lead sentence of an article or to non-sentences that are normally given on Wikipedia in sentence case (image captions, table headings, list items, etc.):
[[File:2010 Opening Ceremonies - KD Lang.jpg |thumb |k.d. lang performing at the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies]]
We could probably even compress the advice about this on various MoS sub-pages and just cross-reference them to this section. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 09:14, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
Please see Talk:The Players Championship#Requested move 23 November 2017. At issue is whether a capitalized "The" should be retained in the title and in running prose when one is favored by many (perhaps a majority) of specialized (in this case golf) sources, but not reflected across reliable sources more generally. Various pro and con arguments are presented including traditionalism versus WP:THE, disambiguation, consistency, whether special rules for publication titles and band names (subject to distinct guidelines) can be extrapolated to other topics, what is and isn't a "proper name", and most of the other stuff we come to expect of one of the louder rows at WP:RM. The outcome of this RM will probably affect two other golf event articles with similar "The" names. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 08:41, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
I quote from Chicago Manual of Style:
"6.93: 2-em dash"
|
---|
|
I find that the double em dash much cleaner than the ugly "n/a", especially in tables where n/a causes clutter. Please also note that the double em dash does not have the same meaning as ellipses. I quote again from the Chicago Manual of Style:
"3.67: Empty cells"
|
---|
|
I therefor propose that something similar to the following be included in the Wikipedia Manual of Style:
A 2-em dash (—— typed as ——
) represents a missing word or part of a word, either omitted to disguise a name (or occasionally an expletive) or else missing from or illegible in quoted or reprinted material. When a whole word is missing, space appears on both sides of the dash. When only part of a word is missing, no space appears between the dash and the existing part (or parts) of the word; when the dash represents the end of a word, a space follows it (unless a period or other punctuation immediately follows). See also 7.66, 13.59.
See also ellipsis for silent words...
If a column head does not apply to one of the entries in the stub, the cell should be filled in by an em-dash. (— typed as—
) (for not applicable a blank cell shall be used in preference of n/a.)— Preceding unsigned comment added by Skvery ( talk • contribs) 07:59, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Even before you (Skvery) get into that: In online typography, a two-em dash does not consist of two em dashes back to back, which have a gap between them in most fonts. It's a separate Unicode character ⸺
(⸺
or ⸺
)
[3]. Next, we already use a spaced ...
for a missing word or words ("one, two, three, ... ten"), and unspaced ...
for a missing part of a word ("anticipa..."). So, there is no gap to fill by using this awkward character. WP virtually never has any need to write something like "Admiral N⸺ and Lady R⸺", and MoS does not cover things that WP doesn't need on a regular basis. Such a usage is permissible already, since there's no rule against it or prescribing something else for "hiding" of details (something we generally don't do, per
WP:NOTCENSORED). Next, "See also ellipsis for silent words..." doesn't have a clear meaning, and we would never end a sentence with an ellipsis like that. Finally, in tables there's no firm rule that "n/a" must be used; more often than not a simple en dash, em dash, hyphen, or a blank are used, so again there is no missing usage to address on Wikipedia. If you don't like "n/a" in a particular case, don't use it (or get talk page consensus to change it if already in use). There are probably circumstances where people will prefer "n/a" for clarity (and it can sometimes have a different contextual meaning that a blank or dash), but there might not be that many of them.
I could see adding a note that the em dash or en dash can be used in this way, as can "n/a" or an empty cell value, but we shouldn't prescribe a specific one, since contextual needs vary. This would probably be covered as
MOS:TABLES rather than in the main MoS. Not every single use of dashes is covered at
MOS:DASH; e.g. many are specified in
MOS:NUM. The main MoS page is just an overview of the commonly needed stuff. MOS:TABLES doesn't seem to offer any advice at all about blank/empty table cells, and that might properly be regarded as (pun intended) a gap to fill.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
09:13, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Some recent changes have been made at WP:Manual of Style/Biographies regarding pseudonyms, stage names, nicknames, hypocorisms, and common names. If anyone wants to support, challenge, or simply discuss the changes, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biographies#Substantive revision of "Pseudonyms, stage names, nicknames, hypocorisms, and common names". A permalink for the matter is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 01:59, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Some recent changes have been made at WP:Manual of Style/Biographies regarding pseudonyms, stage names, nicknames, hypocorisms, and common names. If anyone wants to support, challenge, or simply discuss the changes, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biographies#Substantive revision of "Pseudonyms, stage names, nicknames, hypocorisms, and common names". A permalink for the matter is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 01:59, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
There are many mistakes made by various people and by CLUE BOT especially on religious articles during editing specifically regarding Islam on e.g. wudu, Hazrat Abu Bakr(R.A). Such mistakes are undoubtly unacceptable to all muslims such as removing S.A.W and R.A which is written after Hazrat Muhammad(S.A.W) and his companions respectivelyin order to respect them. Therefore , it is suggested to edit all Islamic articles on wikipedia under various true Islamic scholars and protect these pages to prevent any vandalism. I surely believe that my suggestions would obviously be considered as a priority and would be implemented. As it is not just for me it is for the muslims all over the world. Why should we spread unauthentic information especially on the matters of religion to the people who are unaware of such precious matters? why should we give such people a chance to spread the wrong information in order to fool others. I hope my suggestions would be considered. Muhammad25199907 ( talk) 01:44, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
But still some wrong information is also edited in such articles which is completely unauthentic.Please if you could look onto them such as in "Abu Bakr". And Thankyou for your response.☺ Muhammad25199907 ( talk) 02:10, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Please, after the name of Holy Prophet S.A.W write S.A.W Danfarid133 ( talk) 19:55, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Please see:
Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Accessibility versus convenience in indentation
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
13:38, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Talk:2014–15 A-League National Youth League#Pseudo-headings. --
Marchjuly (
talk)
07:21, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
I've created an RfC at Talk:Monopoly (game)#RfC about the use of singular they seeking comments on whether the article should be edited to avoid the use of "singular they", such as by changing "When a player lands on Free Parking, they may take the money" to "When players land on Free Parking, they may take the money". Strawberry4Ever ( talk) 15:51, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
Does MOS:TV mean to imply that a comma in an on-screen credit means we need to use the comma, even when most news outlets and such do not? See Talk:Game Shakers#MOS:JR. Dicklyon ( talk) 00:44, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
All names should be referred to as credited, or by common name supported by a reliable source. Of course that is the point of this discussion as to whether or not a MOS:BIO style preference overrides an MOS:TV one when they conflict. If it is decided that MOS:TV is subordinate in this area it should be made clear there that it is. Geraldo Perez ( talk) 17:25, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
I've been doing some minor copy-editing on
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (in response to what I feel is an overly superficial GA review of an unstable article, but I don't wanna get into that...), and I was wondering about the following: Gunn "refused to [end the film with Yondu's death] for a long time...But, at the end of the day, I knew that's where it needed to go ... This is a story about a father's love for his son, his ultimate love, so much love that he sacrifices himself for that, and that's what Yondu is. He is 100 percent Peter Quill's father" despite Ego being Quill's biological father.
If I was writing it, I probably wouldn't include such a long quote to begin with, but even I did I probably would have used square brackets instead of incorporating a first-person statement into a Wikipedia-voice sentence. Am I wrong? I'm certain this has come up before, so if any MOS vets could link me to the previous discussion that would be much appreciated. Cheers,
Hijiri 88 (
聖
やや)
12:01, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
About the decision to end the film with Yondu's death, Gun has stated: {{blockquote|I refused to do it for a long time ...}}
... [I'm guessing at the original wording here]. And the ellipsis after "time" should be spaced; "time" is not a cut-off word fragment. The one after "go" should be "...." because the sentence ends. A quote that long isn't needed; this could be trimmed with another ellipsis: "This is a story about a father's love for his son ... despite Ego being Quill's biological father." —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
12:38, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
MOS:POSTABBR is now advising the use of postal abbreviation like (TX, Calif., Hants., ONT, etc.) in source citations. I think this is another WP:POLICYFORK inserted by "keep trying to drive a wedge between MoS and citations" people, and that is should be removed as non-consensus. In my 12 years here I have fixed postal abbreviations on sight in any citation in which I encounter them, and have never been reverted on it, not even once. The idea that there's a consensus in favor of using cryptic (for everyone but residents of the country in question) codes in place of plain English just because they're in citations is a fantasy. The entire point of citations is that they're to be used to verify our content. So: a) don't do it in a way that makes the information harder to use (i.e. defeating the purpose), and b) we don't include publisher locations anyway except when necessary, e.g. for obscure or ambiguously named publishers, where a citation style requires it, where location of publisher may be pertinent e.g. because the topic is something like France–Germany hostilities and most of the sources are French or German and may be biased, etc.
I've brought this up here because this page is way more watchlisted than WT:MOSABBR. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 09:59, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
Are we discouraging use of "WP:" now? I ask because a few editors have been trading out "WP:" for "MOS:" in our policies and guidelines. We can see SMcCandlish recently did it at the WP:Lead guideline. Given how common "WP:" still is on Wikipedia, why should we remove all mention of it as a shortcut in our policies and guidelines? I still prefer "WP:" in most cases, and I see that most editors still use it over the "MOS:" alternative. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:01, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
Shortcut}}
block, defeats the mnemonic purpose of shortcuts by providing too many to remember, lacks the helpful distinction between MoS guidelines and other stuff (e.g., you know that any MOS:FOO is a guideline not a policy, essay, naming conventions guideline, wikiproject page, or whatever), and so on. "Some people use the WP:FOO version" is immaterial. The point of the {{
Shortcut}}
block is to provide one or two shortcuts for the section, and sometimes a couple of others that are to important anchors within the section; not to list every shortcut that goes there. Some sections have 20+ shortcuts that lead to them! We really don't care which one someone uses. (The sole probable exception is that people should stop using both
MOS:LEDE and
WP:LEDE, because
WP:Manual of Style/Lead section is going to some pains to distinguish between WP leads (abstract of all the notable information) and journalistic
ledes (teasers with the gist but suppressing details in a way that entices further reading). One of the reason we have so many shitey lead sections is people keep writing them like news articles, and use of "lede" as if WP jargon perpetuates that problem. I would love to replace both those shortcuts with
soft redirects. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
05:21, 29 November 2017 (UTC)SMcCandlish did retain "WP:LEAD" at the top of the aforementioned edited guideline, though. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:05, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
shortcut|MOS:ENGVAR|WP:ENGVAR}}
in mid-page; it's just clutter, and inspires creation of more unneeded "WP:" shortcuts to MoS subsections and anchors. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
10:36, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
shortcut|MOS:ARTCON|MOS:ART1VAR}}
. Really, who is going to use that second option? I know that I personally don't like having to type extra letters if I don't need to. And to mix in a number with the letters? Easier to just type type "
WP:ARTCON" instead of "MOS:ART1VAR." Look at {{
shortcut|MOS:TIES|MOS:STRONGNAT}}
. No way that I'm using "MOS:STRONGNAT." My fingers will type "
WP:TIES" instead. I also think that seeing "WP:" and "MOS:" confuses newbies, although they will eventually learn that "MOS:" specifically points to guidelines. Still, some of the "MOS:" shortcuts are confusing even to old-timers. The aforementioned "MOS:NICKNAME" and "WP:NICKNAME," which point to two different pages, is one example.
Flyer22 Reborn (
talk)
17:38, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
I think it's useful that the reader be able to spot, on sight, that a given link is to MOS. E Eng 21:54, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
MOS pages are just MOS pages (and NOT policies or guidelines.)Erm ... the box at the top of Wikipedia:Manual of Style prominently calls it a guideline. If MOS is NOT a set of guidelines, that seems a bit misleading. (Having been around Wikipedia for a while, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are two Wikipedia definitions for the word "guideline", however.) ― Mandruss ☎ 20:37, 1 December 2017 (UTC)
{{
Guideline}}
before. Whether there are too many P&G pages and/or shortcuts to them is a philosophical question that isn't really relevant. This isn't about whether our shortcut system or our policy system should be scrapped, but about practical navigation within the system we have. What's weird to me is why, after years (5? 6?) of us replacing WP:FOO shortcuts in MoS pages with MOS:FOO shortcuts is someone suddenly having some kind of not really articulable issue with it? This is not news, or a change from current practice, or anything else different, it's just more routine, incremental cleanup we've been doing slowly (because it's uninteresting even for gnome cleanup work). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
04:59, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
Any reason that we shouldn't open an RfC on changing all the shortcut boxes on MOS pages from WP: to MOS: -- and then do it? E Eng 05:08, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
Do I have to turn the hose on you two? In answer to your question, Flyer, there are a bunch of shortuts in MOSNUM which are still WP:. I don't know about elsewhere. I don't see why we don't just systematically run around and change WP: to MOS: (on MOS pages, of course). E Eng 19:48, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
If the editors who put it together think the
MOS:POSS explanation for "the possessive of singular nouns ending with just one s" is cloudless ... well, I'm here to say that it could use a little tweaking. Having recently dealt with an editor that changed the apostrophe on a surname ending with s from s' to s's — when pronouncing the name with /s's/ made it sound like a bee had stung the name — I really think a little better 'splaining for the not-as cerebral would be helpful. Oxford states in 'Personal names that end in –s': "
With personal names that end in -s but are not spoken with an extra s: just add an apostrophe after the -s: The court dismissed Bridges' appeal. Connors' finest performance was in 1991." The University of Sussex guideline states: "
...a name ending in s takes only an apostrophe if the possessive form is not pronounced with an extra s. Hence: Socrates' philosophy, Saint Saens' music, Ulysses' companions, Aristophanes' plays." Bradeis University AP Style Guide states: '
For singular proper names ending in s, use only an apostrophe: Brandeis’ mission. Grammar and Style in British English states: "
Where possessive nouns ending in s make a harsh ziz sound, the option is available of using an apostrophe without an additional s. Thus – Jones’s house is the one at the end of the street may instead be written – Jones’ house is the one at the end of the street." Heck, even English Grammar for Dummies states: "
If the name of a singular owner ends in the letter s, you may add only an apostrophe, not an apostrophe and another s. But if you like hissing and spitting, feel free to add an apostrophe and an s. Both versions are acceptable."
Any chance that the current
could be rewritten with the directness and simplicity of, say, Oxford's? Pyxis Solitary talk 10:43, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
The Chicago Manual of Style is now recommending a consistent [except as noted below] 's
, regardless of etymology or pronunciation. Some quoted examples (17th ed. §§ 7.16–7.19): "a bass's stripes", "Kansas's legislature", "Marx's theories", "Jesus's adherents", "Berlioz's works", "Tacitus's Histories", "Borges's library", "Dickens's novels", "Malraux's masterpiece", "the Lincolns' marriage" (plural), "the Williamses' new house" (plural), "Descartes's three dreams", "the marquis's mother", "Albert Camus's novel", "Euripides's tragedies", "the Ganges's source", and so on. It makes a strange exception I've not seen anywhere else (§7.20): "Possessive of nouns plural in form, singular in meaning. When the singular form of a noun ending in s is the same as the plural (i.e., the plural is uninflected), the possessives of both are formed by the addition of an apostrophe only. If ambiguity threatens, use of to avoid the possessive. politics' true meaning, economics' forerunners, this species' first record (or, better, the first record of this species)". Less strange: "The same rule applies when the name of a place or an organization or a publication (or the last element in the name is a plural form ending in s ...) even though the entity is singular: the United State's role ..., Highland Hills' late mayor", etc. This codicil seems unnecessary, since we'd automatically use '
not 's
because the word being modified is plural. It has another exception (§7.21) I've seen in some form in two other style guides: In a formulaic for ... sake cliché, use just '
: for goodness' sake, for righteousness' sake, but use 's
for non-stock variants, like for expedience's sake, for Jesus's sake. The obviously problem with this is that "for Jesus's sake" is common and formulaic, while "for righteousness'[s] sake" is neither frequent not a stock phrase, so the CMoS editors were drunk or something when they wrote that part. >;-) Beyond this, CMoS simply observes that the "just use '
after s" system exists, but specifically deprecates it (§7.22).
The simple "stop fighting about it" rule is to always use 's
. We have no need of CMoS's iffy exceptions. It's the only unambiguous option, is recognizable to everyone even if not everyone's favorite, and it avoids the serious problem in an international encyclopedia that there is no guarantee how the end of a name will be pronounced from one dialect to another. Various English (including multiple British) variants tend to shift a final /s/ to /z/ ("Are you going with uz to the circuz", etc.) or less commonly vice versa (found in the American Southwest, parts of India, etc.). There isn't even consistency in how "Jesus'" / "Jesus's" or "Jones's" / "Jones'" are pronounced syllabically, even aside from the /s/ and /z/ issue. In one area it'll be /Jee-zus/ or /Jee-zuz/ and /Jōnz/, and in another /Jee-zus-uz/ or /Jee-zuz-uz/ and /Jōnz-uz/. So, the pronunciation-based "rules" (which seem come to us ultimately from broadcast journalism – what to put on teleprompters – thence to print journalism) are useless rules to try to use here, guaranteed to cause dispute.
We've been over this before and no solid consensus ever seems to emerge. The current MoS wording ("Hodges'" and "Moses'"), however, is useless for the reason I just gave: plenty of people would read aloud /Hoj-uz-uz/ and /Mō-zuz-uz/, rather than using /Hoj-uz/ and /Mō-zuz/ as if the possessive were absent. The extra syllable is pronounced by many to avoid the obvious ambiguity. (Plus, Hodge is a real name, so "Hodge's" is a legit singular possessive). There also the logic problem than anyone really clear on what possessives do and are for is apt to object to a singular possessive like "Williams'" as implying two+ people with a surname of William (which does exist as a surname). The traditionalists who like that spelling are always going to want to compress "Williams's" to that unclear variant, however, unless directed not to. So, continuing to lack a "just use 's
rule" is a recipe for having to have this same debate every few months for as long as Wikipedia exists.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
11:58, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
'
exception for Jesus only, for biblical figures generally, or for "classical antiquity" people more broadly, because the
King James version of the Bible does it, and it's the most-used edition in English. But it's written in slightly post-Elizabethan English, and WP isn't (last I looked, we use hungry not an hungred, and use astonished or stunned, not stonied). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
14:00, 10 December 2017 (UTC)For the possessive of singular nouns, including proper names and words ending with an s (sounded as /s/ or /z/, or silent), add 's: my niece's wedding, James's house, Cortez's men, Glass's books, Illinois's largest employer, Descartes's philosophy. If a name already ends in s or z and would be difficult to pronounce if ’s were added to the end, consider rearranging the phrase to avoid the difficulty: Jesus’s teachings or the teachings of Jesus.
I might work up an RFC on a definite proposal or two. Probably more centralized than here would be best; WP:VPPOL? Please advise if you want to help, or have options you want to see included besides the obvious "status quo" and "also add the s". Dicklyon ( talk) 22:30, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
OK, RFC is now posted and listed: WP:VPPOL#RFC on forming possessive form of singular names, MOS advice simplification. Dicklyon ( talk) 05:12, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
MOS:HEAD is quite clear that image files should not be used in section heading. I am wondering if or how this may apply to templates which reproduce an image in the section heading. For example, Italy at the 1960 Summer Olympics#Medals. The subsection headings in that section use {{ Gold medal}}, {{ Silver medal}} and {{ Bronze medal}} in lieu of simple text. This causes the TOC to show the sections listed as "01 ! Gold", "02 ! Silver" and "03 ! Bronze" respecitively, but otherwise seems to not affect the heading itself. The template pages say the file's are for use in tables, etc., but I am wondering if they are something also not permitted under MOS:HEAD. If this is the case, then maybe something should be added to the relevsant section. -- Marchjuly ( talk) 05:22, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
Please see
Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Russian railway line article titles.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
04:31, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
I've made some conforming and consolidation edits across
MOS:INDENT (in MOS),
MOS:INDENTGAP (at
MOS:ACCESS), and
MOS:DLIST (at
MOS:LISTS). They've all been in agreement for years (other than the third of these was recommending a now-obsolete template), but were not cross-referenced and there thus wasn't a clear picture what the total MoS advice on the matter was. This material, though it was a bit scattered, has been stable and uncontroversial for years, and is provably correct (e.g. with validation tools). I did correct a technical fault at MOS:ACCESS (one validation error that applied several years ago no longer does, due to changes in MW's HTML output, though one validation error still happens with misuse of :
by itself for visual indentation).
However, a huge pile of drama has erupted at
WT:MOSMATH#Indenting for no explicable reason.
MOS:MATHS#Using LaTeX markup continues to effectively require the misuse of :
markup for indentation in articles (we don't really care about talk pages, which are outside MoS's scope, and it's a lost cause until WMF provides us with functional discussion-threading software that properly handles MediaWiki code samples, unlike
WP:Flow). My attempts to get MOS:MATHS to agree with the other three guidelines (including MoS itself, which trumps it as a matter of
WP:CONLEVEL policy) were reverted with confusion and hostility, followed by a false alert at WikiProject Mathematics that the RfC about the matter was "proposing to forbid articles to use colons to indent displayed mathematics"
[7]. It doesn't have anything to do with mathematics but about showing people how to use accessible and valid code to indent (anything). Even
MOS:ACCESS doesn't "forbid" colon indentation (not that a guideline can forbid anything at all). The RfC was of course derailed by a panicked bloc vote of maths editors mislead by that canvassing.
I'm inclined to just let the matter cool off, then re-RfC it again at a later date, with WT:MOSMATH and WT:MATHS and WT:ACCESS and so on neutrally and accurately notified of the discussion. I think the tempers are running too hot right now for any attempt to re-address this pseudo-conflict in the short term to be effective. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 13:17, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
Hi, I thought it best to start a discussion with regards to tense usage in a tv article, as I am fairly certain that another editor (who insists on an incorrect usage of verb tenses) won't initiate discussion here. The section currently going back and forth:
The same editor arguing for past tense usage has made the same argument before, without consensus. I think some discussion about how we use tense in Wikipedia would be helpful to all parties concerned. - Jack Sebastian ( talk) 02:51, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
There is a discussion at Hong Chau about using actor vs. actress. Please see the discussion here. Erik ( talk | contrib) ( ping me) 13:32, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
Propose merging WP:Manual of Style/Proper names#Diacritics into the related material in WP:Manual of Style#Spelling and romanization ( MOS:DIACRITICS), perhaps with some wording from WP:Naming conventions (use English)#Modified letters ( WP:DIACRITICS), compressed into something concise and clear. The material is scattered around and not consistently worded. Most of the rest of WP:Manual of Style/Proper names ( MOS:PN) is slated for merging into MOS:CAPS, as MOS:PN is a redundant "guideline stub" that is not maintained.
After the diacritics merge, cross-references can be used at
MOS:BIO, etc., as needed, and the
WP:DIACRITICS wording can also be probably be reduced to
WP:SUMMARY-style. To make it easier to find in the main MoS page, I would actually split the diacritics paragraph of § Spelling and romanization to a § Diacritics immediately below it, so it shows up in the ToC.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
23:24, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
While we mention not linking things like New York City or Berlin without good reason, we're missing key advice about over-linking geographical name parts, and when including them at all is helpful.
I propose adding a concise section on all the basics of geographical names, referencing the material at
WP:Manual of Style/Linking#What generally should not be linked, and cross-referencing other existing advice as needed. This also includes the "Balanced commas ..." point from
WP:Naming conventions (geographic names). Below is the draft [there will a revised one later], which is for a new section which other pages can link to with {{
Main}}
:
Geographical names are capitalized following the same conventions as other proper nouns. When in doubt about how to capitalize a place name, use the style that constistently dominates in modern, English-language, reliable sources.
Avoid over-linking of such names. Places with which most readers are familiar usually need not be linked unless it is contextually important to do so.
When a place is linked, do not individually link jurisdictional components:
[[Buffalo, New York]]
, not [[Buffalo, New York|Buffalo]], [[New York (state)|New York]]
.[[Brill, Buckinghamshire]]
, or [[Brill, England]]
; not [[Brill, Buckinghamshire|Brill]]
, etc. (and beware ambiguity: "Brill, UK" is ambiguous since
Brill, Cornwall is also in the UK).Familiarity and context:
Do not depend upon sub-national jurisdictions unfamiliar to most English speakers:
It is presumed that most of our readers are familiar with the names of US states, UK counties (administrative and traditional), and Canadian provinces and territories; these need neither links nor the nation name in most contexts. A country's name should be included otherwise, unless already obvious from the context. Remember that Wikipedia content is free to reuse, including offline and without links; the material should make sense as stand-alone text.
|nationality=
parameter. The country name or an abbreviation thereof is also typical in presentations of tabular data where selective omission for one country might be confusingly inconsistent with other entries.Disambiguation: A sub-jurisdiction can be included for disambiguation when a large jurisdiction includes multiple places with the same name:
Be mindful of ambiguities, such as that between Georgia (U.S. state) and Georgia (country), as well as Washington, DC and Washington (state). Another example: various different places have been named Albania historically.
Postal abbreviations: These
are not used, except in tables when space is very tight (
markup the first occurrence with {{
abbr}}
).
[end of proposed section]
Rationale: MoS is very close to "feature complete" after 16+ years, but this is one of the most glaring omissions (not found at MOS:LINKS or elsewhere), since this material is actually among site-wide best practices, as reflected in what we consistently do at FAs, GAs, and most other articles. Its absence from the MoS guidelines is causing real problems, like WP:POLICYFORKing of advice into inconsistent patterns on a national basis. For example, there's an ongoing and rather confused debate at WT:MOSCANADA about making up a special "in articles about a strictly Canadian topic" pseudo-rule, among other such conflicts. This draft has not attempted to resolve the sporadic issue of some editors wanting to use parenthetical disambiguation, since that primarily affects article titles and is not really an MoS issue (i.e., no one seems to be writing things like "London (Ontario)" or "London (Canada)" in our articles with any frequency).
If any of the proposed material is already mentioned piecemeal in other MoS pages, it can be replaced with a cross-reference to this section (or a WP:SUMMARY-style contextual abstract and a cross-ref for the details). This was originally drafted as a section for MOS:LINKS, but a few of the points are not really link-related, so the main MOS page seems the proper location. Cross-refs to other MoS pages have been done as piped links to reduce verbiage. The cross-ref to WP:Naming conventions (geographic names) opens further cross-refs to more specific topical pages, which already cover things like how to refer geographically to rivers that cross multiple jurisdictions, and so on. This MoS page need not be bogged down with any micro-topical detail. PS: The presumption of reader familiarity with US, Canadian, and UK sub-national divisions may be optimistic, but it fits the general pattern of how our articles are actually written.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 20:25, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
The presumption of reader familiarity with US, Canadian, and UK sub-national divisions may be optimistic". I think that is overoptimistic. I don't think the majority of my fellow Americans know the Canadian provinces and wouldn't know most English counties from any place else foreign, let alone differentiate between the Northern Territory, the Northwest Territory or the Northwest Territories. I think that for an international audience there's nothing wrong with including a country with all sub-national subdivisions. To do otherwise feels like ugly Americanism, even if we share with some of our fellow Anglophones. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 07:09, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
If a portion of a writing is given as quoted text, does the principle of minimal change allow written numbers like "three thousand" to be transcribed as 3,000? I do not see this as a minor correction, as neither is incorrect. I see it as needlessly favoring one style over another, and believe it exceeds the liberty intended by this principle. I'd like to know how others feel about this. Thank you.-- John Cline ( talk) 18:38, 19 December 2017 (UTC)