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For some time now, a few editors have been invoking MOS:GENDERID as though it is a piece on article titles. This recently came up again with the Jill Soloway (now Joey Soloway) article mentioned immediately above. At Talk:Joey Soloway#MOS:GENDERID with regard to article titles, I argued that "Regarding this move by Rab V, I just want to inform editors that MOS:GENDERID does not apply to article tiles. It is not about that. The policy to look at is WP:Article titles, specifically WP:Common name and WP:NAMECHANGES in this case. That is why the beginning of MOS:IDENTITY, which MOS:GENDERID is a subsection of, states 'and article titles when the term appears in the title of an article.' Now if one wants to cite WP:Ignore all rules, then cite that. But 'Jill Soloway' is Soloway's common name." Rab V, who moved the article to "Joey Soloway", argued against that, clearly feeling that MOS:GENDERID applies to article titles. I stated that "as made clear at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style before, MOS:GENDERID has never applied to article titles, despite you and a few others using it for an article title argument. We have an article title policy and MOS:GENDERID is not it. The MOS:GENDERID guideline does not trump the WP:Article titles policy."
Other cases of applying MOS:GENDERID beyond pronouns and names in article text? There are a number of them. But another case where an article was moved in the name of MOS:GENDERID is the Paul Denyer article. It was moved to "Paula Denyer" despite the fact that sources barely refer to Denyer as "Paula." And despite the fact that, as the article used to state, "as of 2013, Denyer had not yet taken the step of legally changing names." This line was removed without any valid reason given for the removal. Also, like the article currently states, "Medical specialists evaluated whether Denyer could receive sex reassignment surgery and rejected the idea." This article was also moved by Rab V. It's not like the literature refers to Denyer as a female serial killer; Denyer is considered a male serial killer in the literature. And the way Denyer behaved doesn't align with how female serial killers behave anyway (not unless perhaps killing with a male partner who dictates the killings). When Snifferdogx moved the article back to "Paul Denyer," C.Fred overturned this, citing MOS:GENDERID. So, right now, instead of being based on a policy or guideline, that article title goes by a serial killer's preferred name. And given what Denyer did to women, I understand the outrage at Talk:Paula Denyer. Beyond this, it has also been argued that MOS:GENDERID applies to categories, a notion that SMcCandlish and I disagree with.
So does MOS:GENDERID apply to WP:Article titles? To categories? Should it be used to trump WP:Article titles? Should MOS:GENDERID be updated to speak on article titles and/or categories? Should editors simply be allowed to change these article titles to the significantly less common name with no regard to WP:Article titles but rather on what they personally believe is a WP:Ignore all rules basis? I'll alert Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons, Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography, Wikipedia talk:Article titles, Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia talk:Categorization, and Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) to this section for discussion. If someone wants to alert Wikipedia talk:WikiProject LGBT studies, then do that. Flyer22 Frozen ( talk) 20:17, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
Sometimes the subject of an article will undergo a change of name. When this occurs, we give extra weight to reliable sources written after the name change.This is why the dispute you're trying to raise here doesn't generally come up - sources from before the name change don't matter very much; and in the modern world virtually no reliable high-quality sources are going to ignore a name change due to a transition, so we always end up following the subject's self-identification regardless. That said, it would probably be best to update WP:NAMECHANGE to reflect that common practice unambiguously so as to avoid confusion of the sort that you're expressing here. EDIT: Also, for categories, the guidelines for sexuality require that we respect trans self-identification (and only self-identification.) I can understand missing it since you presumably glanced at the subcategory for gender, but plainly respecting trans self-identification requires categorizing subjects under the gender based on self-identification as well. It was simply put in the wrong subheading because LGBT issues are often lumped together. -- Aquillion ( talk) 20:40, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
Sometimes the subject of an article will undergo a change of name. When this occurs, we give extra weight to reliable sources written after the name change. If the reliable sources written after the change is announced routinely use the new name, Wikipedia should follow suit and change relevant titles to match. If, on the other hand, reliable sources written after the name change is announced continue to use the established name, Wikipedia should continue to do so as well.... Neither Flyer22 nor anyone else has presented any sources published since the name change that use the former name, as far as I can tell, so this seems to be an academic if not in fact a scholastic discussion. Newimpartial ( talk) 22:25, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
De-evolution of human beings into potatoes begins here: limited relevance
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Please do not cast ASPERSIONS on me: I do not make any assumptions about your intentions (which I find entirely opaque); it is your actions that I find confusing. For one thing, if experienced editors have stated over and over again that MOS:GENDERID ... it does not apply to article titlesthat is wonderful, but it only applies to disputed over article titles, and you have not brought such a dispute to our attention on this noticeboad. Also, please do not confuse WP:NAMECHANGES with MOS:CHANGEDNAME. It is CHANGEDNAME - the MOS section - that GENDERID cites with respect to the inclusion of deadnames in the LEDE. You have previously cited NAMECHANGES - the section of the article name policy COMMONNAME - which gives no guidance relevant to the lede, since it is about article titles. Since this discussion (at least the specific case you have presented) is about inclusion in the lede rather than the article namex perhaps we could confine the discussion to the relevant policies? Newimpartial ( talk) 23:37, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
I don't know, Flyer22. Other times, like your faulty understanding of WP:Edit warring, you simply don't understand a policy or guideline, or you put on your own spin on itsounds a lot like tu quoque to me (though of course my AGF practices wouldn't let me use the word "spin" for your oblique interpretations of policy). And as far as And as far as "derailing" goes, you led off this section with the assumption that people have used MOS:GENDERID as a putative basis for article title changes that WP:NAMECHANGES would not support. I have simply pointed out that you haven't shown any examples of this, and that the logic of the two policies generally points the article name and the textual references to the article subject in the same direction. I wouldn't call that "derailing", unless your rails were supposed to go in quite a different direction than the declared topic. Newimpartial ( talk) 05:31, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
As a humanoid spud, I resent the implication that this noise is typical of my starchy species. — Mr. Potato-Head ☏ ¢ 🥔 03:12, 15 October 2020 (UTC) |
Not only is "Paula Denyer" not Denyer's common name, it's not Denyer's legal name and it's not a name that newer sources routinely use. There was no change-over in the literature. Yes, in this modern world, reliable high-quality sources are ignoring Denyer's name change due to a transition'. Which name contemporary RS are using is generally the key to questions of this sort, to whether consensus will consider satisfied the commingled expectations of WP:COMMONNAME/WP:UCRN and WP:NAMECHANGES, in turn interacting with WP:GENDERID and the general MoS principle that our article text and titles should agree when possible. It may actually be the case that, as of this exact date, '
"Jill Soloway" is Soloway's common name'. But that may not mean much (UCRN is not one of the WP:CRITERIA at all, but rather an instruction to use the most common name in RS as the default choice of WP article title, to test against those criteria and against all other applicable policies, guidelines, and other considerations). And even if it true right now, it is not likely to be for long, because the media (the RS we most often rely on for contemporary bio subjects) are quick to adopt such changes for celebrities and such (much quicker than for, say, a little-known murderer in prison). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:52, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
the MoS does not specify...whether to give the former or current name first.I don't see any way around the fact that here it is definitely not making a hard-and-fast rule regarding titles. After all, not only is the title the first appearance of a person's name, but the version of the name that appears first in the text is always (as far as I've seen) the one that is the article's title. Thus, there is no conflict with the policy at WP:Article titles (including WP:COMMONNAME and WP:NAMECHANGES). Arguments based on selective reading of MOS:GENDERID and on ignoring WP:Article titles are not valid; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, the new name will be favored over the deadname as the title under the existing rules. Regarding categories, WP:CATV has to be followed. Crossroads -talk- 03:11, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
I'm focused on whether "Jill Soloway" should be in the lead, not about moving that article back to "Jill Soloway."But now are you arguing that the article should be moved back so we can
waitfor more sources to use this DEADNAME (or not)? I am so confused.
It may actually be the case that, as of this exact date, 'tq- citing your position but then continuing
But that may not mean much (UCRN is not one of the WP:CRITERIA at all, but rather an instruction to use the most common name in RS as the default choice of WP article title, to test against those criteria and against all other applicable policies, guidelines, and other considerations). And even if it true right now, it is not likely to be for long- which is not at all the TOOSOON argument you have (sporadically) been making. Very selective, is what I'm saying.
pointing to all of what SMcCandlish stated, as claimed. That's what I meant by "selective".
it must have been very hard for you, I actually found the DEVO collapse above to be quite satisfying to do.) Newimpartial ( talk) 23:11, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
Digressive sub-thread
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Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page.[a] Such material requires a high degree of sensitivityand
the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment. Therefore, if there is reason to believe using a particular name could somehow harm a subject, we have to take that into account; it is obviously not the only thing we consider, but it is something we are required to take into consideration and is part of the reason MOS:GENDERID exists. There is no particular reason why the logic behind MOS:GENDERID would not apply to article titles. -- Aquillion ( talk) 06:17, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
Give precedence to self-designation as reported in the most up-to-date reliable sources, even when it doesn't match what is most common in reliable sources.
Sometimes the subject of an article will undergo a change of name. When this occurs, we give extra weight to reliable sources written after the name change.but beyond that, I don't think anyone has brought up the fact that the WP:COMMONNAME subsection also says,
When there are multiple names for a subject, all of which are fairly common, and the most common has problems, it is perfectly reasonable to choose one of the othersanyways. The subject of an article explicitly rejecting a name in preference for another would definitely count as “has problems” for that name, to me. Do we ever have these kinds of problems when, say, a company changes its name? Or is it just in regards to respecting people enough to call them by their desired name? (Because if it's the former I might be partial to the idea of renaming the article of a certain chemical company something like “Gassing Indian Babies and Giving U.S. Miners Silicosis and Then Spying On Related Activists, Inc.” Under U.S. law it's only people who aren't subject to corruption of blood for criminal convictions, though to our shame I don't believe any criminal prosecution has taken place here, not even for the 1920s event.) -- ‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 04:57, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect
Wikipedia:MOSCOLOR. The discussion will occur at
Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 November 9#Wikipedia:MOSCOLOR until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.
Soumya-8974
talk
contribs
subpages
17:37, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
Hi, I'm not sure if there is a better place to ask for this (as far as I know, WP:GOCE does not deal with the MOS), but I would like someone to review Union of Bulgaria and Romania, an article I have written, to see if it complies with the MOS. I am following a user's advices before nominating a FAC (which is my intention), which recommend doing this. Can someone do it or is there a better place to request this? If there is anyone interested, you can reply on the peer review that is currently taking place. Thank you. Super Ψ Dro 19:22, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
When mentioning a family characteristic such as religion or ethnicity, should we say (for example) "Her family were Jewish" or "His family was Jewish"? There seems to be a fairly even split of singular/plural in Wikipedia articles, even taking into account US vs UK English . Muzilon ( talk) 22:00, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
Note that the fact that BrE can use plurals with the word family does not mean that it must do so. See here and here. Doremo ( talk) 09:46, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
Nouns such as committee, family, government, jury, squad and team take a singular verb or pronoun when thought of as a single unit, but a plural verb or pronoun when thought of as a collection of individuals:
The family can trace its history back to the middle ages;
The family were sitting down, scratching their heads.
Challenge problem (choose one);
E Eng 14:38, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
The Guardian doesn't have the only style guide to make the distinction drawn above, and it's rather commonsensical, which is probably has much to do with why WP articles tend to be written with this kind of variation. People are more apt to write what makes the most sense in the context than try to exactly mirror a style preferred by one nationalistic style guide or another. If MoS were to address this, it should probably also approach this from the same angle: use singular when writing about something as a unit, and use plural when writing about something as a collective of independent units. I've long noticed this split in operation here already, even within the same article (e.g. when writing about a band as commercial/legal entity versus writing about a band as five musicians making decisions and doing things). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:57, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
Hi, could someone familiar with sidebar best practice help resolve Wikipedia talk:Categories, lists, and navigation templates#Mass adding of sidebars by TheEpicGhosty? Thanks in advance, Jr8825 • Talk 21:33, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
@
Dratman: I would like to see some guidance for indefinite articles preceding phrases in parentheses. Should the article agree with the first word in parentheses or with the word following the right parenthesis? E.g., should it be a (potentially multidimensional) array
or an (potentially multidimensional) array
?
I have moved "
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computing", the target page of "
MOS:COMPUTING", to
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computing (failed proposal), put {{
Failed proposal}}
on it, and re-categorized it in
Category:Wikipedia style guideline proposals instead of in the MoS guideline categories. The template at the top summarizes the consensus discussions about this. The page failed as a guideline back in 2017, and again in 2018 as something from which to even merge-salvage a few points. We just forgot to actually deprecate it at the page itself (though it had already been removed from the {{
Manual of Style}}
navbox). —
SMcCandlish
☏
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14:06, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
I've updated
WP:Manual of Style#Section organization (the main MoS page's summary of
WP:Manual of Style/Layout) to account for things like {{
Authority control}}
, {{
Short description}}
, sister-project link templates, sidebar navigation, disuse of "Bibliography" as a section heading, etc. Looked like this material hasn't been substantively updated in several years. It was also confusing that this section said a whole lot about the lead, and a whole lot about all the "appendix" stuff that goes after the main body of content, but nothing at all about pre-lead elements like hatnotes and cleanup/dispute banners.
The main page for this at MOS:LAYOUT also needs some conforming updates. Both pages are important, as newer users are apt to read the main-MoS summary section, since various welcome templates direct them to the main MoS page as a major guideline, while old hands are more apt to refer to MOS:LAYOUT, knowing that it exists and has all the fine-grained details about layout (or, rather should – thus the need to update).
A minor quibble: LAYOUT says that the rationale for putting {{Authority control}}
where it goes is that it's metadata. Yet the RfC on where to put {{Short description}}
rejected that as a rationale to put it down there or even after navigation hatnotes. So, that pseudo-rationale should be removed; it's perfectly fine for {{Authority control}}
to go where it goes simply as an arbitrary decision by the community, without LAYOUT trying questionably to explain it.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
10:22, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
![]() | This
edit request to
Wikipedia:Manual of Style has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
He said, "[[John Doe|John [Doe]]]
answered."
JEOLIVER001 (
talk)
19:32, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
Hello everyone, I was just searching on the web and I've found this map. In this map, the EU has been labelled as light red which means that British English words like organise and labour are active while of course Ireland, Malta and Cyprus are the only members who have English as their official language. This is English is based on British English and has thus the words organise and labour as words. Since these countries use English as their official language and the UK has left technically British English isn't the official language of the EU. However, it looks like the EU still uses British English in their English Style Guide.
My question is here should every member from Portugal to Finland uses British English as the main English style (with exceptions of the three countries above of course) or does this only apply to EU-related articles like Parliament, treaties, politicians, laws etc? Per MOS:TIES, we should use that type style of English in a country who has it as national ties which the EU kind of has. MOS:TIES does not say anything about the EU thus that's why I'm questioning here about this maybe "issue". If only EU-related articles should use British English can someone please add this into MOS? Cheers. CPA-5 ( talk) 12:39, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Consensus is sought as to the correct way to refer and link to major American cities such as Los Angeles and Boston. The discussion is being held at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking#Need for clarity on linking major American cities. Cbl62 ( talk) 00:01, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
I know that sources like PBS, NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, BBC, etc. should not be italicized. We save that for newspapers and magazines. Where is the MoS guideline for when NOT to italicize those listed news sources? An editor seems to think it makes no difference, and they are changing the citations all over the place. When I'm in doubt, I just look at the article for the source and see how it's done there, because I know that other editors have followed the MoS. -- Valjean ( talk) 14:27, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Further reading § Should further reading sections have "retrieved by" dates?. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
20:41, 25 November 2020 (UTC)
Hi. I've been recently noticed a discussion about whether should we use Extended Latin letters (for example; ç, ğ, etc.) or not. I see that MoS has not any rules about it, so I'm suggesting to use Extended Latin on article names as default for compatibility.-- Ahmetlii ( talk) 19:26, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
However, I get the sense the original poster is concerned about some particular dispute(s) involving when to use or not use such characters (e.g. Mexico vs. México), and isn't asking about the encoding standards. If I've sussed that out correctly, the general answer is that MOS:DIACRITICS is as close to a rule as we have, and is intentionally a bit loosey-goosey. Actual practice (almost entirely established by years of WP:RM decisions) is to use diacritics when reliable sources demonstrate that they belong there (even if many sources in English don't bother with them), with some WP:LOCALCONSENSUS exceptions made on an article-by-article basis. E.g., Mexico is at that spelling because it is almost never spelled in English with the diacritic, and is pronounced in English nothing like it is in Spanish. It's like Munich vs. München. When we give full Spanish names that include that name, we do include the diacritic, e.g. at Mexico City: "Mexico City (Spanish: Ciudad de México) ...".
Another kind of exception to the default to include diacritics is when
a notable person has made it clear that they have dropped the diacritic from their name (at least with regard to them as a public figure; we have no idea how they sign their checks :-). A high-profile case, with significant debate that essentially settled this as a general matter, would be
Stana Katic (vs. Katić). This can also be applied to organizations; e.g., various ones pertaining to the
Sámi people officially use "Sámi", "Sami", or "Saami" in English forms of their names, and we do not "correct" them, even if we default to one spelling (I think Sámi) for the overall subject, and nationally preferred spellings for topics limited to Finland or Norway or Sweden in particular). There was also about a decade-running string of sports-related cases (involving some improprieties like setting up a bogus wikiproject to canvass and PoV-push against diacritics; it was deleted at
MfD). The collective result of these is that WP doesn't care whether various lazy sport governing bodies or journalism sources nuke all the diacritics from the names of everyone; WP does not (in general, or on a categorical basis like "in tennis"). If it's clearly demonstrated that the subject actually uses the diacritic, then WP does, too. This is most often determined by the subjects' official websites and social media pages and such-like. So, ABOUTSELF works both ways on this question. The question frequently comes up with regard to American Hispanic celebrities who may or may not have retained the diacritics in names like González and Guzmán). Diacritics are just one of those areas where one size does not fit all, even if we default toward their inclusion.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
11:20, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
I've noticed the term Latinx being used in a few places on the wiki. It is used instead of the gender-implying Latino or Latina, following MOS:GNL, as generic use of Latino may be comparable to a generic he. However, it is a neologism and used less than the gender-implying alternatives, so MOS:NEO might prohibit its use. How do MOS:GNL and MOS:NEO apply here? Wikinights ( talk) 18:12, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
Since a 2018 consensus discussion, we've been merging the old WP:Manual of Style/Proper names into other MoS pages, and sorting its parts to where they topically belong (because the PN page was disused and getting out-of-synch). As a consequence of some big-chunk merging, most of the diacritics-related material ended up in MOS:CAPS ( MOS:PN for some time has redirected to MOS:CAPS#Proper names). The diacritics material was obviously off-topic there, so it was slated for merger into the related material on that subject in the main MoS page. No one seems to do MoS merger stuff but me, so I finally got off by wikibutt and finished it. :-)
I didn't change anything in the course of the merger, other than some copyediting twiddles: clarified an example; made a procedural point less of a non sequitur (and more neutrally worded); normalized punctuation; put examples in a bullet list to break up the large block of text; did some link cleanup, and added a link to ArbCom stuff in the footnote; then left behind a cross-reference at MOS:PN).
I would caution against any sudden urges to rush in and make substantive changes. Most of this material has been stable for years, and is the product of a lot of discussions, few of which have been characterized by calm and good cheer.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:53, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Images § Preferred lead image time period. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
01:59, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
There wasn't one, and it was a bit of a challenge to track down MoS's material on this, because the main MoS page never mentioned it, nor did MOS:BIO. It's common enough a set of questions to be in main MOS.
MOS:EPONYM, MOS:EPONYMS, and MOS:EPONYMOUS now go to a new bullet item in the main MoS page, adapting material from MOS:CAPS (at MOS:DOCTCAPS), and including a footnote on conventional exceptions. I do not think it says anything novel; it simply records what we're already doing. The MOS:DOCTCAPS versions can probably be compressed, with a cross-reference to MOS:EPONYM. I'll add a cross-reference at MOS:BIO as well, since people are apt to look for this over there. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:21, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
PS: It should not be relocated to Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biography#Names, since eponym also refer to things with non-human namesakes (e.g. named after places, after published works, after organizations, etc.). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:23, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
Unproductive back-and-forth:
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@ SMcCandlish:, MOS:EPONYM, MOS:EPONYMS, and MOS:EPONYMOUS are not working for me. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 13:38, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
I don't see what problem Ajpolino sees in the material he reverted. Is it just that he would prefer capping "Gram-negative" and such (as most sources now do)? Dicklyon ( talk) 17:18, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
No attempt to
SATISFY Ajpolino, here, in article talk, or in user talk, appears to have any result but generating more circular argument. Since he professes no interest, after all, in the actual content matter at issue, I don't think further attempts to address proceduralism-based filibustering will be productive. I'll return to what I said in article talk:
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I've put the
MOS:EPONYMS line-item back in, but with an {{
under discussion inline}}
tag, pointing to this thread. The total disappearance of the material, and the breakage of links to it, had cause the discussion to flounder and to be confusing for people (see, e.g., comments above from Guy_Macon).
The text, as of the timestamp below:
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... Notes
...
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To get to the actual substance of the matter:
I'm failing to see how any of this is controversial (especially since the only objection raised is procedural, not substantive, and was predicated on a case that has been under discussion for 16 years and needs its own RfC; it is neither forbidden nor given imprimatur by the material in MOS:EPONYMS, since there is no answer yet, though there's a footnote in which it may or may not end up being listed, after there's actually a consensus decision about that particular case).
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
04:12, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
Apparently without bothering to consult the community, the MediaWiki devs have recently pushed a change in the underlying software that renders all <blockquote>...</blockquote>
instances (including templated ones like {{
Quote}}
) with a weird grey sidebar (a style borrowed from a particular blogging platform). This looks especially awful when there nested block quotes (as at
Twain–Ament indemnities controversy).
We've had repeated RfCs, TfDs, and other consensus discussions against decoration of this sort, so now we need to figure out exactly how to fix this. We may need to track down where in
the stylesheet cascade this is entering our code that gets sent to the browser. I believe the place to fix this is in en.wikipedia's
MediaWiki:Common.css. Just adding border-left: 0;
to the blockquote {
... }
definition may be enough to do the trick. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:27, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
blockquote {border-style: hidden !important;}
My understanding is that the !important flag is not usually recommended, but I was unable to get it working without that flag. –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
16:54, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Keiynan Lonsdale has stated that Lonsdale's preferred pronoun is " tree", and there has been a start at the article changing all instances of "he" to "tree". Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Gender_identity doesn't really provide guidance in this instance. How do we generally address this in articles? Schazjmd (talk) 01:42, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Keiynan Lonsdale doesn't care for labels all too much, as admitted in an interview with BIllboard. Now, rather than identifying with any specific pronoun, Lonsdale wants to go by “tree."The Love, Simon star opened up about sexuality and gender pronouns in an intimate Instagram Live session on Tuesday.When a fan asked if Lonsdale was gay, the actor was surprised to keep getting that question. “Now it just depends on the day. Sometimes I’m bisexual, sometimes I’m gay, sometimes I feel straight, sometimes I’m not anything,” Lonsdale said on Instagram Live. “It doesn’t matter. Either way, throughout all of that, I’m Keiynan.”Lonsdale further explained: “I don’t want to go by ‘he’ anymore, I just want to go by ‘tree.’ I want people to call me ‘tree,’ because we all come from trees, so it doesn’t matter if you’re a he or a she or a they or a them. At the end of the day, everyone’s a tree. I want to call my friends 'tree' and me 'tree' and everyone 'tree.' So, I think, like now, when people ask me what my preferred pronoun is, I’m going to say ‘tree.’"In a duo of Instagram posts, Lonsdale displayed an affinity for trees. In one, the actor stands shirtless, shrouded by a leaf-filled tree branch. In another, Lonsdale holds a branch of leaves.Lonsdale concluded the Instagram Live remarks by saying: “I’m not high by the way, this is just me.”
In Template:Infobox person, the explanation box for the "children" parameter says (in part) "only list names of independently notable or particularly relevant children", but it does not specify whether to list only first names or first and last names. I sometimes see infoboxes, such as the one in Natalie Wood, in which the link is piped to show just the first name. It seems logical to me to use the name of a notable son or daughter as it appears in the title of that person's article. Also, display of just the fist name seems inconsistent when all other names in the infobox have first and last names. Does WikiPedia have a style guide that applies here? Eddie Blick ( talk) 02:36, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
Specific news article is from The Guardian (UK) [15] where US Phil Spencer is quoted multiple times, including the word "apologise" as printed by the Guardian. This quote (I just added) is being used in an article that has been US variety from the start Xbox Series X and Series S. Do we change that quote to be US since it seems unlikely that Spencer here "said" the UK spelling, or do we need to keep the Guardian's exact version? -- Masem ( t) 18:20, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
I'm relatively new to Wikipedia. It is standard and good for biography articles to have photos of their subjects in a sidebar in the lead section, along with basic info like birth date. I'm wondering if it would be good to suggest at some level (style manual, or template, or somewhere else) including a date of the photograph. This would be useful since people look different at different ages. But is it worth the space it would take up? (Note that I am not suggesting this be *required*, which would be a bad thing, just asking what people think best practice is and where best practice should be specified.) -- editeur24 ( talk) 17:32, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
I noticed a tendency for editors to handle non-technical jargon inconsistently, and when I looked up the policy guidance, it doesn't seem sufficient on this topic. The policy on handling jargon is at MOS:JARGON, which is mainly about technical jargon, and the fact that it should be generally avoided when possible. However, there are articles on topics such as sports and games that use jargon unique to the topic, and the policy at MOS:JARGON doesn't seem sufficient.
Here are some examples:
Other articles than games use jargon that are fairly common in the vernacular, and it doesn't make sense to simplify as per MOS:JARGON. For example:
One possible convention for handling topic-specific jargon is to emphasize (italicize) the first use in the article, and then to use the term normally with no emphasis later in the article. This approach is as described here. The emphasis in the first use queues the reader that this is a specialized term and to note it as distinct usage in this context. Later the term is used normally with no emphasis.
Editors often emphasis the jargon term, especially in the first use, but they do it inconsistently. Some editors italicize the first use or they italicize all instances of the term in the article. Other editors put the term in double quotes. This inconsistency is why I think there should be clear policy indicating the convention to be used in Wikipedia. Coastside ( talk) 23:18, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
On the comprehensibility matter: From a practical-solutions angle (rather than a rule-thumping one) this is arguably really a MOS:GLOSSARIES thing. (That's still technically a draft guideline, though it has for years informed a lot of the well-developed glossaries we already have. Some of the technical detail in it probably needs to move to a Help:Glossaries page; that's why it's been sitting around in draft form for ages. The material in it is entirely stable, though.)
The genesis of it, happily for you, was precisely the problem you're raising, of sports/games jargon, and certain articles being thick with it. We developed it with cue sports as a testbed, since it's pretty much the most jargon-heavy sports and games sector of all time (with the terminology even widely varying by sub-discipline, ENGVAR, sub-national region, generation, professional versus amateur play, etc.).
In summary, the solution is to build a rich,
encyclopedic glossary (not just
WP:DICDEF) of key terms. That's a list article, and it can be
structured a certain way with templates that auto-generate link anchors and yadda yadda. Then use the {{
glossary link}}
meta-template to make a convenient
topical term-linking template for use articles, that ties jargon terms in them to their glossary entries, e.g.: ... divided into periods called {{pologloss|chukka}}s ...
. It's covered in the draft guideline in general, and in the template documentation in particular. To see it in action, have a look at
Glossary of cue sports terms, and the {{
cuegloss}}
links in articles like
Eight-ball and
Snooker. (One wrinkle is that the {{
Defn}}
template that's part of this system ended up being replaced with :
or <dd>
markup in many instances in that glossary, when the extra functions of that corresponding template were not needed in those entries, because that glossary is so large it was hitting the parser-function limit. So, the code doesn't read quite as cleanly as intended.)
—
SMcCandlish
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05:08, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
@ Coastside: The crash course version: At a "Glossary of weird stuff" article (or whatever – I use silly examples), do:
{{ glossary}}
...{{ term|snorkelweasel}}
{{ defn|A weasel trained in underwater activities, using a weaselsnorkel or other breathing apparatus ...}}
...{{term|weaselsnorkel}}
{{defn|An underwater breathing device for weasels and other mustelids ...}}
...{{ glossary end}}
Then, at a regular article (after making a simple link template for that glossary with the {{
glossary link}}
meta-template, e.g. a {{weirdgloss}}
), you can do "Jones was a professional {{weirdgloss|snorkelweasel}}
trainer from 2004 to 2007, and then ran for governor of Nebraska." The catch, of course, is being willing to write and source the glossary article. It can be some work, but in the long run can save a tremendous amount of time and verbiage, by not having to re-explain things in article after article within a related topical scope (which also gets tedious for the reader). —
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
06:15, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
Did I imagine that somewhere that there were guidelines for using gender-neutral language as they pertain to occupations? Doe we have any consensus opinion about this? I'm looking at WP:GNL, for instance, but it's not clear to me if we should be using "actor" vs. "actress" when describing a woman who acts. Comedienne? Dominatrix seems fine, but aviatrix? I know the guideline points to some essays, but we know that always means "Those are just essays!" Would be nice to have something written down in the MOS, unless I'm idiotically missing it. Cyphoidbomb ( talk) 23:18, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
There appears to be a tacit consensus that "serving as" is the appropriate phrase to use when a politician is currently in office. So, to take a completely random example, the lede of Ro Khanna reads:
Rohit Khanna is an American politician, lawyer, and academic serving as the U.S. Representative from California's 17th congressional district since 2017.
But "serving as" has always struck me as odd and faintly ungrammatical, as opposed, for instance, to "who has served". Is my view an idiosyncrasy, or is there a policy statement somewhere that "serving as" is actually correct, or am I on to something here? Thanks for any thoughts. AleatoryPonderings ( ???) ( !!!) 18:10, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
Rohit Khanna is an American politician, lawyer, and academic who has been the U.S. Representative from California's 17th congressional district since 2017.
serving as tablesbecause our furniture hadn't yet arrived." Bus stop ( talk) 23:26, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
Smith currently serves as the President of Ruritaniawhen you could just say
Smith is the President of Ruritania.
Neutrally noting that there is relevant discussion at Talk:Marcia_Fudge#How_should_we_word_the_lead_sentence?. AleatoryPonderings ( ???) ( !!!) 18:10, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Please see:
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/France and French-related articles § Proposed simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS, which is more than a decade outdated
—
SMcCandlish
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07:10, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
@
JsfasdF252: You recently added *Not contain template transclusions.
to the "Section headings" section in the part that talks about things that cause technical issues.
[17]
Is this inherent or is it just a risk that someone will change the template we are using in a way that "breaks" section headers? For example, would {{
pi}}
or for that matter {{
Mvar}}
in a section header cause technical problems? What about {{
smiley}}?
davidwr/(
talk)/(
contribs) 🎄
17:40, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
Test to see if the link in the table of contents takes you to this section. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 19:13, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
As I understand it (subject to correction/rebuttal of course) anything other than plain text in section headings causes screen readers to fail to render or handle the heading correctly. That constitutes a rather serious violation of the WP:ACCESSIBILITY rules. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 20:18, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
<span id="Anchor name"></span>
, another being that this also stops breakage of /* Heading name */
in the edit summary). So, aside from the mess reported above, where the section links don't work anyway, the thing to do here would be use the Unicode pi symbol, italicized as a variable: ''π''
, which would just be π
without italics markup in a #-link to a section. For "weird math stuff" that doesn't have a Unicode symbol, use headings that are plain English (e.g. the name of the constant or whatever), to the extent possible. As David Eppstein says above, there are some cases where some math might be needed, but this should be done with pure HTML, per
MOS:FORMULA. —
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
07:19, 14 December 2020 (UTC)Some while back, we removed from MOS:BQ any references to pull-quote templates, after consensus discussions indicated that pull quotes are not actually encyclopedically appropriate at all (so MoS shouldn't advise about how to use/not use such templates). We even had a successful proposal to stop supporting pull quotes in articles at all (after some earlier weaker consensuses along "usually, with exceptions" lines, e.g. in 2016).
However, the well-intended MoS trimming had the unintentional effect of removing any mention of pull quotes from MoS, anywhere. The loophole result has been a creeping increase in pull quotes in mainspace, which was the opposite of the intent of either of those consensus results. I keep running into pull quotes, especially at bios of high-profile individuals, articles on major public-policy debates, coverage of current events, and articles on published works. (I've fixed two in just the last week, without looking for them; this one was particularly bad, in that its caption including information missing from the main body of the article, and the purportedly quoted text did not match between the body and the pull-quote.)
I propose reinstating this to MOS:BQ in a to-the-point statement, that no longer dwells on particular templates. Something like the following:
Pull quotes do not belong in Wikipedia articles. These are the news and magazine style of "pulling" material already in the article to reuse it in attention-grabbing decorative quotations. This unencyclopedic approach is a form of editorializing, produces out-of-context, undue emphasis, and may lead the reader to conclusions not supported in the material.
Without something like this, there no longer appears to be any clear WP:P&G rationale for removing any pull quote from any article. Consensus was reaffirmed earlier this year (after many prior discussions) to deprecate and now actively prevent (by changing template code) the "giant quotation marks" decoration of block quotes in articles, for most of the same reasons cited in the above proposed text. And, at MediaWiki:Common.css we recently undid a community-undiscussed decision by the MW developers to make all blockquotes decorated with a left-side vertical bar (like the {{ Talk quote block}} used above to present the proposed text). And that was after TfD deleted a template that did the same thing in mainspace (with consensus against merging its decoration features into {{ Quote}}).
System-gaming to draw excessive attention to particular material at articles is clearly neither desirable nor acceptable. Yet all anyone has to do to evade this consensus is put the material first into the main article text, then pull-quote it into some decorative box. That actually makes it worse than the original "giant-quotes" problem, by doing all of that objectionable UNDUE attention stuff, plus having redundant content.
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SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
22:14, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
If a celebrity was born and raised in Hong Kong and a Chinese ethnic, but due to her mother's background having naturalized Japanese citizenship, she'd held Japanese citizenship at birth, then how should we describe her in the opening paragraph? I was leaning towards "a Hong Kong-based Japanese celebrity", but is that correct? Or should we describe her as "a Hong Kong-Japanese celebrity" or "Hong Konger-Japanese...? Please advise or give me some suggestions. Thanks.-- TerryAlex ( talk) 01:48, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
The opening paragraph should usually provide context for the activities that made the person notable. In most modern-day cases, this will be the country of which the person is a citizen, national, or permanent resident. ... Ethnicity ... should generally not be in the lead unless it is relevant to the subject's notability. Similarly, previous nationalities or the place of birth should not be mentioned in the lead unless they are relevant to the subject's notability.
a Hong-Kong celebrity. However, if her Japanese citizenship has played a major role in her life, or if she's spent a lot of time in Japan, I'd suggest
a Hong Kong-Japanese celebrity.
Can someone explain WHY we capitalize “Department of Education” but not “secretary of education”? (I accept that we do... I just don’t understand WHY). Blueboar ( talk) 13:57, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
If you mean what the out-in-the-world underlying reason is, in short it's because Department of Education is a proper name (or the contextual short form of a longer one like United States Department of Education), like England and Great Pyramid of Giza, while secretary of education is simply a role, like early-evening-shift bartender at Jimmy Joe's Bar & Grill (a business entity that has a proper name, like Microsoft or BMW), or NASA astronaut, or captain of the HMS Centaur, or king of Denmark. It's conventional to capitalize formal job/role/position/rank/peerage titles when attached to a name (i.e., when they effectively are a part of the name), though even this is decreasingly the case with commercial job titles. Less so, there's a quasi-convention to capitalize when the title itself is the subject and is unique and important ("King and Queen of Scotland ceased as formal titles with the 1706–1707 Acts of Union").
If you mean what the ivory-tower reasoning is behind the Gestalt, cultural treatment of certain kinds of things as proper names (
proper-noun phrases) and others not (as common-noun phrases), this is something that linguists/philologists and philosophers have been arguing their heads off about for 200+ years, with no apparent end in sight. You can think of it as a
WP:GREATWRONGS matter that WP cannot resolve, if that helps. If you had the wading-though-obtuse-jargon stomach for it, and a lot of money to burn, there are expensive, pretty recent academic volumes published about this stuff fairly often
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22].
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
05:27, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
Since we're on the subject of punctuation vs. ref tags (that is, the little superscript [99] thingamajigs), I want to bring up the current provision that ...
Where a footnote applies only to material within parentheses, the ref tags belong just before the closing parenthesis.
While this has a superficial logic to it, it actually makes no sense and serves no purpose. Consider this passage:
Fine. But under the guideline, if each statement is supported by its own source, we're supposed to move the last ref tag inside the parens, like this:
Why? A ref tag logically covers all material back to the next-prior ref tag, whether that material's in parens, not in parens, or a combination. Period. Without this special provision we'd be doing this:
... which is perfectly sensible and unambiguous. Moving the ref tag inside the parens achieves nothing and looks awful. By the logic of this "parenthesis" exception, if a ref tag applies only to material within a single sentence, then we should move the ref tag before the period/stop closing the sentence [1]. That would be dumb of course, and so is the current special provision for parentheses. I propose we remove it. E Eng 02:35, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
References
The ortolan is served in French cuisine, typically cooked and eaten whole ... The birds are caught with nets set during their autumn migratory flight to Africa. They are then kept in covered cages or boxes. The birds react to the dark by gorging themselves on grain, usually millet seed, until they double their bulk ... The birds are then thrown into a container of Armagnac, which both drowns and marinates the birds.The bird is roasted for eight minutes and then plucked. The consumer then places the bird feet first into their mouth while holding onto the bird's head. The ortolan is then eaten whole, with or without the head, and the consumer spits out the larger bones. The traditional way French gourmands eat ortolans is to cover their heads and face with a large napkin or towel while consuming the bird. The purpose of the towel is debated. Some claim it is to retain the maximum aroma with the flavour as they consume the entire bird at once, others have stated "Tradition dictates that this is to shield – from God’s eyes – the shame of such a decadent and disgraceful act", and others have suggested the towel hides the consumers spitting out bones. This use of the towel was begun by a priest, a friend of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin ...Ortolan hunting was banned in France in 1999, but the law was poorly enforced and it is thought that up to 50,000 ortolans were illegally killed each year during the autumn migration ... France's ortolan population fell 30% between 1997 and 2007.
trying to fix something that is not broken, but unless you can explain what's wrong with the above (which is what we would do as a matter of course if the guideline didn't go out of its way to tell us to do something else) then it's the guideline that's trying to fix something that isn't broken. WP:MOSBLOAT is a serious problem, and every unnecessary provision we can remove is a victory.
That way you suggest that whatever is in the footnote, it is also responsible for placing the sentence between parentheses, which is however an editing choice.
(something like this)[1]instead of
(something like this[2])? Because I think it would be equivalent to, as EEng said, doing
something like this[3].instead of doing it
like this.[4]El Millo ( talk) 18:16, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
The earth revolves around the sun (it also rotates on its own axis).in which case I would personally put both refs after the period. We should base ourselves on sentences that are clearly grammatically correct and that represent a common use of parentheticals, instead of focusing on uncommon or outlandish examples. El Millo ( talk) 18:50, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
The earth revolves around the sun (it also rotates on its own axis)that exhibits bad grammar. It's run-on sentence – basically a parenthetical version of
The earth revolves around the sun, it also rotates on its own axis. E Eng 23:23, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
Question: When using a superscript footnote number at the end of a sentence, should the period precede or follow the footnote number? What about footnote numbers in midsentence that fall next to some other form of punctuation (comma, semicolon, etc.)? Answer: Please see CMOS 14.26: “A note number should generally be placed at the end of a sentence or at the end of a clause. The number normally follows a quotation (whether it is run into the text or set as an extract). Relative to other punctuation, the number follows any punctuation mark except for the dash, which it precedes.”
- Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I'm a man—traditional male pronouns are fine.) 18:16, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
References
the ref outside the parentheticalshould imply
that the source is being cited for everything – including the material before the parenthetical – all the way back to the previous citation. If it doesn't then there should be another ref tag before the opening paren. If I'm wrong please give an example. E Eng 04:19, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Problems like this get even worse in long main-body paragraphs, which are frequently peppered with verifiable but not yet verified additions by drive-by editors, sometimes in mid-sentence. It's not uncommon for single sentences in controversial- or complicated-topic articles to have several citations for specific clauses making severable claims in the sentence. If one of these is parenthetical, then the only way a citation specifically for that is not going to be misleading is if there is another citation immediately before the opening parenthesis (round bracket), which we cannot guarantee. Even if it's incidentally a true condition at this moment, this situation only holds as long as no one ever inserts anything new between those two elements without a citation, which on this wiki is a very unsafe bet. In short: citation accuracy is far more important than subjective typographic quibbles. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:25, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Where a footnote applies only to material within parentheses, the ref tags belong just before the closing parenthesis.— Bagumba ( talk) 09:29, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
Berlin Schönefeld Airport is now closed, although much of it appears to have been absorbed into Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Some info about the airport has been marked with Strikethrough text. I can't find anything in the MOS that says don't do this, although it is obvious to me that bold, italic, color, etc. is used sparingly and strikethrough is only for talk pages. The lead prose indicates the airport is closed, so it should be implicit that the everything else in the article applied to the airport when it was open and not currently. Should the plain text be restored? A query at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Airports has gone unanswered. MB 01:13, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
when the article itself discusses deleted or inserted content, such as an amendment to a statute. I think that unless we want to propose a specific MOS guideline for this, we should probably go with the strikethrough text. Doubly so for reasons of not biting the newcomers. Gbear605 ( talk) 19:13, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
<del>
and <ins>
, though there's been some dispute (off-WP) about exactly when <del>
should actually be used, versus <s>
. And we've learned the hard way not to just make assumptions about what screenreaders are actually doing (many of them are not yet even nearly making as much use of semantic markup as they should). It's conceptually similar to the
MOS:CURLY problem: by now, all browsers should be able to treat "Poem Title" and “Poem Title” as equivalent for search purposes unless explicitly told not to, yet they somehow just aren't all there yet.[To wax techno-political about it, I think problems like this are primarily because WHATWG has insufficient buy-in, and only represents a handful of companies that have anything to do with browsers and other Web user agents; and it seems that what time and resources WHATWG does have are too often squandered picking fights with W3C (which has massive buy-in, but not from a handful of WHATWG browser vendors), instead of cooperating.] —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
05:27, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
In articles, do not use strikethrough.would end different interpretations. MB 14:27, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
<del>
versus <ins>
form) in blocks of legislative and other textual analysis. I think we'd need to identify:
<s>
or <del>
) is the right markup for each case<s>
or <del>
and the invalid but still fairly often used <strike>
, would probably be enough get a bead on it all.PS: I agree "objectionable text" is a weird thing to say there. I think what someone was trying to convey was "Do not add <s>...</s>
around article content you think is inappropriate or incorrect; instead, use an appropriate
inline cleanup/dispute template, and raise the matter on the talk page." It doesn't address anything about allegedly proper use of strikethrough as an intentional part of the content, though, which is what I'm getting at above.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
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20:11, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
I've revised
MOS:NOSTRIKE (in
MOS:ACCESS) to make more sense. I don't think anything it says will be controversial in any way, though it does not address all the bullet-points I mentioned above. It's a (belated) start. I tagged it "under discussion" and pointed to this thread. PS: Weirdly,
MOS:TEXT never mentioned strikethrough at all; I've fixed this with a summary of, and {{
Main}}
cross-reference to,
MOS:NOSTRIKE. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
20:46, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
How would you capitalize "2021 mayoral campaign" as a section head? Does "mayoral" get an upper-case M? -- RoySmith (talk) 19:58, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
@021 mayoral campaign. E Eng 21:03, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
Back in early 2018, we had a near-unanimous RfC concluding that WP does not capitalize the names of traditional (non-trademarked) games and sports, except where they contain a proper name ( Canadian football but gridiron football; Texas hold 'em but royal hold 'em). This was implemented as MOS:GAMECAPS (a.k.a. MOS:SPORTCAPS).
While this has been pretty consistently deployed throughout sports articles, very little has been done address over-capitalization in table/board game articles and children's game articles. We're now seeing WP:CONLEVEL-problematic pushback, including patently false claims that names for non-commercial, folk games like snakes and ladders "are proper names", despite obviously failing to qualify. See, e.g., this multi-page RM at Talk:Snakes and ladders#Requested move 14 December 2020. Given that WP:RM discussions on obscure topics are easily subject to wikiproject canvassing to produce WP:FALSECONSENSUS, I'm not really sure what to do about this. It's similar to a short-lived pattern by WP:DANCE participants to resist de-capitalization of dance move terminology (also covered by MOS:GAMECAPS).
Should we open another RfC on it, to reconfirm the results, and maybe host it in WP:VPPOL? I don't like rehashing style-quibble stuff in such RfCs because the community has better things to spend its time on. But it really isn't permissible for wikiprojects (on games or anything else) to "revolt" against guidelines they don't like after RfCs did not go their way, and take a posture that "failure" by the community to force compliance at "their" pages at warp speed is somehow an excuse to ignore the RfC consensus and defy the guidelines.
However, I'm not even certain this is a wikiproject problem this time. Several commenters at that RM are long-term gadflies who who habitually make clearly incorrect claims that things are "proper names", without any interest in or understanding of the topics in question, but seemingly just out of a "disrupt MoS application as much as possible" pattern, and most especially to keep capitalizing things the guidelines and the bulk of the sources do not capitalize. Five+ years of these antics from the same editors is far too long. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:34, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
When it comes to terminology-heavy subjects, I've long pointed out that it's very helpful to both readers and editors to create and make extensive use of
glossary articles, and the term-link templates that reference them (derived from the
Template:Glossary link meta-template). Example: {{
cuegloss}}
is used thousands, probably tens of thousands, of times in cue-sports articles for pinpoint links to entries at
Glossary of cue sports terms, to obviate the need to re-re-re-explain terms in situ in every article in the category. I'm not sure every folk game needs a glossary, of course, while some major games like chess already have one, but we might could use "Glossary of traditional board games", "Glossary of bowling games", etc. And various geeky topics have needed glossaries for a long time (e.g. Unix and Linux terms). It's kind of a bummer that
Category:Wikipedia glossaries isn't far larger than it is (and with better-developed existing articles).
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
18:19, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
{{
lang|ja-Latn|go}}
; one could also use the {{
Nihongo}}
template, but it has a lot of parser overhead, and is better for cases where we need to generate "
Japanese: " and Kanji or other non-Latin characters, and indicate the transliteration scheme, and ...). The italics would make it clear that it's a foreignism not the English word "go" (present tense of "went"), and thus obviate the alleged recognizability/disambiguation rationale for capitalizing it. That said, I have generally been personally disinclined to get involved in lower-casing {{
lang|ja-Latn|go}}
; as with chess people and their capitalization of gambits, the drama level involved would be too high for my blood pressure. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
18:19, 4 January 2021 (UTC)SMcCandlish – re "not being implemented expeditiously". As you should know, these things never happen expeditiously. It takes work from those of us who notice and care. Many thousands of my edits went to implement MOS:JR. Thousands more for the revised river naming conventions. Hundreds at least on WP:USSTATION, which got me into deep yoghurt. Thousands over the years on MOS:CAPS. Hundreds at least on MOS:POSS. Though only about 1% run into opposition, dealing with those cases is what takes much of the time. Remember the MOS:LQ! Dicklyon ( talk) 04:38, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
Pardon me for a moment while I rant about non breaking spaces. Somebody came by an appropriations act article today and put nbsp in between all the $10 million, $5 billion, $7 million
type numbers. This particular article uses bulleted lists, and probably has 100 of this kind of number. It makes it a little hard to read in the source code editor, but especially hard to read in the visual editor. I'd say it's almost unreadable in the visual editor. Big giant "nbsp" boxes everywhere. Honestly, I wonder if these non breaking spaces are worth the trouble. It takes a wikipedian extra time and effort to add them, and it clogs the visual editor with visual noise. For what is, in my opinion, not much of a benefit. Am I out in left field here, or do others also feel this way? –
Novem Linguae (
talk)
09:34, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
and put nbsp in between all the $10
million, $5 billion, $7 million type numbers. This particular
$82 billion for schools and universities, including $54 billion to public K-12 schools, nbsp is needed for the second and subsequent dollar amounts.Our priority is what the reader sees, not our own convenience. My advice is to stop using VE. E Eng 19:55, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
in most of the bullets in your screenshot nbsp isn't needed since there's zero chance of a linebreak one word after the *did you not understand? E Eng 18:29, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
Agreed with EEng and Stepho that most of the cases in that example are unnecessary, because they are at the very beginnings of lines. Also agree to avoid Visual Editor, or at least switch into source mode any time it is bothering you, and before saving. VE tends to booger up a lot of markup, and it is safest to re-examine what it thinks it is doing before saving changes. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:23, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
I found this useful MOS page via a google search: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Punctuation inside or outside. Strangely, it is in the namespace "Wikipedia talk". Any interest in moving it into the "Wikipedia:Manual of Style" namespace? And giving it a shortcut code like MOS:PIOO? I'm happy to make the move if we get consensus. Thanks. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 19:44, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
"MOS:" redirects to "Wikipedia:Manual of Style". There is a disambiguation page named " MOS". Therefore, I added a hatnote of MOS: redirecting to manual of style to the MOS disambiguation page since anyone might be looking of what MOS could also refer to. Seventyfiveyears ( talk) 14:18, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
IF a reader intentionally types "MOS:", they're likely looking for "Wikipedia:Manual of Style": Which is why I think a hatnote is unneccessary: a reader is unlikely to have mistakenly gotten here.— Bagumba ( talk) 01:38, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
I've removed it, given the lack of consensus to include it.— Bagumba ( talk) 18:11, 13 January 2021 (UTC)
This is something MOS regulars may have an opinion about, so please comment. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 21:38, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
Perhaps it should be pointed out that articles about organizations with long names are exempted from this rule? For example, abbreviating Human Rights Defenders and Promoters as HRDP may not be a standard abbreviation (and thus invented), but writing Human Rights Defenders and Promoters everywhere in the article is cumbersome and needlessly repetitive. Another example is Moscow Research Center for Human Rights which in the article is abbreviated MRCHR. ImTheIP ( talk) 14:23, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
The section states:
However, articles about periodicals that are no longer being produced should normally, and with commonsense exceptions, use the past tense. Generally, do not use past tense except for past events, subjects that are dead or no longer meaningfully exist, or periodicals and similar written material that are no longer being produced.
I find it a bit strange that we have this artificial split for periodicals but would exempt radio and TV shows, podcasts, and so on. So a discontinued magazine was but a discontinued radio/TV show or a podcast still is? What's the logic here? This leaves a lot of blurry boundaries not addressed. What about a website? What about a website that was both a podcast and a magazine? I think we should try to standardize this better. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:14, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
I'm looking at these three examples:
Why are discontinued TV shows and radio shows in present tense, and discontinued comic books in past tense? — Naddruf ( talk ~ contribs) 20:43, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
By default, write articles in the present tense, including those covering works of fiction
and products or works that have been discontinued. However, articles about periodicals that are no longer being produced should normally, and with commonsense exceptions, use the past tense. Generally, do not use past tense except for past events, subjects that are dead or no longer meaningfully exist, or periodicals and similar written material that are no longer being produced.
I can't seem to find what I'm looking for in the Manual of Style, but does Wikipedia follow the MLA's style and capitalise the first letter of direct quotations? — Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 21:11, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
PS: The answer to every single question that begins with something like "does Wikipedia follow the [some other publisher] style" is no, because WP has its own style guide. If MLA or APA or MHRA or AMA or whoever say something eminently sensible in their style guide and WP has a consensus it should be in ours, then it will be. MoS is largely built from averaging all the academic style guides, plus various WP-specific adjustment. If MoS doesn't address something at all, it means it's left to editorial discretion on a case-by-case basis, as something not likely to affect encyclopedic tone, accuracy, or reader comprehension (or to spark recurrent editorial strife). But for this particular matter, we already have
MOS:PMC, and it's central concern is in fact accuracy.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
20:57, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
If you have an opinion, please share at Talk:Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Gråbergs Gråa Sång ( talk) 16:49, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
There is a discussion HERE on the talk page for musician Sophie's article over pronouns. Sophie preferred not to use gendered or non-binary pronouns ( Pitchfork and Slate sources) so we're not sure the best way to phrase things without the sentences becoming very awkwardly written. Could we get some input? Thanks. Abbyjjjj96 ( talk) 23:19, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Give precedence to self-designation as reported in the most up-to-date reliable sources [...] Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the pronouns, possessive adjectives, and gendered nouns (for example "man/woman", "waiter/waitress", "chairman/chairwoman") that reflect that person's latest expressed gender self-identification. To me I don't see a reason that shouldn't apply to a preference for averting pronouns entirely. — Bilorv ( talk) 23:41, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
The crew of the helpless and doomed American ship cheered Calliope as the corvette slipped past. The British ship's drive for the open sea was called by the American commander on the scene "one of the grandest sights a seaman or anyone else ever saw; the lives of 250 souls depended on the hazardous adventure." Making for the harbour mouth, the British ship's bow and stern alternately rose and plunged ...
preference for averting pronouns entirely. Ridiculous. Singular they is fine. E Eng 02:00, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
the most wretchedly twisted-out-of-shape writingon Wikipedia (or, I actually said, in the solar system). That's different. For the amusement of the editors assembled here's a post of mine from the discussion just linked:
After retirement from active service, Calliope served as a training ship until 1951, when the old corvette was sold for breaking
... which gave the corvette one more knot of speed, a difference that would be crucial in the disaster that made Calliope famous
The vessel nevertheless was a fully rigged sailing ship
The ship was not activated until 25 January 1887, when the vessel was placed in commission for the China Station
The vessel was reassigned to the Australia Station later in 1887. The cruiser was in New Zealand at the end of that year
The crew of the helpless and doomed American ship cheered Calliope as the corvette slipped past. The British ship's drive for the open sea was called by the American commander on the scene "one of the grandest sights a seaman or anyone else ever saw; the lives of 250 souls depended on the hazardous adventure." Making for the harbour mouth, the British ship's bow and stern alternately rose and plunged ...
Captain Kane then took his ship to Sydney
Calliope returned to service on the Australian station after repairs were complete. At the end of 1889 the cruiser was recalled to the United Kingdom.
Calliope was returned to reserve and promptly stricken from the effective list. The cruiser laid up at Portsmouth, and in 1906 was listed for sale for a time. The next year Calliope was moved to North East England
... cheered Calliope as the corvette slipped past. The British ship's drive for the open sea ..., in which Calliope, the corvette, and the British ship are all the same thing, but referred to by three different names to keep you on your toes, or possibly for comedic effect. It's like one of those bedroom farces in which the characters go out one door then reenter via another in different guises ("Let's see... so Count Evander and the undergamekeeper and the barmaid are all the same person ... I think ...") Truly wretched.
or, I actually said, in the solar system" when what was actually said was "
on earth or any other planet". This is obviously an attempt to retroactively construe the statement as excluding exoplanets, in light of recent revelations that even more wretchedly twisted-out-of-shape writing exists on Gamma Cephei Ab. For all intensive purposes I could care less, but it's high time to set the wrecker's strait and rain in the peddling of blatant Ms. Information. jp× g 21:45, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
At the age of approximately nine or ten years old, Sophie confessed to their parents a desire to drop out of school to be an electronic music producer (although they did not let Sophie do so, and Sophie continued their schooling)." What is the alternative way of writing that without resorting to the ridiculous "Sophie confessed to Sophie's parents"? And there's this sentence, "
Sophie was asked by a half-sister to DJ her wedding, later Sophie admitted that the half-sister "didn't know what I was doing in my room on my own" and had assumed Sophie was a DJ." You can't even specify that it's Sophie's half-sister, unless you want to use "Sophie" five times in one sentence. Abbyjjjj96 ( talk) 02:58, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
I think the rewrite is, At the age of approximately nine or ten years old, Sophie expressed a desire to drop out of school to be an electronic music producer (although Sophie's parents would not allow this, and Sophie had to continue in school).
Not going to win a Pulitzer, true, but not unencyclopaedic or terribly contorted IMO.
Newimpartial (
talk)
03:43, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
preferred not to use gendered or nonbinary pronouns. They is neither gendered nor nonbinary. This entire discussion has been based on a failure to read the source carefully, or (though I'm not pointing any fingers) an apparent desire to find an issue where there is none. E Eng 04:58, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
"acquiesce to SOPHIE's wishes to always refer to SOPHIE as SOPHIE and not to use pronouns". This project is written in English. The language is a pre-existing thing. This language happens to make use of pronouns. We use the language as it exists. We should not be caving in to unreasonable demands. The English language also happens to sometimes use gendered pronouns in reference to inanimate objects, ships, for example. Some say this is sexist. I disagree. And I haven't heard any ships speaking up about this. Here is an article from 2018 from the exceptionally erudite The Economist, containing sentences like "She never reached her destination: in June that year she was sunk by a squadron of British ships. For more than three centuries her final resting place remained a mystery." Bus stop ( talk) 03:27, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
"shoehorning"anything in, EEng. Bus stop ( talk) 15:21, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
The MOS says use single quotation marks for simple glosses, e.g. "Cossack comes from Turkic qazaq 'freebooter'." But what about explicitly mentioning a translation, i.e. "The Turkic word qazaq means freebooter"? Is freebooter here being mentioned as a word, in which case it should be formatted in italics? But using quotation marks seems more common, and I sometimes see single quotation marks used, though this usage isn't really a simple gloss. The lang series of templates does this, e.g. {{lang-tr|qazaq|lit=freebooter}} gives " Turkish: qazaq, lit. 'freebooter'." Is it still a simple gloss if preceded by lit.? Or should double quotation marks be used? This would be correct if the sentence said: "The Turkic word qazaq is defined by the dictionary as "freebooter"." Is there a general rule that covers this though? -- Paul_012 ( talk) 11:31, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
{{
lang-tr|...|lit=}}
output is correct, and is consistent with the output of all similar templates. If they were wrong, this would have been noticed a long time ago. And, if the sentence said "The Turkic word qazaq is defined by [source name here] as 'freebooter'", then we would still use single quotes, because it still qualifies as a gloss or short definition. If it were a complicated and unique definition, then it should probably be directly quoted and given as a quotation rather than presented as if a gloss/translation (but we usually do not use dictionaries this way, anyhow, but summarize them as we would any other source material). A publisher has no copyright/plagiarism interest in a very short definition/gloss, especially one also appearing in other similar works, so we have no reason to treat it as a quotation. Aside: WP would never write "defined by the dictionary as" since there is no such thing as "the dictionary" from any kind of encyclopedic perspective, only particular dictionaries. Moving on, WP does not stylistically draw a distinction between a loose gloss, a simple definition, and a literal translation; they take single quotes, same as is typical in linguistics journals (when they are not doing something fancified like an interlinear gloss table). The distinction between them is quite blurry anyway; many concise definitions will precisely coincide with a gloss, and most translations of terms are glosses, except when they're being done morpheme-by-morpheme in the most technically literal way possible – which is not how WP does them except to illustrate specific linguistic points, e.g. about the grammar of a Turkic language. A simple example would be that Spanish perro will be glossed as 'dog', will be be defined in Spanish–English dictionaries as 'dog', and in a literal translation of a phrase containing it will be translated as 'dog'. If some dictionary somewhere has something complicated, such "dog, inclusive of any domesticated dog type such as a hound, but generally exclusive of a dingo or other non-domesticated canid", it's unlikely we'll have any reason to quote that verbatim. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
04:10, 5 February 2021 (UTC)foo meaning "bar"cases in articles pre-date the existence of MOS:SINGLE (or this part of it), and its important to remember that no one has to read MoS before editing here, nor does anyone memorize every single line-item in it. MoS primarily exists as a reference for WP:GNOME cleanup, and as a "rulebook" for dispute settlement, with goals of predictable and consistent output for the readers, and reduction in editorial strife over trivia. The average editor never reads a word of MoS unless led to it in the course of some dispute; most editors just write like they are used to writing, and other editors clean up after them later. That's how it's always been. There is no line-item in any guideline or policy that is universally followed, and if that were a requirement WP would simply have no rules at all. This particular line-item matters because quotation marks already serve other important purposes on Wikipedia, which can be contextually confused (the most obvious are actual literal quotations, and for words-as-words markup as an alternative to italics when italics are already used heavily in the same material for something else, such as non-English terms). This sort of potential confusion is why single quotes for glosses/definitions became a norm in linguistics writing to begin with (at least in works in which double-quotes are the normal style for direct quotations). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:37, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
Over time, MOS:CONFORM (on making conforming changes to quoted material) has drifted away from the intent of MOS:PMC (principle of minimal change) and the rationale behind MOS:LQ (use of logical quotation for precision/accuracy, especially to avoid confusing readers about whether the quotation is a sentence or a fragment).
What it says now:
When quoting a complete sentence, it is usually recommended to keep the first word capitalized. However, if the quoted passage has been integrated into the surrounding sentence (for example, with an introduction such as "X said that"), the original capital letter may be lower-cased.
- LaVesque's report stated: "The equipment was selected for its low price. This is the primary reason for criticism of the program."
- LaVesque's report said that "the equipment was selected for its low price".
- The program was criticized primarily because "the equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.
It is not normally necessary to explicitly note changes in capitalization. However, for more precision, the altered letter may be put inside square brackets: "The" → "[t]he".
- The program was criticized primarily because "[t]he equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.
What it should probably say:
When quoting a complete sentence, keep the first word capitalized, even if the quoted passage has been grammatically integrated into the surrounding sentence:
- LaVesque's report stated: "The equipment was selected for its low price. This is the primary reason for criticism of the program."
- LaVesque's report said that "The equipment was selected for its low price".
- The program was criticized primarily because "The equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.
It is permissible to make a change of capitalization with square brackets:
- The program was criticized primarily because "[t]he equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.
If only the opening fragment is quoted, and is not likely to be mistaken for a complete sentence, it is permissible but not required to simply lower-case the first character without annotation:
- The report did not specify who authorized the program's purchases, stating only that "the equipment was selected" and that the choice was cost-based.
This would better reflect actual practice (and even a recent discussion of such matters on this very page), has more in common with text treatment by other publishers with high textual-accuracy standards (i.e., academic vs. news publishers), actually acknowledges more variance in practice in some ways, is a bit less pedantically worded, and is more consistent with the rest of the guidelines, which are heavily weighted toward precision. That is, LQ and PMC are the rule, to which CONFORM permits some exceptions, not at all the other way around. We don't need to be excessive about this stuff, of course, like mandating "[...]" instead of just "..." as some academic publishers do, but we should not be undermining two important guidelines with one that is clearly subordinate to them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:05, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#MEDLEAD about Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#Lead ( WP:MEDLEAD). Input from editors across Wikipedia would be most welcome. -- Colin° Talk 10:37, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
Should we use == Heading text ==, ==Heading text== or both. 2600:1700:6180:6290:299D:E8B3:B374:1B32 ( talk)
Example textsigns and the heading text? — El Millo ( talk) 23:01, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
Duplicate discussion here closed. Main discussion is at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#Implementing deadname RFCs. Dicklyon ( talk) 06:46, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
This discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Not sure this section should be the biggest here....what talk was there about adding a mass amount of text here? Has this wording been vented? This seems overwhelming to say the least. Why is this not added to the main BIO page about this over all added here with no talk here?-- Moxy 🍁 18:48, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
So in your view, Izno, we should have a discussion at
WT:MOSBIO to finalize implementation text and then another discussion here about how much of it should be in the main MOS? You don't think that where the text is going should influence what text is actually drafted? I'm still getting a NIMBY vibe here, as I mentioned in the MOSBIO discussion. The fact is that Masem's comment has not really been supported in either venue, and they are the only one that has questioned whether the draft text matches the RfC closes. As far as I can tell, Moxy had not read the RfC closes or the MOSBIO discussion at the time this section was created, so perhaps we could have a more focused discussion here about how much of the guidance belongs here, versus MOSBIO or a freestanding page, and stay away from max NIMBY.
Newimpartial (
talk)
00:51, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
|
As per MOS:NICKCRUFT, "foreign language details can make the lead sentence difficult to understand" and should be "avoided". However, on Talk:Michael_the_Brave#Hungarian_name? it is suggested that the policy is not violated when such foreign names are presented. There are even articles, like Matthias Corvinus, with 5 foreign-language names. Which are the recommendations is such cases? 77wonders ( talk) 15:11, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
If there is a geographic object which is split between two countries with identifiable language/translation each, which language/translation should be given first and is there a policy/guideline/RfC/etc to determine this? — CuriousGolden (T· C) 15:47, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
I’ll add to the question, also based on what the translation order should be determined? -- ZaniGiovanni ( talk) 17:13, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
There is an absence of guidance on how to format exempli gratia (e.g.) and id est (i.e.).
In my internet research on typography and style guides, the most formal presentation when immediately following a sentence is with the use of an em dash and comma like this: —e.g.,
Ironically, the strongest source of information I could find on the use of various types of dashes is Wikipedia itself. But this article doesn't yet cover the use case of —e.g.,
As of March 2021 [update] the Wikipedia editor's text field erroneously renders the em dash as an en dash. In other words, if you are authoring an article in the text editor, you go to Advanced > Special characters > Symbols and click on the em dash button (or you can press the keyboard shortcut for an em dash), then an en dash is erroneously displayed in the text field. However, if you publish your changes, the resulting HTML page correctly renders the em dash with the correct unicode character. This is a call to action that there is a bug that needs to be fixed in the editor but I don't know where to report it. Also, I'm not yet sure if its a browser bug or wikipedia/MediaWiki bug.
Note, this is not an invitation to debate if i.e. and e.g. should be discouraged or avoided. That ground has been covered in archived discussions here. Likewise, the use of commas ( here, here, here, and here), full stops, italics, and even brackets have been debated. There are a lot of external links here.
The MoS itself is not internally consistent with the typography of e.g.. It varies from using hyphens before e.g. and commas following it. It even has an instance of a colon following e.g.
Two proposed actions:
1) fix the editor bug
2) create a bot that judiciously changes wikipedia to use an em dash before e.g. but only in cases where it starts a new clause but not in cases where it does not create a new clause such as where it may appear following an opening parenthesis or the beginning of a table cell, etc.
Chris Murphy ( talk) 10:17, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
en dash is erroneously displayed in the text field– There is no bug. It's a longstanding problem that hypen, minus, ndash, and mdash (respectively: - • − • – • —) are hard to distinguish as they are rendered in
The MoS itself is not internally consistent– MOS is an ecumenical zone where various WP:ENGVARs and other style choices coexist side by side in peace and harmony. I quote from User:EEng#A_rolling_stone_gathers_no_MOS:
In the last 48 hr I've become aware of a simmering dispute over whether the text of MOS itself should be in American or British English. With any luck the participants will put that debate (let's call it Debate D1) on hold in order to begin Debate D2: consideration of the variety of English in which D1 should be conducted. Then, if there really is a God in Heaven, D1 and D2 will be the kernel around which will form an infinite regress of metadebates D3, D4, and so on -- a superdense accretion of pure abstraction eventually collapsing on itself to form a black hole of impenetrable disputation, wholly aloof from the mundane cares of practical application and from which no light, logic or reason can emerge.That some editors will find themselves inexorably and irreversibly drawn into this abyss, mesmerized on their unending trip to nowhere by a kaleidoscope of linguistic scintillation reminiscent of the closing shots of 2001, is of course to be regretted. But they will know in their hearts that their sacrifice is for the greater good of Wikipedia. That won't be true, of course, but it would be cruel to disabuse them of that comforting fiction as we bid them farewell and send them on their way.
create a bot that [etc etc etc]– You say
This is not an invitation to debatebut – trust me – that's an invitation to debate. Anyway, I don't know who's going to develop this bot that knows what a clause is and so on.
are hard to distinguish as they are rendered— Thank you, your user experience helps to isolate where the bug may reside. For you, the en and em characters are merely hard to distinguish in the text editor, but for me, they are pixel for pixel identical. Therefore, you must be on a different platform or browser from me and that then suggests that this is possibly a browser bug, not a bug in MediaWiki. What OS and browser are you using?
I don't know who's going to develop this bot that knows what a clause is— The bot can skip areas where the em dash is not appropriate. As I said, the beginning of table cells, after opening parenthesis, etc. The bot doesn't need to know what a clause is to accomplish this logic. I would be willing to work on it eventually, if granted the authority to do so.
Your concern about British English is slightly germane to the e.g. debate, but localization is not an important aspect of the issues I raised. If it's important, maybe someday there can be a read-only ben.wikpedia.org with reasonable BE translation. Chris Murphy ( talk) 11:03, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
<br />
not <br>
; while both will parse in HTML 5, the latter breaks the editing-mode syntax highlighter (at least the one available under the Preferences menu). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
09:00, 21 March 2021 (UTC)Category:21st century-related lists has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 ( 𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 11:11, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
In other words, is the term "actress" deprecated, or not, or is there nothing in the MoS about that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Herostratus ( talk • contribs) 22:53, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
There once was a male lesbian Thespian from Nantucket
Whose gender was no drop in the bucket
But rather than quibble
With lesser minds that spew dribble
He is now simply known as
Pat.
There was a Young Person of
Thespiae,
Whose toilette was so grim to espy;
She dressed in a some jeans,
Spickle-speckled with greens,
That ombliferous person of Thespiae.
It is just an act
Kimono open to all
Gender still unknown
References
So... in the language, we have (altho it's on the way out) "man" meaning human, and then "man" (the subset of humans that are male) and "woman" (the subset of humans that are female). The two meanings of "man" engenders confusion and can be insulting to women. It the past, we used the generic "he" for generic humans (when a particular person isn't involved). "The clown blows up the balloons and then he pops them". That "he" can be taken to mean "male", so that's not good. So instead we use "they" a lot more (other words like "xe" have been used, but "they" has caught on). And this is all to the good.
For thespians, we are doing the opposite, here. "Pat Carroll took the stage, and damn if that actor didn't make a great speech" can be taken as "Pat Carroll took the stage, and damn if he didn't make a great speech". We are introducing confusion, and also disregarding (and thus basically deprecating) Pat Carrol's femaleness (if they are female -- and we don't know, do we.)
We don't have an acceptable generic word where person-who-acts is the superclass, and "actor" and "actress" are the subclasses, as we do with "they" for humans generally. "Thespian" is obscure and "actron" hasn't caught on.
The other thing is, even if we did, gender is really important for thespians. It just is. It's not important for pilots or doctors or welders. It is for actrons. If you replace a male pilot with a female pilot, it doesn't matter. If you replace one of the male leads it Brokeback Mountain with a female, it matters. It's a different movie. When giving a person's profession to the reader, we don't need "aviatrix" but we do need "actress", because that matters in helping the reader get a sense of where the person fits in the theater and film world. We're here to serve the reader.
As to what's generally used, it appears to be "actress" here in Wikipedia (by random sample), and we are encouraged to follow regular practice for most things. As for the world in general, I googled Cate Blanchett (chosen at random) and without fear or favor came up with this result, in order of rank:
That's the first two pages and I stopped. If you count Wikipedia (not sure you should) that's 6-1 for "actress". That doesn't seem consisted with a claim that "actor" is generally used for females and males. It may be a trend with the hip crowd, but we're supposed to lag not lead trends. Herostratus ( talk) 03:41, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
No, no such "rule" exists. Spy-cicle💥 Talk? 04:36, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
I see that MOS:GNL says, "Use gender-neutral language, and the table headed Examples of gender indication in occupational titles in the Gender indication section of that wikilinked article may be relevant. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 14:35, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
actor and singer. A veteran of musical theatre, Briones rose to prominence for her—a 12-word gap. 'Her' is in the article 26 times (twice in the lede); 'she', 28 times (four in the lede); 'he' once (clearly referring to her father [a second to Alex Kurtzman in a citation]); 'his' twice (clearly referring to a reviewer and to Data); 'him' does not appear. No reader reasonably versed in the English language could find any confusion with Ms. Briones' gender identity. — ATS ( talk) 17:30, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
I see acter would seem gender neutral. If acting exists, why not acter‽ Kautr ( talk) 20:50, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
{{
Crossref|For "actress" versus "actor", see ...}}
. This doesn't rise to the importance level of needing to be specified in the main MoS page, or even living in MOS:BIO (where the section on job titles is already overly long). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
05:05, 3 April 2021 (UTC)A discussion (not a formal RfC, yet) regarding the "military conflicts" exception of the above is under way at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Military_history#Coats_of_arms_in_infoboxes. Input of further editors would be welcome. RandomCanadian ( talk / contribs) 17:25, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § RfC: Modification of Agatheira for syntactic compliance with linguistic precision guidelines. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
01:03, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
April Fools!
One of the most comprehensive sections of the Mos, the section on dashes, stretches to more than 14,000 characters and covers a variety of dash-related concerns.E Eng 02:28, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
the reign of Eumenes II (188-158 BC)
the reign of Eumenes II (188–158 BC)
See Wikipedia talk:Stable version to revert to#RFC for a RFC involving RETAIN. Crouch, Swale ( talk) 18:11, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
Do we write "the early 20th-century upper class" or "the early-20th-century upper class"? Wolfdog ( talk) 15:43, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
Anyway, I think usage on this exact question is going to vary even by individual, depending on context. For example, I would be more likely to use "early-20th-century" when it proceeded another modifier. Ex.: "early-20th-century nationalistic movements", because it is in fact clearer for the reader, that "early" is modifying "20th[-]century" not the entire string about the movements. And they were not in fact early nationalistic movements, but direct outgrowths of late 19th-century proto-fascism. But that last clause makes me notice for sure something that I suspected: I'm disinclined to do it if what follows the construction also contains a hyphen, because lots and lots and lots of hyphens become more of a problem than a help. I would feel compelled to add it anyway in a case like "late-19th-century proto-fascist sentiment" (modifier modifier noun), again because it was not late proto-fascist sentiment but early (even taking into account that proto- implies early – the proto-fascist period lasted well into the 20th century). Nor do me mean "among the proto-fascism examples toward the end of the 19th century, select only last few of them". We just mean "proto-fascism examples toward the end of the 19th century", the end. In messy cases like that, however, I would strongly consider just rewriting, e.g. "proto-fascist sentiment of the late 19th century" which has only one hyphen (required because proto- is a prefix not a word).
In short, I would oppose making a rule requiring or even recommending "early 20th-century", since it should be left to editorial discretion, and MoS is already overlong with examples, so we don't need to add a new block of "sometimes do this, sometimes do that" stuff, especially given that there are no recurrent knock-down, drag-out fights about this stuff. If someone does what to fight with you about it, just rewrite to avoid (it's the first rule of MoS!), as I did in an example here.
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SMcCandlish
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03:47, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
I have question about how MOS handles italics in captions on mainspace articles. Should words or phrases be in italics when in brackets when it is something like "(pictured)" or "(left)" in captions, etc? I have seem this kind of implementation around at WP:TFA Examples or WP:DYK Examples or in some mainspace GAs (e.g. D'oh-in' in the Wind, 200 (South Park)) but it seems to be inconsistent. Kind regards Spy-cicle💥 Talk? 15:10, 10 March 2021 (UTC)
(r)or
(r)or
(right)or
(right)(though I suspect fewer will mind if you use italics than will object if you don't). If you want to open at discussion aimed at standardizing this sort of stuff, do it at WT:Manual of Style/Captions. But I don't recommend it. Really I don't. E Eng 01:21, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
(r)and
(r)would be compliant with MOS:ABBR. 207.161.86.162 ( talk) 07:23, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
In the end, given that people are apt to keep italicizing these things, and there's not a burning need to legislate against this, nor to require it, we should probably have a template for them ({{
caption note}}
, shortcut {{
capnote}}
, using the {{
inline hatnote}}
meta-template) that marks them up with CSS classes like hatnotes and other claptrap get, so they are distinguishable from the real content, including by
WP:REUSE tools, by user CSS, and so on. They are basically inline hatnotes, of a sort similar to {{
cross reference}}
and its shortcuts: {{
crossref|printworthy=y|see [[#Brobingnagese language|below]]}}
, or {{
xref|For additional details, see [[Lilliputese dialects]].}}
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SMcCandlish
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04:28, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
Gameography and ludography are both words regarding the works of a game designer, or people who have otherwise worked on games (a lá discography or bibliography). On biographical articles on Wikipedia, there seems to be no consesus as for which to use, for instance, Derek Yu and Hideo Kojima use gameography, while Edmund McMillen and Peter Molyneux use ludography. See also Shigeru Miyamoto ludography, which was recently moved from Shigeru Miyamoto gameography. Results from Google search of Wikipedia:
This topic stems from a disagreement between Heffner000 and I on Cr1TiKaL (see User talk:Heffner000#Rationale behind use of "Gameography" instead of "Ludography"), and I think a third opinion would be appreciated. I believe there needs to be some consistency between articles; MOS:HEAD states the following: "Section headings should follow all the guidance for article titles". MOS:AT states the following: "A title should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is [...] consistent with those of related articles". Ergo, headings should be consistent between articles.
To resolve this issue, I propose the usage of one term over the other. Therefore I suggest ludography over gameography for several reasons:
References
What are your thoughts? Kind regards, Orcaguy ( talk) 18:32, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
Filmography is recognizable for the average reader, the word "film" is common
more universal alternatives like "Works" or similar.
We also have some articles use musicography instead of discography, both are appropriate terms in that case, and there's no big debate there.
I don't buy the linguistic etymology argument
In many fields, abbreviations and acronyms are used quite commonly. Sometimes this such an extent that the full name is not so well known, sometimes the initialism and the full words are used interchangeably. People might search for information using the acronym. Where an article is giving scope to some area it may be helpful to list both the full name and the acronym, even when the abbreviated form isn't used elsewhere on within the article. This appears often the case where the abbreviated thing doesn't necessarily have (or warrant) its own page.
Is there a correct way to handle this?
Options may include:
Are there further options?
What is our preferred stance on this? And what types of evidence should be considered when choosing an approach to this?
For options (D) and (E) above, will we need to find a WP:SECONDARY to demonstrate that the acronym is indeed commonly used? Or would a definition on some primary source be acceptable? (Perhaps counts of google hits may be inaccurate, or indeed for some short initialisms they may be tricky to disambiguate.)
Considering relative frequency of use of the full term versus initialism would be sensible, but again what level of evidence is required? Chumpih. ( talk) 06:38, 14 March 2021 (UTC) + edits to clarify 11:46.
{{
glossary link}}
template to provide links to definitions. This proved to be a godsend when it came to writing about
cue sports (billiards, snooker, pool), which is perhaps the most jargon-heavy sport of all time. That would be a very useful approach for any acronym-heavy field. You just explain the terms once in the glossary, then link to them with something like {{astrogloss|UHTC}}
any time it seems prudent. Well, maybe explain it outright in the article one time, for
WP:REUSE purposes (someone might rip the bare text of the article). —
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
11:14, 4 April 2021 (UTC)The notion that tables shouldn't be collapsed upon the loading of a page seems to be based on some incorrect ideas and some misleading positioning of sentences. The current wording gives the impression that the mobile version of the site will strip auto-collapsed tables; this is false, only navboxes are stripped from the mobile view.
The second half of this is crystal balling and outdated. Google Lite is only available as a hidden "advanced" feature in the mobile version of Chrome, that was barely announced beyond 2016. No data shows that this number of users is either A) significant or B) growing. Also, Google cached pages / LITE searches display the exact same as their mobile and desktop counterparts on my phone. Disabling javascript simply displays collapsed data as uncollapsed. I think this section needs to be updated as it seems unnecessarily regressive. - Floydian τ ¢ 15:32, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
If information in a list, infobox, or other non-navigational content seems extraneous or trivial enough to inspire pre-collapsing it, consider raising a discussion on the article (or template) talk page about whether it should be included at all- and this is what should be made the focus of that section if any changes are made. I would also welcome input as to whether there are accessibility issues that involve CSS classes which provide collapsibility - examples being screen readers and other software/devices which automatically alter/change the way content is produced. Furthermore, we must (per MOS:PRECOLLAPSE)
remember that Wikipedia content can be reused freely in ways we cannot predict as well as accessed directly via older browsersand adding complexity via collapsing things when there is a better solution is contrary to that goal of WP. If information is important to an article, it is important to the goal of Wikipedia that virtually any reasonable reuse-of-content case be able to obtain a complete picture of the important content of said article - which auto-collapsing may prevent by suggesting the content is not important. The better solution is listed in MOS:COLLAPSE already - either un-collapse the content if it is important enough to be in the article, change the way in which it is presented to make collapsing or not a moot point, or remove the content altogether.To summarize, I do not support altering MOS:COLLAPSED to decrease guidance against (auto-)collapsing things in articles, but I do support revisiting why it's important and rewording the section accordingly - including clarifying that current modern browsers and official websites display the content even when CSS/JS are not used. I also think that it should be made clear that auto-collapsing is not a means for "visual" changes to an article - i.e. making an article "flow" better, or allowing people to "skip" tables/etc - but is instead only to be used as a way to include information which is relevant and has a good reason for inclusion, but outdated or supplementary - the prime example being historical data on pages it is not likely to be the primary topic, but is still useful for historical data. We must primarily remember that we are not an indiscriminate collection of information, and information which is "hidden" by default should be evaluated with serious weight given to the idea that maybe that information/data is not in line with Wikipedia's purpose. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez ( User/ say hi!) 02:52, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking § Linking non-major countries. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
21:28, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
The section §Italicized links seems to be covering proper syntax rather than a preferred style. That's more suitable for a help page on formatting than a MoS. The MoS is already long enough, let's cut the fat. Opencooper ( talk) 00:25, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
I found interest in reviving discussion of this failed proposal, which is not covered by any current guideline and includes points that are not explicit in any existing guideline; for example, the use of the dated and inaccurate term Caucasians for White people. A major factor in its failure was being mislabeled as a proposed naming convention for articles. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 17:35, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
Under MOS:JOBTITLES, UK political offices (like Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for the Home Department etc.) are rarely capitalised. I'd like to put forward the idea of reversing this presumption.
The first reason for doing this is for consistency with many other sources, like the gov.uk website and the parliament.uk website. While other outlets, like BBC News, generally don't capitalise job titles, I'd certainly argue that Wikipedia is much closer in substance to the first two examples than a news website. The second reason for this is because MOS:JOBTITLES specifically makes use of a distinction between titles and offices, however that distinction isn't really known in the UK; Boris Johnson isn't Prime Minister Johnson or Mr Prime Minister, but The Right Honourable Boris Johnson MP, who also happens to hold the offices of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Minister for the Union. While the distinction between titles and offices might work for US Presidents and Senators, for example, it doesn't really work in the UK, as for our articles it means that almost every use of these terms are in lower case. Finally, MOS:JOBTITLES deems offices common nouns, but I'd argue that it is much more nuanced than that. According to Wikipedia's own entry for proper and common nouns, proper nouns refer to a single entity, while common nouns refer to a class of entitites. Surely, you could call the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom its own entity? It may have had many holders who all fall into the category of having been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but it's still a corporation sole in itself that, in itself, gives its current holder (and only its current holder) certain powers. What do other people think? FollowTheTortoise ( talk) 16:55, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
"Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization."The government sources are self-published primary sources, and I give more weight to secondary sources such as the BBC. I also see no reason to make an unnecessary distinction between the UK and other countries. All the best, Mini apolis 21:23, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
"Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization."I haven't seen a single reason so far that we'd make an exception to that rule just for British offices, as, again, the clear majority of British secondary sources, including encyclopedic and news sources, follow something resembling the MOS:JOBTITLES rule. Wallnot ( talk) 01:04, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for your feedback, everybody! I think that all I really had to say on the matter was included in my original comment, but it's clear that the consensus is that MOS:JOBTITLES shouldn't be changed. FollowTheTortoise ( talk) 09:45, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
I want to propose a simplification of the section on hyphens.
Current
=== Hyphens ===
Hyphens (-) indicate conjunction. There are three main uses:
- In hyphenated personal names: John Lennard-Jones.
- To link prefixes with their main terms in certain constructions (quasi-scientific, pseudo-Apollodorus, ultra-nationalistic).
- A hyphen may be used to distinguish between homographs (re-dress means dress again, but redress means remedy or set right).
- There is a clear trend to join both elements in all varieties of English (subsection, nonlinear). Hyphenation clarifies when the letters brought into contact are the same (non-negotiable, sub-basement) or are vowels (pre-industrial), or where a word is uncommon (co-proposed, re-target) or may be misread (sub-era, not subera). Some words of these sorts are nevertheless common without the hyphen (e.g. cooperation is more frequently attested than co-operation in contemporary English).
Proposed
=== Hyphens ===
Hyphens (-) indicate conjunction. There are three main uses:
- Personal names (Daniel Day-Lewis)
- Certain prefixes (vice-president, ex-boyfriend). Note that general usage tends to avoid hyphens for many prefixes (subsection, nonlinear). Use a hyphen in the following situations:
- If it changes the meaning (re-dress dress again versus redress set right)
- To separate the same letter (non-negotiable) or vowels (pre-industrial) unless doing so goes against general usage (cooperation not co-operation)
- To avoid misreadings (sub-era not subera)
- Uncommon words with no established usage (co-propose)
Thoughts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fredlesaltique ( talk • contribs) 04:44, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
- A double-barrelled surname or compound give name that is hyphenated for a particular subject in most reliable sources ( Daniel Day-Lewis, Yu Myeong-Hee, Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron)
- ...
- ...
- To separate the same letter (non-negotiable) or vowels (pre-industrial) unless doing so goes against general usage (reunion not re-union)
- In personal names ( Daniel Day-Lewis, John Lennard-Jones)
- ...
- ...
- To separate the same letter (non-negotiable) or vowels (pre-industrial) unless doing so goes against general usage (reunion not re-union). Note that some words commonly lack a hyphen (cooperate versus co-operate)
I left a message at Talk:Post–Cold War era#En dash or hyphen? — hueman1 ( talk • contributions) 02:16, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
and fail to fix factual errors in it a decade after they're reported >cough cough<May I ask to what this is referring? 207.161.86.162 ( talk) 07:01, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
When speaking about a romantic partner, what set of terms should be employed? "Boyfriend"/"girlfriend" or just "partner"?
I believe it should be the latter, for two reasons:
Envysan ( talk) 03:46, 23 March 2021 (UTC)
do not bother checking your inbox– You mean like "If the phone don't ring, you'll know it's me"? E Eng 06:41, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
I've twice reverted edits by Entitled2Titled to Loudoun County, Virginia that have introduced "Mr."/"Ms." honorifics into the tables of government officials. I cannot find any other examples of such tables/lists including these, so I do not see any precedent for doing so. The wording of MOS:MR is somewhat vague to me, but my takeaway is that including an honorific on subsequent mentions is inappropriate, but it does not say that including them on the first mention is appropriate. This seems to agree with MOS:HONORIFIC, which states "[i]n general, honorific prefixes—styles and honorifics in front of a name—in Wikipedia's own voice should not be included, but may be discussed in the article." Thus, I believe that the inclusion of such titles contravenes the MOS, and they should be removed. Is there an actual consensus on this and/or is my interpretation reasonable? I searched the talk archives but was unable to find anything definitive. Thanks. -- Kinu t/ c 17:52, 24 April 2021 (UTC)
We have a long-standing problem of confusion about whether to use a hyphen or an en dash in names like Travancore–Cochin (AKA Thiru–Kochi or State of Travancore–Cochin), a merger of the formerly separate Travancore/Thiru and Cochin/Kochi. Despite MOS:DASH being for a long time eminently clear to use an en dash for mergers between coeval/comparable entities (and in other cases involving them, such as relations between or collaborations involving separate entities), there keeps being regurgitative debate about this at WP:RM. I've traced this perennial conflict to the addition of the following to MoS (the MOS:DUALNATIONALITIES subsection of MOS:DASH), seemingly without discussion:
That's a nonsense "rationale", as every merged jurisdiction (or dual-named meta-jurisdiction) like Travancore–Cochin is "a single jurisdiction during its ... existence". I.e., someone has forced the guideline to directly contradict itself. I've commented out this line, pending further discussion, but believe that it should simply be deleted. I think what has happened here is that someone got confused about Austro-Hungarian Empire using a hyphen, and assumed it must also apply to Austria–Hungary then made up a rationale to get that result. But Austro-Hungarian uses a hyphen for an entirely unrelated reason: Austro- is not a word but a combining form. It's the same kind of construction as Afro-Cuban and Franco-Prussian.
Despite this confusion, the majority of RM discussions have understood the overall gist of MOS:DASH and have concluded to use the en dash for names of merged or superset jurisdictions that have the names or parts of the names of component places in the combined name and which use short horizontal lines to separate those components (thus Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, etc., etc.). But the injection of this "Austria-Hungary" pseudo-rule has caused and continues to cause confusion and counter-argument, which defeats the purpose of having a clear and consistent guideline. And it has produced some inconsistent results, e.g. North Rhine-Westphalia (which is not northern "Rhine-Westphalia" but North Rhine combined with Westphalia), and Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu Province, though these do not appear to be the result in most cases of RM discussions being misled by the line quoted above (they mostly seem to be article titles chosen before MOS:DASH existed, or more recently by editors who have no read it).
PS: This stuff has no effect on Wilkes-Barre or Guinea-Bissau or Vitoria-Gasteiz, which are hyphened for entirely different reasons and which are not merged jurisdictions or supra-jurisdictional names. (The first is a place with two kind of randomly chosen namesakes that had nothing to do with the place or each other, and which could as easily have been named Badger-cake or Hospitality-Socrates or Pottery-Holstein. It ended up hyphenated just because it did, and if had been established recently it probably would not be since we don't use hyphens that way in contemporary English. But it has no reason to take an en dash. The second is due to a French convention of using a hyphen to stand in for something like "containing" or "related to" or "associated with"; it means 'the Guinea that has Bissau', basically. German has a directly reversed convention where such a name is applied to the enclosed place not the surrounding one: Berlin-Charlottenburg, meaning essentially 'the Charlottenburg of/in Berlin'. The handful of places with these sorts of names take hyphens are are all former European colonies or are in Europe. The third is a case of two languages' names for the same place being given at once, in this case Spanish and Basque. Various places with names of that kind don't take hyphens, e.g. Papua New Guinea.)
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SMcCandlish
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13:22, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
Does
Wikipedia:Manual of Style#In ranges that might otherwise be expressed with to or through include ranges of page numbers, e.g., 123-456 – 123-789
? If so, should the first sentence include them? Should there be an example?
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (
talk)
13:25, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
As I said before, contractions are to be avoided in formal writing. However, I was going to say that cannot is usually one word, though "can not" does exist. 68.197.54.51 ( talk) 15:04, 10 April 2021 (UTC)
I was patrolling edit requests and came across this and was wondering if there was an existing consensus about this? It seems like the kind of thing that would already have a megabyte of argument and discussion about. I didn't want to answer the request yea or nae without knowing if I was going to go awry of a guideline or somesuch. Thanks. ScottishFinnishRadish ( talk) 11:07, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 215 | ← | Archive 219 | Archive 220 | Archive 221 | Archive 222 | Archive 223 | → | Archive 225 |
For some time now, a few editors have been invoking MOS:GENDERID as though it is a piece on article titles. This recently came up again with the Jill Soloway (now Joey Soloway) article mentioned immediately above. At Talk:Joey Soloway#MOS:GENDERID with regard to article titles, I argued that "Regarding this move by Rab V, I just want to inform editors that MOS:GENDERID does not apply to article tiles. It is not about that. The policy to look at is WP:Article titles, specifically WP:Common name and WP:NAMECHANGES in this case. That is why the beginning of MOS:IDENTITY, which MOS:GENDERID is a subsection of, states 'and article titles when the term appears in the title of an article.' Now if one wants to cite WP:Ignore all rules, then cite that. But 'Jill Soloway' is Soloway's common name." Rab V, who moved the article to "Joey Soloway", argued against that, clearly feeling that MOS:GENDERID applies to article titles. I stated that "as made clear at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style before, MOS:GENDERID has never applied to article titles, despite you and a few others using it for an article title argument. We have an article title policy and MOS:GENDERID is not it. The MOS:GENDERID guideline does not trump the WP:Article titles policy."
Other cases of applying MOS:GENDERID beyond pronouns and names in article text? There are a number of them. But another case where an article was moved in the name of MOS:GENDERID is the Paul Denyer article. It was moved to "Paula Denyer" despite the fact that sources barely refer to Denyer as "Paula." And despite the fact that, as the article used to state, "as of 2013, Denyer had not yet taken the step of legally changing names." This line was removed without any valid reason given for the removal. Also, like the article currently states, "Medical specialists evaluated whether Denyer could receive sex reassignment surgery and rejected the idea." This article was also moved by Rab V. It's not like the literature refers to Denyer as a female serial killer; Denyer is considered a male serial killer in the literature. And the way Denyer behaved doesn't align with how female serial killers behave anyway (not unless perhaps killing with a male partner who dictates the killings). When Snifferdogx moved the article back to "Paul Denyer," C.Fred overturned this, citing MOS:GENDERID. So, right now, instead of being based on a policy or guideline, that article title goes by a serial killer's preferred name. And given what Denyer did to women, I understand the outrage at Talk:Paula Denyer. Beyond this, it has also been argued that MOS:GENDERID applies to categories, a notion that SMcCandlish and I disagree with.
So does MOS:GENDERID apply to WP:Article titles? To categories? Should it be used to trump WP:Article titles? Should MOS:GENDERID be updated to speak on article titles and/or categories? Should editors simply be allowed to change these article titles to the significantly less common name with no regard to WP:Article titles but rather on what they personally believe is a WP:Ignore all rules basis? I'll alert Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons, Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography, Wikipedia talk:Article titles, Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia talk:Categorization, and Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) to this section for discussion. If someone wants to alert Wikipedia talk:WikiProject LGBT studies, then do that. Flyer22 Frozen ( talk) 20:17, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
Sometimes the subject of an article will undergo a change of name. When this occurs, we give extra weight to reliable sources written after the name change.This is why the dispute you're trying to raise here doesn't generally come up - sources from before the name change don't matter very much; and in the modern world virtually no reliable high-quality sources are going to ignore a name change due to a transition, so we always end up following the subject's self-identification regardless. That said, it would probably be best to update WP:NAMECHANGE to reflect that common practice unambiguously so as to avoid confusion of the sort that you're expressing here. EDIT: Also, for categories, the guidelines for sexuality require that we respect trans self-identification (and only self-identification.) I can understand missing it since you presumably glanced at the subcategory for gender, but plainly respecting trans self-identification requires categorizing subjects under the gender based on self-identification as well. It was simply put in the wrong subheading because LGBT issues are often lumped together. -- Aquillion ( talk) 20:40, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
Sometimes the subject of an article will undergo a change of name. When this occurs, we give extra weight to reliable sources written after the name change. If the reliable sources written after the change is announced routinely use the new name, Wikipedia should follow suit and change relevant titles to match. If, on the other hand, reliable sources written after the name change is announced continue to use the established name, Wikipedia should continue to do so as well.... Neither Flyer22 nor anyone else has presented any sources published since the name change that use the former name, as far as I can tell, so this seems to be an academic if not in fact a scholastic discussion. Newimpartial ( talk) 22:25, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
De-evolution of human beings into potatoes begins here: limited relevance
|
---|
Please do not cast ASPERSIONS on me: I do not make any assumptions about your intentions (which I find entirely opaque); it is your actions that I find confusing. For one thing, if experienced editors have stated over and over again that MOS:GENDERID ... it does not apply to article titlesthat is wonderful, but it only applies to disputed over article titles, and you have not brought such a dispute to our attention on this noticeboad. Also, please do not confuse WP:NAMECHANGES with MOS:CHANGEDNAME. It is CHANGEDNAME - the MOS section - that GENDERID cites with respect to the inclusion of deadnames in the LEDE. You have previously cited NAMECHANGES - the section of the article name policy COMMONNAME - which gives no guidance relevant to the lede, since it is about article titles. Since this discussion (at least the specific case you have presented) is about inclusion in the lede rather than the article namex perhaps we could confine the discussion to the relevant policies? Newimpartial ( talk) 23:37, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
I don't know, Flyer22. Other times, like your faulty understanding of WP:Edit warring, you simply don't understand a policy or guideline, or you put on your own spin on itsounds a lot like tu quoque to me (though of course my AGF practices wouldn't let me use the word "spin" for your oblique interpretations of policy). And as far as And as far as "derailing" goes, you led off this section with the assumption that people have used MOS:GENDERID as a putative basis for article title changes that WP:NAMECHANGES would not support. I have simply pointed out that you haven't shown any examples of this, and that the logic of the two policies generally points the article name and the textual references to the article subject in the same direction. I wouldn't call that "derailing", unless your rails were supposed to go in quite a different direction than the declared topic. Newimpartial ( talk) 05:31, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
As a humanoid spud, I resent the implication that this noise is typical of my starchy species. — Mr. Potato-Head ☏ ¢ 🥔 03:12, 15 October 2020 (UTC) |
Not only is "Paula Denyer" not Denyer's common name, it's not Denyer's legal name and it's not a name that newer sources routinely use. There was no change-over in the literature. Yes, in this modern world, reliable high-quality sources are ignoring Denyer's name change due to a transition'. Which name contemporary RS are using is generally the key to questions of this sort, to whether consensus will consider satisfied the commingled expectations of WP:COMMONNAME/WP:UCRN and WP:NAMECHANGES, in turn interacting with WP:GENDERID and the general MoS principle that our article text and titles should agree when possible. It may actually be the case that, as of this exact date, '
"Jill Soloway" is Soloway's common name'. But that may not mean much (UCRN is not one of the WP:CRITERIA at all, but rather an instruction to use the most common name in RS as the default choice of WP article title, to test against those criteria and against all other applicable policies, guidelines, and other considerations). And even if it true right now, it is not likely to be for long, because the media (the RS we most often rely on for contemporary bio subjects) are quick to adopt such changes for celebrities and such (much quicker than for, say, a little-known murderer in prison). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:52, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
the MoS does not specify...whether to give the former or current name first.I don't see any way around the fact that here it is definitely not making a hard-and-fast rule regarding titles. After all, not only is the title the first appearance of a person's name, but the version of the name that appears first in the text is always (as far as I've seen) the one that is the article's title. Thus, there is no conflict with the policy at WP:Article titles (including WP:COMMONNAME and WP:NAMECHANGES). Arguments based on selective reading of MOS:GENDERID and on ignoring WP:Article titles are not valid; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, the new name will be favored over the deadname as the title under the existing rules. Regarding categories, WP:CATV has to be followed. Crossroads -talk- 03:11, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
I'm focused on whether "Jill Soloway" should be in the lead, not about moving that article back to "Jill Soloway."But now are you arguing that the article should be moved back so we can
waitfor more sources to use this DEADNAME (or not)? I am so confused.
It may actually be the case that, as of this exact date, 'tq- citing your position but then continuing
But that may not mean much (UCRN is not one of the WP:CRITERIA at all, but rather an instruction to use the most common name in RS as the default choice of WP article title, to test against those criteria and against all other applicable policies, guidelines, and other considerations). And even if it true right now, it is not likely to be for long- which is not at all the TOOSOON argument you have (sporadically) been making. Very selective, is what I'm saying.
pointing to all of what SMcCandlish stated, as claimed. That's what I meant by "selective".
it must have been very hard for you, I actually found the DEVO collapse above to be quite satisfying to do.) Newimpartial ( talk) 23:11, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
Digressive sub-thread
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Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page.[a] Such material requires a high degree of sensitivityand
the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment. Therefore, if there is reason to believe using a particular name could somehow harm a subject, we have to take that into account; it is obviously not the only thing we consider, but it is something we are required to take into consideration and is part of the reason MOS:GENDERID exists. There is no particular reason why the logic behind MOS:GENDERID would not apply to article titles. -- Aquillion ( talk) 06:17, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
Give precedence to self-designation as reported in the most up-to-date reliable sources, even when it doesn't match what is most common in reliable sources.
Sometimes the subject of an article will undergo a change of name. When this occurs, we give extra weight to reliable sources written after the name change.but beyond that, I don't think anyone has brought up the fact that the WP:COMMONNAME subsection also says,
When there are multiple names for a subject, all of which are fairly common, and the most common has problems, it is perfectly reasonable to choose one of the othersanyways. The subject of an article explicitly rejecting a name in preference for another would definitely count as “has problems” for that name, to me. Do we ever have these kinds of problems when, say, a company changes its name? Or is it just in regards to respecting people enough to call them by their desired name? (Because if it's the former I might be partial to the idea of renaming the article of a certain chemical company something like “Gassing Indian Babies and Giving U.S. Miners Silicosis and Then Spying On Related Activists, Inc.” Under U.S. law it's only people who aren't subject to corruption of blood for criminal convictions, though to our shame I don't believe any criminal prosecution has taken place here, not even for the 1920s event.) -- ‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 04:57, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect
Wikipedia:MOSCOLOR. The discussion will occur at
Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 November 9#Wikipedia:MOSCOLOR until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.
Soumya-8974
talk
contribs
subpages
17:37, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
Hi, I'm not sure if there is a better place to ask for this (as far as I know, WP:GOCE does not deal with the MOS), but I would like someone to review Union of Bulgaria and Romania, an article I have written, to see if it complies with the MOS. I am following a user's advices before nominating a FAC (which is my intention), which recommend doing this. Can someone do it or is there a better place to request this? If there is anyone interested, you can reply on the peer review that is currently taking place. Thank you. Super Ψ Dro 19:22, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
When mentioning a family characteristic such as religion or ethnicity, should we say (for example) "Her family were Jewish" or "His family was Jewish"? There seems to be a fairly even split of singular/plural in Wikipedia articles, even taking into account US vs UK English . Muzilon ( talk) 22:00, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
Note that the fact that BrE can use plurals with the word family does not mean that it must do so. See here and here. Doremo ( talk) 09:46, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
Nouns such as committee, family, government, jury, squad and team take a singular verb or pronoun when thought of as a single unit, but a plural verb or pronoun when thought of as a collection of individuals:
The family can trace its history back to the middle ages;
The family were sitting down, scratching their heads.
Challenge problem (choose one);
E Eng 14:38, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
The Guardian doesn't have the only style guide to make the distinction drawn above, and it's rather commonsensical, which is probably has much to do with why WP articles tend to be written with this kind of variation. People are more apt to write what makes the most sense in the context than try to exactly mirror a style preferred by one nationalistic style guide or another. If MoS were to address this, it should probably also approach this from the same angle: use singular when writing about something as a unit, and use plural when writing about something as a collective of independent units. I've long noticed this split in operation here already, even within the same article (e.g. when writing about a band as commercial/legal entity versus writing about a band as five musicians making decisions and doing things). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:57, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
Hi, could someone familiar with sidebar best practice help resolve Wikipedia talk:Categories, lists, and navigation templates#Mass adding of sidebars by TheEpicGhosty? Thanks in advance, Jr8825 • Talk 21:33, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
@
Dratman: I would like to see some guidance for indefinite articles preceding phrases in parentheses. Should the article agree with the first word in parentheses or with the word following the right parenthesis? E.g., should it be a (potentially multidimensional) array
or an (potentially multidimensional) array
?
I have moved "
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computing", the target page of "
MOS:COMPUTING", to
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computing (failed proposal), put {{
Failed proposal}}
on it, and re-categorized it in
Category:Wikipedia style guideline proposals instead of in the MoS guideline categories. The template at the top summarizes the consensus discussions about this. The page failed as a guideline back in 2017, and again in 2018 as something from which to even merge-salvage a few points. We just forgot to actually deprecate it at the page itself (though it had already been removed from the {{
Manual of Style}}
navbox). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
14:06, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
I've updated
WP:Manual of Style#Section organization (the main MoS page's summary of
WP:Manual of Style/Layout) to account for things like {{
Authority control}}
, {{
Short description}}
, sister-project link templates, sidebar navigation, disuse of "Bibliography" as a section heading, etc. Looked like this material hasn't been substantively updated in several years. It was also confusing that this section said a whole lot about the lead, and a whole lot about all the "appendix" stuff that goes after the main body of content, but nothing at all about pre-lead elements like hatnotes and cleanup/dispute banners.
The main page for this at MOS:LAYOUT also needs some conforming updates. Both pages are important, as newer users are apt to read the main-MoS summary section, since various welcome templates direct them to the main MoS page as a major guideline, while old hands are more apt to refer to MOS:LAYOUT, knowing that it exists and has all the fine-grained details about layout (or, rather should – thus the need to update).
A minor quibble: LAYOUT says that the rationale for putting {{Authority control}}
where it goes is that it's metadata. Yet the RfC on where to put {{Short description}}
rejected that as a rationale to put it down there or even after navigation hatnotes. So, that pseudo-rationale should be removed; it's perfectly fine for {{Authority control}}
to go where it goes simply as an arbitrary decision by the community, without LAYOUT trying questionably to explain it.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
10:22, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
![]() | This
edit request to
Wikipedia:Manual of Style has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
He said, "[[John Doe|John [Doe]]]
answered."
JEOLIVER001 (
talk)
19:32, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
Hello everyone, I was just searching on the web and I've found this map. In this map, the EU has been labelled as light red which means that British English words like organise and labour are active while of course Ireland, Malta and Cyprus are the only members who have English as their official language. This is English is based on British English and has thus the words organise and labour as words. Since these countries use English as their official language and the UK has left technically British English isn't the official language of the EU. However, it looks like the EU still uses British English in their English Style Guide.
My question is here should every member from Portugal to Finland uses British English as the main English style (with exceptions of the three countries above of course) or does this only apply to EU-related articles like Parliament, treaties, politicians, laws etc? Per MOS:TIES, we should use that type style of English in a country who has it as national ties which the EU kind of has. MOS:TIES does not say anything about the EU thus that's why I'm questioning here about this maybe "issue". If only EU-related articles should use British English can someone please add this into MOS? Cheers. CPA-5 ( talk) 12:39, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Consensus is sought as to the correct way to refer and link to major American cities such as Los Angeles and Boston. The discussion is being held at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking#Need for clarity on linking major American cities. Cbl62 ( talk) 00:01, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
I know that sources like PBS, NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, BBC, etc. should not be italicized. We save that for newspapers and magazines. Where is the MoS guideline for when NOT to italicize those listed news sources? An editor seems to think it makes no difference, and they are changing the citations all over the place. When I'm in doubt, I just look at the article for the source and see how it's done there, because I know that other editors have followed the MoS. -- Valjean ( talk) 14:27, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Further reading § Should further reading sections have "retrieved by" dates?. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
20:41, 25 November 2020 (UTC)
Hi. I've been recently noticed a discussion about whether should we use Extended Latin letters (for example; ç, ğ, etc.) or not. I see that MoS has not any rules about it, so I'm suggesting to use Extended Latin on article names as default for compatibility.-- Ahmetlii ( talk) 19:26, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
However, I get the sense the original poster is concerned about some particular dispute(s) involving when to use or not use such characters (e.g. Mexico vs. México), and isn't asking about the encoding standards. If I've sussed that out correctly, the general answer is that MOS:DIACRITICS is as close to a rule as we have, and is intentionally a bit loosey-goosey. Actual practice (almost entirely established by years of WP:RM decisions) is to use diacritics when reliable sources demonstrate that they belong there (even if many sources in English don't bother with them), with some WP:LOCALCONSENSUS exceptions made on an article-by-article basis. E.g., Mexico is at that spelling because it is almost never spelled in English with the diacritic, and is pronounced in English nothing like it is in Spanish. It's like Munich vs. München. When we give full Spanish names that include that name, we do include the diacritic, e.g. at Mexico City: "Mexico City (Spanish: Ciudad de México) ...".
Another kind of exception to the default to include diacritics is when
a notable person has made it clear that they have dropped the diacritic from their name (at least with regard to them as a public figure; we have no idea how they sign their checks :-). A high-profile case, with significant debate that essentially settled this as a general matter, would be
Stana Katic (vs. Katić). This can also be applied to organizations; e.g., various ones pertaining to the
Sámi people officially use "Sámi", "Sami", or "Saami" in English forms of their names, and we do not "correct" them, even if we default to one spelling (I think Sámi) for the overall subject, and nationally preferred spellings for topics limited to Finland or Norway or Sweden in particular). There was also about a decade-running string of sports-related cases (involving some improprieties like setting up a bogus wikiproject to canvass and PoV-push against diacritics; it was deleted at
MfD). The collective result of these is that WP doesn't care whether various lazy sport governing bodies or journalism sources nuke all the diacritics from the names of everyone; WP does not (in general, or on a categorical basis like "in tennis"). If it's clearly demonstrated that the subject actually uses the diacritic, then WP does, too. This is most often determined by the subjects' official websites and social media pages and such-like. So, ABOUTSELF works both ways on this question. The question frequently comes up with regard to American Hispanic celebrities who may or may not have retained the diacritics in names like González and Guzmán). Diacritics are just one of those areas where one size does not fit all, even if we default toward their inclusion.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
11:20, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
I've noticed the term Latinx being used in a few places on the wiki. It is used instead of the gender-implying Latino or Latina, following MOS:GNL, as generic use of Latino may be comparable to a generic he. However, it is a neologism and used less than the gender-implying alternatives, so MOS:NEO might prohibit its use. How do MOS:GNL and MOS:NEO apply here? Wikinights ( talk) 18:12, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
Since a 2018 consensus discussion, we've been merging the old WP:Manual of Style/Proper names into other MoS pages, and sorting its parts to where they topically belong (because the PN page was disused and getting out-of-synch). As a consequence of some big-chunk merging, most of the diacritics-related material ended up in MOS:CAPS ( MOS:PN for some time has redirected to MOS:CAPS#Proper names). The diacritics material was obviously off-topic there, so it was slated for merger into the related material on that subject in the main MoS page. No one seems to do MoS merger stuff but me, so I finally got off by wikibutt and finished it. :-)
I didn't change anything in the course of the merger, other than some copyediting twiddles: clarified an example; made a procedural point less of a non sequitur (and more neutrally worded); normalized punctuation; put examples in a bullet list to break up the large block of text; did some link cleanup, and added a link to ArbCom stuff in the footnote; then left behind a cross-reference at MOS:PN).
I would caution against any sudden urges to rush in and make substantive changes. Most of this material has been stable for years, and is the product of a lot of discussions, few of which have been characterized by calm and good cheer.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:53, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Images § Preferred lead image time period. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
01:59, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
There wasn't one, and it was a bit of a challenge to track down MoS's material on this, because the main MoS page never mentioned it, nor did MOS:BIO. It's common enough a set of questions to be in main MOS.
MOS:EPONYM, MOS:EPONYMS, and MOS:EPONYMOUS now go to a new bullet item in the main MoS page, adapting material from MOS:CAPS (at MOS:DOCTCAPS), and including a footnote on conventional exceptions. I do not think it says anything novel; it simply records what we're already doing. The MOS:DOCTCAPS versions can probably be compressed, with a cross-reference to MOS:EPONYM. I'll add a cross-reference at MOS:BIO as well, since people are apt to look for this over there. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:21, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
PS: It should not be relocated to Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biography#Names, since eponym also refer to things with non-human namesakes (e.g. named after places, after published works, after organizations, etc.). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:23, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
Unproductive back-and-forth:
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@ SMcCandlish:, MOS:EPONYM, MOS:EPONYMS, and MOS:EPONYMOUS are not working for me. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 13:38, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
I don't see what problem Ajpolino sees in the material he reverted. Is it just that he would prefer capping "Gram-negative" and such (as most sources now do)? Dicklyon ( talk) 17:18, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
No attempt to
SATISFY Ajpolino, here, in article talk, or in user talk, appears to have any result but generating more circular argument. Since he professes no interest, after all, in the actual content matter at issue, I don't think further attempts to address proceduralism-based filibustering will be productive. I'll return to what I said in article talk:
|
I've put the
MOS:EPONYMS line-item back in, but with an {{
under discussion inline}}
tag, pointing to this thread. The total disappearance of the material, and the breakage of links to it, had cause the discussion to flounder and to be confusing for people (see, e.g., comments above from Guy_Macon).
The text, as of the timestamp below:
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... Notes
...
|
To get to the actual substance of the matter:
I'm failing to see how any of this is controversial (especially since the only objection raised is procedural, not substantive, and was predicated on a case that has been under discussion for 16 years and needs its own RfC; it is neither forbidden nor given imprimatur by the material in MOS:EPONYMS, since there is no answer yet, though there's a footnote in which it may or may not end up being listed, after there's actually a consensus decision about that particular case).
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
04:12, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
Apparently without bothering to consult the community, the MediaWiki devs have recently pushed a change in the underlying software that renders all <blockquote>...</blockquote>
instances (including templated ones like {{
Quote}}
) with a weird grey sidebar (a style borrowed from a particular blogging platform). This looks especially awful when there nested block quotes (as at
Twain–Ament indemnities controversy).
We've had repeated RfCs, TfDs, and other consensus discussions against decoration of this sort, so now we need to figure out exactly how to fix this. We may need to track down where in
the stylesheet cascade this is entering our code that gets sent to the browser. I believe the place to fix this is in en.wikipedia's
MediaWiki:Common.css. Just adding border-left: 0;
to the blockquote {
... }
definition may be enough to do the trick. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:27, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
blockquote {border-style: hidden !important;}
My understanding is that the !important flag is not usually recommended, but I was unable to get it working without that flag. –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
16:54, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Keiynan Lonsdale has stated that Lonsdale's preferred pronoun is " tree", and there has been a start at the article changing all instances of "he" to "tree". Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Gender_identity doesn't really provide guidance in this instance. How do we generally address this in articles? Schazjmd (talk) 01:42, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Keiynan Lonsdale doesn't care for labels all too much, as admitted in an interview with BIllboard. Now, rather than identifying with any specific pronoun, Lonsdale wants to go by “tree."The Love, Simon star opened up about sexuality and gender pronouns in an intimate Instagram Live session on Tuesday.When a fan asked if Lonsdale was gay, the actor was surprised to keep getting that question. “Now it just depends on the day. Sometimes I’m bisexual, sometimes I’m gay, sometimes I feel straight, sometimes I’m not anything,” Lonsdale said on Instagram Live. “It doesn’t matter. Either way, throughout all of that, I’m Keiynan.”Lonsdale further explained: “I don’t want to go by ‘he’ anymore, I just want to go by ‘tree.’ I want people to call me ‘tree,’ because we all come from trees, so it doesn’t matter if you’re a he or a she or a they or a them. At the end of the day, everyone’s a tree. I want to call my friends 'tree' and me 'tree' and everyone 'tree.' So, I think, like now, when people ask me what my preferred pronoun is, I’m going to say ‘tree.’"In a duo of Instagram posts, Lonsdale displayed an affinity for trees. In one, the actor stands shirtless, shrouded by a leaf-filled tree branch. In another, Lonsdale holds a branch of leaves.Lonsdale concluded the Instagram Live remarks by saying: “I’m not high by the way, this is just me.”
In Template:Infobox person, the explanation box for the "children" parameter says (in part) "only list names of independently notable or particularly relevant children", but it does not specify whether to list only first names or first and last names. I sometimes see infoboxes, such as the one in Natalie Wood, in which the link is piped to show just the first name. It seems logical to me to use the name of a notable son or daughter as it appears in the title of that person's article. Also, display of just the fist name seems inconsistent when all other names in the infobox have first and last names. Does WikiPedia have a style guide that applies here? Eddie Blick ( talk) 02:36, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
Specific news article is from The Guardian (UK) [15] where US Phil Spencer is quoted multiple times, including the word "apologise" as printed by the Guardian. This quote (I just added) is being used in an article that has been US variety from the start Xbox Series X and Series S. Do we change that quote to be US since it seems unlikely that Spencer here "said" the UK spelling, or do we need to keep the Guardian's exact version? -- Masem ( t) 18:20, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
I'm relatively new to Wikipedia. It is standard and good for biography articles to have photos of their subjects in a sidebar in the lead section, along with basic info like birth date. I'm wondering if it would be good to suggest at some level (style manual, or template, or somewhere else) including a date of the photograph. This would be useful since people look different at different ages. But is it worth the space it would take up? (Note that I am not suggesting this be *required*, which would be a bad thing, just asking what people think best practice is and where best practice should be specified.) -- editeur24 ( talk) 17:32, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
I noticed a tendency for editors to handle non-technical jargon inconsistently, and when I looked up the policy guidance, it doesn't seem sufficient on this topic. The policy on handling jargon is at MOS:JARGON, which is mainly about technical jargon, and the fact that it should be generally avoided when possible. However, there are articles on topics such as sports and games that use jargon unique to the topic, and the policy at MOS:JARGON doesn't seem sufficient.
Here are some examples:
Other articles than games use jargon that are fairly common in the vernacular, and it doesn't make sense to simplify as per MOS:JARGON. For example:
One possible convention for handling topic-specific jargon is to emphasize (italicize) the first use in the article, and then to use the term normally with no emphasis later in the article. This approach is as described here. The emphasis in the first use queues the reader that this is a specialized term and to note it as distinct usage in this context. Later the term is used normally with no emphasis.
Editors often emphasis the jargon term, especially in the first use, but they do it inconsistently. Some editors italicize the first use or they italicize all instances of the term in the article. Other editors put the term in double quotes. This inconsistency is why I think there should be clear policy indicating the convention to be used in Wikipedia. Coastside ( talk) 23:18, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
On the comprehensibility matter: From a practical-solutions angle (rather than a rule-thumping one) this is arguably really a MOS:GLOSSARIES thing. (That's still technically a draft guideline, though it has for years informed a lot of the well-developed glossaries we already have. Some of the technical detail in it probably needs to move to a Help:Glossaries page; that's why it's been sitting around in draft form for ages. The material in it is entirely stable, though.)
The genesis of it, happily for you, was precisely the problem you're raising, of sports/games jargon, and certain articles being thick with it. We developed it with cue sports as a testbed, since it's pretty much the most jargon-heavy sports and games sector of all time (with the terminology even widely varying by sub-discipline, ENGVAR, sub-national region, generation, professional versus amateur play, etc.).
In summary, the solution is to build a rich,
encyclopedic glossary (not just
WP:DICDEF) of key terms. That's a list article, and it can be
structured a certain way with templates that auto-generate link anchors and yadda yadda. Then use the {{
glossary link}}
meta-template to make a convenient
topical term-linking template for use articles, that ties jargon terms in them to their glossary entries, e.g.: ... divided into periods called {{pologloss|chukka}}s ...
. It's covered in the draft guideline in general, and in the template documentation in particular. To see it in action, have a look at
Glossary of cue sports terms, and the {{
cuegloss}}
links in articles like
Eight-ball and
Snooker. (One wrinkle is that the {{
Defn}}
template that's part of this system ended up being replaced with :
or <dd>
markup in many instances in that glossary, when the extra functions of that corresponding template were not needed in those entries, because that glossary is so large it was hitting the parser-function limit. So, the code doesn't read quite as cleanly as intended.)
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
05:08, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
@ Coastside: The crash course version: At a "Glossary of weird stuff" article (or whatever – I use silly examples), do:
{{ glossary}}
...{{ term|snorkelweasel}}
{{ defn|A weasel trained in underwater activities, using a weaselsnorkel or other breathing apparatus ...}}
...{{term|weaselsnorkel}}
{{defn|An underwater breathing device for weasels and other mustelids ...}}
...{{ glossary end}}
Then, at a regular article (after making a simple link template for that glossary with the {{
glossary link}}
meta-template, e.g. a {{weirdgloss}}
), you can do "Jones was a professional {{weirdgloss|snorkelweasel}}
trainer from 2004 to 2007, and then ran for governor of Nebraska." The catch, of course, is being willing to write and source the glossary article. It can be some work, but in the long run can save a tremendous amount of time and verbiage, by not having to re-explain things in article after article within a related topical scope (which also gets tedious for the reader). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
06:15, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
Did I imagine that somewhere that there were guidelines for using gender-neutral language as they pertain to occupations? Doe we have any consensus opinion about this? I'm looking at WP:GNL, for instance, but it's not clear to me if we should be using "actor" vs. "actress" when describing a woman who acts. Comedienne? Dominatrix seems fine, but aviatrix? I know the guideline points to some essays, but we know that always means "Those are just essays!" Would be nice to have something written down in the MOS, unless I'm idiotically missing it. Cyphoidbomb ( talk) 23:18, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
There appears to be a tacit consensus that "serving as" is the appropriate phrase to use when a politician is currently in office. So, to take a completely random example, the lede of Ro Khanna reads:
Rohit Khanna is an American politician, lawyer, and academic serving as the U.S. Representative from California's 17th congressional district since 2017.
But "serving as" has always struck me as odd and faintly ungrammatical, as opposed, for instance, to "who has served". Is my view an idiosyncrasy, or is there a policy statement somewhere that "serving as" is actually correct, or am I on to something here? Thanks for any thoughts. AleatoryPonderings ( ???) ( !!!) 18:10, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
Rohit Khanna is an American politician, lawyer, and academic who has been the U.S. Representative from California's 17th congressional district since 2017.
serving as tablesbecause our furniture hadn't yet arrived." Bus stop ( talk) 23:26, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
Smith currently serves as the President of Ruritaniawhen you could just say
Smith is the President of Ruritania.
Neutrally noting that there is relevant discussion at Talk:Marcia_Fudge#How_should_we_word_the_lead_sentence?. AleatoryPonderings ( ???) ( !!!) 18:10, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Please see:
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/France and French-related articles § Proposed simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS, which is more than a decade outdated
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
07:10, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
@
JsfasdF252: You recently added *Not contain template transclusions.
to the "Section headings" section in the part that talks about things that cause technical issues.
[17]
Is this inherent or is it just a risk that someone will change the template we are using in a way that "breaks" section headers? For example, would {{
pi}}
or for that matter {{
Mvar}}
in a section header cause technical problems? What about {{
smiley}}?
davidwr/(
talk)/(
contribs) 🎄
17:40, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
Test to see if the link in the table of contents takes you to this section. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 19:13, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
As I understand it (subject to correction/rebuttal of course) anything other than plain text in section headings causes screen readers to fail to render or handle the heading correctly. That constitutes a rather serious violation of the WP:ACCESSIBILITY rules. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 20:18, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
<span id="Anchor name"></span>
, another being that this also stops breakage of /* Heading name */
in the edit summary). So, aside from the mess reported above, where the section links don't work anyway, the thing to do here would be use the Unicode pi symbol, italicized as a variable: ''π''
, which would just be π
without italics markup in a #-link to a section. For "weird math stuff" that doesn't have a Unicode symbol, use headings that are plain English (e.g. the name of the constant or whatever), to the extent possible. As David Eppstein says above, there are some cases where some math might be needed, but this should be done with pure HTML, per
MOS:FORMULA. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
07:19, 14 December 2020 (UTC)Some while back, we removed from MOS:BQ any references to pull-quote templates, after consensus discussions indicated that pull quotes are not actually encyclopedically appropriate at all (so MoS shouldn't advise about how to use/not use such templates). We even had a successful proposal to stop supporting pull quotes in articles at all (after some earlier weaker consensuses along "usually, with exceptions" lines, e.g. in 2016).
However, the well-intended MoS trimming had the unintentional effect of removing any mention of pull quotes from MoS, anywhere. The loophole result has been a creeping increase in pull quotes in mainspace, which was the opposite of the intent of either of those consensus results. I keep running into pull quotes, especially at bios of high-profile individuals, articles on major public-policy debates, coverage of current events, and articles on published works. (I've fixed two in just the last week, without looking for them; this one was particularly bad, in that its caption including information missing from the main body of the article, and the purportedly quoted text did not match between the body and the pull-quote.)
I propose reinstating this to MOS:BQ in a to-the-point statement, that no longer dwells on particular templates. Something like the following:
Pull quotes do not belong in Wikipedia articles. These are the news and magazine style of "pulling" material already in the article to reuse it in attention-grabbing decorative quotations. This unencyclopedic approach is a form of editorializing, produces out-of-context, undue emphasis, and may lead the reader to conclusions not supported in the material.
Without something like this, there no longer appears to be any clear WP:P&G rationale for removing any pull quote from any article. Consensus was reaffirmed earlier this year (after many prior discussions) to deprecate and now actively prevent (by changing template code) the "giant quotation marks" decoration of block quotes in articles, for most of the same reasons cited in the above proposed text. And, at MediaWiki:Common.css we recently undid a community-undiscussed decision by the MW developers to make all blockquotes decorated with a left-side vertical bar (like the {{ Talk quote block}} used above to present the proposed text). And that was after TfD deleted a template that did the same thing in mainspace (with consensus against merging its decoration features into {{ Quote}}).
System-gaming to draw excessive attention to particular material at articles is clearly neither desirable nor acceptable. Yet all anyone has to do to evade this consensus is put the material first into the main article text, then pull-quote it into some decorative box. That actually makes it worse than the original "giant-quotes" problem, by doing all of that objectionable UNDUE attention stuff, plus having redundant content.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
22:14, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
If a celebrity was born and raised in Hong Kong and a Chinese ethnic, but due to her mother's background having naturalized Japanese citizenship, she'd held Japanese citizenship at birth, then how should we describe her in the opening paragraph? I was leaning towards "a Hong Kong-based Japanese celebrity", but is that correct? Or should we describe her as "a Hong Kong-Japanese celebrity" or "Hong Konger-Japanese...? Please advise or give me some suggestions. Thanks.-- TerryAlex ( talk) 01:48, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
The opening paragraph should usually provide context for the activities that made the person notable. In most modern-day cases, this will be the country of which the person is a citizen, national, or permanent resident. ... Ethnicity ... should generally not be in the lead unless it is relevant to the subject's notability. Similarly, previous nationalities or the place of birth should not be mentioned in the lead unless they are relevant to the subject's notability.
a Hong-Kong celebrity. However, if her Japanese citizenship has played a major role in her life, or if she's spent a lot of time in Japan, I'd suggest
a Hong Kong-Japanese celebrity.
Can someone explain WHY we capitalize “Department of Education” but not “secretary of education”? (I accept that we do... I just don’t understand WHY). Blueboar ( talk) 13:57, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
If you mean what the out-in-the-world underlying reason is, in short it's because Department of Education is a proper name (or the contextual short form of a longer one like United States Department of Education), like England and Great Pyramid of Giza, while secretary of education is simply a role, like early-evening-shift bartender at Jimmy Joe's Bar & Grill (a business entity that has a proper name, like Microsoft or BMW), or NASA astronaut, or captain of the HMS Centaur, or king of Denmark. It's conventional to capitalize formal job/role/position/rank/peerage titles when attached to a name (i.e., when they effectively are a part of the name), though even this is decreasingly the case with commercial job titles. Less so, there's a quasi-convention to capitalize when the title itself is the subject and is unique and important ("King and Queen of Scotland ceased as formal titles with the 1706–1707 Acts of Union").
If you mean what the ivory-tower reasoning is behind the Gestalt, cultural treatment of certain kinds of things as proper names (
proper-noun phrases) and others not (as common-noun phrases), this is something that linguists/philologists and philosophers have been arguing their heads off about for 200+ years, with no apparent end in sight. You can think of it as a
WP:GREATWRONGS matter that WP cannot resolve, if that helps. If you had the wading-though-obtuse-jargon stomach for it, and a lot of money to burn, there are expensive, pretty recent academic volumes published about this stuff fairly often
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22].
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
05:27, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
Since we're on the subject of punctuation vs. ref tags (that is, the little superscript [99] thingamajigs), I want to bring up the current provision that ...
Where a footnote applies only to material within parentheses, the ref tags belong just before the closing parenthesis.
While this has a superficial logic to it, it actually makes no sense and serves no purpose. Consider this passage:
Fine. But under the guideline, if each statement is supported by its own source, we're supposed to move the last ref tag inside the parens, like this:
Why? A ref tag logically covers all material back to the next-prior ref tag, whether that material's in parens, not in parens, or a combination. Period. Without this special provision we'd be doing this:
... which is perfectly sensible and unambiguous. Moving the ref tag inside the parens achieves nothing and looks awful. By the logic of this "parenthesis" exception, if a ref tag applies only to material within a single sentence, then we should move the ref tag before the period/stop closing the sentence [1]. That would be dumb of course, and so is the current special provision for parentheses. I propose we remove it. E Eng 02:35, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
References
The ortolan is served in French cuisine, typically cooked and eaten whole ... The birds are caught with nets set during their autumn migratory flight to Africa. They are then kept in covered cages or boxes. The birds react to the dark by gorging themselves on grain, usually millet seed, until they double their bulk ... The birds are then thrown into a container of Armagnac, which both drowns and marinates the birds.The bird is roasted for eight minutes and then plucked. The consumer then places the bird feet first into their mouth while holding onto the bird's head. The ortolan is then eaten whole, with or without the head, and the consumer spits out the larger bones. The traditional way French gourmands eat ortolans is to cover their heads and face with a large napkin or towel while consuming the bird. The purpose of the towel is debated. Some claim it is to retain the maximum aroma with the flavour as they consume the entire bird at once, others have stated "Tradition dictates that this is to shield – from God’s eyes – the shame of such a decadent and disgraceful act", and others have suggested the towel hides the consumers spitting out bones. This use of the towel was begun by a priest, a friend of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin ...Ortolan hunting was banned in France in 1999, but the law was poorly enforced and it is thought that up to 50,000 ortolans were illegally killed each year during the autumn migration ... France's ortolan population fell 30% between 1997 and 2007.
trying to fix something that is not broken, but unless you can explain what's wrong with the above (which is what we would do as a matter of course if the guideline didn't go out of its way to tell us to do something else) then it's the guideline that's trying to fix something that isn't broken. WP:MOSBLOAT is a serious problem, and every unnecessary provision we can remove is a victory.
That way you suggest that whatever is in the footnote, it is also responsible for placing the sentence between parentheses, which is however an editing choice.
(something like this)[1]instead of
(something like this[2])? Because I think it would be equivalent to, as EEng said, doing
something like this[3].instead of doing it
like this.[4]El Millo ( talk) 18:16, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
The earth revolves around the sun (it also rotates on its own axis).in which case I would personally put both refs after the period. We should base ourselves on sentences that are clearly grammatically correct and that represent a common use of parentheticals, instead of focusing on uncommon or outlandish examples. El Millo ( talk) 18:50, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
The earth revolves around the sun (it also rotates on its own axis)that exhibits bad grammar. It's run-on sentence – basically a parenthetical version of
The earth revolves around the sun, it also rotates on its own axis. E Eng 23:23, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
Question: When using a superscript footnote number at the end of a sentence, should the period precede or follow the footnote number? What about footnote numbers in midsentence that fall next to some other form of punctuation (comma, semicolon, etc.)? Answer: Please see CMOS 14.26: “A note number should generally be placed at the end of a sentence or at the end of a clause. The number normally follows a quotation (whether it is run into the text or set as an extract). Relative to other punctuation, the number follows any punctuation mark except for the dash, which it precedes.”
- Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I'm a man—traditional male pronouns are fine.) 18:16, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
References
the ref outside the parentheticalshould imply
that the source is being cited for everything – including the material before the parenthetical – all the way back to the previous citation. If it doesn't then there should be another ref tag before the opening paren. If I'm wrong please give an example. E Eng 04:19, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Problems like this get even worse in long main-body paragraphs, which are frequently peppered with verifiable but not yet verified additions by drive-by editors, sometimes in mid-sentence. It's not uncommon for single sentences in controversial- or complicated-topic articles to have several citations for specific clauses making severable claims in the sentence. If one of these is parenthetical, then the only way a citation specifically for that is not going to be misleading is if there is another citation immediately before the opening parenthesis (round bracket), which we cannot guarantee. Even if it's incidentally a true condition at this moment, this situation only holds as long as no one ever inserts anything new between those two elements without a citation, which on this wiki is a very unsafe bet. In short: citation accuracy is far more important than subjective typographic quibbles. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:25, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Where a footnote applies only to material within parentheses, the ref tags belong just before the closing parenthesis.— Bagumba ( talk) 09:29, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
Berlin Schönefeld Airport is now closed, although much of it appears to have been absorbed into Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Some info about the airport has been marked with Strikethrough text. I can't find anything in the MOS that says don't do this, although it is obvious to me that bold, italic, color, etc. is used sparingly and strikethrough is only for talk pages. The lead prose indicates the airport is closed, so it should be implicit that the everything else in the article applied to the airport when it was open and not currently. Should the plain text be restored? A query at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Airports has gone unanswered. MB 01:13, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
when the article itself discusses deleted or inserted content, such as an amendment to a statute. I think that unless we want to propose a specific MOS guideline for this, we should probably go with the strikethrough text. Doubly so for reasons of not biting the newcomers. Gbear605 ( talk) 19:13, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
<del>
and <ins>
, though there's been some dispute (off-WP) about exactly when <del>
should actually be used, versus <s>
. And we've learned the hard way not to just make assumptions about what screenreaders are actually doing (many of them are not yet even nearly making as much use of semantic markup as they should). It's conceptually similar to the
MOS:CURLY problem: by now, all browsers should be able to treat "Poem Title" and “Poem Title” as equivalent for search purposes unless explicitly told not to, yet they somehow just aren't all there yet.[To wax techno-political about it, I think problems like this are primarily because WHATWG has insufficient buy-in, and only represents a handful of companies that have anything to do with browsers and other Web user agents; and it seems that what time and resources WHATWG does have are too often squandered picking fights with W3C (which has massive buy-in, but not from a handful of WHATWG browser vendors), instead of cooperating.] —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
05:27, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
In articles, do not use strikethrough.would end different interpretations. MB 14:27, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
<del>
versus <ins>
form) in blocks of legislative and other textual analysis. I think we'd need to identify:
<s>
or <del>
) is the right markup for each case<s>
or <del>
and the invalid but still fairly often used <strike>
, would probably be enough get a bead on it all.PS: I agree "objectionable text" is a weird thing to say there. I think what someone was trying to convey was "Do not add <s>...</s>
around article content you think is inappropriate or incorrect; instead, use an appropriate
inline cleanup/dispute template, and raise the matter on the talk page." It doesn't address anything about allegedly proper use of strikethrough as an intentional part of the content, though, which is what I'm getting at above.
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SMcCandlish
☏
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20:11, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
I've revised
MOS:NOSTRIKE (in
MOS:ACCESS) to make more sense. I don't think anything it says will be controversial in any way, though it does not address all the bullet-points I mentioned above. It's a (belated) start. I tagged it "under discussion" and pointed to this thread. PS: Weirdly,
MOS:TEXT never mentioned strikethrough at all; I've fixed this with a summary of, and {{
Main}}
cross-reference to,
MOS:NOSTRIKE. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
20:46, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
How would you capitalize "2021 mayoral campaign" as a section head? Does "mayoral" get an upper-case M? -- RoySmith (talk) 19:58, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
@021 mayoral campaign. E Eng 21:03, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
Back in early 2018, we had a near-unanimous RfC concluding that WP does not capitalize the names of traditional (non-trademarked) games and sports, except where they contain a proper name ( Canadian football but gridiron football; Texas hold 'em but royal hold 'em). This was implemented as MOS:GAMECAPS (a.k.a. MOS:SPORTCAPS).
While this has been pretty consistently deployed throughout sports articles, very little has been done address over-capitalization in table/board game articles and children's game articles. We're now seeing WP:CONLEVEL-problematic pushback, including patently false claims that names for non-commercial, folk games like snakes and ladders "are proper names", despite obviously failing to qualify. See, e.g., this multi-page RM at Talk:Snakes and ladders#Requested move 14 December 2020. Given that WP:RM discussions on obscure topics are easily subject to wikiproject canvassing to produce WP:FALSECONSENSUS, I'm not really sure what to do about this. It's similar to a short-lived pattern by WP:DANCE participants to resist de-capitalization of dance move terminology (also covered by MOS:GAMECAPS).
Should we open another RfC on it, to reconfirm the results, and maybe host it in WP:VPPOL? I don't like rehashing style-quibble stuff in such RfCs because the community has better things to spend its time on. But it really isn't permissible for wikiprojects (on games or anything else) to "revolt" against guidelines they don't like after RfCs did not go their way, and take a posture that "failure" by the community to force compliance at "their" pages at warp speed is somehow an excuse to ignore the RfC consensus and defy the guidelines.
However, I'm not even certain this is a wikiproject problem this time. Several commenters at that RM are long-term gadflies who who habitually make clearly incorrect claims that things are "proper names", without any interest in or understanding of the topics in question, but seemingly just out of a "disrupt MoS application as much as possible" pattern, and most especially to keep capitalizing things the guidelines and the bulk of the sources do not capitalize. Five+ years of these antics from the same editors is far too long. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:34, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
When it comes to terminology-heavy subjects, I've long pointed out that it's very helpful to both readers and editors to create and make extensive use of
glossary articles, and the term-link templates that reference them (derived from the
Template:Glossary link meta-template). Example: {{
cuegloss}}
is used thousands, probably tens of thousands, of times in cue-sports articles for pinpoint links to entries at
Glossary of cue sports terms, to obviate the need to re-re-re-explain terms in situ in every article in the category. I'm not sure every folk game needs a glossary, of course, while some major games like chess already have one, but we might could use "Glossary of traditional board games", "Glossary of bowling games", etc. And various geeky topics have needed glossaries for a long time (e.g. Unix and Linux terms). It's kind of a bummer that
Category:Wikipedia glossaries isn't far larger than it is (and with better-developed existing articles).
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
18:19, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
{{
lang|ja-Latn|go}}
; one could also use the {{
Nihongo}}
template, but it has a lot of parser overhead, and is better for cases where we need to generate "
Japanese: " and Kanji or other non-Latin characters, and indicate the transliteration scheme, and ...). The italics would make it clear that it's a foreignism not the English word "go" (present tense of "went"), and thus obviate the alleged recognizability/disambiguation rationale for capitalizing it. That said, I have generally been personally disinclined to get involved in lower-casing {{
lang|ja-Latn|go}}
; as with chess people and their capitalization of gambits, the drama level involved would be too high for my blood pressure. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
18:19, 4 January 2021 (UTC)SMcCandlish – re "not being implemented expeditiously". As you should know, these things never happen expeditiously. It takes work from those of us who notice and care. Many thousands of my edits went to implement MOS:JR. Thousands more for the revised river naming conventions. Hundreds at least on WP:USSTATION, which got me into deep yoghurt. Thousands over the years on MOS:CAPS. Hundreds at least on MOS:POSS. Though only about 1% run into opposition, dealing with those cases is what takes much of the time. Remember the MOS:LQ! Dicklyon ( talk) 04:38, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
Pardon me for a moment while I rant about non breaking spaces. Somebody came by an appropriations act article today and put nbsp in between all the $10 million, $5 billion, $7 million
type numbers. This particular article uses bulleted lists, and probably has 100 of this kind of number. It makes it a little hard to read in the source code editor, but especially hard to read in the visual editor. I'd say it's almost unreadable in the visual editor. Big giant "nbsp" boxes everywhere. Honestly, I wonder if these non breaking spaces are worth the trouble. It takes a wikipedian extra time and effort to add them, and it clogs the visual editor with visual noise. For what is, in my opinion, not much of a benefit. Am I out in left field here, or do others also feel this way? –
Novem Linguae (
talk)
09:34, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
and put nbsp in between all the $10
million, $5 billion, $7 million type numbers. This particular
$82 billion for schools and universities, including $54 billion to public K-12 schools, nbsp is needed for the second and subsequent dollar amounts.Our priority is what the reader sees, not our own convenience. My advice is to stop using VE. E Eng 19:55, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
in most of the bullets in your screenshot nbsp isn't needed since there's zero chance of a linebreak one word after the *did you not understand? E Eng 18:29, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
Agreed with EEng and Stepho that most of the cases in that example are unnecessary, because they are at the very beginnings of lines. Also agree to avoid Visual Editor, or at least switch into source mode any time it is bothering you, and before saving. VE tends to booger up a lot of markup, and it is safest to re-examine what it thinks it is doing before saving changes. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:23, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
I found this useful MOS page via a google search: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Punctuation inside or outside. Strangely, it is in the namespace "Wikipedia talk". Any interest in moving it into the "Wikipedia:Manual of Style" namespace? And giving it a shortcut code like MOS:PIOO? I'm happy to make the move if we get consensus. Thanks. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 19:44, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
"MOS:" redirects to "Wikipedia:Manual of Style". There is a disambiguation page named " MOS". Therefore, I added a hatnote of MOS: redirecting to manual of style to the MOS disambiguation page since anyone might be looking of what MOS could also refer to. Seventyfiveyears ( talk) 14:18, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
IF a reader intentionally types "MOS:", they're likely looking for "Wikipedia:Manual of Style": Which is why I think a hatnote is unneccessary: a reader is unlikely to have mistakenly gotten here.— Bagumba ( talk) 01:38, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
I've removed it, given the lack of consensus to include it.— Bagumba ( talk) 18:11, 13 January 2021 (UTC)
This is something MOS regulars may have an opinion about, so please comment. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 21:38, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
Perhaps it should be pointed out that articles about organizations with long names are exempted from this rule? For example, abbreviating Human Rights Defenders and Promoters as HRDP may not be a standard abbreviation (and thus invented), but writing Human Rights Defenders and Promoters everywhere in the article is cumbersome and needlessly repetitive. Another example is Moscow Research Center for Human Rights which in the article is abbreviated MRCHR. ImTheIP ( talk) 14:23, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
The section states:
However, articles about periodicals that are no longer being produced should normally, and with commonsense exceptions, use the past tense. Generally, do not use past tense except for past events, subjects that are dead or no longer meaningfully exist, or periodicals and similar written material that are no longer being produced.
I find it a bit strange that we have this artificial split for periodicals but would exempt radio and TV shows, podcasts, and so on. So a discontinued magazine was but a discontinued radio/TV show or a podcast still is? What's the logic here? This leaves a lot of blurry boundaries not addressed. What about a website? What about a website that was both a podcast and a magazine? I think we should try to standardize this better. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:14, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
I'm looking at these three examples:
Why are discontinued TV shows and radio shows in present tense, and discontinued comic books in past tense? — Naddruf ( talk ~ contribs) 20:43, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
By default, write articles in the present tense, including those covering works of fiction
and products or works that have been discontinued. However, articles about periodicals that are no longer being produced should normally, and with commonsense exceptions, use the past tense. Generally, do not use past tense except for past events, subjects that are dead or no longer meaningfully exist, or periodicals and similar written material that are no longer being produced.
I can't seem to find what I'm looking for in the Manual of Style, but does Wikipedia follow the MLA's style and capitalise the first letter of direct quotations? — Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 21:11, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
PS: The answer to every single question that begins with something like "does Wikipedia follow the [some other publisher] style" is no, because WP has its own style guide. If MLA or APA or MHRA or AMA or whoever say something eminently sensible in their style guide and WP has a consensus it should be in ours, then it will be. MoS is largely built from averaging all the academic style guides, plus various WP-specific adjustment. If MoS doesn't address something at all, it means it's left to editorial discretion on a case-by-case basis, as something not likely to affect encyclopedic tone, accuracy, or reader comprehension (or to spark recurrent editorial strife). But for this particular matter, we already have
MOS:PMC, and it's central concern is in fact accuracy.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
20:57, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
If you have an opinion, please share at Talk:Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Gråbergs Gråa Sång ( talk) 16:49, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
There is a discussion HERE on the talk page for musician Sophie's article over pronouns. Sophie preferred not to use gendered or non-binary pronouns ( Pitchfork and Slate sources) so we're not sure the best way to phrase things without the sentences becoming very awkwardly written. Could we get some input? Thanks. Abbyjjjj96 ( talk) 23:19, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Give precedence to self-designation as reported in the most up-to-date reliable sources [...] Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the pronouns, possessive adjectives, and gendered nouns (for example "man/woman", "waiter/waitress", "chairman/chairwoman") that reflect that person's latest expressed gender self-identification. To me I don't see a reason that shouldn't apply to a preference for averting pronouns entirely. — Bilorv ( talk) 23:41, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
The crew of the helpless and doomed American ship cheered Calliope as the corvette slipped past. The British ship's drive for the open sea was called by the American commander on the scene "one of the grandest sights a seaman or anyone else ever saw; the lives of 250 souls depended on the hazardous adventure." Making for the harbour mouth, the British ship's bow and stern alternately rose and plunged ...
preference for averting pronouns entirely. Ridiculous. Singular they is fine. E Eng 02:00, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
the most wretchedly twisted-out-of-shape writingon Wikipedia (or, I actually said, in the solar system). That's different. For the amusement of the editors assembled here's a post of mine from the discussion just linked:
After retirement from active service, Calliope served as a training ship until 1951, when the old corvette was sold for breaking
... which gave the corvette one more knot of speed, a difference that would be crucial in the disaster that made Calliope famous
The vessel nevertheless was a fully rigged sailing ship
The ship was not activated until 25 January 1887, when the vessel was placed in commission for the China Station
The vessel was reassigned to the Australia Station later in 1887. The cruiser was in New Zealand at the end of that year
The crew of the helpless and doomed American ship cheered Calliope as the corvette slipped past. The British ship's drive for the open sea was called by the American commander on the scene "one of the grandest sights a seaman or anyone else ever saw; the lives of 250 souls depended on the hazardous adventure." Making for the harbour mouth, the British ship's bow and stern alternately rose and plunged ...
Captain Kane then took his ship to Sydney
Calliope returned to service on the Australian station after repairs were complete. At the end of 1889 the cruiser was recalled to the United Kingdom.
Calliope was returned to reserve and promptly stricken from the effective list. The cruiser laid up at Portsmouth, and in 1906 was listed for sale for a time. The next year Calliope was moved to North East England
... cheered Calliope as the corvette slipped past. The British ship's drive for the open sea ..., in which Calliope, the corvette, and the British ship are all the same thing, but referred to by three different names to keep you on your toes, or possibly for comedic effect. It's like one of those bedroom farces in which the characters go out one door then reenter via another in different guises ("Let's see... so Count Evander and the undergamekeeper and the barmaid are all the same person ... I think ...") Truly wretched.
or, I actually said, in the solar system" when what was actually said was "
on earth or any other planet". This is obviously an attempt to retroactively construe the statement as excluding exoplanets, in light of recent revelations that even more wretchedly twisted-out-of-shape writing exists on Gamma Cephei Ab. For all intensive purposes I could care less, but it's high time to set the wrecker's strait and rain in the peddling of blatant Ms. Information. jp× g 21:45, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
At the age of approximately nine or ten years old, Sophie confessed to their parents a desire to drop out of school to be an electronic music producer (although they did not let Sophie do so, and Sophie continued their schooling)." What is the alternative way of writing that without resorting to the ridiculous "Sophie confessed to Sophie's parents"? And there's this sentence, "
Sophie was asked by a half-sister to DJ her wedding, later Sophie admitted that the half-sister "didn't know what I was doing in my room on my own" and had assumed Sophie was a DJ." You can't even specify that it's Sophie's half-sister, unless you want to use "Sophie" five times in one sentence. Abbyjjjj96 ( talk) 02:58, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
I think the rewrite is, At the age of approximately nine or ten years old, Sophie expressed a desire to drop out of school to be an electronic music producer (although Sophie's parents would not allow this, and Sophie had to continue in school).
Not going to win a Pulitzer, true, but not unencyclopaedic or terribly contorted IMO.
Newimpartial (
talk)
03:43, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
preferred not to use gendered or nonbinary pronouns. They is neither gendered nor nonbinary. This entire discussion has been based on a failure to read the source carefully, or (though I'm not pointing any fingers) an apparent desire to find an issue where there is none. E Eng 04:58, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
"acquiesce to SOPHIE's wishes to always refer to SOPHIE as SOPHIE and not to use pronouns". This project is written in English. The language is a pre-existing thing. This language happens to make use of pronouns. We use the language as it exists. We should not be caving in to unreasonable demands. The English language also happens to sometimes use gendered pronouns in reference to inanimate objects, ships, for example. Some say this is sexist. I disagree. And I haven't heard any ships speaking up about this. Here is an article from 2018 from the exceptionally erudite The Economist, containing sentences like "She never reached her destination: in June that year she was sunk by a squadron of British ships. For more than three centuries her final resting place remained a mystery." Bus stop ( talk) 03:27, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
"shoehorning"anything in, EEng. Bus stop ( talk) 15:21, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
The MOS says use single quotation marks for simple glosses, e.g. "Cossack comes from Turkic qazaq 'freebooter'." But what about explicitly mentioning a translation, i.e. "The Turkic word qazaq means freebooter"? Is freebooter here being mentioned as a word, in which case it should be formatted in italics? But using quotation marks seems more common, and I sometimes see single quotation marks used, though this usage isn't really a simple gloss. The lang series of templates does this, e.g. {{lang-tr|qazaq|lit=freebooter}} gives " Turkish: qazaq, lit. 'freebooter'." Is it still a simple gloss if preceded by lit.? Or should double quotation marks be used? This would be correct if the sentence said: "The Turkic word qazaq is defined by the dictionary as "freebooter"." Is there a general rule that covers this though? -- Paul_012 ( talk) 11:31, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
{{
lang-tr|...|lit=}}
output is correct, and is consistent with the output of all similar templates. If they were wrong, this would have been noticed a long time ago. And, if the sentence said "The Turkic word qazaq is defined by [source name here] as 'freebooter'", then we would still use single quotes, because it still qualifies as a gloss or short definition. If it were a complicated and unique definition, then it should probably be directly quoted and given as a quotation rather than presented as if a gloss/translation (but we usually do not use dictionaries this way, anyhow, but summarize them as we would any other source material). A publisher has no copyright/plagiarism interest in a very short definition/gloss, especially one also appearing in other similar works, so we have no reason to treat it as a quotation. Aside: WP would never write "defined by the dictionary as" since there is no such thing as "the dictionary" from any kind of encyclopedic perspective, only particular dictionaries. Moving on, WP does not stylistically draw a distinction between a loose gloss, a simple definition, and a literal translation; they take single quotes, same as is typical in linguistics journals (when they are not doing something fancified like an interlinear gloss table). The distinction between them is quite blurry anyway; many concise definitions will precisely coincide with a gloss, and most translations of terms are glosses, except when they're being done morpheme-by-morpheme in the most technically literal way possible – which is not how WP does them except to illustrate specific linguistic points, e.g. about the grammar of a Turkic language. A simple example would be that Spanish perro will be glossed as 'dog', will be be defined in Spanish–English dictionaries as 'dog', and in a literal translation of a phrase containing it will be translated as 'dog'. If some dictionary somewhere has something complicated, such "dog, inclusive of any domesticated dog type such as a hound, but generally exclusive of a dingo or other non-domesticated canid", it's unlikely we'll have any reason to quote that verbatim. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
04:10, 5 February 2021 (UTC)foo meaning "bar"cases in articles pre-date the existence of MOS:SINGLE (or this part of it), and its important to remember that no one has to read MoS before editing here, nor does anyone memorize every single line-item in it. MoS primarily exists as a reference for WP:GNOME cleanup, and as a "rulebook" for dispute settlement, with goals of predictable and consistent output for the readers, and reduction in editorial strife over trivia. The average editor never reads a word of MoS unless led to it in the course of some dispute; most editors just write like they are used to writing, and other editors clean up after them later. That's how it's always been. There is no line-item in any guideline or policy that is universally followed, and if that were a requirement WP would simply have no rules at all. This particular line-item matters because quotation marks already serve other important purposes on Wikipedia, which can be contextually confused (the most obvious are actual literal quotations, and for words-as-words markup as an alternative to italics when italics are already used heavily in the same material for something else, such as non-English terms). This sort of potential confusion is why single quotes for glosses/definitions became a norm in linguistics writing to begin with (at least in works in which double-quotes are the normal style for direct quotations). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:37, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
Over time, MOS:CONFORM (on making conforming changes to quoted material) has drifted away from the intent of MOS:PMC (principle of minimal change) and the rationale behind MOS:LQ (use of logical quotation for precision/accuracy, especially to avoid confusing readers about whether the quotation is a sentence or a fragment).
What it says now:
When quoting a complete sentence, it is usually recommended to keep the first word capitalized. However, if the quoted passage has been integrated into the surrounding sentence (for example, with an introduction such as "X said that"), the original capital letter may be lower-cased.
- LaVesque's report stated: "The equipment was selected for its low price. This is the primary reason for criticism of the program."
- LaVesque's report said that "the equipment was selected for its low price".
- The program was criticized primarily because "the equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.
It is not normally necessary to explicitly note changes in capitalization. However, for more precision, the altered letter may be put inside square brackets: "The" → "[t]he".
- The program was criticized primarily because "[t]he equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.
What it should probably say:
When quoting a complete sentence, keep the first word capitalized, even if the quoted passage has been grammatically integrated into the surrounding sentence:
- LaVesque's report stated: "The equipment was selected for its low price. This is the primary reason for criticism of the program."
- LaVesque's report said that "The equipment was selected for its low price".
- The program was criticized primarily because "The equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.
It is permissible to make a change of capitalization with square brackets:
- The program was criticized primarily because "[t]he equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.
If only the opening fragment is quoted, and is not likely to be mistaken for a complete sentence, it is permissible but not required to simply lower-case the first character without annotation:
- The report did not specify who authorized the program's purchases, stating only that "the equipment was selected" and that the choice was cost-based.
This would better reflect actual practice (and even a recent discussion of such matters on this very page), has more in common with text treatment by other publishers with high textual-accuracy standards (i.e., academic vs. news publishers), actually acknowledges more variance in practice in some ways, is a bit less pedantically worded, and is more consistent with the rest of the guidelines, which are heavily weighted toward precision. That is, LQ and PMC are the rule, to which CONFORM permits some exceptions, not at all the other way around. We don't need to be excessive about this stuff, of course, like mandating "[...]" instead of just "..." as some academic publishers do, but we should not be undermining two important guidelines with one that is clearly subordinate to them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:05, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#MEDLEAD about Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#Lead ( WP:MEDLEAD). Input from editors across Wikipedia would be most welcome. -- Colin° Talk 10:37, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
Should we use == Heading text ==, ==Heading text== or both. 2600:1700:6180:6290:299D:E8B3:B374:1B32 ( talk)
Example textsigns and the heading text? — El Millo ( talk) 23:01, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
Duplicate discussion here closed. Main discussion is at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#Implementing deadname RFCs. Dicklyon ( talk) 06:46, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
This discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Not sure this section should be the biggest here....what talk was there about adding a mass amount of text here? Has this wording been vented? This seems overwhelming to say the least. Why is this not added to the main BIO page about this over all added here with no talk here?-- Moxy 🍁 18:48, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
So in your view, Izno, we should have a discussion at
WT:MOSBIO to finalize implementation text and then another discussion here about how much of it should be in the main MOS? You don't think that where the text is going should influence what text is actually drafted? I'm still getting a NIMBY vibe here, as I mentioned in the MOSBIO discussion. The fact is that Masem's comment has not really been supported in either venue, and they are the only one that has questioned whether the draft text matches the RfC closes. As far as I can tell, Moxy had not read the RfC closes or the MOSBIO discussion at the time this section was created, so perhaps we could have a more focused discussion here about how much of the guidance belongs here, versus MOSBIO or a freestanding page, and stay away from max NIMBY.
Newimpartial (
talk)
00:51, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
|
As per MOS:NICKCRUFT, "foreign language details can make the lead sentence difficult to understand" and should be "avoided". However, on Talk:Michael_the_Brave#Hungarian_name? it is suggested that the policy is not violated when such foreign names are presented. There are even articles, like Matthias Corvinus, with 5 foreign-language names. Which are the recommendations is such cases? 77wonders ( talk) 15:11, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
If there is a geographic object which is split between two countries with identifiable language/translation each, which language/translation should be given first and is there a policy/guideline/RfC/etc to determine this? — CuriousGolden (T· C) 15:47, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
I’ll add to the question, also based on what the translation order should be determined? -- ZaniGiovanni ( talk) 17:13, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
There is an absence of guidance on how to format exempli gratia (e.g.) and id est (i.e.).
In my internet research on typography and style guides, the most formal presentation when immediately following a sentence is with the use of an em dash and comma like this: —e.g.,
Ironically, the strongest source of information I could find on the use of various types of dashes is Wikipedia itself. But this article doesn't yet cover the use case of —e.g.,
As of March 2021 [update] the Wikipedia editor's text field erroneously renders the em dash as an en dash. In other words, if you are authoring an article in the text editor, you go to Advanced > Special characters > Symbols and click on the em dash button (or you can press the keyboard shortcut for an em dash), then an en dash is erroneously displayed in the text field. However, if you publish your changes, the resulting HTML page correctly renders the em dash with the correct unicode character. This is a call to action that there is a bug that needs to be fixed in the editor but I don't know where to report it. Also, I'm not yet sure if its a browser bug or wikipedia/MediaWiki bug.
Note, this is not an invitation to debate if i.e. and e.g. should be discouraged or avoided. That ground has been covered in archived discussions here. Likewise, the use of commas ( here, here, here, and here), full stops, italics, and even brackets have been debated. There are a lot of external links here.
The MoS itself is not internally consistent with the typography of e.g.. It varies from using hyphens before e.g. and commas following it. It even has an instance of a colon following e.g.
Two proposed actions:
1) fix the editor bug
2) create a bot that judiciously changes wikipedia to use an em dash before e.g. but only in cases where it starts a new clause but not in cases where it does not create a new clause such as where it may appear following an opening parenthesis or the beginning of a table cell, etc.
Chris Murphy ( talk) 10:17, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
en dash is erroneously displayed in the text field– There is no bug. It's a longstanding problem that hypen, minus, ndash, and mdash (respectively: - • − • – • —) are hard to distinguish as they are rendered in
The MoS itself is not internally consistent– MOS is an ecumenical zone where various WP:ENGVARs and other style choices coexist side by side in peace and harmony. I quote from User:EEng#A_rolling_stone_gathers_no_MOS:
In the last 48 hr I've become aware of a simmering dispute over whether the text of MOS itself should be in American or British English. With any luck the participants will put that debate (let's call it Debate D1) on hold in order to begin Debate D2: consideration of the variety of English in which D1 should be conducted. Then, if there really is a God in Heaven, D1 and D2 will be the kernel around which will form an infinite regress of metadebates D3, D4, and so on -- a superdense accretion of pure abstraction eventually collapsing on itself to form a black hole of impenetrable disputation, wholly aloof from the mundane cares of practical application and from which no light, logic or reason can emerge.That some editors will find themselves inexorably and irreversibly drawn into this abyss, mesmerized on their unending trip to nowhere by a kaleidoscope of linguistic scintillation reminiscent of the closing shots of 2001, is of course to be regretted. But they will know in their hearts that their sacrifice is for the greater good of Wikipedia. That won't be true, of course, but it would be cruel to disabuse them of that comforting fiction as we bid them farewell and send them on their way.
create a bot that [etc etc etc]– You say
This is not an invitation to debatebut – trust me – that's an invitation to debate. Anyway, I don't know who's going to develop this bot that knows what a clause is and so on.
are hard to distinguish as they are rendered— Thank you, your user experience helps to isolate where the bug may reside. For you, the en and em characters are merely hard to distinguish in the text editor, but for me, they are pixel for pixel identical. Therefore, you must be on a different platform or browser from me and that then suggests that this is possibly a browser bug, not a bug in MediaWiki. What OS and browser are you using?
I don't know who's going to develop this bot that knows what a clause is— The bot can skip areas where the em dash is not appropriate. As I said, the beginning of table cells, after opening parenthesis, etc. The bot doesn't need to know what a clause is to accomplish this logic. I would be willing to work on it eventually, if granted the authority to do so.
Your concern about British English is slightly germane to the e.g. debate, but localization is not an important aspect of the issues I raised. If it's important, maybe someday there can be a read-only ben.wikpedia.org with reasonable BE translation. Chris Murphy ( talk) 11:03, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
<br />
not <br>
; while both will parse in HTML 5, the latter breaks the editing-mode syntax highlighter (at least the one available under the Preferences menu). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
09:00, 21 March 2021 (UTC)Category:21st century-related lists has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 ( 𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 11:11, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
In other words, is the term "actress" deprecated, or not, or is there nothing in the MoS about that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Herostratus ( talk • contribs) 22:53, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
There once was a male lesbian Thespian from Nantucket
Whose gender was no drop in the bucket
But rather than quibble
With lesser minds that spew dribble
He is now simply known as
Pat.
There was a Young Person of
Thespiae,
Whose toilette was so grim to espy;
She dressed in a some jeans,
Spickle-speckled with greens,
That ombliferous person of Thespiae.
It is just an act
Kimono open to all
Gender still unknown
References
So... in the language, we have (altho it's on the way out) "man" meaning human, and then "man" (the subset of humans that are male) and "woman" (the subset of humans that are female). The two meanings of "man" engenders confusion and can be insulting to women. It the past, we used the generic "he" for generic humans (when a particular person isn't involved). "The clown blows up the balloons and then he pops them". That "he" can be taken to mean "male", so that's not good. So instead we use "they" a lot more (other words like "xe" have been used, but "they" has caught on). And this is all to the good.
For thespians, we are doing the opposite, here. "Pat Carroll took the stage, and damn if that actor didn't make a great speech" can be taken as "Pat Carroll took the stage, and damn if he didn't make a great speech". We are introducing confusion, and also disregarding (and thus basically deprecating) Pat Carrol's femaleness (if they are female -- and we don't know, do we.)
We don't have an acceptable generic word where person-who-acts is the superclass, and "actor" and "actress" are the subclasses, as we do with "they" for humans generally. "Thespian" is obscure and "actron" hasn't caught on.
The other thing is, even if we did, gender is really important for thespians. It just is. It's not important for pilots or doctors or welders. It is for actrons. If you replace a male pilot with a female pilot, it doesn't matter. If you replace one of the male leads it Brokeback Mountain with a female, it matters. It's a different movie. When giving a person's profession to the reader, we don't need "aviatrix" but we do need "actress", because that matters in helping the reader get a sense of where the person fits in the theater and film world. We're here to serve the reader.
As to what's generally used, it appears to be "actress" here in Wikipedia (by random sample), and we are encouraged to follow regular practice for most things. As for the world in general, I googled Cate Blanchett (chosen at random) and without fear or favor came up with this result, in order of rank:
That's the first two pages and I stopped. If you count Wikipedia (not sure you should) that's 6-1 for "actress". That doesn't seem consisted with a claim that "actor" is generally used for females and males. It may be a trend with the hip crowd, but we're supposed to lag not lead trends. Herostratus ( talk) 03:41, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
No, no such "rule" exists. Spy-cicle💥 Talk? 04:36, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
I see that MOS:GNL says, "Use gender-neutral language, and the table headed Examples of gender indication in occupational titles in the Gender indication section of that wikilinked article may be relevant. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 14:35, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
actor and singer. A veteran of musical theatre, Briones rose to prominence for her—a 12-word gap. 'Her' is in the article 26 times (twice in the lede); 'she', 28 times (four in the lede); 'he' once (clearly referring to her father [a second to Alex Kurtzman in a citation]); 'his' twice (clearly referring to a reviewer and to Data); 'him' does not appear. No reader reasonably versed in the English language could find any confusion with Ms. Briones' gender identity. — ATS ( talk) 17:30, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
I see acter would seem gender neutral. If acting exists, why not acter‽ Kautr ( talk) 20:50, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
{{
Crossref|For "actress" versus "actor", see ...}}
. This doesn't rise to the importance level of needing to be specified in the main MoS page, or even living in MOS:BIO (where the section on job titles is already overly long). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
05:05, 3 April 2021 (UTC)A discussion (not a formal RfC, yet) regarding the "military conflicts" exception of the above is under way at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Military_history#Coats_of_arms_in_infoboxes. Input of further editors would be welcome. RandomCanadian ( talk / contribs) 17:25, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § RfC: Modification of Agatheira for syntactic compliance with linguistic precision guidelines. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
01:03, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
April Fools!
One of the most comprehensive sections of the Mos, the section on dashes, stretches to more than 14,000 characters and covers a variety of dash-related concerns.E Eng 02:28, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
the reign of Eumenes II (188-158 BC)
the reign of Eumenes II (188–158 BC)
See Wikipedia talk:Stable version to revert to#RFC for a RFC involving RETAIN. Crouch, Swale ( talk) 18:11, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
Do we write "the early 20th-century upper class" or "the early-20th-century upper class"? Wolfdog ( talk) 15:43, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
Anyway, I think usage on this exact question is going to vary even by individual, depending on context. For example, I would be more likely to use "early-20th-century" when it proceeded another modifier. Ex.: "early-20th-century nationalistic movements", because it is in fact clearer for the reader, that "early" is modifying "20th[-]century" not the entire string about the movements. And they were not in fact early nationalistic movements, but direct outgrowths of late 19th-century proto-fascism. But that last clause makes me notice for sure something that I suspected: I'm disinclined to do it if what follows the construction also contains a hyphen, because lots and lots and lots of hyphens become more of a problem than a help. I would feel compelled to add it anyway in a case like "late-19th-century proto-fascist sentiment" (modifier modifier noun), again because it was not late proto-fascist sentiment but early (even taking into account that proto- implies early – the proto-fascist period lasted well into the 20th century). Nor do me mean "among the proto-fascism examples toward the end of the 19th century, select only last few of them". We just mean "proto-fascism examples toward the end of the 19th century", the end. In messy cases like that, however, I would strongly consider just rewriting, e.g. "proto-fascist sentiment of the late 19th century" which has only one hyphen (required because proto- is a prefix not a word).
In short, I would oppose making a rule requiring or even recommending "early 20th-century", since it should be left to editorial discretion, and MoS is already overlong with examples, so we don't need to add a new block of "sometimes do this, sometimes do that" stuff, especially given that there are no recurrent knock-down, drag-out fights about this stuff. If someone does what to fight with you about it, just rewrite to avoid (it's the first rule of MoS!), as I did in an example here.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
03:47, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
I have question about how MOS handles italics in captions on mainspace articles. Should words or phrases be in italics when in brackets when it is something like "(pictured)" or "(left)" in captions, etc? I have seem this kind of implementation around at WP:TFA Examples or WP:DYK Examples or in some mainspace GAs (e.g. D'oh-in' in the Wind, 200 (South Park)) but it seems to be inconsistent. Kind regards Spy-cicle💥 Talk? 15:10, 10 March 2021 (UTC)
(r)or
(r)or
(right)or
(right)(though I suspect fewer will mind if you use italics than will object if you don't). If you want to open at discussion aimed at standardizing this sort of stuff, do it at WT:Manual of Style/Captions. But I don't recommend it. Really I don't. E Eng 01:21, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
(r)and
(r)would be compliant with MOS:ABBR. 207.161.86.162 ( talk) 07:23, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
In the end, given that people are apt to keep italicizing these things, and there's not a burning need to legislate against this, nor to require it, we should probably have a template for them ({{
caption note}}
, shortcut {{
capnote}}
, using the {{
inline hatnote}}
meta-template) that marks them up with CSS classes like hatnotes and other claptrap get, so they are distinguishable from the real content, including by
WP:REUSE tools, by user CSS, and so on. They are basically inline hatnotes, of a sort similar to {{
cross reference}}
and its shortcuts: {{
crossref|printworthy=y|see [[#Brobingnagese language|below]]}}
, or {{
xref|For additional details, see [[Lilliputese dialects]].}}
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
04:28, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
Gameography and ludography are both words regarding the works of a game designer, or people who have otherwise worked on games (a lá discography or bibliography). On biographical articles on Wikipedia, there seems to be no consesus as for which to use, for instance, Derek Yu and Hideo Kojima use gameography, while Edmund McMillen and Peter Molyneux use ludography. See also Shigeru Miyamoto ludography, which was recently moved from Shigeru Miyamoto gameography. Results from Google search of Wikipedia:
This topic stems from a disagreement between Heffner000 and I on Cr1TiKaL (see User talk:Heffner000#Rationale behind use of "Gameography" instead of "Ludography"), and I think a third opinion would be appreciated. I believe there needs to be some consistency between articles; MOS:HEAD states the following: "Section headings should follow all the guidance for article titles". MOS:AT states the following: "A title should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is [...] consistent with those of related articles". Ergo, headings should be consistent between articles.
To resolve this issue, I propose the usage of one term over the other. Therefore I suggest ludography over gameography for several reasons:
References
What are your thoughts? Kind regards, Orcaguy ( talk) 18:32, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
Filmography is recognizable for the average reader, the word "film" is common
more universal alternatives like "Works" or similar.
We also have some articles use musicography instead of discography, both are appropriate terms in that case, and there's no big debate there.
I don't buy the linguistic etymology argument
In many fields, abbreviations and acronyms are used quite commonly. Sometimes this such an extent that the full name is not so well known, sometimes the initialism and the full words are used interchangeably. People might search for information using the acronym. Where an article is giving scope to some area it may be helpful to list both the full name and the acronym, even when the abbreviated form isn't used elsewhere on within the article. This appears often the case where the abbreviated thing doesn't necessarily have (or warrant) its own page.
Is there a correct way to handle this?
Options may include:
Are there further options?
What is our preferred stance on this? And what types of evidence should be considered when choosing an approach to this?
For options (D) and (E) above, will we need to find a WP:SECONDARY to demonstrate that the acronym is indeed commonly used? Or would a definition on some primary source be acceptable? (Perhaps counts of google hits may be inaccurate, or indeed for some short initialisms they may be tricky to disambiguate.)
Considering relative frequency of use of the full term versus initialism would be sensible, but again what level of evidence is required? Chumpih. ( talk) 06:38, 14 March 2021 (UTC) + edits to clarify 11:46.
{{
glossary link}}
template to provide links to definitions. This proved to be a godsend when it came to writing about
cue sports (billiards, snooker, pool), which is perhaps the most jargon-heavy sport of all time. That would be a very useful approach for any acronym-heavy field. You just explain the terms once in the glossary, then link to them with something like {{astrogloss|UHTC}}
any time it seems prudent. Well, maybe explain it outright in the article one time, for
WP:REUSE purposes (someone might rip the bare text of the article). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
11:14, 4 April 2021 (UTC)The notion that tables shouldn't be collapsed upon the loading of a page seems to be based on some incorrect ideas and some misleading positioning of sentences. The current wording gives the impression that the mobile version of the site will strip auto-collapsed tables; this is false, only navboxes are stripped from the mobile view.
The second half of this is crystal balling and outdated. Google Lite is only available as a hidden "advanced" feature in the mobile version of Chrome, that was barely announced beyond 2016. No data shows that this number of users is either A) significant or B) growing. Also, Google cached pages / LITE searches display the exact same as their mobile and desktop counterparts on my phone. Disabling javascript simply displays collapsed data as uncollapsed. I think this section needs to be updated as it seems unnecessarily regressive. - Floydian τ ¢ 15:32, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
If information in a list, infobox, or other non-navigational content seems extraneous or trivial enough to inspire pre-collapsing it, consider raising a discussion on the article (or template) talk page about whether it should be included at all- and this is what should be made the focus of that section if any changes are made. I would also welcome input as to whether there are accessibility issues that involve CSS classes which provide collapsibility - examples being screen readers and other software/devices which automatically alter/change the way content is produced. Furthermore, we must (per MOS:PRECOLLAPSE)
remember that Wikipedia content can be reused freely in ways we cannot predict as well as accessed directly via older browsersand adding complexity via collapsing things when there is a better solution is contrary to that goal of WP. If information is important to an article, it is important to the goal of Wikipedia that virtually any reasonable reuse-of-content case be able to obtain a complete picture of the important content of said article - which auto-collapsing may prevent by suggesting the content is not important. The better solution is listed in MOS:COLLAPSE already - either un-collapse the content if it is important enough to be in the article, change the way in which it is presented to make collapsing or not a moot point, or remove the content altogether.To summarize, I do not support altering MOS:COLLAPSED to decrease guidance against (auto-)collapsing things in articles, but I do support revisiting why it's important and rewording the section accordingly - including clarifying that current modern browsers and official websites display the content even when CSS/JS are not used. I also think that it should be made clear that auto-collapsing is not a means for "visual" changes to an article - i.e. making an article "flow" better, or allowing people to "skip" tables/etc - but is instead only to be used as a way to include information which is relevant and has a good reason for inclusion, but outdated or supplementary - the prime example being historical data on pages it is not likely to be the primary topic, but is still useful for historical data. We must primarily remember that we are not an indiscriminate collection of information, and information which is "hidden" by default should be evaluated with serious weight given to the idea that maybe that information/data is not in line with Wikipedia's purpose. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez ( User/ say hi!) 02:52, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking § Linking non-major countries. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
21:28, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
The section §Italicized links seems to be covering proper syntax rather than a preferred style. That's more suitable for a help page on formatting than a MoS. The MoS is already long enough, let's cut the fat. Opencooper ( talk) 00:25, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
I found interest in reviving discussion of this failed proposal, which is not covered by any current guideline and includes points that are not explicit in any existing guideline; for example, the use of the dated and inaccurate term Caucasians for White people. A major factor in its failure was being mislabeled as a proposed naming convention for articles. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 17:35, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
Under MOS:JOBTITLES, UK political offices (like Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for the Home Department etc.) are rarely capitalised. I'd like to put forward the idea of reversing this presumption.
The first reason for doing this is for consistency with many other sources, like the gov.uk website and the parliament.uk website. While other outlets, like BBC News, generally don't capitalise job titles, I'd certainly argue that Wikipedia is much closer in substance to the first two examples than a news website. The second reason for this is because MOS:JOBTITLES specifically makes use of a distinction between titles and offices, however that distinction isn't really known in the UK; Boris Johnson isn't Prime Minister Johnson or Mr Prime Minister, but The Right Honourable Boris Johnson MP, who also happens to hold the offices of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Minister for the Union. While the distinction between titles and offices might work for US Presidents and Senators, for example, it doesn't really work in the UK, as for our articles it means that almost every use of these terms are in lower case. Finally, MOS:JOBTITLES deems offices common nouns, but I'd argue that it is much more nuanced than that. According to Wikipedia's own entry for proper and common nouns, proper nouns refer to a single entity, while common nouns refer to a class of entitites. Surely, you could call the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom its own entity? It may have had many holders who all fall into the category of having been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but it's still a corporation sole in itself that, in itself, gives its current holder (and only its current holder) certain powers. What do other people think? FollowTheTortoise ( talk) 16:55, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
"Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization."The government sources are self-published primary sources, and I give more weight to secondary sources such as the BBC. I also see no reason to make an unnecessary distinction between the UK and other countries. All the best, Mini apolis 21:23, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
"Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization."I haven't seen a single reason so far that we'd make an exception to that rule just for British offices, as, again, the clear majority of British secondary sources, including encyclopedic and news sources, follow something resembling the MOS:JOBTITLES rule. Wallnot ( talk) 01:04, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for your feedback, everybody! I think that all I really had to say on the matter was included in my original comment, but it's clear that the consensus is that MOS:JOBTITLES shouldn't be changed. FollowTheTortoise ( talk) 09:45, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
I want to propose a simplification of the section on hyphens.
Current
=== Hyphens ===
Hyphens (-) indicate conjunction. There are three main uses:
- In hyphenated personal names: John Lennard-Jones.
- To link prefixes with their main terms in certain constructions (quasi-scientific, pseudo-Apollodorus, ultra-nationalistic).
- A hyphen may be used to distinguish between homographs (re-dress means dress again, but redress means remedy or set right).
- There is a clear trend to join both elements in all varieties of English (subsection, nonlinear). Hyphenation clarifies when the letters brought into contact are the same (non-negotiable, sub-basement) or are vowels (pre-industrial), or where a word is uncommon (co-proposed, re-target) or may be misread (sub-era, not subera). Some words of these sorts are nevertheless common without the hyphen (e.g. cooperation is more frequently attested than co-operation in contemporary English).
Proposed
=== Hyphens ===
Hyphens (-) indicate conjunction. There are three main uses:
- Personal names (Daniel Day-Lewis)
- Certain prefixes (vice-president, ex-boyfriend). Note that general usage tends to avoid hyphens for many prefixes (subsection, nonlinear). Use a hyphen in the following situations:
- If it changes the meaning (re-dress dress again versus redress set right)
- To separate the same letter (non-negotiable) or vowels (pre-industrial) unless doing so goes against general usage (cooperation not co-operation)
- To avoid misreadings (sub-era not subera)
- Uncommon words with no established usage (co-propose)
Thoughts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fredlesaltique ( talk • contribs) 04:44, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
- A double-barrelled surname or compound give name that is hyphenated for a particular subject in most reliable sources ( Daniel Day-Lewis, Yu Myeong-Hee, Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron)
- ...
- ...
- To separate the same letter (non-negotiable) or vowels (pre-industrial) unless doing so goes against general usage (reunion not re-union)
- In personal names ( Daniel Day-Lewis, John Lennard-Jones)
- ...
- ...
- To separate the same letter (non-negotiable) or vowels (pre-industrial) unless doing so goes against general usage (reunion not re-union). Note that some words commonly lack a hyphen (cooperate versus co-operate)
I left a message at Talk:Post–Cold War era#En dash or hyphen? — hueman1 ( talk • contributions) 02:16, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
and fail to fix factual errors in it a decade after they're reported >cough cough<May I ask to what this is referring? 207.161.86.162 ( talk) 07:01, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
When speaking about a romantic partner, what set of terms should be employed? "Boyfriend"/"girlfriend" or just "partner"?
I believe it should be the latter, for two reasons:
Envysan ( talk) 03:46, 23 March 2021 (UTC)
do not bother checking your inbox– You mean like "If the phone don't ring, you'll know it's me"? E Eng 06:41, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
I've twice reverted edits by Entitled2Titled to Loudoun County, Virginia that have introduced "Mr."/"Ms." honorifics into the tables of government officials. I cannot find any other examples of such tables/lists including these, so I do not see any precedent for doing so. The wording of MOS:MR is somewhat vague to me, but my takeaway is that including an honorific on subsequent mentions is inappropriate, but it does not say that including them on the first mention is appropriate. This seems to agree with MOS:HONORIFIC, which states "[i]n general, honorific prefixes—styles and honorifics in front of a name—in Wikipedia's own voice should not be included, but may be discussed in the article." Thus, I believe that the inclusion of such titles contravenes the MOS, and they should be removed. Is there an actual consensus on this and/or is my interpretation reasonable? I searched the talk archives but was unable to find anything definitive. Thanks. -- Kinu t/ c 17:52, 24 April 2021 (UTC)
We have a long-standing problem of confusion about whether to use a hyphen or an en dash in names like Travancore–Cochin (AKA Thiru–Kochi or State of Travancore–Cochin), a merger of the formerly separate Travancore/Thiru and Cochin/Kochi. Despite MOS:DASH being for a long time eminently clear to use an en dash for mergers between coeval/comparable entities (and in other cases involving them, such as relations between or collaborations involving separate entities), there keeps being regurgitative debate about this at WP:RM. I've traced this perennial conflict to the addition of the following to MoS (the MOS:DUALNATIONALITIES subsection of MOS:DASH), seemingly without discussion:
That's a nonsense "rationale", as every merged jurisdiction (or dual-named meta-jurisdiction) like Travancore–Cochin is "a single jurisdiction during its ... existence". I.e., someone has forced the guideline to directly contradict itself. I've commented out this line, pending further discussion, but believe that it should simply be deleted. I think what has happened here is that someone got confused about Austro-Hungarian Empire using a hyphen, and assumed it must also apply to Austria–Hungary then made up a rationale to get that result. But Austro-Hungarian uses a hyphen for an entirely unrelated reason: Austro- is not a word but a combining form. It's the same kind of construction as Afro-Cuban and Franco-Prussian.
Despite this confusion, the majority of RM discussions have understood the overall gist of MOS:DASH and have concluded to use the en dash for names of merged or superset jurisdictions that have the names or parts of the names of component places in the combined name and which use short horizontal lines to separate those components (thus Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, etc., etc.). But the injection of this "Austria-Hungary" pseudo-rule has caused and continues to cause confusion and counter-argument, which defeats the purpose of having a clear and consistent guideline. And it has produced some inconsistent results, e.g. North Rhine-Westphalia (which is not northern "Rhine-Westphalia" but North Rhine combined with Westphalia), and Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu Province, though these do not appear to be the result in most cases of RM discussions being misled by the line quoted above (they mostly seem to be article titles chosen before MOS:DASH existed, or more recently by editors who have no read it).
PS: This stuff has no effect on Wilkes-Barre or Guinea-Bissau or Vitoria-Gasteiz, which are hyphened for entirely different reasons and which are not merged jurisdictions or supra-jurisdictional names. (The first is a place with two kind of randomly chosen namesakes that had nothing to do with the place or each other, and which could as easily have been named Badger-cake or Hospitality-Socrates or Pottery-Holstein. It ended up hyphenated just because it did, and if had been established recently it probably would not be since we don't use hyphens that way in contemporary English. But it has no reason to take an en dash. The second is due to a French convention of using a hyphen to stand in for something like "containing" or "related to" or "associated with"; it means 'the Guinea that has Bissau', basically. German has a directly reversed convention where such a name is applied to the enclosed place not the surrounding one: Berlin-Charlottenburg, meaning essentially 'the Charlottenburg of/in Berlin'. The handful of places with these sorts of names take hyphens are are all former European colonies or are in Europe. The third is a case of two languages' names for the same place being given at once, in this case Spanish and Basque. Various places with names of that kind don't take hyphens, e.g. Papua New Guinea.)
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
13:22, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
Does
Wikipedia:Manual of Style#In ranges that might otherwise be expressed with to or through include ranges of page numbers, e.g., 123-456 – 123-789
? If so, should the first sentence include them? Should there be an example?
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (
talk)
13:25, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
As I said before, contractions are to be avoided in formal writing. However, I was going to say that cannot is usually one word, though "can not" does exist. 68.197.54.51 ( talk) 15:04, 10 April 2021 (UTC)
I was patrolling edit requests and came across this and was wondering if there was an existing consensus about this? It seems like the kind of thing that would already have a megabyte of argument and discussion about. I didn't want to answer the request yea or nae without knowing if I was going to go awry of a guideline or somesuch. Thanks. ScottishFinnishRadish ( talk) 11:07, 21 April 2021 (UTC)