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Please note the current discussion on dashes has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dashes) as it was too long for this page.
Tired of the incessant omission of serial commas in many Wikipedia articles, bolstered no doubt by the odious standards set by nearly all print and online news sources that I've recently read, I finally went to my local library and reviewed every major work on writing style that they had in the Reference section. The only one that disagreed with the consensus described in this article under Commas was The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, 1st edition, 1999. Yet everyone seems to be following it! Are we so lazy that we can't be troubled to add a single comma, just because some upstart authority (compared to the Oxford, Harvard, and even Chicago University Presses) decided it needed the fractional character space taken by a punctuation mark that sometimes isn't necessary for clarity? (Excuse me while I take a few deep breaths. ☺) Anyway, since omitting the serial comma is so prevalent in popular writing, I wonder if we should cite in the main article the solitary exception to this consensus, pointing out that its motives are likely not based on clarity but rather ink and paper conservation. Comments? — Jeff Q 23:20, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Although grammar gurus abandoned that comma rule for a while in the twentieth century, we have since realized that using the serial comma (as it is called) is a good idea ...
Well, my problem with "Bob, Tom and Jerry" is that it makes Tom and Jerry seem more closely associated with one another than either is with Bob... john k 01:40, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Just an observation. The serial comma is not normally used in Ireland, or, I believe in Britain or Australia. Filiocht 12:19, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
This has no weight really, but I just think the serial comma looks messy; why add unnecessary punctuation? If its an ambiguous case, then use I use it, if not, I don't. I was tought in grade school to use it, but I always hated that (: — siro χ o
I don't feel strongly either way, but the Associated Press stylebook, which most U.S. newspapers go by, is generally against serial commas. Maurreen 17:51, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to propose that all names, in all languages, are given as [Family name] [comma] [Given name] in article titles (as, for example: Parker, Sarah Jessica). This would solve a lot of problems related to name orders which contradict the common English order of [Given name] [Family name]. Exploding Boy 21:43, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)
Wetman 07:52, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Exploding Boy might try looking up Family name and see what a mess his system would create. To begin with, not everyone has a family name. There are numerous incompatible systems of nomenclature, present and past. What benefit if the article on Hamlet were renamed to , Hamlet and the article on Henry VIII was renamed to Tudor, Henry, VIII or something similar and the article on Björk was renamed to , Björk, Guðmundsdóttir or something similar? Jallan 21:33, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
This is a terrible idea. Among other things, this makes the situation for other languages where given name comes second even worse. Will we have Mao, Zedong? john k 16:58, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Yes, Mao, Zedong is desirable if for no other reason than that people will then be aware that he was not Mr. Zedong, just as Koizumi Junichiro isn't Mr. Junichiro and Kim Il-sung isn't Mr. Il-Sung. Exploding Boy 22:15, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
Not only is this idea blatantly bad, but it contradicts our policy about locating the article at the most common english name. →Raul654 22:17, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
Just one comment: people with a patronymic but without a family name are normally sorted on their first name, thus Björk Guðmundsdóttir, not Guðmundsdóttir, Björk, even in cases where other names are sorted with family name first. (As a matter of fact, the entire Icelandic phonebook is sorted according to first name.) However, I wouldn't trust most contemporary, Anglophone contributors on Wikipedia to recognize the difference between a patronymic and a family name, and if the unnecessarily complicated way of writing "last name" first would be implemented, names with a patronymic will no doubt often be written in the wrong order. // Tupsharru 06:07, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
It appears that Exploding Boy really wants to go with standard bibliographic style. That is somewhat more complex than always putting the family surname first. General bibliographic usage as been to generally list names by surname, followed by a comma, then by the other names, when the names are post-medieval names and when they are of European origin or names of those who have adopted European conventions or when the names have been adapted to fit European conventions. These modern surnames are sometimes patrynomics rather than family surnames. Names not fitting this convention are generally not re-ordered. Classical Roman names, for example, are not reordered. One normally does not see "Antonius Creticus, Marcus" rather than "Marcus Antonius Creticus" in an index. Where in modern usage surnames seldom appear, as with royal families of Europe, the names generally don't appear ordered by surname in indexes. It would be extraordinary to find a book referring to Queen Elizabeth II of the UK and find her listed in its index under something like "Windsor, Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom, II".
An advantage of the traditional system is that it clarifies whether a surname is a modern family surname or a descriptive surname. If we come across "Marie d'Anjou" in an index, the reference is almost certainly to some pre-modern personage connected with the territory of Anjou, likely a member of its ruling family. If we come across "D'Anjou, Marie", the reference is almost certainly to a more modern person who happens to have the hereditary surname "D'Anjou". There is some small value in such a distinction, though it annoys indexers of books dealing with periods when hereditary family surnames were first coming into vogue.
But adopting the normal bibliographical system in Wikipedia would not at all solve a dispute over order of Chinese names. Under the traditional system someone knows immediately, by the presence of a comma, that in the case of "Dickens, Charles", for example, that "Dickens" is a surname and that in normal use the two elements are reversed. But coming across references like Hrólf Kraki, Vlad Tepe, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Mark Antony, Julius Caesar, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a reader unfamiliar with the name style or the persons knows nothing other than that, if there is a family name within any of these combinations, it is not marked by a comma. The only one of the above where we could reasonably make this clear though a comma is Mark Antony which we might reverse as Antony, Mark. For the rest, there is nothing to indicate whether "Hrólf", "Vlad", "Ho", "Julius", "Antiochus", and "Mao" are family names or not. In fact, of these, only "Mao" is a pure family name, "Julius" comes very close though the full family name was "Julius Caesar" (the given name "Gaius" being usually dropped in references to this particular personage).
One might use Mao, Zedong as Exploding Boy suggests. But the comma also indicates reversal and so indicates that in normal text we should see "Zedong Mao". That is incorrect. Placing a comma here would mislead. And that is not done in traditional usage. The dispute on particular names is because in environments derived from European culture the elements of Chinese names are indeed sometimes reversed. Should a Chinese name appear in reversed order or native order in an article title if it mostly appears in reversed order in English sources, as for example the name of a person of Chinese ancestry who is a native-born US citizen? Adopting normal bibliographic conventions in Wikipedia would now mean that the dispute would be instead about whether a comma should follow the family name rather than about the order in which the name elements should appear. The dispute would still exist. Exploding Boy's suggestion doesn't solve it at all.
Jallan 14:20, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I've done some searching and come to the conclusions that (a) we don't currently have a policy on this and (b) this is the right place to raise the issue. Apologies if I'm mistaken.
Capitalization in Wikipedia articles is not consistent as regards the following usages. Can we adopt official policies and include them in our MoS? Have I missed the fact that we already have them? Or is this not the sort of thing we need to adopt specific policies for?
I know I'm supposed to be bold, but I didn't think unilateral changes to the Manual of Style were quite what was intended. Comments on these proposals are solicited.
Clearly one heads north when one is going to North Dakota, but does one go to Southeastern Pennsylvania or southeastern Pennsylvania? If something comes from the Pacific Northwest, is it Northwestern or northwestern? I'm inclined to say the latter, i.e. to use lowercase, and the Chicago Manual of Style seems to back me up at the bottom of [1].
However, I think that Western and Eastern, when they refer to the cultures of the two hemispheres, are special cases. Western music, for example, is inconsistent, and I don't know which way to correct it. I guess I'd prefer capitals in this case, e.g. "I've spent six semesters studying Western philosophy and I'm sick of hearing about Western beliefs and customs", but I don't feel strongly about it.
How about this?
Maurreen 17:20, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
We should probably give some examples. I was thinking of something like:
Directions and regions:
I don't know that I like the idea of capitalizing when you don't know for sure, but I like it just as much as not capitalizing when you don't know for sure, and I like them both better than telling people to do whatever they feel like, which I don't think befits a style guide. — Triskaideka 20:07, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think all of this might be more trouble than it's worth. Isn't it already a standard rule of English that proper nouns are uppercase, and most other things aren't?
I think it's best for the style guide to a concise reference to common questions that arise in Wikkipedialand. Maurreen 04:59, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Triskaideka, I'm not clear on what you mean by "terms in common usage."
Is this better?
Maurreen 04:34, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Right now our official policy is to put punctuation marks inside quotation marks if it is a full quotation, but outside the quotation marks if it is a partial quotation. I've been looking at many encyclopedias and found that this is uncommon even in British publications. does anybody else feel that the current policy is needlessly confusing... or am I simply being an Ugly American here? I'd like to change it to have a uniform "punctuation goes inside quotation marks" style, but I really don't want to step on anyone's toes – just looking for a few comments on the issue. ;) [[User:Neutrality| Neutrality ( talk)]] 16:52, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)
(" Sarah")]] 22:30, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Three French words with related meanings are maison 'house', domaine 'estate, property', and château 'castle'.
Three French words with related meanings are maison 'house,' domaine, 'estate, property,' and château 'castle.'
In a literary work, we recommend the American style of always placing periods and commas inside the quotation marks. In a technical or legal work, where accuracy is essential, we recommend the British practice of placing periods and commas within quotation marks only when they are part of the quoted material.
Various observations: The comma and period inside the quotes "look better" only when true typography is used to place the quote over the punctuation, so that's not really an argument for doing it. My arguments for doing it come from Chicago and many other American style guides, but most acknowledge the historic reasons for the punctuation order. In technical style guides here, it is not the general case for punctuation to go outside the quotes, only when what's inside the quotes is an exact value (as in: type this URL into the field: "http://www.foo.com".). However, I have no problem using the Wikipedia style guide and editing according to that. Elf | Talk 15:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I want to comment on the formatting of lists of inline translations of words. Compare this, from the preceding topic:
with this from the following topic on this page:
The latter--parens instead of quotes without dividing punctuation--is much easier to scan, read, comprehend than the former, and that's the form I've been changing things to as I have found them. For example, History of the Scots language was almost unreadable until parens were used. Elf | Talk 15:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'm sure I saw a comment a while ago that several users who can just about read Cyrillic find the italicised forms difficult (as some of the italicised forms aren't immediately obviously the same character as their non-italicised forms). Naturally, now I want to re-read it, I can't find it, nor can I find anything in the Manual of Style.
I'd like to propose that we create a policy thus:
A possible addition might include a guide on how to iotised and palatised characters, such as Ч (Che), Ш (Sha), Щ (Shcha), Я (Ya) and Ё (Yo). (Personally I'd suggest a háček on the core consonant(s) — so č, š, šč — and a letter Y before a vowel — ya, yo).
Opinions? :o) — OwenBlacker 21:46, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to make the proposal, consistent with a number of style guides I've read, that all Latin acronyms but especially e.g. and i.e. be avoided in articles in favour of phrases like "for example/example:" and "that is/in other words". Derrick Coetzee 01:28, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'm planning on adding this revised policy in a week if there are no objections. Comments? [[User:Neutrality| Neutrality ( talk)]] 03:07, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)
Don't think so. Punctuation is pretty much the first line of "style" and should remain in the main body of the Manual. Ortolan88 18:02, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
While most of the pages have, as thier first sentence the particular universe they're from, I was thinking if it would be good for the first line of every entry like this to appear as something like this:
Part of the Star Trek fictional universe.
Then the start of the article text (after a single empty line), just so there's something universal to differentiate fictional articles from non-fictional. -- Barry 16:46, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)
Because the discussion on gender neutrality for pronouns has died out, I'm going to remove the link to the discussion from the style guide. Maurreen 14:04, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I've seen a few potentially libelous articles, with statements along the lines of someone was "arrested for ..." If the person hasn't been convicted or pleaded guilty, the sentences should be reworeded. Does anyone object to adding an explanation in the style guide about this? Maurreen 23:16, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Moved from Village pump. Reuben 18:30, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I have always learned that constructions like "somewhat of a bore" are incorrect - in this case, "something of a bore" or "somewhat boring" would be correct. See for instance
"Common Errors in English". I haven't found any sources supporting the "somewhat of a..." form, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be correct in the UK. Any comments? In the U.S. at least, "somewhat of a..." is often used but is considered incorrect.
Reuben 08:26, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Go to Talk:Earth. I removed the word billion from the article yesterday because billion is a word with ambiguity in its meaning. Then, later on, it was returned, with scientific notation also being kept. Does anyone have any opinions about the use of the word billion at Wikipedia?? 66.245.96.130 16:30, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)
We should definately avoid this, as there are other, clearer ways of saying the same thing. It is like the flamable / inflamable debate. The amount of confusion is not worth being right. Mark Richards 03:15, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
User:Susvolans replaced a paragraph about rendering the glottal stop in Hawaiian with new material. I have reverted to the older version. The new material was as follows:
The grave accent (`) is also used as a diacritical mark to indicate a glottal stop; however, except in article titles, the left quotation mark should be used for this purpose instead (e.g., Hawai‘i, not Hawai`i or Hawai'i). It is supported in almost all browsers, and can be used in Wikipedia. <!-- Get rid of the rest of the paragraph once the English Wikipedia supports Unicode throughout --> Do not type a left quotation mark directly into Wikipedia. It may display correctly on your browser, but not on others. Instead, use the HTML entity ‘ or the numeric form, ‘ or ‘. Wikipedia in English does not currently support left quotation marks in article titles; a grave accent should be used instead.
The difficulties are that, other than in Hawaiian, the glottal stop is normally indicated by a right quotation mark or a similar mark and the left quotation mark or similar mark mark indicates a pharyngeal consonant found in Semitic languages called there ‘ayan or ‘ain. The symbols resembling quotation marks are commonly used in Latin-letter transliterations of Arabic names and of Hebrew names and words in scholarly transliterations. Accordingly all renderings of glottal stop are not done by a left-quotation mark symbol. Also, two more technical symbols are available in Unicode: U+02BE MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING and U+02BF MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING which are generally preferred by Semiticists for transliterations of Semitic words and names and which are already in use in hundreds of articles in Wikipedia for transliterations of Semitic names.
At the least the above needs to be reworded to recognize this. Personally, it seems to me reasonable to use ‘ for ( ‘ ) at the present time for the ‘okina character in Hawaiian. But that is itself not the proper character according to Unicode and Hawaiian government specifications. The proper character is U+02BD MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA. See the discussion at Okina and the external links there. If Susvolans' recommendation is accepted for Hawaiian, it should at least be mentioned in the recommendation that in future, when systems better support it, the proper ‘okina symbol should be substituted. Or, since of common browsers, only Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows currently won't find the proper characters if they exist on any font on the system and insert them, should we perhaps now be using the proper character (as is being done in many Semitic transliterations) rather than wait only because Microsoft can no longer be bothered to improve their browser to the standard of other browsers?
Jallan 15:27, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia obviously should generally be somewhere in the middle. But exactly where is probably very contentious. And the target is constantly moving. I expect this is why the matter has not come up in the style manual. It's too hot to touch and too complex. And the genie is out of the bottle already. Many articles, perhaps thousands of articles, exist using characters that don't display on all systems. Yet users and other editors aren't complaining signficantly. I don't recall ever seeing a complaint outside of an occasional individual complaint on a talk page, that was quickly overruled by others or where a compromise was easily obtained. Obviously, then, using such characters is an option, since it has been taken as an option with minimal or no opposition. There is no policy that every Wikipedia article must display to perfection on every system, regardless of browser being used and local fonts available. The problem tends to be self-correcting, in that those users who care about seeing particular special characters are also the ones who have their systems set up to view them properly (or are already used to seeing them displayed as boxes or question marks on other sites). The other users don't care, and so the boxes or question marks that appear don't matter to them. They just know that some characters are being used that don't display properly on their system, which often happens when languages other than their native language are displayed. Nothing odd there at all. All quite normal. Just what one expects. And editors using rare characters are generally restrained in their use.1. Bleeding edge: Do things right from the beginning, using the proper Unicode characters and proper XHTML features and expect readers who care to use proper tools. The entire web will catch up soon enough. After all, using anything outside of Latin 1 or one of the other standard 8-bit sets on the web was considered rather daring only three years ago. Things move very quickly. So build for the future, not for the past. People too stubborn to upgrade when upgrades are free will just have put up with a few characters not appearing properly, but often characters they don't care about anyway.
2. Ultra-careful: Don't use any character or any feature that every browser at least as old as Netscape 5.0 onward doesn't support fully. You can always update the page later. For Wikipedia this would mean almost nothing outside of Latin-1.
We were originally talking about User:Susvolans's quite reasonable attempt to replace some material in the style guide which is obviously outdated. Even the Hawaii article now ignores that recommendation. The difficulty was in part that Susvolans spoke of "glottal stop" rather than simply ‘okina and that opened up another set of issues, indeed the whole matter of special characters, however such characters are going to be defined. Also, if the style manual is going to be changed on that point, as indeed it should be, since the character proposed for ‘okina is in fact not the official character, there should be some discussion on the matter of whether people should go through articles containing Hawaiian forms and replace one incorect character (the typewriter apostrophe) by another incorrect character (the left quotation mark) or should immediately start using the proper character.
I don't think we should to try to define general usages here for all unusual characters. It's too big. What characters particular editors wish to use for transliteration depends very much on what they are trying to do and the particular languages they are dealing with and what users might expect ... and so forth. People dealing with Semitic languages should be dealing with issues having to do with transliterating Semitic languages, people dealing with English phonetics should be deciding how to render English phonetics, people dealing with Hindu languages should be deciding how to render Hindu languages, people working on articles on logic should decide what logical notation should be used, people discussing Chinese characters are the ones who can best decide which characters are most likely to display properly. If people working in any such field wish to set up standards for that field they should try to get consnensus themselves. Mostly that is what has been happening.
As to the current obsolete rule about how to render ‘okina, I have two alternate suggestions:
1. Simply remove it. It was an oddity anyway. We don't have similar rules for Semitic transliteration or Hindu transliteration or how to render Icelandic here. Those working on articles displaying Hawaiian forms can do as they wish, as is done with other languages.<br\><br\>2. Change to a modified version of Susvolans' recommendation that refers only to the ‘okina rather than glottal stop in general, which I believe is what Susvolans intended to do. The revised text might read:
To indicate the ‘okina (glottal stop) character in Hawaiian, the left quotation mark should be used (that is, Hawai‘i, not Hawai`i or Hawai'i), though in any article titles where the ‘okina should be displayed, the grave accent must currently be used as a substitute. (The proper Unicode ‘okina symbol is Unicode U+02BD MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA, but currently this is not available in many fonts and unfortunately display problems are likely to result on many systems if the correct character is used.)<!-- Get rid of the rest of the paragraph once the English Wikipedia supports Unicode throughout --> But do not type or paste a left quotation mark directly into the Wikipedia editor. It may display correctly on your browser, but not on others. Instead, use the HTML entity ‘ or the numeric form, ‘ or ‘.
I'm not pushing this exact text or even the exact recommendation. It is for those working on articles where Hawaiian forms will be displayed to decide whether ‘okina should now be rendered by ‘ or by the more correct ʻ (as in Hawaiʻi versus Hawai‘i). They can best balance current problems versus future benefits in using the ʻ character now or using ‘ now—knowing that in a year or two at most everything should be changed to the proper form.
Jallan 04:12, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Read m:instruction creep. Restricting the character set other than on a case-by-case pragmatic basis is generally bad, so we should just cut back, possibly including parts of the preceding section. Susvolans 12:26, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
This is general, rather than restricted to Hawaiian and makes it clear that the curly single quotation mark characters may be used in particular circumstances without committing to desireablity of doing so, as something for case-by-case discussion on talk pages and so on. I think it is useful to warn against attempting to use the curly quote characters directly rather than using the HTML entities.<br\><br\> Jallan 14:27, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)Characters identical in appearance to left single quotation mark or right single quotation mark are used as letters in some languages and some Latin-letter transliteration systems, for example the ‘okina character in Hawaiian and for ’alef and ‘ayan or ‘ain in Semitic languages. For such purposes, use of the single left quotation and right quotation characters may be acceptable to produce unambiguous display on almost all systems even though these characters are not the recommended ones in Unicode for those purposes. The characters may also be used in discussions about the quotation marks themselves.<!-- Get rid of the rest of the paragraph once the English Wikipedia supports Unicode throughout --> If using left or right quotation mark for such reasons, do not type or paste a left quotation mark directly into the Wikipedia editor. It may display correctly on your browser, but not on others. Instead, use the HTML entities ‘ or ’ or the correponding numeric forms: ‘ and ’ or ‘ and ’. If necessary to represent such characters as letters in article titles, the normal straight apostrophe ( ' ) should usually be used in place of the right quotation mark and the grave accent ( ` ) in place of the left quotation mark.
1. Simply remove it. It was an oddity anyway. We don't have similar rules for Semitic transliteration or Hindu transliteration or how to render Icelandic here. Those working on articles displaying Hawaiian forms can do as they wish, as is done with other languages.<br\><br\> Maurreen 13:52, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The current guide says (under "scientifc style"):
This is OK (I guess) but recently we have had a round of edit war followed by inconclusive (rather thin) discussion over at Talk:Global_warming#Standards_.26_Chemical_names over whether this policy applies to science articles in general, or just (as the policy above appears to say) for chemical names. I'm introducing the discussion here in the hope of getting some more opinions.
I would like to propose that the policy above be modified to include:
or somesuch. You might think that unneccessary, but see the discussion on the t:GW ( William M. Connolley 18:49, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)).
Google hits:
Search pattern All languages English only sulfur 1,760,000 1,130,000 sulphur 1,560,000 978,000 sulfur -sulphur 1,130,000 1,050,000 sulphur -sulfur 967,000 913,000
The form sulfur is currently at least acceptable to a large number of people (as is sulphur), however unacceptable it might be to one individual here. That's fact. And of course many who use sulfur in some contexts are quite willing to accept sulphur in others, and vice versa, or willing to accept both evenly, or don't care much at all, or follow their own preferences in their own writing and don't mind others doing the same. Jallan 20:41, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
"I would like to propose that the policy above be modified to include: note that this policy applies strictly to articles whose main concern is chemistry, and not to science articles only peripherally concerned with chemistry, in which case the std wiki policy applies.. "
Please do not insert this shortsighted, hasty and completely unnecessary clause in the style manual. Can you imagine the edit wars that will be created by such a thing? Each and every article dealing with chemistry in any way will have one. We've already had a war on Global warming because Connolley thinks that it is only slightly related to chemistry
and therefore should remain exempt from IUPAC nomenclature (Vsmith and I disagree with that completely). Wikipedia should strive to attain the maximum amount of standardization between all articles, and especially SCIENCE articles, as possible. I wish to stress again, this is NOT a USA vs. whatever argument here, this is an international standard.-- Deglr6328 23:13, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The issue has been discussed in Wikipedia:WikiProject Science and the following is the reccomendation there:
- Vsmith 22:27, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
User:William M. Connolley has launched an edit and revert attack on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Science page in an obvious attempt to be disruptive and obscure the points made here. I am asking him to stop and engage in serious discussion. - Vsmith 17:20, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I am proposing that the current guide under scientific style:
In articles about chemicals and chemistry, use IUPAC names for chemicals wherever possible, except in article titles, where the common name should be used if different, followed by mention of the IUPAC name.
be modified to reflect the
Wikipedia:WikiProject Science recommendation above, as follows.
In the interest of consistency and clarity the
IUPAC standard for chemical names and spellings should be followed in all science and science related articles, except in article titles, where the common name of a compound should be used if different, followed by mention of the IUPAC name. Alternative terminology and spellings should be referenced in addition when dealing with historical development and some local or regional issues.
-
Vsmith 22:41, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Jallan 13:54, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)Variant terminology and spellings may also be used in addition to IUPAC recommendations where appropriate, for example in direct quotations and close paraphrases, in historical discussions, when treating local or regional issues, and for general clarification.
How about spelling out IUPAC on first reference? I never heard of it before I came to Wikipedia. Maurreen 04:07, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Follow the links here
IUPAC
The following quote is from [
World Wide Words], (read the whole article for a good and humorous perspective on the issue):
Nobody is suggesting British people change these spellings for all purposes, only when using them in scientific contexts. The Royal Society of Chemistry rushed out a press release the next day to support the QCA, pointing out that standardisation is especially important for ease of communication (like looking things up in databases, for example, where variant versions of common terms are a bugbear). The Society added that standard chemical nomenclature already specifies the f forms of words like sulfur following agreement by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 1990.
-
Vsmith 12:02, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Maybe it would be good to invite people interested in chemistry to the discussion. Maurreen 22:12, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I'm going to delete the following, which was not discussed. The point here seems to be only that references can get outdated. Maurreen 22:51, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
"However, bear in mind that good manuals of style only report what constructions/language people used when they were researched. When dealing with new constructions/neologisms/changes in usage of language, they may not be adequate. And if it's a fine point you're faced with, you'll probably find both options you're thinking about are acceptable anyway."
I am going to revert to before the recent changes by jguk, which were not discussed and more than I initially realized. I will add back in the notes about discussing significant changes. Maurreen 05:11, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Because the style guide is about 40 kb, I made a quick trim draft at * Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style--Draft Trim. See if you think it's OK. Maurreen 05:58, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I think this should be put back. It is a nice tip for rare but occasional cases where extra spacing is wanted (without fiddling with ).The page itself will only display one space (unless you use to force it otherwise).
This was only added to the Manual very recently. But it is recommendation of most style guides and I believe it to be an excellent one, one I've tried to follow for years, though I still catch myself typing one or the other of these. The abbreviations i.e. and e.g. are essentially space-savers for use primarily in footnotes and in compressed writing and in technical writing and I think should be left there, where they do belong.* Scholarly abbreviations of Latin terms like i.e., or e.g. should be avoided and English terms such as such as and for example used instead.
I personally found this very helpful. I think it should remain though it could do with some shortening.<br\><br\>I agree with the rest of the changes. I especially agree with the omission of multiple examples where one or two alone suffices.<br\>Thus "other meanings" should be used rather than "alternate meaning" or "alternative meaning". Some dictionaries discourage or do not even recognize this latter use of alternate. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary "Usage Note" at alternative simply says: "Alternative should not be confused with alternate." However, alternative is also not entirely acceptable because of the very common connotations in American English of "non-traditional" or "out-of-the-mainstream". Further, some traditional usage experts consider "alternative" to be appropriate only when there are exactly two alternatives.
The colon doesn't work well, as it only indents on the left side. I have been using <blockquote> and </blockquote> instead which do the job properly. I realize they are deprecated HTML tags ... but they work properly.This is done by prepending a colon to the first line.
I agree with this, but why bother? In actual practice in Wikipedia it seems it is ok to ignore this, as long as you do it with a template. Most inconsistant.Try to avoid highlighting that the article is incomplete and in need of further work.
Anglicization is just Oxford-style British English spelling, as used, for example, in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: "Translation of these presented little difficulty; but there remained one or two older names of forgotten meaning, and these I have been content to anglicize in spelling: as Took for Tûk, or Boffin for Bophîn." This is a very bad example in the Manual. Anyone jarred by that deserves a good jarring! :-)A reference to "the American labour movement" (with a U) or to "Anglicization" (with a Z) may be jarring.
This advice is horrendous! Is there another style guide in the world that would suggest one should reconsider using normal, everyday English words because they have more than one common spelling? The result of this, if people paid any attention, would be a non-standard Wikipedia dialect of English, limited to spelling-neutral vocabulary. Better to go with a fixed spelling, whether US or Britsh or whatever, than this!<br\><br\> Jallan 01:12, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)If the spelling appears within the article text, also consider a consistent synonym such as focus or middle rather than center/centre.
Jallan, my understanding about the part on Latin abbreviations is that there was no consensus.
For the other things that you'd like put back in, do you want to do that, and then we can move it over to the regular style guide page?
Then we could talk about other substantive changes separately. Thanks. Maurreen 02:53, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Yet the very next section reads:A reference to "the American labour movement" (with a U) or to "Anglicization" (with a Z) may be jarring.
... a supposed example of when one should italicize. My feeling is that capital letters standing for letter names are more often not italicized in such contexts, unlike lowercase letters. If the Draft Trim says for another day without any complaints or additional changes, then I guess it can be taken as accepted. Jallan 03:29, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)The letter E is the most common letter in English
[[<s>George W. Bush</s>grammar]]
, is encouraged. [[language]]s
. [[language|languages]]
— and easier to type. This syntax is also applicable to adjective constructs such as [[Asia]]n
, as well as hyphenated phrases and the like.I disagree with jguk's changes to the draft trim. A trim is meant only to shorten. Any desired changes in meaning deserve to be brought up separately and individually. And I agree with Jallan that they should wait until after a decision on the draft trim. Maurreen 05:57, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
1 Writers are not required to follow
all or any ofthese rules (remove tautology)'
The tautology was an idiomatic, nuanced tautology. Perhaps idiomatic nuance should be avoided in a set of rules intended to be also read by people are not all totally fluent in English. But I would keep "all" at least.
2
the joy of wiki editing is that perfection is not required.(remove POV. What is perfection when talking about English anyway?)
Not POV at all. You don't have to edit any article to your own standards of perfection if you don't want to. Work on the parts where your own strengths lie. Others will fix the parts where their strengths lie. That is POV only in that it is a POV espoused at Wikipedia, quite different than a POV that article will be accepted only when vetted by give other experts, which is another quite legitimate POV.
3
Copy-editing wikipedians will refer to this manual, and pages will either gradually be made to conform with this guide or this guide will itself be changed to the same effect.(turn the tide against instruction creep)
This explains why so-called rules can be ignored, because other Wikipedians in their editing will enforce them. It looks forward to the ideal of total agreement between style guide and all articles. It is a clear explanation of how things are supposed to work in Wikipedia, and in this case (more than in some other explanations elsewhere of other facets of Wikipeida), how they actually do work. Wikipedia has a house style, just like other publications. It has editors who attempt to enforce it, just like other publications. The difference is that anyone who wants to can be a writer or editor. Many publications do not insist that all writers conform exactly to their house style: that is one thing editors are for, to edit the writing to conform to house style or to ask the author to rework material to conform to house style. The struck-out sentence is essential.
4 This article concentrates on when you may choose to use them
No. This article concentrates on "when". A writer may ignore the rules, as indicated, but later editors of the text should mostly apply them and should mostly not edit an article contrary to the rules. The meaning of the original has been subverted.
7 You may wish to consider the following suggestions: (clarify that these are guidelines not rules)
This is not clarification. This is a radical change. Guidelines are rules, whether on the page to guide a pen or in common metaphor. The material removed in number 2 clarifies: "Pages are expected to be edited to conform with this guide."
:10
This is discouraged in most situations.(no need to say this, people know what looks ok and what doesn't)
This text was a strong hint to editors that this practice should mostly be edited out, but not always – that some latitude is given here. Such hints are needed to make the guide practical. And one of the reasons why there are such guides is that people disagree on what looks ok and what doesn't.
These changes indicate a POV contrary to how this page and the more specialized parts of this guide are used within Wikipedia. The pages are used as guides and sets of rules for editors who are deciding how to improve an article and are also used as protection against editors making arbitary stylistic changes to an article. Their wordings are cited regularly in disputes. They have far more authority than simple suggestions that Wkipedians "may wish to consider". They are the rules.
8 Contractions reinserted throughout (making article easier to read)
A style guide should follow its own rules. First loosen the rules in the guide by obtaining consensus on this point. I personally doubt that there is any gain in readibility in using contractions. There is probably more gain in readibility in avoiding negatives which would get rid of many of them as a side-effect. Also, not all rules in this guide or its sub-guides are what I would choose to use. But one tries to follow them, just as one should to follow the guidelines in any project one becomes involved with. Idiosyncratic claims that something is easier or harder are often undemonstrable. Personally, I prefer spelling through and though as thru and tho, forms that are, I think, obviously easier to read, forms that did have a vogue for a while in the 60s. Also iland is easier to read than island as well as being the correct etymological form. (I have numerous other preferred spellings that I think would not be welcomed here.)
12 Replaced 'capitalization' with 'using capitals' (and derivatives) throughout. (keeping it simple)
"Using capitals" is not quite the same thing. It suggests uppercasing of the entire word (which admittedly capitalization can also mean). Later, instead of "using capitals" the replacement is the specific and perfectly accurate "begin the first letter with a capital". Now words ending in -ize/-ize are usually not very attractive and there is nothing wrong with using synonyms for that reason. But I do object to what appears to be an attempt to take away the supposed freedom at Wikipedia to choose the spelling one wishes (within the limits of some demonstratable modern conventional spelling and consistancy within an articles) by discouraging use of the very words to which this freedom can be applied. Surely we would not accept attempts to replace all occurrences of died with the euphemisim passed on and all occurrences of genital organs with private parts and so forth, while not disallowing such euphemisms either. The phrase "being the first letter with a capital" looks fine until one realizes why it is being used. Then it looks absurd: variantion-spelling prudery against words that are not monogomous in respect to the string of letters they hang out with. Should food in Wikipedia, but nowhere else, have only taste, and not flavour? Should Wikipedia have theatrical establishments and movie houses and stages but no theatres or theaters?
There are some excellent style changes here as well. I like some of the changes very much. But I agree with Maurreen. There are too many changes here and too many of them are dubious and too many indicate an attempt to change the POV of how this page is used and has been intended to be used to consider this suggested replacement adequate as a whole.
Jallan 02:44, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I think the elimination of all contractions on this page was a bit hasty. Some of the resulting expressions, such as "Do not get fancy", seem quite awkward to me. I'd also argue that Wikipedia's tone in general is more informal than paper encyclopedias and so benefits from more conversational wording (I also used this to argue for singular they.) While eliminating contractions is often acceptable, I would suggest it be avoided when it results in a stilted or awkward expression. Am I alone in this? Derrick Coetzee 16:18, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
You're invited to a poll at Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks over whether that should remain the article's title or it should be changed to "Attacks of September 11, 2001".
I favor the latter, because using two commas to set the year off is widely supported by U.S. English reference books, and Wikipedia style says: "If a word or phrase is generally regarded as correct, then prefer it to an alternative that is often regarded as incorrect." Maurreen 07:38, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I would like to suggest removing the following guidline:
I think this is wrong for the following reasons:
Gadykozma 14:45, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
In short articles, do not add any links to the "See also" section that are already present in the text of the article.
A short article might be defined as an article entirely visible on a terminal without scrolling, but then that despends on the user's resolution settings. That's the best defence I can come up with to keeping this in some form. Unless someone has a better one and a different modification, I'd go with deleting it. Jallan 22:48, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
In short articles, do not add any links to the "See also" section that are already present in the text of the article.
Maurreen 17:21, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
First: Notice the also in "See also". Second:No one needs links made in the article body also in a "see also" section in an online article when computers have the capability of instantly searching through text. In windows try Ctrl-F. Hyacinth 03:04, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
toAgain, do not add any links to the "See also" section that are already present in the text of the article. If you remove a redundant link from the See also section of an article, it may be an explicit cross reference (see below), so consider making the link in the main text bold instead.
Or even:In short articles and within sections of longer articles there should normally be no duplication of links: a particularly important link should be only in a See also section or in the main text in bold style, but not both.
Jallan 03:31, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)Avoid duplicating links in short articles or within sections of long articles. An especially important link can be emphasized by placing it within a See also section or by bolding it.
I am looking for a input to help resolve a dispute about the article on style guides. The question is this: Was the article better before or after the rewrite? Thanks. Maurreen 15:30, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I added a section on specialised vocabulary. Feel free to edit as required, but certainly for rail transport, a warning is needed. The US and UK evolved entirely separate terminology or "jargon". So I first said that most situations people need to explain jargon anyways, or avoid its use, but pointed out that this was especially necessary as some places use an entirely different set of jargon.
Should I add the section to this current page? zoney ♣ talk 11:08, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I've moved a list of where all the Manual of Style-type guidance can be found to the top of the page. (i) It will be easier to see what policies we've got now; (ii) It will shorten that annoyingly long contents list; (iii) it's slightly shorter. Hope this isn't seen as too controversial. (And I'm not attached to the linking sentence I've added at the top of the new list. If anyone can think of better wording, please change it.) jguk 20:38, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I've moved a list of where all the Manual of Style-type guidance can be found to the top of the page. (i) It will be easier to see what policies we've got now; (ii) It will shorten that annoyingly long contents list; (iii) it's slightly shorter. Hope this isn't seen as too controversial. (And I'm not attached to the linking sentence I've added at the top of the new list. If anyone can think of better wording, please change it.) jguk 20:38, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Sometimes I think it is work repeating a link. For instance, Maher Arar contains the text " Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and Sudan"; Syria is not linked because it is mentioned further up the article. I would link it. PhilHibbs 14:18, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The existing guideline for capitalization of region names is confusingly vague. Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Directions_and_regions currently says:
This seems to conflict with the consensus at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization), which I've codified in that page as "region names are proper nouns". I suggest trimming the confusing text quoted above and replacing it with the following guidelines: (a) region names and geographic features notable enough to have Wikipedia articles are proper nouns, and should be capitalized; (b) region names containing directions (eastern Iowa) are proper nouns only if widely used enough to merit their own articles, and should otherwise be lowercased in article text. Comments? -- Rbellin 22:14, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The primary thing that confused me about the existing guideline is that it seems to apply to all region names, when in fact (I think?) it wants to discuss the specific case of region names including directions. That is, regions like the Connecticut River Valley (this was the one I was trying to deal with) are preferably all-caps, at least according to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization), while the case of eastern Iowa or Western Massachusetts can be more complicated. So I'm okay with the vagueness, if it must persist, on this subtopic, but the broader topic should be handled more prominently. (And "notable" or "meriting a Wikipedia article" is not a standard based on the current state of Wikipedia.) -- Rbellin 03:29, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
We might want to consider how to avoid or resolve alphabetic international rivalry within Wikipedia. For example, when listing items, do you have a preference for either of these two formats: "U.K. style guides, U.S. style guides" or "American style guides, British style guides" ? Maurreen 16:30, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
The Manual says: 'For the English Wikipedia, there is no preference among the major national varieties of English.'
I agree with this rule. But there are two exceptions to this rule in the manual. I propose removing these exceptions. Poll to run until 20:00 UTC on 8 November.
I object to this poll. The person who started it didn’t even sign the proposal. This proposed change in policy has had no previous discussion, let alone a serious effort at consensus.
Further, the poll does not list the option of leaving the policy as is.
See Wikipedia:How to create policy, which includes changing current policy. It includes the following:
Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines says: "Wikipedia policy is formulated for the most part by consensus. This consensus may be reached through open debate over difficult questions, or it may simply develop as a result of established practice."
Wikipedia:Survey guidelines says: "Wikipedia is not a democracy. In general decisions are made by consensus (see consensus decision making) rather than a strict majority rule. However, on occasion it is useful to take a survey of opinions on some issue, as an aid to achieving consensus and an indication of which options have the most support. ... Consensus must be reached about the nature of the survey before it starts. Allow about a week for this process." Maurreen 06:06, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Proposal 1 is to delete the following:
When referring to the United States, please use "U.S."; that is the more common style in that country, is easier to search for automatically, and we want one uniform style on this. When referring to the United States in a long abbreviation (USA, USN, USAF), periods should not be used.
Rationale for:
Replace the policy:
8.3 Commas
As stated by Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, and other authoritative sources, when a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series of three or more elements, a comma is used before the conjunction: "The wires were brown, blue, and green." The reason for the final serial comma is to prevent the last two elements from being confused as a unit. Consider its utility in this sentence: "The author would like to thank her parents, Sinéad O'Connor and Pope John-Paul II."
With:
Take care to avoid ambiguity when using lists as part of a sentence. Ambiguity can arise when it is unclear whether words are or are not in apposition. Consider the following sentences:
"The author would like to thank her parents, Sinéad and Bob."
"Joe Bloggs was congratulated by John Smith, the Chairman of the committee, and Jane Doe."
Is the author thanking two people (her parents), or three?
Did two or three people congratulate Joe Bloggs?
Disambiguate by rephrasing or using semicolons:
"The author would like to thank Sinéad and Bob, her parents"
"Joe Bloggs was congratulated by John Smith, the Chairman of the committee; and Jane Doe."
Rationale for:
As per proposal 2 (A), but do not replace the deleted text with anything.
Rationale for:
The Manual says: 'For the English Wikipedia, there is no preference among the major national varieties of English.'
I agree with this rule. But there are two exceptions to this rule in the manual. I propose removing these exceptions. Poll to run until 20:00 UTC on 8 November.
I object to this poll. The person who started it didn’t even sign the proposal. This proposed change in policy has had no previous discussion, let alone a serious effort at consensus.
See Wikipedia:How to create policy, which includes changing current policy. It includes the following:
Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines says: "Wikipedia policy is formulated for the most part by consensus. This consensus may be reached through open debate over difficult questions, or it may simply develop as a result of established practice."
Wikipedia:Survey guidelines says: "Wikipedia is not a democracy. In general decisions are made by consensus (see consensus decision making) rather than a strict majority rule. However, on occasion it is useful to take a survey of opinions on some issue, as an aid to achieving consensus and an indication of which options have the most support. ... Consensus must be reached about the nature of the survey before it starts. Allow about a week for this process." Maurreen 06:06, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Proposal 1 is to delete the following:
When referring to the United States, please use "U.S."; that is the more common style in that country, is easier to search for automatically, and we want one uniform style on this. When referring to the United States in a long abbreviation (USA, USN, USAF), periods should not be used.
Rationale for:
Replace the policy:
8.3 Commas
As stated by Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, and other authoritative sources, when a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series of three or more elements, a comma is used before the conjunction: "The wires were brown, blue, and green." The reason for the final serial comma is to prevent the last two elements from being confused as a unit. Consider its utility in this sentence: "The author would like to thank her parents, Sinéad O'Connor and Pope John-Paul II."
With:
Take care to avoid ambiguity when using lists as part of a sentence. Ambiguity can arise when it is unclear whether words are or are not in apposition. Consider the following sentences:
"The author would like to thank her parents, Sinéad and Bob."
"Joe Bloggs was congratulated by John Smith, the Chairman of the committee, and Jane Doe."
Is the author thanking two people (her parents), or three?
Did two or three people congratulate Joe Bloggs?
Disambiguate by rephrasing or using semicolons:
"The author would like to thank Sinéad and Bob, her parents"
"Joe Bloggs was congratulated by John Smith, the Chairman of the committee; and Jane Doe."
Rationale for:
Choosing any of these involves taking a position. Not mentioning the issue at all here would have meant going with #2 since that is the current position of recommended style guides.1). Leave it up to individual editors to choose between "A, B(,) and C" or "A, B, and C".
2). Mandate "A, B, and C" as is currently done and which follows almost all current publically accessible style guides except those for newspapers.
3). Mandate "A, B(,) and C" which used to be the common recommendation in many litterary and academic style guides.
As per proposal 2 (A), but do not replace the deleted text with anything.
Rationale for:
In Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style--Draft Trim discussion archive, Jguk said: “Where we can, we should avoid using language that marks it out as being US/UK or as preferring one particular style of writing words over another.” He has made similar statements elsewhere.
I believe that his view in this regard is at least part of the basis for the poll above. If so, probably that is what should be discussed, at least initially to see if anyone shares his view. Maurreen 12:58, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
In my view, some of the issues concerning this style guide might be resolved more easily if we decided some general philosophical issues that could guide future decisions. For example, these could include whether we think it should be more concise or more detailed, or how formal to be with the language. Any comments about such a possible philosophical underpinning? Maurreen 12:58, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Along the lines of what Jallan suggested about organizing supporting material for the style guide, I've been working on organizing the archives topically. One of these is called "Visual presentation."
I'm not sure what's the best title. Other options include "Layout" or "Design." What do you think? Maurreen 07:18, 5 Nov 2004 (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 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | → | Archive 10 |
Please note the current discussion on dashes has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dashes) as it was too long for this page.
Tired of the incessant omission of serial commas in many Wikipedia articles, bolstered no doubt by the odious standards set by nearly all print and online news sources that I've recently read, I finally went to my local library and reviewed every major work on writing style that they had in the Reference section. The only one that disagreed with the consensus described in this article under Commas was The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, 1st edition, 1999. Yet everyone seems to be following it! Are we so lazy that we can't be troubled to add a single comma, just because some upstart authority (compared to the Oxford, Harvard, and even Chicago University Presses) decided it needed the fractional character space taken by a punctuation mark that sometimes isn't necessary for clarity? (Excuse me while I take a few deep breaths. ☺) Anyway, since omitting the serial comma is so prevalent in popular writing, I wonder if we should cite in the main article the solitary exception to this consensus, pointing out that its motives are likely not based on clarity but rather ink and paper conservation. Comments? — Jeff Q 23:20, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Although grammar gurus abandoned that comma rule for a while in the twentieth century, we have since realized that using the serial comma (as it is called) is a good idea ...
Well, my problem with "Bob, Tom and Jerry" is that it makes Tom and Jerry seem more closely associated with one another than either is with Bob... john k 01:40, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Just an observation. The serial comma is not normally used in Ireland, or, I believe in Britain or Australia. Filiocht 12:19, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
This has no weight really, but I just think the serial comma looks messy; why add unnecessary punctuation? If its an ambiguous case, then use I use it, if not, I don't. I was tought in grade school to use it, but I always hated that (: — siro χ o
I don't feel strongly either way, but the Associated Press stylebook, which most U.S. newspapers go by, is generally against serial commas. Maurreen 17:51, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to propose that all names, in all languages, are given as [Family name] [comma] [Given name] in article titles (as, for example: Parker, Sarah Jessica). This would solve a lot of problems related to name orders which contradict the common English order of [Given name] [Family name]. Exploding Boy 21:43, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)
Wetman 07:52, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Exploding Boy might try looking up Family name and see what a mess his system would create. To begin with, not everyone has a family name. There are numerous incompatible systems of nomenclature, present and past. What benefit if the article on Hamlet were renamed to , Hamlet and the article on Henry VIII was renamed to Tudor, Henry, VIII or something similar and the article on Björk was renamed to , Björk, Guðmundsdóttir or something similar? Jallan 21:33, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
This is a terrible idea. Among other things, this makes the situation for other languages where given name comes second even worse. Will we have Mao, Zedong? john k 16:58, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Yes, Mao, Zedong is desirable if for no other reason than that people will then be aware that he was not Mr. Zedong, just as Koizumi Junichiro isn't Mr. Junichiro and Kim Il-sung isn't Mr. Il-Sung. Exploding Boy 22:15, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
Not only is this idea blatantly bad, but it contradicts our policy about locating the article at the most common english name. →Raul654 22:17, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
Just one comment: people with a patronymic but without a family name are normally sorted on their first name, thus Björk Guðmundsdóttir, not Guðmundsdóttir, Björk, even in cases where other names are sorted with family name first. (As a matter of fact, the entire Icelandic phonebook is sorted according to first name.) However, I wouldn't trust most contemporary, Anglophone contributors on Wikipedia to recognize the difference between a patronymic and a family name, and if the unnecessarily complicated way of writing "last name" first would be implemented, names with a patronymic will no doubt often be written in the wrong order. // Tupsharru 06:07, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
It appears that Exploding Boy really wants to go with standard bibliographic style. That is somewhat more complex than always putting the family surname first. General bibliographic usage as been to generally list names by surname, followed by a comma, then by the other names, when the names are post-medieval names and when they are of European origin or names of those who have adopted European conventions or when the names have been adapted to fit European conventions. These modern surnames are sometimes patrynomics rather than family surnames. Names not fitting this convention are generally not re-ordered. Classical Roman names, for example, are not reordered. One normally does not see "Antonius Creticus, Marcus" rather than "Marcus Antonius Creticus" in an index. Where in modern usage surnames seldom appear, as with royal families of Europe, the names generally don't appear ordered by surname in indexes. It would be extraordinary to find a book referring to Queen Elizabeth II of the UK and find her listed in its index under something like "Windsor, Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom, II".
An advantage of the traditional system is that it clarifies whether a surname is a modern family surname or a descriptive surname. If we come across "Marie d'Anjou" in an index, the reference is almost certainly to some pre-modern personage connected with the territory of Anjou, likely a member of its ruling family. If we come across "D'Anjou, Marie", the reference is almost certainly to a more modern person who happens to have the hereditary surname "D'Anjou". There is some small value in such a distinction, though it annoys indexers of books dealing with periods when hereditary family surnames were first coming into vogue.
But adopting the normal bibliographical system in Wikipedia would not at all solve a dispute over order of Chinese names. Under the traditional system someone knows immediately, by the presence of a comma, that in the case of "Dickens, Charles", for example, that "Dickens" is a surname and that in normal use the two elements are reversed. But coming across references like Hrólf Kraki, Vlad Tepe, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Mark Antony, Julius Caesar, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a reader unfamiliar with the name style or the persons knows nothing other than that, if there is a family name within any of these combinations, it is not marked by a comma. The only one of the above where we could reasonably make this clear though a comma is Mark Antony which we might reverse as Antony, Mark. For the rest, there is nothing to indicate whether "Hrólf", "Vlad", "Ho", "Julius", "Antiochus", and "Mao" are family names or not. In fact, of these, only "Mao" is a pure family name, "Julius" comes very close though the full family name was "Julius Caesar" (the given name "Gaius" being usually dropped in references to this particular personage).
One might use Mao, Zedong as Exploding Boy suggests. But the comma also indicates reversal and so indicates that in normal text we should see "Zedong Mao". That is incorrect. Placing a comma here would mislead. And that is not done in traditional usage. The dispute on particular names is because in environments derived from European culture the elements of Chinese names are indeed sometimes reversed. Should a Chinese name appear in reversed order or native order in an article title if it mostly appears in reversed order in English sources, as for example the name of a person of Chinese ancestry who is a native-born US citizen? Adopting normal bibliographic conventions in Wikipedia would now mean that the dispute would be instead about whether a comma should follow the family name rather than about the order in which the name elements should appear. The dispute would still exist. Exploding Boy's suggestion doesn't solve it at all.
Jallan 14:20, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I've done some searching and come to the conclusions that (a) we don't currently have a policy on this and (b) this is the right place to raise the issue. Apologies if I'm mistaken.
Capitalization in Wikipedia articles is not consistent as regards the following usages. Can we adopt official policies and include them in our MoS? Have I missed the fact that we already have them? Or is this not the sort of thing we need to adopt specific policies for?
I know I'm supposed to be bold, but I didn't think unilateral changes to the Manual of Style were quite what was intended. Comments on these proposals are solicited.
Clearly one heads north when one is going to North Dakota, but does one go to Southeastern Pennsylvania or southeastern Pennsylvania? If something comes from the Pacific Northwest, is it Northwestern or northwestern? I'm inclined to say the latter, i.e. to use lowercase, and the Chicago Manual of Style seems to back me up at the bottom of [1].
However, I think that Western and Eastern, when they refer to the cultures of the two hemispheres, are special cases. Western music, for example, is inconsistent, and I don't know which way to correct it. I guess I'd prefer capitals in this case, e.g. "I've spent six semesters studying Western philosophy and I'm sick of hearing about Western beliefs and customs", but I don't feel strongly about it.
How about this?
Maurreen 17:20, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
We should probably give some examples. I was thinking of something like:
Directions and regions:
I don't know that I like the idea of capitalizing when you don't know for sure, but I like it just as much as not capitalizing when you don't know for sure, and I like them both better than telling people to do whatever they feel like, which I don't think befits a style guide. — Triskaideka 20:07, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think all of this might be more trouble than it's worth. Isn't it already a standard rule of English that proper nouns are uppercase, and most other things aren't?
I think it's best for the style guide to a concise reference to common questions that arise in Wikkipedialand. Maurreen 04:59, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Triskaideka, I'm not clear on what you mean by "terms in common usage."
Is this better?
Maurreen 04:34, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Right now our official policy is to put punctuation marks inside quotation marks if it is a full quotation, but outside the quotation marks if it is a partial quotation. I've been looking at many encyclopedias and found that this is uncommon even in British publications. does anybody else feel that the current policy is needlessly confusing... or am I simply being an Ugly American here? I'd like to change it to have a uniform "punctuation goes inside quotation marks" style, but I really don't want to step on anyone's toes – just looking for a few comments on the issue. ;) [[User:Neutrality| Neutrality ( talk)]] 16:52, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)
(" Sarah")]] 22:30, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Three French words with related meanings are maison 'house', domaine 'estate, property', and château 'castle'.
Three French words with related meanings are maison 'house,' domaine, 'estate, property,' and château 'castle.'
In a literary work, we recommend the American style of always placing periods and commas inside the quotation marks. In a technical or legal work, where accuracy is essential, we recommend the British practice of placing periods and commas within quotation marks only when they are part of the quoted material.
Various observations: The comma and period inside the quotes "look better" only when true typography is used to place the quote over the punctuation, so that's not really an argument for doing it. My arguments for doing it come from Chicago and many other American style guides, but most acknowledge the historic reasons for the punctuation order. In technical style guides here, it is not the general case for punctuation to go outside the quotes, only when what's inside the quotes is an exact value (as in: type this URL into the field: "http://www.foo.com".). However, I have no problem using the Wikipedia style guide and editing according to that. Elf | Talk 15:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I want to comment on the formatting of lists of inline translations of words. Compare this, from the preceding topic:
with this from the following topic on this page:
The latter--parens instead of quotes without dividing punctuation--is much easier to scan, read, comprehend than the former, and that's the form I've been changing things to as I have found them. For example, History of the Scots language was almost unreadable until parens were used. Elf | Talk 15:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'm sure I saw a comment a while ago that several users who can just about read Cyrillic find the italicised forms difficult (as some of the italicised forms aren't immediately obviously the same character as their non-italicised forms). Naturally, now I want to re-read it, I can't find it, nor can I find anything in the Manual of Style.
I'd like to propose that we create a policy thus:
A possible addition might include a guide on how to iotised and palatised characters, such as Ч (Che), Ш (Sha), Щ (Shcha), Я (Ya) and Ё (Yo). (Personally I'd suggest a háček on the core consonant(s) — so č, š, šč — and a letter Y before a vowel — ya, yo).
Opinions? :o) — OwenBlacker 21:46, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to make the proposal, consistent with a number of style guides I've read, that all Latin acronyms but especially e.g. and i.e. be avoided in articles in favour of phrases like "for example/example:" and "that is/in other words". Derrick Coetzee 01:28, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'm planning on adding this revised policy in a week if there are no objections. Comments? [[User:Neutrality| Neutrality ( talk)]] 03:07, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)
Don't think so. Punctuation is pretty much the first line of "style" and should remain in the main body of the Manual. Ortolan88 18:02, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
While most of the pages have, as thier first sentence the particular universe they're from, I was thinking if it would be good for the first line of every entry like this to appear as something like this:
Part of the Star Trek fictional universe.
Then the start of the article text (after a single empty line), just so there's something universal to differentiate fictional articles from non-fictional. -- Barry 16:46, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)
Because the discussion on gender neutrality for pronouns has died out, I'm going to remove the link to the discussion from the style guide. Maurreen 14:04, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I've seen a few potentially libelous articles, with statements along the lines of someone was "arrested for ..." If the person hasn't been convicted or pleaded guilty, the sentences should be reworeded. Does anyone object to adding an explanation in the style guide about this? Maurreen 23:16, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Moved from Village pump. Reuben 18:30, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I have always learned that constructions like "somewhat of a bore" are incorrect - in this case, "something of a bore" or "somewhat boring" would be correct. See for instance
"Common Errors in English". I haven't found any sources supporting the "somewhat of a..." form, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be correct in the UK. Any comments? In the U.S. at least, "somewhat of a..." is often used but is considered incorrect.
Reuben 08:26, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Go to Talk:Earth. I removed the word billion from the article yesterday because billion is a word with ambiguity in its meaning. Then, later on, it was returned, with scientific notation also being kept. Does anyone have any opinions about the use of the word billion at Wikipedia?? 66.245.96.130 16:30, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)
We should definately avoid this, as there are other, clearer ways of saying the same thing. It is like the flamable / inflamable debate. The amount of confusion is not worth being right. Mark Richards 03:15, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
User:Susvolans replaced a paragraph about rendering the glottal stop in Hawaiian with new material. I have reverted to the older version. The new material was as follows:
The grave accent (`) is also used as a diacritical mark to indicate a glottal stop; however, except in article titles, the left quotation mark should be used for this purpose instead (e.g., Hawai‘i, not Hawai`i or Hawai'i). It is supported in almost all browsers, and can be used in Wikipedia. <!-- Get rid of the rest of the paragraph once the English Wikipedia supports Unicode throughout --> Do not type a left quotation mark directly into Wikipedia. It may display correctly on your browser, but not on others. Instead, use the HTML entity ‘ or the numeric form, ‘ or ‘. Wikipedia in English does not currently support left quotation marks in article titles; a grave accent should be used instead.
The difficulties are that, other than in Hawaiian, the glottal stop is normally indicated by a right quotation mark or a similar mark and the left quotation mark or similar mark mark indicates a pharyngeal consonant found in Semitic languages called there ‘ayan or ‘ain. The symbols resembling quotation marks are commonly used in Latin-letter transliterations of Arabic names and of Hebrew names and words in scholarly transliterations. Accordingly all renderings of glottal stop are not done by a left-quotation mark symbol. Also, two more technical symbols are available in Unicode: U+02BE MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING and U+02BF MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING which are generally preferred by Semiticists for transliterations of Semitic words and names and which are already in use in hundreds of articles in Wikipedia for transliterations of Semitic names.
At the least the above needs to be reworded to recognize this. Personally, it seems to me reasonable to use ‘ for ( ‘ ) at the present time for the ‘okina character in Hawaiian. But that is itself not the proper character according to Unicode and Hawaiian government specifications. The proper character is U+02BD MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA. See the discussion at Okina and the external links there. If Susvolans' recommendation is accepted for Hawaiian, it should at least be mentioned in the recommendation that in future, when systems better support it, the proper ‘okina symbol should be substituted. Or, since of common browsers, only Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows currently won't find the proper characters if they exist on any font on the system and insert them, should we perhaps now be using the proper character (as is being done in many Semitic transliterations) rather than wait only because Microsoft can no longer be bothered to improve their browser to the standard of other browsers?
Jallan 15:27, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia obviously should generally be somewhere in the middle. But exactly where is probably very contentious. And the target is constantly moving. I expect this is why the matter has not come up in the style manual. It's too hot to touch and too complex. And the genie is out of the bottle already. Many articles, perhaps thousands of articles, exist using characters that don't display on all systems. Yet users and other editors aren't complaining signficantly. I don't recall ever seeing a complaint outside of an occasional individual complaint on a talk page, that was quickly overruled by others or where a compromise was easily obtained. Obviously, then, using such characters is an option, since it has been taken as an option with minimal or no opposition. There is no policy that every Wikipedia article must display to perfection on every system, regardless of browser being used and local fonts available. The problem tends to be self-correcting, in that those users who care about seeing particular special characters are also the ones who have their systems set up to view them properly (or are already used to seeing them displayed as boxes or question marks on other sites). The other users don't care, and so the boxes or question marks that appear don't matter to them. They just know that some characters are being used that don't display properly on their system, which often happens when languages other than their native language are displayed. Nothing odd there at all. All quite normal. Just what one expects. And editors using rare characters are generally restrained in their use.1. Bleeding edge: Do things right from the beginning, using the proper Unicode characters and proper XHTML features and expect readers who care to use proper tools. The entire web will catch up soon enough. After all, using anything outside of Latin 1 or one of the other standard 8-bit sets on the web was considered rather daring only three years ago. Things move very quickly. So build for the future, not for the past. People too stubborn to upgrade when upgrades are free will just have put up with a few characters not appearing properly, but often characters they don't care about anyway.
2. Ultra-careful: Don't use any character or any feature that every browser at least as old as Netscape 5.0 onward doesn't support fully. You can always update the page later. For Wikipedia this would mean almost nothing outside of Latin-1.
We were originally talking about User:Susvolans's quite reasonable attempt to replace some material in the style guide which is obviously outdated. Even the Hawaii article now ignores that recommendation. The difficulty was in part that Susvolans spoke of "glottal stop" rather than simply ‘okina and that opened up another set of issues, indeed the whole matter of special characters, however such characters are going to be defined. Also, if the style manual is going to be changed on that point, as indeed it should be, since the character proposed for ‘okina is in fact not the official character, there should be some discussion on the matter of whether people should go through articles containing Hawaiian forms and replace one incorect character (the typewriter apostrophe) by another incorrect character (the left quotation mark) or should immediately start using the proper character.
I don't think we should to try to define general usages here for all unusual characters. It's too big. What characters particular editors wish to use for transliteration depends very much on what they are trying to do and the particular languages they are dealing with and what users might expect ... and so forth. People dealing with Semitic languages should be dealing with issues having to do with transliterating Semitic languages, people dealing with English phonetics should be deciding how to render English phonetics, people dealing with Hindu languages should be deciding how to render Hindu languages, people working on articles on logic should decide what logical notation should be used, people discussing Chinese characters are the ones who can best decide which characters are most likely to display properly. If people working in any such field wish to set up standards for that field they should try to get consnensus themselves. Mostly that is what has been happening.
As to the current obsolete rule about how to render ‘okina, I have two alternate suggestions:
1. Simply remove it. It was an oddity anyway. We don't have similar rules for Semitic transliteration or Hindu transliteration or how to render Icelandic here. Those working on articles displaying Hawaiian forms can do as they wish, as is done with other languages.<br\><br\>2. Change to a modified version of Susvolans' recommendation that refers only to the ‘okina rather than glottal stop in general, which I believe is what Susvolans intended to do. The revised text might read:
To indicate the ‘okina (glottal stop) character in Hawaiian, the left quotation mark should be used (that is, Hawai‘i, not Hawai`i or Hawai'i), though in any article titles where the ‘okina should be displayed, the grave accent must currently be used as a substitute. (The proper Unicode ‘okina symbol is Unicode U+02BD MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA, but currently this is not available in many fonts and unfortunately display problems are likely to result on many systems if the correct character is used.)<!-- Get rid of the rest of the paragraph once the English Wikipedia supports Unicode throughout --> But do not type or paste a left quotation mark directly into the Wikipedia editor. It may display correctly on your browser, but not on others. Instead, use the HTML entity ‘ or the numeric form, ‘ or ‘.
I'm not pushing this exact text or even the exact recommendation. It is for those working on articles where Hawaiian forms will be displayed to decide whether ‘okina should now be rendered by ‘ or by the more correct ʻ (as in Hawaiʻi versus Hawai‘i). They can best balance current problems versus future benefits in using the ʻ character now or using ‘ now—knowing that in a year or two at most everything should be changed to the proper form.
Jallan 04:12, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Read m:instruction creep. Restricting the character set other than on a case-by-case pragmatic basis is generally bad, so we should just cut back, possibly including parts of the preceding section. Susvolans 12:26, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
This is general, rather than restricted to Hawaiian and makes it clear that the curly single quotation mark characters may be used in particular circumstances without committing to desireablity of doing so, as something for case-by-case discussion on talk pages and so on. I think it is useful to warn against attempting to use the curly quote characters directly rather than using the HTML entities.<br\><br\> Jallan 14:27, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)Characters identical in appearance to left single quotation mark or right single quotation mark are used as letters in some languages and some Latin-letter transliteration systems, for example the ‘okina character in Hawaiian and for ’alef and ‘ayan or ‘ain in Semitic languages. For such purposes, use of the single left quotation and right quotation characters may be acceptable to produce unambiguous display on almost all systems even though these characters are not the recommended ones in Unicode for those purposes. The characters may also be used in discussions about the quotation marks themselves.<!-- Get rid of the rest of the paragraph once the English Wikipedia supports Unicode throughout --> If using left or right quotation mark for such reasons, do not type or paste a left quotation mark directly into the Wikipedia editor. It may display correctly on your browser, but not on others. Instead, use the HTML entities ‘ or ’ or the correponding numeric forms: ‘ and ’ or ‘ and ’. If necessary to represent such characters as letters in article titles, the normal straight apostrophe ( ' ) should usually be used in place of the right quotation mark and the grave accent ( ` ) in place of the left quotation mark.
1. Simply remove it. It was an oddity anyway. We don't have similar rules for Semitic transliteration or Hindu transliteration or how to render Icelandic here. Those working on articles displaying Hawaiian forms can do as they wish, as is done with other languages.<br\><br\> Maurreen 13:52, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The current guide says (under "scientifc style"):
This is OK (I guess) but recently we have had a round of edit war followed by inconclusive (rather thin) discussion over at Talk:Global_warming#Standards_.26_Chemical_names over whether this policy applies to science articles in general, or just (as the policy above appears to say) for chemical names. I'm introducing the discussion here in the hope of getting some more opinions.
I would like to propose that the policy above be modified to include:
or somesuch. You might think that unneccessary, but see the discussion on the t:GW ( William M. Connolley 18:49, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)).
Google hits:
Search pattern All languages English only sulfur 1,760,000 1,130,000 sulphur 1,560,000 978,000 sulfur -sulphur 1,130,000 1,050,000 sulphur -sulfur 967,000 913,000
The form sulfur is currently at least acceptable to a large number of people (as is sulphur), however unacceptable it might be to one individual here. That's fact. And of course many who use sulfur in some contexts are quite willing to accept sulphur in others, and vice versa, or willing to accept both evenly, or don't care much at all, or follow their own preferences in their own writing and don't mind others doing the same. Jallan 20:41, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
"I would like to propose that the policy above be modified to include: note that this policy applies strictly to articles whose main concern is chemistry, and not to science articles only peripherally concerned with chemistry, in which case the std wiki policy applies.. "
Please do not insert this shortsighted, hasty and completely unnecessary clause in the style manual. Can you imagine the edit wars that will be created by such a thing? Each and every article dealing with chemistry in any way will have one. We've already had a war on Global warming because Connolley thinks that it is only slightly related to chemistry
and therefore should remain exempt from IUPAC nomenclature (Vsmith and I disagree with that completely). Wikipedia should strive to attain the maximum amount of standardization between all articles, and especially SCIENCE articles, as possible. I wish to stress again, this is NOT a USA vs. whatever argument here, this is an international standard.-- Deglr6328 23:13, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The issue has been discussed in Wikipedia:WikiProject Science and the following is the reccomendation there:
- Vsmith 22:27, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
User:William M. Connolley has launched an edit and revert attack on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Science page in an obvious attempt to be disruptive and obscure the points made here. I am asking him to stop and engage in serious discussion. - Vsmith 17:20, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I am proposing that the current guide under scientific style:
In articles about chemicals and chemistry, use IUPAC names for chemicals wherever possible, except in article titles, where the common name should be used if different, followed by mention of the IUPAC name.
be modified to reflect the
Wikipedia:WikiProject Science recommendation above, as follows.
In the interest of consistency and clarity the
IUPAC standard for chemical names and spellings should be followed in all science and science related articles, except in article titles, where the common name of a compound should be used if different, followed by mention of the IUPAC name. Alternative terminology and spellings should be referenced in addition when dealing with historical development and some local or regional issues.
-
Vsmith 22:41, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Jallan 13:54, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)Variant terminology and spellings may also be used in addition to IUPAC recommendations where appropriate, for example in direct quotations and close paraphrases, in historical discussions, when treating local or regional issues, and for general clarification.
How about spelling out IUPAC on first reference? I never heard of it before I came to Wikipedia. Maurreen 04:07, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Follow the links here
IUPAC
The following quote is from [
World Wide Words], (read the whole article for a good and humorous perspective on the issue):
Nobody is suggesting British people change these spellings for all purposes, only when using them in scientific contexts. The Royal Society of Chemistry rushed out a press release the next day to support the QCA, pointing out that standardisation is especially important for ease of communication (like looking things up in databases, for example, where variant versions of common terms are a bugbear). The Society added that standard chemical nomenclature already specifies the f forms of words like sulfur following agreement by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 1990.
-
Vsmith 12:02, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Maybe it would be good to invite people interested in chemistry to the discussion. Maurreen 22:12, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I'm going to delete the following, which was not discussed. The point here seems to be only that references can get outdated. Maurreen 22:51, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
"However, bear in mind that good manuals of style only report what constructions/language people used when they were researched. When dealing with new constructions/neologisms/changes in usage of language, they may not be adequate. And if it's a fine point you're faced with, you'll probably find both options you're thinking about are acceptable anyway."
I am going to revert to before the recent changes by jguk, which were not discussed and more than I initially realized. I will add back in the notes about discussing significant changes. Maurreen 05:11, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Because the style guide is about 40 kb, I made a quick trim draft at * Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style--Draft Trim. See if you think it's OK. Maurreen 05:58, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I think this should be put back. It is a nice tip for rare but occasional cases where extra spacing is wanted (without fiddling with ).The page itself will only display one space (unless you use to force it otherwise).
This was only added to the Manual very recently. But it is recommendation of most style guides and I believe it to be an excellent one, one I've tried to follow for years, though I still catch myself typing one or the other of these. The abbreviations i.e. and e.g. are essentially space-savers for use primarily in footnotes and in compressed writing and in technical writing and I think should be left there, where they do belong.* Scholarly abbreviations of Latin terms like i.e., or e.g. should be avoided and English terms such as such as and for example used instead.
I personally found this very helpful. I think it should remain though it could do with some shortening.<br\><br\>I agree with the rest of the changes. I especially agree with the omission of multiple examples where one or two alone suffices.<br\>Thus "other meanings" should be used rather than "alternate meaning" or "alternative meaning". Some dictionaries discourage or do not even recognize this latter use of alternate. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary "Usage Note" at alternative simply says: "Alternative should not be confused with alternate." However, alternative is also not entirely acceptable because of the very common connotations in American English of "non-traditional" or "out-of-the-mainstream". Further, some traditional usage experts consider "alternative" to be appropriate only when there are exactly two alternatives.
The colon doesn't work well, as it only indents on the left side. I have been using <blockquote> and </blockquote> instead which do the job properly. I realize they are deprecated HTML tags ... but they work properly.This is done by prepending a colon to the first line.
I agree with this, but why bother? In actual practice in Wikipedia it seems it is ok to ignore this, as long as you do it with a template. Most inconsistant.Try to avoid highlighting that the article is incomplete and in need of further work.
Anglicization is just Oxford-style British English spelling, as used, for example, in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: "Translation of these presented little difficulty; but there remained one or two older names of forgotten meaning, and these I have been content to anglicize in spelling: as Took for Tûk, or Boffin for Bophîn." This is a very bad example in the Manual. Anyone jarred by that deserves a good jarring! :-)A reference to "the American labour movement" (with a U) or to "Anglicization" (with a Z) may be jarring.
This advice is horrendous! Is there another style guide in the world that would suggest one should reconsider using normal, everyday English words because they have more than one common spelling? The result of this, if people paid any attention, would be a non-standard Wikipedia dialect of English, limited to spelling-neutral vocabulary. Better to go with a fixed spelling, whether US or Britsh or whatever, than this!<br\><br\> Jallan 01:12, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)If the spelling appears within the article text, also consider a consistent synonym such as focus or middle rather than center/centre.
Jallan, my understanding about the part on Latin abbreviations is that there was no consensus.
For the other things that you'd like put back in, do you want to do that, and then we can move it over to the regular style guide page?
Then we could talk about other substantive changes separately. Thanks. Maurreen 02:53, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Yet the very next section reads:A reference to "the American labour movement" (with a U) or to "Anglicization" (with a Z) may be jarring.
... a supposed example of when one should italicize. My feeling is that capital letters standing for letter names are more often not italicized in such contexts, unlike lowercase letters. If the Draft Trim says for another day without any complaints or additional changes, then I guess it can be taken as accepted. Jallan 03:29, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)The letter E is the most common letter in English
[[<s>George W. Bush</s>grammar]]
, is encouraged. [[language]]s
. [[language|languages]]
— and easier to type. This syntax is also applicable to adjective constructs such as [[Asia]]n
, as well as hyphenated phrases and the like.I disagree with jguk's changes to the draft trim. A trim is meant only to shorten. Any desired changes in meaning deserve to be brought up separately and individually. And I agree with Jallan that they should wait until after a decision on the draft trim. Maurreen 05:57, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
1 Writers are not required to follow
all or any ofthese rules (remove tautology)'
The tautology was an idiomatic, nuanced tautology. Perhaps idiomatic nuance should be avoided in a set of rules intended to be also read by people are not all totally fluent in English. But I would keep "all" at least.
2
the joy of wiki editing is that perfection is not required.(remove POV. What is perfection when talking about English anyway?)
Not POV at all. You don't have to edit any article to your own standards of perfection if you don't want to. Work on the parts where your own strengths lie. Others will fix the parts where their strengths lie. That is POV only in that it is a POV espoused at Wikipedia, quite different than a POV that article will be accepted only when vetted by give other experts, which is another quite legitimate POV.
3
Copy-editing wikipedians will refer to this manual, and pages will either gradually be made to conform with this guide or this guide will itself be changed to the same effect.(turn the tide against instruction creep)
This explains why so-called rules can be ignored, because other Wikipedians in their editing will enforce them. It looks forward to the ideal of total agreement between style guide and all articles. It is a clear explanation of how things are supposed to work in Wikipedia, and in this case (more than in some other explanations elsewhere of other facets of Wikipeida), how they actually do work. Wikipedia has a house style, just like other publications. It has editors who attempt to enforce it, just like other publications. The difference is that anyone who wants to can be a writer or editor. Many publications do not insist that all writers conform exactly to their house style: that is one thing editors are for, to edit the writing to conform to house style or to ask the author to rework material to conform to house style. The struck-out sentence is essential.
4 This article concentrates on when you may choose to use them
No. This article concentrates on "when". A writer may ignore the rules, as indicated, but later editors of the text should mostly apply them and should mostly not edit an article contrary to the rules. The meaning of the original has been subverted.
7 You may wish to consider the following suggestions: (clarify that these are guidelines not rules)
This is not clarification. This is a radical change. Guidelines are rules, whether on the page to guide a pen or in common metaphor. The material removed in number 2 clarifies: "Pages are expected to be edited to conform with this guide."
:10
This is discouraged in most situations.(no need to say this, people know what looks ok and what doesn't)
This text was a strong hint to editors that this practice should mostly be edited out, but not always – that some latitude is given here. Such hints are needed to make the guide practical. And one of the reasons why there are such guides is that people disagree on what looks ok and what doesn't.
These changes indicate a POV contrary to how this page and the more specialized parts of this guide are used within Wikipedia. The pages are used as guides and sets of rules for editors who are deciding how to improve an article and are also used as protection against editors making arbitary stylistic changes to an article. Their wordings are cited regularly in disputes. They have far more authority than simple suggestions that Wkipedians "may wish to consider". They are the rules.
8 Contractions reinserted throughout (making article easier to read)
A style guide should follow its own rules. First loosen the rules in the guide by obtaining consensus on this point. I personally doubt that there is any gain in readibility in using contractions. There is probably more gain in readibility in avoiding negatives which would get rid of many of them as a side-effect. Also, not all rules in this guide or its sub-guides are what I would choose to use. But one tries to follow them, just as one should to follow the guidelines in any project one becomes involved with. Idiosyncratic claims that something is easier or harder are often undemonstrable. Personally, I prefer spelling through and though as thru and tho, forms that are, I think, obviously easier to read, forms that did have a vogue for a while in the 60s. Also iland is easier to read than island as well as being the correct etymological form. (I have numerous other preferred spellings that I think would not be welcomed here.)
12 Replaced 'capitalization' with 'using capitals' (and derivatives) throughout. (keeping it simple)
"Using capitals" is not quite the same thing. It suggests uppercasing of the entire word (which admittedly capitalization can also mean). Later, instead of "using capitals" the replacement is the specific and perfectly accurate "begin the first letter with a capital". Now words ending in -ize/-ize are usually not very attractive and there is nothing wrong with using synonyms for that reason. But I do object to what appears to be an attempt to take away the supposed freedom at Wikipedia to choose the spelling one wishes (within the limits of some demonstratable modern conventional spelling and consistancy within an articles) by discouraging use of the very words to which this freedom can be applied. Surely we would not accept attempts to replace all occurrences of died with the euphemisim passed on and all occurrences of genital organs with private parts and so forth, while not disallowing such euphemisms either. The phrase "being the first letter with a capital" looks fine until one realizes why it is being used. Then it looks absurd: variantion-spelling prudery against words that are not monogomous in respect to the string of letters they hang out with. Should food in Wikipedia, but nowhere else, have only taste, and not flavour? Should Wikipedia have theatrical establishments and movie houses and stages but no theatres or theaters?
There are some excellent style changes here as well. I like some of the changes very much. But I agree with Maurreen. There are too many changes here and too many of them are dubious and too many indicate an attempt to change the POV of how this page is used and has been intended to be used to consider this suggested replacement adequate as a whole.
Jallan 02:44, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I think the elimination of all contractions on this page was a bit hasty. Some of the resulting expressions, such as "Do not get fancy", seem quite awkward to me. I'd also argue that Wikipedia's tone in general is more informal than paper encyclopedias and so benefits from more conversational wording (I also used this to argue for singular they.) While eliminating contractions is often acceptable, I would suggest it be avoided when it results in a stilted or awkward expression. Am I alone in this? Derrick Coetzee 16:18, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
You're invited to a poll at Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks over whether that should remain the article's title or it should be changed to "Attacks of September 11, 2001".
I favor the latter, because using two commas to set the year off is widely supported by U.S. English reference books, and Wikipedia style says: "If a word or phrase is generally regarded as correct, then prefer it to an alternative that is often regarded as incorrect." Maurreen 07:38, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I would like to suggest removing the following guidline:
I think this is wrong for the following reasons:
Gadykozma 14:45, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
In short articles, do not add any links to the "See also" section that are already present in the text of the article.
A short article might be defined as an article entirely visible on a terminal without scrolling, but then that despends on the user's resolution settings. That's the best defence I can come up with to keeping this in some form. Unless someone has a better one and a different modification, I'd go with deleting it. Jallan 22:48, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
In short articles, do not add any links to the "See also" section that are already present in the text of the article.
Maurreen 17:21, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
First: Notice the also in "See also". Second:No one needs links made in the article body also in a "see also" section in an online article when computers have the capability of instantly searching through text. In windows try Ctrl-F. Hyacinth 03:04, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
toAgain, do not add any links to the "See also" section that are already present in the text of the article. If you remove a redundant link from the See also section of an article, it may be an explicit cross reference (see below), so consider making the link in the main text bold instead.
Or even:In short articles and within sections of longer articles there should normally be no duplication of links: a particularly important link should be only in a See also section or in the main text in bold style, but not both.
Jallan 03:31, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)Avoid duplicating links in short articles or within sections of long articles. An especially important link can be emphasized by placing it within a See also section or by bolding it.
I am looking for a input to help resolve a dispute about the article on style guides. The question is this: Was the article better before or after the rewrite? Thanks. Maurreen 15:30, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I added a section on specialised vocabulary. Feel free to edit as required, but certainly for rail transport, a warning is needed. The US and UK evolved entirely separate terminology or "jargon". So I first said that most situations people need to explain jargon anyways, or avoid its use, but pointed out that this was especially necessary as some places use an entirely different set of jargon.
Should I add the section to this current page? zoney ♣ talk 11:08, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I've moved a list of where all the Manual of Style-type guidance can be found to the top of the page. (i) It will be easier to see what policies we've got now; (ii) It will shorten that annoyingly long contents list; (iii) it's slightly shorter. Hope this isn't seen as too controversial. (And I'm not attached to the linking sentence I've added at the top of the new list. If anyone can think of better wording, please change it.) jguk 20:38, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I've moved a list of where all the Manual of Style-type guidance can be found to the top of the page. (i) It will be easier to see what policies we've got now; (ii) It will shorten that annoyingly long contents list; (iii) it's slightly shorter. Hope this isn't seen as too controversial. (And I'm not attached to the linking sentence I've added at the top of the new list. If anyone can think of better wording, please change it.) jguk 20:38, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Sometimes I think it is work repeating a link. For instance, Maher Arar contains the text " Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and Sudan"; Syria is not linked because it is mentioned further up the article. I would link it. PhilHibbs 14:18, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The existing guideline for capitalization of region names is confusingly vague. Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Directions_and_regions currently says:
This seems to conflict with the consensus at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization), which I've codified in that page as "region names are proper nouns". I suggest trimming the confusing text quoted above and replacing it with the following guidelines: (a) region names and geographic features notable enough to have Wikipedia articles are proper nouns, and should be capitalized; (b) region names containing directions (eastern Iowa) are proper nouns only if widely used enough to merit their own articles, and should otherwise be lowercased in article text. Comments? -- Rbellin 22:14, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The primary thing that confused me about the existing guideline is that it seems to apply to all region names, when in fact (I think?) it wants to discuss the specific case of region names including directions. That is, regions like the Connecticut River Valley (this was the one I was trying to deal with) are preferably all-caps, at least according to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization), while the case of eastern Iowa or Western Massachusetts can be more complicated. So I'm okay with the vagueness, if it must persist, on this subtopic, but the broader topic should be handled more prominently. (And "notable" or "meriting a Wikipedia article" is not a standard based on the current state of Wikipedia.) -- Rbellin 03:29, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
We might want to consider how to avoid or resolve alphabetic international rivalry within Wikipedia. For example, when listing items, do you have a preference for either of these two formats: "U.K. style guides, U.S. style guides" or "American style guides, British style guides" ? Maurreen 16:30, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
The Manual says: 'For the English Wikipedia, there is no preference among the major national varieties of English.'
I agree with this rule. But there are two exceptions to this rule in the manual. I propose removing these exceptions. Poll to run until 20:00 UTC on 8 November.
I object to this poll. The person who started it didn’t even sign the proposal. This proposed change in policy has had no previous discussion, let alone a serious effort at consensus.
Further, the poll does not list the option of leaving the policy as is.
See Wikipedia:How to create policy, which includes changing current policy. It includes the following:
Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines says: "Wikipedia policy is formulated for the most part by consensus. This consensus may be reached through open debate over difficult questions, or it may simply develop as a result of established practice."
Wikipedia:Survey guidelines says: "Wikipedia is not a democracy. In general decisions are made by consensus (see consensus decision making) rather than a strict majority rule. However, on occasion it is useful to take a survey of opinions on some issue, as an aid to achieving consensus and an indication of which options have the most support. ... Consensus must be reached about the nature of the survey before it starts. Allow about a week for this process." Maurreen 06:06, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Proposal 1 is to delete the following:
When referring to the United States, please use "U.S."; that is the more common style in that country, is easier to search for automatically, and we want one uniform style on this. When referring to the United States in a long abbreviation (USA, USN, USAF), periods should not be used.
Rationale for:
Replace the policy:
8.3 Commas
As stated by Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, and other authoritative sources, when a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series of three or more elements, a comma is used before the conjunction: "The wires were brown, blue, and green." The reason for the final serial comma is to prevent the last two elements from being confused as a unit. Consider its utility in this sentence: "The author would like to thank her parents, Sinéad O'Connor and Pope John-Paul II."
With:
Take care to avoid ambiguity when using lists as part of a sentence. Ambiguity can arise when it is unclear whether words are or are not in apposition. Consider the following sentences:
"The author would like to thank her parents, Sinéad and Bob."
"Joe Bloggs was congratulated by John Smith, the Chairman of the committee, and Jane Doe."
Is the author thanking two people (her parents), or three?
Did two or three people congratulate Joe Bloggs?
Disambiguate by rephrasing or using semicolons:
"The author would like to thank Sinéad and Bob, her parents"
"Joe Bloggs was congratulated by John Smith, the Chairman of the committee; and Jane Doe."
Rationale for:
As per proposal 2 (A), but do not replace the deleted text with anything.
Rationale for:
The Manual says: 'For the English Wikipedia, there is no preference among the major national varieties of English.'
I agree with this rule. But there are two exceptions to this rule in the manual. I propose removing these exceptions. Poll to run until 20:00 UTC on 8 November.
I object to this poll. The person who started it didn’t even sign the proposal. This proposed change in policy has had no previous discussion, let alone a serious effort at consensus.
See Wikipedia:How to create policy, which includes changing current policy. It includes the following:
Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines says: "Wikipedia policy is formulated for the most part by consensus. This consensus may be reached through open debate over difficult questions, or it may simply develop as a result of established practice."
Wikipedia:Survey guidelines says: "Wikipedia is not a democracy. In general decisions are made by consensus (see consensus decision making) rather than a strict majority rule. However, on occasion it is useful to take a survey of opinions on some issue, as an aid to achieving consensus and an indication of which options have the most support. ... Consensus must be reached about the nature of the survey before it starts. Allow about a week for this process." Maurreen 06:06, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Proposal 1 is to delete the following:
When referring to the United States, please use "U.S."; that is the more common style in that country, is easier to search for automatically, and we want one uniform style on this. When referring to the United States in a long abbreviation (USA, USN, USAF), periods should not be used.
Rationale for:
Replace the policy:
8.3 Commas
As stated by Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, and other authoritative sources, when a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series of three or more elements, a comma is used before the conjunction: "The wires were brown, blue, and green." The reason for the final serial comma is to prevent the last two elements from being confused as a unit. Consider its utility in this sentence: "The author would like to thank her parents, Sinéad O'Connor and Pope John-Paul II."
With:
Take care to avoid ambiguity when using lists as part of a sentence. Ambiguity can arise when it is unclear whether words are or are not in apposition. Consider the following sentences:
"The author would like to thank her parents, Sinéad and Bob."
"Joe Bloggs was congratulated by John Smith, the Chairman of the committee, and Jane Doe."
Is the author thanking two people (her parents), or three?
Did two or three people congratulate Joe Bloggs?
Disambiguate by rephrasing or using semicolons:
"The author would like to thank Sinéad and Bob, her parents"
"Joe Bloggs was congratulated by John Smith, the Chairman of the committee; and Jane Doe."
Rationale for:
Choosing any of these involves taking a position. Not mentioning the issue at all here would have meant going with #2 since that is the current position of recommended style guides.1). Leave it up to individual editors to choose between "A, B(,) and C" or "A, B, and C".
2). Mandate "A, B, and C" as is currently done and which follows almost all current publically accessible style guides except those for newspapers.
3). Mandate "A, B(,) and C" which used to be the common recommendation in many litterary and academic style guides.
As per proposal 2 (A), but do not replace the deleted text with anything.
Rationale for:
In Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style--Draft Trim discussion archive, Jguk said: “Where we can, we should avoid using language that marks it out as being US/UK or as preferring one particular style of writing words over another.” He has made similar statements elsewhere.
I believe that his view in this regard is at least part of the basis for the poll above. If so, probably that is what should be discussed, at least initially to see if anyone shares his view. Maurreen 12:58, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
In my view, some of the issues concerning this style guide might be resolved more easily if we decided some general philosophical issues that could guide future decisions. For example, these could include whether we think it should be more concise or more detailed, or how formal to be with the language. Any comments about such a possible philosophical underpinning? Maurreen 12:58, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Along the lines of what Jallan suggested about organizing supporting material for the style guide, I've been working on organizing the archives topically. One of these is called "Visual presentation."
I'm not sure what's the best title. Other options include "Layout" or "Design." What do you think? Maurreen 07:18, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)