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 20 | Archive 21 | Archive 22 | Archive 23 | Archive 24 | Archive 25 | → | Archive 30 |
I see no guideline on the description of images, so if such a protocol exists, please forgive me. I notice a great disparity in the description of images on Wikipedia, and would appreciate if this matter was even loosely regulated, be it for the sake of consistency.
Usually, image captions aren't ended with a period, however they may contain several sentences. Following are several examples of captions using commonly accepted rules.
As for the image summary, unique to Wikipedia, perhaps it should follow the same rule, with the image source indicated in italicized parentheses, if applicable. See the following example.
Picture of Wikipedia's possible mascot. It is reading books and a Web site ( Wikipedia)
Thank you for your input,
Grumpy Troll 21:39, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Is there a Wikipedia standard to proper use of the — character? Is it...
I personally favor the first convention but I'm not convinced that I am correct for doing so. -- Bletch 23:01, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
I was thinking it would be cool if we had a section at the end of a movie's article stating wether it has easter eggs and if so what they are. - Indolering
There seems to be something of a battle over whether to refer to U.S. usage/UK usage or American usage/British usage. I have added in what I think is correct term, which neither of the combatants were using. That is American english and British english. BTW Irish usage actually is called Hiberno-English!!! I've added it in too. That way readers of the page can go to the actual pages and find out what those darn things actually are. FearÉIREANN \ (caint) 17:41, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
One point of bad style that I've seen in a number of articles is the failure to reintroduce subjects properly in new sections. For example, they might do like this:
Chickoomunga's face is big. He likes to eat cherries.
He's very elite in his society. (Better: Chickoomunga is very elite in his society, or Society has given Chickoomunga an elite position.)
The concept is that a section shouldn't really read like a continuation of previous stuff; to some extent, it should stand on its own. I don't think the use of pronouns beginning section should be strictly disallowed, but at least recommended against. Deco 21:18, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Has a lot of good pointers. Good resource.
http://www.economist.com/research/StyleGuide/ Jacoplane 02:25, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
This was recently added: "+ Notice that, consistent with the policy of Wikipedia:Lists, See also list items are not capitalized unless the word normally would be, such as, in the above example, Internet." Was there any discussion about this? Maurreen (talk) 03:06, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
==See also==
* [[Internet troll]]
* [[flaming]]
The Manual of Style states:
Every manual of style I have seen has outright banned contractions (except within quotations) in formal writing. What does "excessive" mean? Two contractions? Three contractions? Four contractions? Suppose we said that it is four. Then three contractions are allowable within an article? Personally, I think that just makes the rare contractions within an article look even more glaring, hurting the stylistic presentation of the article even more, to have one or two contractions scattered throughout an article. Would people object to an outright ban on contractions to clarify the issue? When are contractions ever useful in encyclopedic writing? — Lowellian ( reply) 11:10, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
Hmm, okay, I see. A note: looking through the history, I see now that the language was changed from:
to:
on a July 6 edit [1]. — Lowellian ( reply) 19:03, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
I can't find any discussion to settle a question that arose on United States of Europe and occurs elsewhere. Is there a policy on the use of German eszet (AKA ß, AKA szlig) in English Wikipedia? I understand that many Latin characters with diacritics are used in English texts, but the use of eszet seems gratuitous. It's my understanding that it's not used in all forms of German. I've never seen it in an English text except where eszet itself is being explained. English users will not use it to search for Strauss, for example, and how man native English speakers know how to pronounce it? 2%, maybe? The capper is the opening of Franz Josef Strauß: "Dr. h.c. Franz Josef Strauß (spelled Strauss in English)..." This is English. -- Tysto 21:37, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
We should use English names in the English Wikipedia. Johann Strauss is the spelling used in English - therefore the English Wikipedia should use that spelling. Otherwise we'll get to the absurdity that all Greeks, Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc. have their articles at places that are meaningless squiggles to an English-reader, jguk 07:42, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
We should no more use non-English letters like ß than we should use Chinese characters in ordinary text or article titles. The initial paragraph of an article can (and should) give the name as it was used the name's owner, but the title should be the English name, and although it is debatable whether certain diacritics can be counted as English, ß is decidedly on the side of not English. For precedent, þ was recently moved back to thorn (letter), and þ has a much stronger claim to being an "English letter" than ß does. Nohat 07:50, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Based on these comments, virtually none of which called me dirty names, I propose this as a standard:
This naturally raises other questions ( Goebbels v. Göbbels; Mueller v. Müller) which must be dealt with in the same section, but should not be a consideration in your comments at the moment. Also, I should have mentioned before: Basil Fawlty rules are in effect. -- Tysto 14:54, 2005 August 25 (UTC)
However, I am in the “allow ß” camp. I prefer the German spelling (it is in roman type, unlike Mao and Lenin), obviously with a pronunciation (which is needed anyway—pronouncing the first S is no easier than pronouncing the last ß). That would come out asFranz Josef Strauss (German: Strauß) was the …
On a related note, Goebbels should not be moved to Göbbels (that is not how he is spelt) and Richard Strauss should of course remain where he is, too. Likewise, not all Muellers are Müllers or vice versa. Why throw away all that wonderful information? It is easy to “dumb down” the data for a user agent and display all Müllers as Mueller or Muller or whatever transliteration is desired (there are web browsers who do that for you). But we cannot go the other way. So the data needs to distinguish Richard Strauss and Franz Josef Strauß, and we should be happy that there are editors who care about such things. Arbor 07:33, 26 August 2005 (UTC)Franz Josef Strauß (/ʃtraʊs/) was the…
My vote is for ss in the title, correct spelling given as soon as possible in the text. We are trying to write an encyclopaedia for English-speaking non-specialists: we aim to be accurate (object=encyclopaedia), but we are not necessarily normative (audience=non-specialists). The information we convey is in the article text and images, not the title. Let us expend proportionate amounts of work per word on article text and title! Physchim62 02:44, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Chuck, Nohat, and Physchim62 -- do not use ß in article titles -- do provie the speeling using ß (where appropraite) promptly near the start of the article. Possibly provide redirects from the fom using ß. DES (talk) 00:07, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Franz Josef Strauss (German: Strauß /ʃtraʊs/) was the…
But should there be an English pronunciation as well? I don't think anybody in the anglosphere says /ʃtraʊs/, do they? Would that mean we ought to write something like this:
Franz Josef Strauss (/strɔ:s/, German: Strauß /ʃtraʊs/) was the…
I quite like this. (It really doesn't have much to do with ß… sorry) Arbor 09:23, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Pronunciation guides aside, I think we do have consensus on the use of "ss" in titles and articles, followed by the German in parentheses (with Arbor's tweak. I'll add it to the MoS. -- Tysto 07:04, 2005 August 30 (UTC)
I don't see how the use of an Old English letter in a 250 year old trade name should influence our discussion about what letters are used in English today. We should write it "Encyclopedia Britannica", just like we don't use all caps or the trademark sign when referring to REALTORs, although we do discuss the all caps version in the article. The English language alphabet people learn in school does not contain ß, æ, or ő, because they are not english letters. I don't see why this seems such a problem to you: ß and ő have never been used in English. Æ is no longer used. Chuck 07:02, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
German spelling is for de:articles. Same for the rest of the raft. Mao is Mao, Aesop is Aesop. This is en:, which should be renamed am: and restricted to American spelling; let the Brits have their own project, then we can each establish actual consistent styles. As soon as you cross the line from talking about the man to talking about how his name is properly spelled, you are no longer in an American-language reference work; you're in a cross-language project. I would endorse, though not actively support, a multilingual gadget that did all sorts of nifty translations, transliterations, and spelling in different alphabets and character sets, with nice big bold highlighting of proper names in the language in which they originate.
(By the way, I have three different IPA fonts installed, and I still can't read IPA pronunciations on WP.)
Meanwhile, this is not de:. — Xiong 熊 talk * 08:17, 2005 September 1 (UTC)
I strongly agree with Chuck and Xiong above, characters not in normal english use should not be used in article titles. This includes Æ, Œ, ß, and ő and most of the other non-standard-english glyphs discussed in this thread. DES (talk) 17:28, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
Urhixidur 16:33, 2005 September 5 (UTC)
I honestly can’t believe it! The (almost complete) lack of diacritics in modern English seems to make native speakers thereof quite ignorant. It’s a matter of politeness and respect to write proper names in their native form, if possible (that’s no problem with Unicode) and understandable (i.e. in the same script). A foreign name is not an English word. That means names in Latin script should remain unchanged and be used in that form for the article titles (redirects mandatory). Therefore it should read:
Eszett is hardly more a ligature than ä, ö and ü in German. The umlauts were vowels with small es on top originally and are still decomposed thusly. Therefore, if you used ss instead of ß, you would consequently also have to write e.g.
because otherwise clueless people would incorrectly write “Schroder”. (There are border cases like Händel.) Of course the Swiss don’t use ß anymore, but there a still proper Swiss names containing it.
One transliteration or rather transcription method has to be selected for each script other than the Latin, of course, where only transcriptions are also language-dependent. If you started to do so for Latin-script names you would open a can of worms for you would have to transcribe more than just diacritics, e.g. *“Shvartsenegger”, *“Ineshtine” or *“Novittski”, although the English orthography is quite etymological in general (the correct spelling is still “doppelgänger” AFAIK). In return the rest of us¹ keeps writing “Bush” instead of “Busch”, “Buch(e)”, “Busz” or “Buš”. Centuries ago it was common to use local variants of (latinised) names throughout Europe, though, which can still be seen with place names and the pope (e.g. Ioannes, Johannes, Joan, Jonas, János, Giovanni, John, Jean, Juan, Jan, Ivan, João, …).
¹ Actually there are some East European languages/countries where it is common to transcribe foreign names like “Džordž Buš”, which is probably due to a very phonemic use of the script—something that can’t be said about English. Christoph Päper 02:39, 27 September 2005 (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 20 | Archive 21 | Archive 22 | Archive 23 | Archive 24 | Archive 25 | → | Archive 30 |
I see no guideline on the description of images, so if such a protocol exists, please forgive me. I notice a great disparity in the description of images on Wikipedia, and would appreciate if this matter was even loosely regulated, be it for the sake of consistency.
Usually, image captions aren't ended with a period, however they may contain several sentences. Following are several examples of captions using commonly accepted rules.
As for the image summary, unique to Wikipedia, perhaps it should follow the same rule, with the image source indicated in italicized parentheses, if applicable. See the following example.
Picture of Wikipedia's possible mascot. It is reading books and a Web site ( Wikipedia)
Thank you for your input,
Grumpy Troll 21:39, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Is there a Wikipedia standard to proper use of the — character? Is it...
I personally favor the first convention but I'm not convinced that I am correct for doing so. -- Bletch 23:01, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
I was thinking it would be cool if we had a section at the end of a movie's article stating wether it has easter eggs and if so what they are. - Indolering
There seems to be something of a battle over whether to refer to U.S. usage/UK usage or American usage/British usage. I have added in what I think is correct term, which neither of the combatants were using. That is American english and British english. BTW Irish usage actually is called Hiberno-English!!! I've added it in too. That way readers of the page can go to the actual pages and find out what those darn things actually are. FearÉIREANN \ (caint) 17:41, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
One point of bad style that I've seen in a number of articles is the failure to reintroduce subjects properly in new sections. For example, they might do like this:
Chickoomunga's face is big. He likes to eat cherries.
He's very elite in his society. (Better: Chickoomunga is very elite in his society, or Society has given Chickoomunga an elite position.)
The concept is that a section shouldn't really read like a continuation of previous stuff; to some extent, it should stand on its own. I don't think the use of pronouns beginning section should be strictly disallowed, but at least recommended against. Deco 21:18, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Has a lot of good pointers. Good resource.
http://www.economist.com/research/StyleGuide/ Jacoplane 02:25, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
This was recently added: "+ Notice that, consistent with the policy of Wikipedia:Lists, See also list items are not capitalized unless the word normally would be, such as, in the above example, Internet." Was there any discussion about this? Maurreen (talk) 03:06, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
==See also==
* [[Internet troll]]
* [[flaming]]
The Manual of Style states:
Every manual of style I have seen has outright banned contractions (except within quotations) in formal writing. What does "excessive" mean? Two contractions? Three contractions? Four contractions? Suppose we said that it is four. Then three contractions are allowable within an article? Personally, I think that just makes the rare contractions within an article look even more glaring, hurting the stylistic presentation of the article even more, to have one or two contractions scattered throughout an article. Would people object to an outright ban on contractions to clarify the issue? When are contractions ever useful in encyclopedic writing? — Lowellian ( reply) 11:10, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
Hmm, okay, I see. A note: looking through the history, I see now that the language was changed from:
to:
on a July 6 edit [1]. — Lowellian ( reply) 19:03, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
I can't find any discussion to settle a question that arose on United States of Europe and occurs elsewhere. Is there a policy on the use of German eszet (AKA ß, AKA szlig) in English Wikipedia? I understand that many Latin characters with diacritics are used in English texts, but the use of eszet seems gratuitous. It's my understanding that it's not used in all forms of German. I've never seen it in an English text except where eszet itself is being explained. English users will not use it to search for Strauss, for example, and how man native English speakers know how to pronounce it? 2%, maybe? The capper is the opening of Franz Josef Strauß: "Dr. h.c. Franz Josef Strauß (spelled Strauss in English)..." This is English. -- Tysto 21:37, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
We should use English names in the English Wikipedia. Johann Strauss is the spelling used in English - therefore the English Wikipedia should use that spelling. Otherwise we'll get to the absurdity that all Greeks, Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc. have their articles at places that are meaningless squiggles to an English-reader, jguk 07:42, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
We should no more use non-English letters like ß than we should use Chinese characters in ordinary text or article titles. The initial paragraph of an article can (and should) give the name as it was used the name's owner, but the title should be the English name, and although it is debatable whether certain diacritics can be counted as English, ß is decidedly on the side of not English. For precedent, þ was recently moved back to thorn (letter), and þ has a much stronger claim to being an "English letter" than ß does. Nohat 07:50, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Based on these comments, virtually none of which called me dirty names, I propose this as a standard:
This naturally raises other questions ( Goebbels v. Göbbels; Mueller v. Müller) which must be dealt with in the same section, but should not be a consideration in your comments at the moment. Also, I should have mentioned before: Basil Fawlty rules are in effect. -- Tysto 14:54, 2005 August 25 (UTC)
However, I am in the “allow ß” camp. I prefer the German spelling (it is in roman type, unlike Mao and Lenin), obviously with a pronunciation (which is needed anyway—pronouncing the first S is no easier than pronouncing the last ß). That would come out asFranz Josef Strauss (German: Strauß) was the …
On a related note, Goebbels should not be moved to Göbbels (that is not how he is spelt) and Richard Strauss should of course remain where he is, too. Likewise, not all Muellers are Müllers or vice versa. Why throw away all that wonderful information? It is easy to “dumb down” the data for a user agent and display all Müllers as Mueller or Muller or whatever transliteration is desired (there are web browsers who do that for you). But we cannot go the other way. So the data needs to distinguish Richard Strauss and Franz Josef Strauß, and we should be happy that there are editors who care about such things. Arbor 07:33, 26 August 2005 (UTC)Franz Josef Strauß (/ʃtraʊs/) was the…
My vote is for ss in the title, correct spelling given as soon as possible in the text. We are trying to write an encyclopaedia for English-speaking non-specialists: we aim to be accurate (object=encyclopaedia), but we are not necessarily normative (audience=non-specialists). The information we convey is in the article text and images, not the title. Let us expend proportionate amounts of work per word on article text and title! Physchim62 02:44, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Chuck, Nohat, and Physchim62 -- do not use ß in article titles -- do provie the speeling using ß (where appropraite) promptly near the start of the article. Possibly provide redirects from the fom using ß. DES (talk) 00:07, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Franz Josef Strauss (German: Strauß /ʃtraʊs/) was the…
But should there be an English pronunciation as well? I don't think anybody in the anglosphere says /ʃtraʊs/, do they? Would that mean we ought to write something like this:
Franz Josef Strauss (/strɔ:s/, German: Strauß /ʃtraʊs/) was the…
I quite like this. (It really doesn't have much to do with ß… sorry) Arbor 09:23, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Pronunciation guides aside, I think we do have consensus on the use of "ss" in titles and articles, followed by the German in parentheses (with Arbor's tweak. I'll add it to the MoS. -- Tysto 07:04, 2005 August 30 (UTC)
I don't see how the use of an Old English letter in a 250 year old trade name should influence our discussion about what letters are used in English today. We should write it "Encyclopedia Britannica", just like we don't use all caps or the trademark sign when referring to REALTORs, although we do discuss the all caps version in the article. The English language alphabet people learn in school does not contain ß, æ, or ő, because they are not english letters. I don't see why this seems such a problem to you: ß and ő have never been used in English. Æ is no longer used. Chuck 07:02, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
German spelling is for de:articles. Same for the rest of the raft. Mao is Mao, Aesop is Aesop. This is en:, which should be renamed am: and restricted to American spelling; let the Brits have their own project, then we can each establish actual consistent styles. As soon as you cross the line from talking about the man to talking about how his name is properly spelled, you are no longer in an American-language reference work; you're in a cross-language project. I would endorse, though not actively support, a multilingual gadget that did all sorts of nifty translations, transliterations, and spelling in different alphabets and character sets, with nice big bold highlighting of proper names in the language in which they originate.
(By the way, I have three different IPA fonts installed, and I still can't read IPA pronunciations on WP.)
Meanwhile, this is not de:. — Xiong 熊 talk * 08:17, 2005 September 1 (UTC)
I strongly agree with Chuck and Xiong above, characters not in normal english use should not be used in article titles. This includes Æ, Œ, ß, and ő and most of the other non-standard-english glyphs discussed in this thread. DES (talk) 17:28, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
Urhixidur 16:33, 2005 September 5 (UTC)
I honestly can’t believe it! The (almost complete) lack of diacritics in modern English seems to make native speakers thereof quite ignorant. It’s a matter of politeness and respect to write proper names in their native form, if possible (that’s no problem with Unicode) and understandable (i.e. in the same script). A foreign name is not an English word. That means names in Latin script should remain unchanged and be used in that form for the article titles (redirects mandatory). Therefore it should read:
Eszett is hardly more a ligature than ä, ö and ü in German. The umlauts were vowels with small es on top originally and are still decomposed thusly. Therefore, if you used ss instead of ß, you would consequently also have to write e.g.
because otherwise clueless people would incorrectly write “Schroder”. (There are border cases like Händel.) Of course the Swiss don’t use ß anymore, but there a still proper Swiss names containing it.
One transliteration or rather transcription method has to be selected for each script other than the Latin, of course, where only transcriptions are also language-dependent. If you started to do so for Latin-script names you would open a can of worms for you would have to transcribe more than just diacritics, e.g. *“Shvartsenegger”, *“Ineshtine” or *“Novittski”, although the English orthography is quite etymological in general (the correct spelling is still “doppelgänger” AFAIK). In return the rest of us¹ keeps writing “Bush” instead of “Busch”, “Buch(e)”, “Busz” or “Buš”. Centuries ago it was common to use local variants of (latinised) names throughout Europe, though, which can still be seen with place names and the pope (e.g. Ioannes, Johannes, Joan, Jonas, János, Giovanni, John, Jean, Juan, Jan, Ivan, João, …).
¹ Actually there are some East European languages/countries where it is common to transcribe foreign names like “Džordž Buš”, which is probably due to a very phonemic use of the script—something that can’t be said about English. Christoph Päper 02:39, 27 September 2005 (UTC)