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There is a mismatch between a literal reading of MOSNUM advice on UK usage and the Times Style Guide..
This guide says, "The overwhelming preference is sporting, foreign, engineering and scientific stories to be metric…” [1] MOSNUM follows this in science and non-UK/US contexts and has adapted this in engineering. However, in the sporting context, the Times Style Guide is not explicitly followed. As a result, a literal reading of MOSNUM guidance may be somewhat out of line with the Times Style Guide, British practice and much Wikipedia practice in several sports.
To deal with this gap between MOSNUM and Wikipedia practice, an explanatory clause like the engineering clause could be helpful. Perhaps it could read like this:
This would support present UK practice in sports, whether imperial or metric, and also support the predominant Wikipedia practice. Also, as any adjustment in the order of UK units would still have to be approved in advance, the good order achieved by the General Sanctions on UK units would not be overturned.
What do others think of this proposal? Michael Glass ( talk) 02:03, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
You appear to be labouring under the misunderstanding that we do not already have an overwhelming preference for metric in sporting contexts as the TSG suggests. The problem comes when "sporting contexts" means a completely different thing in the real world (such as the TSG) compared with Wikipedia unit discussions. The TSG clearly advises metric in general for sport but prefers imperial units for personal dimensions in general. Neither MOSNUM nor the TSG requires that all sports articles use imperial. MOSNUM actually basically says that all UK sporting contexts (in the Real World meaning) use metric.
There has always been this bizarre absolutist fallacy, in UK units discussion, that the fact that the MOS prefers one set of units means either:
This is very rarely argued with any other part of the MOS. For every other part of the MOS, the rules are (to quote the template at the top of the page) "a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply." I do not understand why people refuse to acknowledge that this applies to UK-related units just as it does the rest of the MOS.
For example, we do not have any language anywhere in the MOS at all that would allow US weightlifters' dimensions to be given in metric units. Nothing at all. Yet if you go on United States records in Olympic weightlifting the dimensions of the linked weightlifters are metric-first. There is a good topic-specific reason to go against the MOS rule, so editors have. This can apply to British articles too, if there is a good topic-specific reason, (bearing in mind - and I shouldn't have to say this but I do - that a user's preference for source-based units does not count).
I note with interest Michael's first bullet point. I never actually mentioned weightlifting before this message. I acknowledge that it is probably fully metric-first, but that can be handled within the current rules. Of course, his document does not "prove" anything - it happens to use metric units, which is a different thing - and even if it did all the contexts that it gives would already be metric-first according to even the most absolutist application of our existing rules. Kahastok talk 11:48, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
Point taken about the walls of text, EEng! That's why I have inserted a subheading below.
The present wording says:
This policy is honoured more in the breach than in the observance in the UK sporting context.
The proposed wording modifies the general policy only in the case of UK sporting articles:
Could I just ask people what they think of the actual wording.
I think if we concentrate on the wording it might not take a huge wall of text to decide YES or NO, or to revise it. Michael Glass ( talk) 23:42, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
England accounts for almost 83 per cent of the population of the UK and this gives it considerable weight in discussions about British usage. However, English data is not evidence of usage in Scotland, Ulster and Wales. On that basis I withdraw my proposal and will check the data of sporting usage in Scotland Northern Ireland and Wales.
However, I feel it is necessary to state the following:
On the evidence I supplied:
I also wish to make the following points:
Michael Glass ( talk) 02:47, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
I'm not going to claim that I am all right and Kahastok is all wrong. However, I really do consider that his call for a topic ban is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
I would also like to draw attention to some of Kahastok's odd lapses immediately above.
Kahastok's response is as out of line as his foul language was. I condemn it. Michael Glass ( talk) 14:36, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Are star and cross (* 1905; † 1974) allow? According to Special:Search/insource:/\(\*\ 19/ we have over 800 of these. — Dispenser 13:35, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
Would it be possible to add a specific clause addressing the notation for display resolutions? There are some editors arguing that the only acceptable forms are the following:
and that any other forms, such as:
are in fact all prohibited by the MOS, due to the following clauses:
I would like to note a reminder at this time that I am not arguing about what the MOS currently says, I am asking for a change to the MOS to address this topic specifically. Since "1920x1080" is read aloud as "1920-by-1080" and represents the dimensions of a display (in pixels, generally), I am forced to agree the MOS does currently endorse only those two forms explicitly. However, these are essentially the two least readable forms. Either using a multiplication sign or adding spaces (or both) improves readability, but neither is explicitly allowed unless units are also included, which decreases readability again, is cumbersome when discussing many resolutions in a sentence, and is not consistent with real-world usage of these terms (it is rare for one to state the units when writing a resolution).
My personal feeling is that the multiplication sign with spaces, but without units (i.e. 1920 × 1080), should be explicitly allowed for display resolutions. The combination of spaces and multiplication sign is the most readable and most professional form in my opinion. The spaces are also consistent with the style set by the MOS for mathematical usage of the multiplication sign, just without the requirement for units after the numbers when dealing with display resolutions (which is consistent with how resolutions are written and encountered normally). I don't think that the "1920x1080" unspaced letter x form should be explicitly prohibited for resolutions (though I would not mind), I just think this alternative more professional form should be explicitly allowed by the MOS for resolutions. It would allow a more readable style without resorting to the cumbersome "full form" with both spaces and units. GlenwingKyros ( talk) 05:39, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
1920x1080looks absolutely awful, and
1920×1080looks still kind of awful, but maybe just acceptably so.
As cost-per-pixel dropped, screen sizes of 2400 x 3600 became common
Eggs are often sold in dozens, typically in 2 x 6 cartons, though 3 x 4 cartons are often seen
Regarding the two changes https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Allosaurus&oldid=750736819 and https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Allosaurus&oldid=750737130 , please explain your justification to support non-standard measure units/regionalism in the English Wikipedia which is not US Wikipedia.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.235.229.22 ( talk • contribs)
I just want draw people's attention to Template:Floruit. Through a series of IP edits (possibly the same person from multiple IPs), the template has gone from a very simple shortcut for adding fl. to dates to something extremely complicated to look at. It's in need of a look at from an expert on templates. I've never seen this kind of thing from an IP before. McLerristarr | Mclay1 13:38, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Is it really necessary to have 2 different unit symbols for nautical mile? I don't see the benefit of the duplication, and have the impression that nmi is in more widespread use than NM. Would anyone object to removing NM is an option? Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 21:05, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
References
It's not clear in MOS:TIME what cases "usually" refers to in "Usually, use noon and midnight rather than 12 pm and 12 am;". What is everyone's thoughts on if this applies to tables that have other dates in them, such as in this table here: 2016 Western Michigan Broncos football team#Schedule. In my opinion, "noon" is acceptable to use here because the intent to clarify "noon" outweighs the desire for all rows to be consistent, but I'm curious what the MOS experts think. — X96lee15 ( talk) 14:09, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
12:00 is ambiguous, but 12:00AM is not ambiguous, and neither is 12:00PM. But it's something people do get confused about, so noon or midnight seems to me always better where possible. The only problem situation I can think of is a sortable table, but I suspect there's some technical trick to get around that too. E Eng 21:46, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
Should the headings on a multi-season TV series page be "season one" or "season 1"? The former appears to comply with the MoS but the latter appears to be in common use. IanB2 ( talk) 07:49, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
MOS:NUMERAL gives recommended abbreviations for million (M) and billion (bn) but not trillion. Should that not be recorded as "tn"? Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison ( talk) 09:43, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
found here. I changed the sum towhile energy bonds make up 15.7% of the $1.3tn junk bond market
on the next commit. I hope that satisfies EEng. Is there a consensus on my suggestion? Does the main page need to be modified? Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison ( talk) 21:57, 9 November 2016 (UTC)$1.3 trillion
Here is an example of a change to a cite web template. Another editor objected to the change. I sometimes find it less than obvious what exact punctuation was used on a web page, and I don't think Wikipedia is obliged to keep the original punctuation if a web page uses a hyphen, minus sign or em dash in a date range. Even harder to tell what kind of dash/hyphen is on the cover of a book. What do others think? Chris the speller yack 15:38, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
To quote the policy: "BP years are given as 18,000 BP or spelled out as 18,000 years before present (not 18,000 YBP, 18,000 before present, 18,000 years before the present, or similar)."
If this is a scientific notation, there should be no room for making assumptions. We should be saying either 18,000 years BP, or we should be accepting 18,000 YBP after first defining it in an article.
Does anyone have an opinion on this before I amend the policy, please? Regards, William Harris | talk 04:30, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for your support, and forgiving my initial lack of clarity above. We also have scientific articles quite comfortably using YBP after it has been initially defined, of which this is one of many examples: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4446326/ It is often used in ancient DNA studies, and I can see no reason why Wikipedia should not be doing the same rather than banning the term "YBP" with no reason provided. Regards, William Harris | talk 03:09, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
At Uncertain, incomplete, or approximate dates, we have:
[[Floruit|fl.]]
, or {{
fl.}}
may be used:
That last bit has apparently been there for some time. A year or two ago I added the html comment, <!-- Huh? As opposed to kings, queens, and clergymen, who sit around all day? What about mathematicians – do they have an "occupation"? --> but there has been no reply to date. Any thoughts? E Eng 07:32, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
See #Unit_names_and_symbols, the 29kg example. I propose to split example into two independent issues: 1. When to use a space, 2. What kind of space to use (NBSP or simple)? As it is presented now, it is confusing by mixing things up. Also the word "but" is used incorrectly, as there is no contradiction just a different situation; consider reading "and" instead. In split rows:
Use a nonbreaking space ({{
nbsp}} or ) between a number and a unit symbol, or use {{
nowrap}}. Certain symbols with which no space is used are shown in the "Specific units" table below.
|
29 kg Markup: 29 kg or {{nowrap|29 kg}}
|
29kg |
Use a normal space ( ) between a number and a unit name. | 29 kilograms Markup: 29 kilograms
|
Just wanted to share with my esteemed fellow editors that anagrams of Manual of Style incude Of, um, anal style; Foul, lame, nasty; and Lame! Flay us not!.
And the winner is... A muse? Flatly, no! E Eng 15:54, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
The international standard unit symbols for the pound force and avoirdupois pound are lbf and lb, respectively. I have encountered many articles that use non-standard symbols such as lbm, lb_m, lb_f and lb_F. My attempts to harmonise (by following the international standard) are met with claims that it is somehow clearer to use these non-standard symbols. I have made a text proposal at mosnum in the spirit of WP:BRD. Please also feel free to comment at Lbm and Slug (mass). Thanks, Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 12:02, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
I suggest the phrase "The international standard unit symbols" at the beginning of this section is nonsense. If the people who still use customary British and American units were interested in following international standards, we'd all be using SI. The fact that these older units persist proves that international standards have made limited headway in this realm. Jc3s5h ( talk) 15:44, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
I'm afraid I do object, on the grounds that I'd first like to see actual arguments on both sides, emanating from actual discussions on actual articles. Otherwise we're working in a vacuum. E Eng 22:00, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
References
Dondervogel, I agree with you in general, that we should use lb for mass and lbf for force, and should make those changes in articles and templates that do otherwise, and then if someone objects, invite them to discuss it there, or more centrally here. But not just let it lie, since it's clearly a mess. On the other hand, I think that lb can sometimes be used where lbf is what is meant, as long as it's not ambiguous what is intended. Perhaps in constructs such as foot pounds and pounds per square inch, where including the f would seem unconventional? Dicklyon ( talk) 05:57, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
OK, looking back to where this came up, and particularly at the IP's opinion in Template_talk:GravEngAbs#Eliminate_pound_mass_because_it.27s_not_part_of_a_real_system_of_units, I can see more clearly the issue that Dondervogel is struggling with there. Apparently in aviation they like the system of lb always being a force, and sometimes go so far as to claim that there's no such thing as a pound mass, and so propose one radical approach. Most "modern" systems go the other way and define a pound as only a mass. In typical usage, it might be either, and usually nobody cares which; whether you buy you cheese using a spring scale or a balance, a pound is a pound unless you're extra terrestrial. So the right thing to do is probably dependent on the context, and I admit that in a context where the difference is relevant or under discussion, using both lbf and lbm or some such is a good idea. In most contexts, however, just using lb is probably fine; if the interpretation is important, linking the first use to the appropriate article Pound (mass) or Pound (force) should be enough to remove any problem. Using lbf in general where lb is conventional would be horrible for the general audience. If one or more article or template discussions could be resolved along such lines (or some other consensus), I'd support saying something about it here, too. Invite me to relevant discussions please. Dicklyon ( talk) 18:31, 14 December 2016 (UTC) A half-pound of Newtons
The purpose of mosnum is to promote uniformity of style in units and numbers. There are several templates used to harmonise symbols for the pound (mass) and pound (force) across articles. One of these uses lbf and lbm, one uses lbf, and another uses lbm. Mosnum is not doing its job. Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 23:24, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
site:wikipedia.org +kbps
" yields "About 146,000 results", and similar sorts of results for the others. Good luck "promoting clarity and cohesion, while helping editors write articles with consistent and precise language, layout, and formatting" in those articles. --
RexxS (
talk) 17:56, 31 December 2016 (UTC)References
When I made this edit [26] it seemed perfectly obvious, but on reflection I realize I just don't know. In other words, which are correct?
6 foot 5 inchesand
6 foot 1 inchor
6 feet 5 inchesand
6 feet 1 inch
(Obviously there's no issue about the inch/inches.) Our current text on mixed units
old version doesn't explicitly address the question. Thoughts?
E
Eng 01:57, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
6 gallon 5 ouncesand
6 gallon 1 ounce
6 gallons 5 ouncesand
6 gallons 1 ounce
OK, good. I think Primergrey's comment is the key: I often hear "six foot two", never "six feet two", but "six feet two inches" and never "six foot two inches"
. Clearly we're never going to say merely "A six foot two man" in an article, so that decides it: we're agreed that (B) and (D) are correct, (A) and (C) wrong?
E
Eng 03:43, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
I'd appreciate it if a few of you could take a look
old version.
E
Eng 04:03, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
Actually, we would say "a six-foot man" because it's being used as an adjective directly in that sort of construction: "a four-inch stick"; a "ten-ton weight"; etc. The colloquialism is when it's used as a predicate: "the man was six foot tall" - I never hear "the man was six feet tall", although it's technically correct. -- RexxS ( talk) 17:13, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
What we need to do is:
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 23:59, 1 January 2017 (UTC)
So I come here for reassurance and get soooo confused. This edit back in March 2014 tried to shorten the (apparently) obnoxiously long list of examples:
in section Numbers as figures or words. Currently the complete examples of the rule are
Now I may be dysfunctional but reading that says to me that the examples of "larger ones" includes both 'fifty-six' and 'five hundred'.
The original examples included one example hyphenated and three examples not hyphenated. This lent itself to comparison between the examples, eliciting understanding that 'fifty-six' should be hyphenated, the others not. This was lost in the attempt at neatening up.
Which would be better? Changing this to "(fifty-six, but not five hundred)" or simply restoring the original list of four examples? I feel having more examples is nearly always better, and especially apt when reading comprehension is impaired. (Shenme says 'hiya!') Shenme ( talk) 06:11, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
Which dates do we use for departures at midnight? For example, Maggie Hassan's resignation as Governor of New Hampshire took effect at midnight 3 January 2017. Do we use 2 January or 3 January, as the departure date? GoodDay ( talk) 14:33, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
According to MOS:FOREIGNITALIC, foreign terms that aren't commonly used in English should be italicised. This probably applies to foreign units such as the Japanese tsubo or the Thai rai. This isn't spelled out in MOSNUM, however, and there's the possibility of conflict with preferred style for units, whose symbols are generally set in roman (as opposed to variables, which are in italics).
I've been discussing adding italics to some such units in Template:Convert, and it's been suggested that further input be requested here first. So, should foreign units be italicised, following the above? Or is there more reason not to? -- Paul_012 ( talk) 08:08, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
{{convert|100|arpent|lk=in}}
→ 100
arpents (34 ha){{convert|100|pyeong|lk=in}}
→ 100
pyeong (330 m2){{convert|100|rai|lk=in}}
→ 100
rai (160,000 m2){{convert|100|dunam|lk=in}}
→ 100
dunams (0.10 km2; 0.039 sq mi){{convert|100|shaku|lk=in}}
→ 100
shaku (30 m){{convert|100|viss|lk=in}}
→ 100
viss (160 kg)Please see Template talk:Infobox unit#RfC: capitalization rule for name parameter, about whether a unit name that appears at the top of an infobox should be capitalized or not. Jc3s5h ( talk) 20:24, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
In all seriousness, I want to thank WikiOriginal-9 for taking the time to reduce the GDQ (gloom-and-doom quotient) of this guideline [28]. E Eng 21:58, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
This is your only warning; if you invent a new acronym again, you may be asked to write a date format essay without further notice. Kendall-K1 ( talk) 03:50, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
A reader writes in at WP:OTRS ticket:2017020210016846. This reader released their email with a free license, specifically, "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported and GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts)".
This has always bothered me, and I'm not sure how to fix the issue outside of going in and editing each of the 366 days of the year pages, so I'm hoping you have a way of correcting this easier than I can.
At the top of each of these pages (such as today's - /info/en/?search=February_2 ) , wikipedia states the frequency of that day being on a particular day of the week (for a 400 year period). for example, today states
This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Sunday or Monday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Wednesday or Friday (56).
While this may be true for some arbitrary selected span of 400 years, if you took a different span of 400 years, the results would be different. This is similar to stating that February 2 always falls on Thursdays (when observing for one year - 2017)
The day of the week in which a specific date falls on rotates through a 28 year rotation. so every 28 years, any day of the year will land on a Sunday 4 times, Monday 4 times, Tuesday 4 times, etc.
If instead of a 400 year period, you had selected a multiple of 28, and used either 392 or 420, you would have found that each day would have fallen equally on each day of the week.
I realize I say "you" when I know that wikipedia is edited by people all over the world, but I think this error should be corrected from each of the date pages as it is incorrect.
This article is the subject of a request emailed to the
Volunteer Response Team (VRT). Issues identified are: reader writes in |
Anyone with comments should reply here, and I will direct the person to read here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:47, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
"While this may be true for some arbitrary selected span of 400 years, if you took a different span of 400 years, the results would be different."Turns out that is NOT a problem, because the Gregorian system (including the proleptic Gregorian calendar which goes back in time indefinitely albeit counterfactually/ahistorically), you can select an arbitrary span of *any* set of consecutive 400-years-duration, and get the same result. Above I used the span from 2000-thru-2399, which started on a Wednesday for 2/2/2000... but if I shifted up a notch, and used the span from 2001-thru-2400, the counterintuitive 58+57+56 outcome would still hold with no changes, because we dropped 2/2/2000 from the span, but replaced it with 2/2/2400, which is also a Wednesday since it is exactly 400 years away, and the Gregorian calendar *has* a 400-year-cycle. As pointed out by Kahastok, this is always the case: 2017 matches 2417, and also matches 1617, and so on, in terms of what the days-of-the-week look like. However, if you go back to 1217, you HAVE to use the proleptic Gregorian, otherwise things will get seriously out of whack mathematically speaking.
"The day of the week in which a specific date falls on rotates through a 28 year rotation."And that *is* in fact the case, for some calendrical systems, as explained at the Solar cycle (calendar) article. As Jc3s5h mentioned above, the result for the Julian calendar would differ, since it uses a different leapday-scheme from the Gregorian. While it is true that February_2 and the other on-this-day articles in wikipedia have an intro-paragraph which only covers the Gregorian calendar, that does not mean wikipedia should ignore the Julian calendar. The very first thing in the February_2#Events section is the Breviary of Alaric which is traditionally dated to February 2nd during 506 Anno Domini. There is no cite for that 2/2/0506 datestamp in the February_2 article, but if you click on the Breviary of Alaric article there is a cite to a couple of sources published in the late 1800s. So the question becomes, were those sources using the proleptic Gregorian calendar, for the year 506 A.D.? Probably they were not, is my guess, although the source doesn't specifically say if they were using old-style (Julian) dates, or new-style (Gregorian) dates.
"The dating method used should follow that used by reliable secondary sources (or if reliable sources disagree, that used most commonly, with an explanatory footnote)."So probably the February_2 article, and other on-this-day articles, should follow the example set by WP:RS. What is the tactic most commonly used by On This Day type of publications, that are WP:RS? I would assume they use a mixture of Julian and Gregorian, but they might do something different. In particular, I'd really like to know whether or not the WP:RS utilize the strange-sounding
"...but the start of the Julian year should be assumed to be 1 January..."thing that MOS:JG guideline recommends. That would impact our specific use-case, since we are usually listing the year in which an event/birth/death happened. So for instance, George Washington was born "February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731]" and we only list him at February_22#Births with 1732 as the year-of-birth. Is that normal/proper/etc? Do some WP:RS crossref him On This Day: February 11th (for G.W. see Feb 22nd), and also, do some RS use 1731 rather than 1732 for Washington's birth-year? Agree that we should get the exact wording hammered out, for footnotes and intro-text, before we go WP:BOLDly changing all 366 entries 47.222.203.135 ( talk) 16:01, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
Should this be clarified here? It seems it's not widely understood, and at least one of our articles put the year 0 in the mouth of a source that said year 1 until a moment ago. Maybe say Some sources refer to a year 0; where it is necessary to use such sources, try to find a way to work around this
(say, using "the beginning of the year" or "the turn of the era", or rounding up to "year 1"), or at least say the converse Do not insert a year 0 if a source uses wording like "turn of the era", etc.
?
Hijiri 88 (
聖
やや) 12:44, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict) When one is exclusively using AD and BC notation (or equivalently, CE and BCE) there is no year 0. But if one is using astronomical year numbering or the version of ISO 8601 adopted in 2004, there is a year 0. Also, in astronomical works, it is common to use several ways of designating time in the same text, and the reader is expected to keep them straight. So unless 聖 tells us exactly which article and which source are at issue, it's impossible to say if there is an error or not. Jc3s5h ( talk) 14:57, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
In the "Uncertain, incomplete, or approximate dates" section, {{ c.}} is used in one of the examples, but this template is now deprecated and is being replaced (has been already?) by {{ circa}} with the nolk=yes parameter. I remember some time ago reading the preference that we use {{ circa}} in the first occurrence, and {{ c.}} subsequently to avoid over-linking. I'm not sure I know all of the ins and outs here, so can someone more knowledgeable update the advice in this section - at least change the example, and restore the advice about second and subsequent uses? David Brooks ( talk) 01:06, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
In aircraft articles, specifications are given in metric and imperial. Template:convert is often used between units, but can imply errors by rounding when it shouldn't, when conversion are made backwards, with the wrong source unit. The best thing to do is to retain the manufacturer specs, as in Airbus_A330neo#Specifications where the template isn't called but the manufacturer conversions are used, with its deliberate rounding. To avoid confusing it with the output of Template:convert, I separate units with a slash instead of giving one or the other inside brackets, I don't even know which is preferred : obviously Airbus engineering works in metric, but its marketing is often in imperial units as it is customary. Do you think this agnosticism, not choosing a preferred unit and showing it, can be useful for the reader? -- Marc Lacoste ( talk) 14:01, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
I posted this 19 February 2014 and it was archived 12 March 2014 without generating any useful discussion, but it remains an issue.
In section Julian and Gregorian calendars it says, "Dates of events in countries using the Gregorian calendar are given in the Gregorian calendar." For example, Greece did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1923, so events in Greece prior to 1923 are supposed to be given with the Julian date. Presumably this rule applies generally, but it does not specifically state that this rule applies in Days of the Year articles. A reader looking at a Days of the Year article (e.g. January 1) would assume that two events or births in the same year both happened the same day. This would suggest that all events, births, and deaths in Days of the Year articles should be in the Gregorian calendar starting in 1582. The downside of this would be that articles about people and events relating to countries that adopted the Gregorian calendar after 1582 would have different dates from the Days of the Year article. This could be confusing!
I think WP:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Julian and Gregorian calendars should be modified to clarify the application of "Dates of events in countries using the Gregorian calendar are given in the Gregorian calendar" to Days of the Year articles. Whichever way the decision goes, I would suggest that events, births and deaths after 1582 in countries that still used the Julian Calendar should have clarifications in Days of the Year articles. For example, Ioannis Kapodistrias (11 February 1776 – 9 October 1831) is listed in February 11 as
His Gregorian birthday is February 22, 1776. So if it is ruled that the use of Gregorian dates goes by country in Days of the Year articles, I would modify his listing in February 11 to something like
And if it is ruled that Days of the Year articles list Gregorian dates starting in 1582, I would suggest listing Ioannis Kapodistrias in February 22 something like
— Anomalocaris ( talk) 16:17, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
How should a date that uses multiple seasons be entered? An issue of a certain journal ("Medieval Life," used on the Pioneer Helmet page) is dated "Autumn/Winter 1997/8." I've changed the years in the citation to "1997–98," but can't find a workaround for the seasons (e.g., "Autumn–Winter," "Autumn-Winter," or "Autumn/Winter") that doesn't tell me to "Check date values in: |date=." Thanks in advance for any suggestions! -- Usernameunique ( talk) 21:51, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
Please come participate in the discussion at WP:VPP#Date links on portal date-specific pages. Thank you. ··· 日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:48, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
Is it Cretan Revolt (1866–1869) or Cretan Revolt (1866–69); Ecuadorian–Peruvian territorial dispute of 1857–60 or Ecuadorian–Peruvian territorial dispute of 1857–1860? The examples use different styles.-- Zoupan 03:23, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
The style guide states the following rule: “A comma follows the year unless followed by other punctuation”. It then provides the following sentence as an example:
The weather on March 12, 2005, was clear and warm
This sentence actually demonstrates that the rule is wrong (quite apart from the fact that the official style guide cannot even punctuate its own examples correctly with a final period). Remove the date from the sentence, and one is left with:
The weather, was clear and warm
The comma within the date (12,) is part of the date format, whereas the comma following the date (2015,) is part of the sentence structure, not part of the date. So removing the date from the sentence leaves us with a misplaced comma. The other way of trying to explain this concept is to reverse the above. A date is formatted thus:
March 12, 2015
Now create a sentence:
The weather was clear and warm.
Now add the date to that sentence:
The weather on March 12, 2015 was clear and warm.
Finally, the best way to avoid this issue altogether is to refrain from interrupting the natural flow of the sentence in the first place simply by writing the sentence thus:
The weather was clear and warm on March 12, 2015.
Therefore, I urge that we remove the above incorrect rule from the style guide altogether.
— Dilidor ( talk) 18:18, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
following the rule to always put a comma after the year never causes confusion and seldom offends. I'll show you where it offends:
I completely agree with EEng, but I also think there is value in consistency within an article. As Chris the speller said above, s/he added two commas after the year to make those two dates consistent with all the other dates that had a comma after the year. Before undoing those edits, Dilidor should have checked to see what style was used throughout the article. If s/he had, s/he would have seen that the style was to use a comma, and should have left Chris' edits alone. I'd like to add that, in my experience, Americans are taught to use the comma after the year – witness the Chicago Manual of Style. This is, of course, in the American date style format. The comma has nothing to do with pausing or not pausing; it is a visual marker to set the date off from the rest of the sentence. I don't think a comma is needed after a year in the British date style format. You are free, Dilidor, to start a discussion at the MoS, but I think you will come up against a lot of resistance to a new rule requiring, or a new guideline recommending, leaving out the comma after the year in the American date style format. I suggest leaving it as it is, and in a way similar to determining the variant of English used by searching the article and the article's history, we look for the preferred or dominant date style used in an article and work for consistency. I do recommend using the comma after the year in the American date style format, though. – Corinne ( talk) 01:59, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
January 1, 1920 started like any other day.
Before we discuss the events of January 1, 1920, I'd like to set some ground rules.
Dilidor: Thank you for your interest in improving Wikipedia. The rule "A comma follows the year unless followed by other punctuation" is not wrong. It agrees with the Chicago Manual of Style and other style guides. Please notice that the rule is footnoted, and the footnote links to Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Commas, where it details it:
Incorrect: | He set October 1, 2011 as the deadline for Chattanooga, Oklahoma to meet his demands. |
Correct: | He set October 1, 2011, as the deadline for Chattanooga, Oklahoma, to meet his demands. |
In the Incorrect example, "2011" binds more tightly to the words "as the deadline" than it does to "October 1"; the comma after "2001" helps bind the date together. And in the same example, "Oklahoma" binds more tightly to "to meet his demands" than it does to "Chattanooga"; the comma after "Oklahoma" helps bind the "city, state" construction together. (Notice that I put "city, state" in quotes; without the quotes, the word "state" would bind more closely to "construction" than to "city"!) There are numerous online sources that support this comma, including:
Rule 9. Use a comma to separate the day of the month from the year, and—what most people forget!—always put one after the year, also.
Example: It was in the Sun's June 5, 2003, edition.
When the date appears in the middle of a sentence, commas should appear both before and after the year.
Her arrival on April 10, 1988, was considered a turning point for the company.
— Anomalocaris ( talk) 17:20, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
EEng, acknowledging that you've been editing here longer than I have and that I wouldn't tell you anything that I was certain you already knew, I have to question your fairly regular statements about "MOS commandments" and various synomolies (I know). Speaking only of the style guidelines, there is no mechanism, codified or unwritten, to "deal with" editors who write section headers in title case, link France three times in one article, or break any other MOS "rule". That edits being brought into line with a house style should be seen as "micromanaging" or any other disparaging term, seems to me to be the result of some sort of vanity, as though one's edits were already perfect as written. Certainly many readers do not care about consistency, which is to say, they are not bothered by inconsistency. Some are bothered by it, though, and I think I can safely say that no one is bothered by consistency. So really, these gnoming edits are an improvement for some and a lateral move for others. I can't see a negative aspect of it. Primergrey ( talk) 04:04, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
Possibly the best solution would be a line at the beginning of each article containing a couple dozen commas, and also some semicolons, quotation marks, and so forth. The reader could then be instructed to mentally sprinkle them throughout the text in whatever manner she finds pleasing. Herostratus ( talk) 02:35, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
The page currently says:
I think this is fine advice for four-digit years, and maybe even for three-digit ones, but not for one- and two-digit years. It is not very intuitive for most people to interpret a bare small number as a year, in a phrase like Sextus Aelius Catus (consul in 4). Consul in four what?
It's true that the advice allows an exception to avoid ambiguity, but I'm not sure the phrase is ambiguous. It's not that there's another available meaning; it's that many readers may struggle to find even one meaning. But if you say consul in 4 AD, then it's clear.
On a possibly related note, there was a convention until not too long ago that articles on AD/CE years appeared at the bare number (like 1972). That was confusing for small numbers, many of which were more intuitive as articles about the numbers themselves rather than the years. So now all one- and two-digit bare-number links are either to the article about the number, or to a disambig page including links to the number and the year.
I propose that the guidance be amended to allow (and possibly even encourage) AD/CE for one- and two-digit years, even if not "ambiguous" per se. -- Trovatore ( talk) 09:58, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
On Bibliography of biology#Zoology, I'm still seeing an error, no matter what I do to the Pliny reference. Any help? = paul2520 ( talk) 18:32, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
"Context determines whether the 12- or 24-hour clock is used ... " says the guideline, and that's all. This has been used as an excuse by Europeans from non-English speaking countries, when writing in English on enWP, generally to impose 14:35 rather than 2:35 PM pm (for example) upon all of us working with this project, no matter what the actual context. Being bi-continental, and a translator, I have grown up with these problems and worked with them for over 50 years. It is my firm conviction that military time, aka the 24-hour clock, normally is confusing to people in English-speaking countries and is not normally used (knowledgeably) in English text. Even in Britain, that time format is only used on a few formal documents and a bits of rare transportation information. Google seems to clearly bear me out on that. Couldn't our guideline be more specific as to what is meant by "context", since "context" is now being interpreted as "do as you please even if most people will be confused". --
SergeWoodzing (
talk) 11:20, 4 May 2017 (UTC)
is confusing to American readers probablyI doubt it. -- Izno ( talk) 12:20, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
This has been used as an excuse by Europeans from non-English speaking countries, when writing in English on enWP, generally to impose 14:35 rather than 2:35 pm– where's the evidence that it's people from non-English speaking countries who use the 24 hour clock here? I would always do so in formal writing because it removes ambiguity.
Even in Britain, that time format is only used on a few formal documents and a bits of rare transportation information– nonsense; it's used on every bus, railway and flight electronic information board I've ever seen in the UK and in the corresponding printed timetables, as is easy to demonstrate by searching online. The guideline is fine as it is; if it were changed it should move towards suggesting the least ambiguous format, namely the 24 hour clock. Peter coxhead ( talk) 13:05, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
there's no point in talking about this until we see some actual examples in actual articles. Until then it's just the usual MOS philosophizing, I meant that we need to see examples of article editing situations where either "the wrong outcome" was arrived at, or excessive editor time was consumed before arriving at the "right" outcome, and changing the guideline would fix that. If it's not possible to give such examples, there's no point in changing the guidelines. E Eng 16:07, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Nobody [...] uses 24 hour notation in America, since I have not disputed that statement. The statement I disputed was
is confusing to American readers probably. And then you get wormy about Americans having to do the translation. You seem to continue changing your goalposts. -- Izno ( talk) 17:06, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
On the other hand, if people are writing stuff like "By 15:30, the fire had spread to the main building..." in articles, that's a problem even if people aren't fighting over it. Well, if people are writing that stuff, and it's a problem, and someone can shows us examples of it, why hasn't that person attempted to change it in those articles? If not, then for all we know this could just be fixed in those articles, with no debate and no need for a guidelines change. That's what I mean by
Until then it's just the usual MOS philosophizing. "Problems" that were never even the subject of talk page discussion aren't problems. E Eng 17:13, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Searching on "at 15:30" randomly I found that:
I think these latter, at least, are wrong. It's not crisis, but it a low-level degradation of the accessibity of the material. I understand where they probably came from: source documents from weather scientists in the first case, military people in the second. IMO it's lazy to not fix these these.
"The race was held over a duration of 24 hours, starting at 3:30pm on Saturday, January 28" at 2012 24 Hours of Daytona, would, if changed to "at 15:30", be even worse. However, it doesn't say that, and no point inventing theoretical problems.
IMO MOS:COMMONALITY would tend to indicate use of 12 hour time generally if it is common in Britain (and Canada etc.). If a British person were to read ""At 3:30 pm on 26 May, Hitler ordered the panzer groups to continue their advance" and think "well that just looks odd" MOS:COMMONALITY might not apply. If they had to think "OK... that means... hold on... yes, 15:30" to understand the time of the event, then MOS:COMMONALITY would definitely not apply. I don't know if this is the situation or not.
Indian and other non-Anglosphere readers might matter some. They're a secondary consideration, but many of our readers are ESL cases, some of whom might have enough trouble already accessing the material, and if "3:30 pm" makes them pause and stumble, that's a data point.
@ User:Izno, I guess we just disagree. Have you graduated college perhaps? That could be the problem right there. Most people have not graduated college. This is something to keep in mind I think. And Americans are pretty provincial. Most speak only the one language and know less about the world than outsiders realize, I think. Herostratus ( talk) 00:27, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
I'm aware there are a few topic areas (hurricanes/weather events, military history, maybe others) where guidelines (maybe informal) call for use of 24-hr format. Can someone point to examples of other articles where there was argument over which format to use? I agree that 12-hr format should be universally understandable, if not always the natural format for some readers for some topics. E Eng 15:22, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
Over at Japanese_units_of_measurement, one user has added precise unit conversions in the form of what seem to be astonishingly large fractions, such as "62,500,000/158,080,329" (n.b., commas are part of what that user included). Is there a formal MoS position on such fractions? Editors here are invited to weigh in on the talk page there. Rhialto ( talk) 20:05, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Overcapitalization of "vol." and "no.", which is also relevant to MOS:NUM (including proposal of merging some material to this page), but is addressing material presently in the main MOS page. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 23:21, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
Has anyone noticed the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(plurals)#.27Measurements_involving_two_or_more_units_.28such_as_pounds_per_square_inch_or_miles_per_hour.29_should_usually_have_the_first_word_in_the_plural.27? The question is whether units like metre per second and foot-pound should be renamed as metres per second and feet-pound. The discussion has far reaching consequences and could result in widespread renaming of units from singular to plural (or limited renaming from plural to singular, depending on the outcome). Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 14:14, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
In section 3.5, Dates and numbers#Decimals/Grouping of digits/Grouping with narrow gaps, the following sentence appears to contain a typo:
Shouldn't the 'or' be a 'not'?
It seems that it should, but I didn't want to make a change on an important guide like this one without double checking. Thanks! - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) 11:38, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
* Digits are generally grouped into threes. Right of the decimal point, you may use a final group of four instead of leaving an 'orphaned' digit at the end of the sequence, e.g. 99.1234567. However, one or two digits at the end of a sequence are also acceptable, e.g., 99.1234567.
- Mark D Worthen PsyD
(talk) 14:59, 24 June 2017 (UTC)What's the guideline for "one-and-a-half" in article prose -- to use words, or numbers? I've read the "Fractions and ratios" section of this page but I'm still not clear on which is recommended. "these single-family homes are narrow, one-and-a-half story brick structures", or "these single-family homes are narrow, 1+1⁄2-story brick structures"? (Pinging @ Chris the speller:, re this edit.) — Mudwater ( Talk) 21:10, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
The Kipper Kids article mentions a duo where one is from the U.S. and one is from the UK. Which date format should be used? Right now the DOB is in the format for the particular person. AngusWOOF ( bark • sniff) 03:33, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
A question about this sentence from MOS:DATERET: Where an article has shown no clear sign of which format is used, the first person to insert a date is equivalent to "the first major contributor".
Does this mean the first person to insert a date in the article's text, or does it mean the first person to insert a date anywhere, even citations? MOS:DATEUNIFY seems to say that the format used in the article's text may influence the format used in citations, but not necessarily the other way around. Bmf 051 ( talk) 01:10, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
In Chrome on Mac OS, I'm seeing an error in the table (but have not gone and fixed it, in case others do not see it on other platforms).
The "Do not use a leading zero in month or day, except in all-numeric (yyyy-mm-dd) format" cell in the Comments column is spanning the "2007-4-15" example in the "Unacceptable" column, which is not an example of what the comment proscribes.
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SMcCandlish ☺
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¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 19:02, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
09 June | 9 June | Do not use a leading zero in month or day, except in all-numeric (yyyy-mm-dd) formats |
June 09 | June 9 | |
2007-4-5 | 2007-04-05 | Do not omit leading zeros in all-numeric (yyyy-mm-dd) formats |
For the sake of simpler English, may I suggest that the instructions be re-written as positive statements rather than negatives?
09 June | 9 June | Remove leading zeros in date formats that have months written out as words. |
June 09 | June 9 | |
2007-4-5 | 2007-04-05 | Include leading zeros in all-numeric (yyyy-mm-dd) date formats |
Rhialto ( talk) 21:28, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
Currently the manual states that if a specific page has dates set using a certain era notation (BC vs. BCE) then it should remain that way unless their is a specific reason for this. I do not understand the motivation behind this and think it should be amended. If a user is willing to take the time to change a page to have more modern and proper notation (BCE-CE) then that should be appropriate and encouraged, specifically on pages regarding mathematical or scientific topics which should use the most current notation and be devoid of any of the religious connotation that BC-AD holds. Lessconfusedthanbefore ( talk) 16:59, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
-Jc3s5h, I'm not interested in whether a "majority" believe one way or another. Rather, respectable organizations like Chicago Manual of Style and Smithsonian declare a prefrence for CE and it seems that in order for Wikipedia to be a more inclusive and credible resource, it would behoove us to follow in their stead. Lessconfusedthanbefore ( talk) 01:02, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
As for the central quetsion: EEng is correct that this topic is a stylistic warzone and has been one for a long time. However, the assertion by JohnBlackburne that "there is no religious connotation [to] using BC/AD" is absurd on its face, since the religious connotations of it are the source of the recurrent controversy, on and off Wikipedia, and were the very reason that CE/BCE alternatives were ever implemented. Etymological arguments about "Wednesday" are
false equivalence through analogies that are not actually analogous. No analogies are ever going to get around the demonstrable fact that people on and off WP object to BC/AD specifically because of its tie to Christian dogma. The recurrent dispute here (which is a rather obvious
WP:Systemic bias matter) is never going to go away until we revise MOS to use BCE/CE by default and to reserve BC/AD for topics in which those are especially appropriate (biblical and Christian church matters, and the history of Christendom before the modern era, including its interactions, e.g. the Crusades, with neighboring cultures). Whenever I encounter BC/AD used in articles that are not within the appropriate purviews (i.e. "there are reasons specific to [the article's] content" for a change), I change it to BCE/CE dating (especially in science articles, including archaeology), and am very rarely reverted on it. There appears to me to be a general editorial consensus on the matter, which we've simply not updated MOSNUM to include. I generally oppose substantive (versus clarifying) changes to MoS at this stage of its development, but we should continue to make those that tie off disputatious loose ends and which will curtail recurrent strife.
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SMcCandlish ☺
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¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 20:09, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
There is a discussion at WP:AN#Appeal my topic ban regarding a topic ban which I have suggested could still apply to MOS/MOSNUM, but active editors here may think that unnecessary. 92.19.24.150 ( talk) 22:08, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
I did a search through the MOS talk archives. I can't say I read through every thread, but I have not yet seen a clear explanation of "strong national ties". It seems like I regularly see people act as though any person, place, thing, event, idea, company, etc. that was born, formed, created, invented, or otherwise primarily existed in a given country has "strong national ties" to that country such that WP:DATERET does not apply. "Strong national ties" suggests it's also possible to have "weak national ties" or "moderate national ties" that would not be sufficient to change the date format on the basis of such ties. I would not say that being born in the United States gives me "strong national ties" to the United States, for example. If I were also an employee of the Federal Government, if I were a Founding Father, or if I ran for President of the United States, then there would be "strong national ties". Similarly (at the risk of belaboring my point), a book that happens to be published here has no strong national ties unless, say, it's a book about American exceptionalism or the Constitution. I'm intentionally omitting the specific examples that led me to ask this question, since I'm looking for best practices rather than dispute resolution. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 18:17, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
Here Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Military_history#BL_article_naming Primergrey ( talk) 06:55, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
I know it's been there since the year dot (thoughtfully trashed by an anon recently), but I hate most of it—especially that weird rule about not starting a sentence with a numeral. I disregard it in my professional editing and writing. Tony (talk) 13:17, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
However, this rule is common to most style guides, and WP and its readers are probably best served by sticking to it for consistency, comprehensibility, and avoidance-of-chaos reasons. If it were excised, we'd end up in a year or less with probably hundreds of thousands of pointless cases of people beginning sentences with numerals out of sheer laziness, not because they had any contextually important reason to do so. It really doesn't take much writing practice to avoid starting sentences with numeric figures that (e.g. in a maths or science article) shouldn't be converted to spelled-out number words like "twenty-three". And the rule really has no effect on editors; those who don't want to follow the rule or aren't aware of it don't get yelled at; WP:GNOMEs just fix it after the fact as part of their general copyediting maintenance. We already have an exemption for formal and proper names. Are there any other variances that really seem needed?
Another way of looking at it is that so many people are familiar with and certain of this rule as a general English usage matter (outside of specific contexts that permit sentence-initial numerals, familiar to some writers) that eliminating the rule here would probably manufacture a tremendous amount of dispute over a long period of time, which is the opposite of what MoS is for. To the extent non-trivial changes are still being made to MoS, they're mostly to address: disputes that were once rare and have in time become recurrent and tendentious; poor wording that needs clarification because some subset of editors misinterpret it; and (rarely and often contentiously, as at
MOS:JR and
MOS:IDENTITY) actual shifts in real-world usage. There are aspects of MoS that are weird, like our list-item style (start with capital letter, do not end with semicolon – a habit borrowed from Powerpoint presentations and probably not found in any major style guides). But we've had them so long that changing them would cause a lot of strife and a lot of content churn over trivia without objectively improving articles. The "sentences don't start with numerals" rule is surely in that category.
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SMcCandlish ☺
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¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 05:04, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
Here's the sentence in question from the article Toronto Maple Leafs:
Between October 17, 1992, and October 15, 2016, the Maple Leafs took a unique approach to retired numbers.
The general rule is that, with that date format, there is always a comma after the year. There's no exception to that in a range spelled out with "and" instead of a dash, is there? — C.Fred ( talk) 20:11, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Between October 17, 1992 and October 15, 2016, the Maple Leafs took...
Between 17 October 1992 and 15 October 2016, the Maple Leafs took...
After 2016 the Maple Leafs took...
After October 17, 1992, the Maple Leafs took...
After October 17, 1992 the Maple Leafs took...
Is there a credible rationale for why ordinals, e.g. the 1st of November, etc., are deprecated; and if there is, is it worth inclusion in the article? Graham.Fountain | Talk 10:17, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
I don't think it's about the (pointless) effort to save characters -- it's about clarity. Even when directly quoting a verbal speech, we don't write "...cost three hundred dollars", but "...cost $300", even though that makes the "dollars" appear out of the spoken order. We do this to make it quicker and easier for the reader to understand, even if that ignores a technical detail of quoting accuracy. Does adding ordinals in dates make things easier to read? I don't see how. "31st August" just adds a couple letters of clutter over "31 August"; if reading this out loud, I'd bet most people would say it the same either way. Numerals are preferred over spelling out numbers for a reason. That same reasoning should discourage inserting character hints of ordinals in dates, where they are assumed to be ordinals anyway.
I'm not sure that means our MOS should banish these ordinals, but I think it's one argument to do so. -- A D Monroe III ( talk) 17:27, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
My understanding is that this was a regional English thing, with US English tending to prefer cardinals, and UK English traditionally preferring ordinals, although some UK manuals of style (eg Guardian, UK gov, and Oxford) seem to be switching over to ordinals for days of the month (while keeping cardinals for century numbers). Rhialto ( talk) 09:29, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
To address a comment (by Graham.Fountain) that I missed: "there might be room for the personal taste and style of the contributor" –
WP:NOT#BLOG. WP doesn't exist for personal expressive catharsis, it exists for readers, and providing them with information in the clearest and least ambiguous way.
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SMcCandlish ☺
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¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 23:41, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
Fellow editors,
It's likely that we'll be living with increasing amounts of Wikidata-generated text on the English Wikipedia. Yet it's being generated in Berlin by developers and programmers in the German chapter without reference to the stylistic consensus that has painstakingly evolved on this site over the past 14 years.
I believe we should be taking more than a little interest in the style and formatting of Wikidata outputs. I've sounded a warning at the Wikidata state of affairs discussion that has been playing out during September. That page contians many expressions of caution, dismay, and alarm at the potential pitfalls of Wikidata's ability to roll out text at its whim, and at the lack of control we will have over the inevitable encroachments on en.WP.
Wikidata is an important project that will be riding the transition from biological algorithms (that's us, as creative editors) to electronic algorithms (that's machines that generate and read WP text). It's the latter that will slowly grow to dominate WMF sites from the mid-2020s onward, in a process that will be occurring in the economy at large in the first half of the century.
I urge editors to keep abreast of the developments, and to be ready to insist that Wikidata consult us on style and formatting before releasing on our site each displayed text that it proposes. This should be a matter of established protocol, in my view.
Tony (talk) 10:23, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
I have begun an RFC about accurate dates in citation metadata: Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#RFC: Accurate dates in citation metadata. Jc3s5h ( talk) 15:00, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
Does WP:DATERANGE apply to the titles of sources, i.e. those linking to Wikisource? Please see Template talk:Cite DNB#Hyphens and dashes again.-- Nevé – selbert 06:11, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
In the section Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers #Numbers as figures or words, there are examples of markup that have no reason behind them. In particular:
21{{nbsp}}million
I fail to see why "million" is any different in general from any other word.
The guidance at MOS:NBSP is "It is desirable to prevent line breaks where breaking across lines might be confusing or awkward." If you examine the sentence "Over 60 million people live in the UK", what is confusing or awkward about breaking after the 60? It does not impart any alternative meaning, so is not confusing; and starting the next line with "million" is no more awkward than any other word. Of course starting a line with an abbreviation or unit symbol, or punctuation like an ellipsis would be awkward, but we have MOS guidance already asking us to avoid those circumstances.
I do understand that sentences like "She sold the company for £5 million." would benefit from having a non-breaking space before the million. But that is simply because the currency unit appearing before the ordinal allows the fragment "She sold the company for £5" to have a very different meaning and a cognitive dissonance occurs if the reader then encounters "million" at the start of the next line. Nevertheless, those cases are already covered by MOS:NBSP's "prevent line breaks where breaking across lines might be confusing", so why should we be requiring a non-breaking space in all cases of an ordinal followed by "million" (or "billion", etc.)? -- RexxS ( talk) 18:29, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
{{
ns}}
. This should probably be merged with {{
nbsp}}
since they serve the same purpose (including spans of multiple non-breaking spaces). —
SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 03:42, 11 October 2017 (UTC)"The average weight of a [car make and model] in kilograms is approximately 1.5 |
thousand." |
"She sold the company for £5 |
million." |
"In 2014, between 9 and 29 million people between the ages of 15 and 64 used ecstasy". -- RexxS ( talk) 15:51, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
There does not seem to be any guidance in this Manual of Style on what units to use in prose writing and whether to convert them (such as this edit: "they used bamboo pipelines to transport and carry both brine and natural gas for many miles" to "they used bamboo pipelines to transport and carry both brine and natural gas for many kilometres."). WP:UNITS seems to state use SI (kilometers) "In all other articles" without "strong national ties", but it seems to just cover actual unit measurement, not prose. Using the unit "miles" without converting in prose seems to be supported by this Manual because it is cited twice as an example, "He walked several miles", "Miles of trenches were dug". Fountains of Bryn Mawr ( talk) 18:44, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
Please see
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting#Mathematics variables section is wrong and needs updating
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 05:40, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
The example given "1960s Boston" - since it is referring to "Boston of the 1960s" I believe it should be written with an apostrophe in this case! i.e., "1960's Boston." Be good! 238-Gdn ( talk) 07:39, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
Let's stop arguing this through edit summaries.
It seems we have three separate concerns. Stanton doesn't like changing between singular and plural in the same sentence. EE notes that the other entries in the table are plural, and points out that you can say "letters other than X". My concern is that "hyphen" is not the name of the hyphen in the same sense that X is the name of the letter X.
Is that an accurate summary? If we agree on the problem, we might have a better chance of finding a solution. -- Trovatore ( talk) 16:40, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Do not use separators other than hyphensI probably won't unthinkingly change it years from now. E Eng 21:33, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Do not use separators other than hyphens? E Eng 04:25, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
I notice that the page says "Sport scores and vote tallies should be given as figures, even if in the zero-to-nine range (a 25–7 victory; ...)". Can I interpret this as expressing a preference for an en-dash as the preferred punctuation mark in such instances – versus, for example "a 25-7 victory" or "a 25:7 victory" or "a 25 : 7 victory"? — BarrelProof ( talk) 20:38, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
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There is a mismatch between a literal reading of MOSNUM advice on UK usage and the Times Style Guide..
This guide says, "The overwhelming preference is sporting, foreign, engineering and scientific stories to be metric…” [1] MOSNUM follows this in science and non-UK/US contexts and has adapted this in engineering. However, in the sporting context, the Times Style Guide is not explicitly followed. As a result, a literal reading of MOSNUM guidance may be somewhat out of line with the Times Style Guide, British practice and much Wikipedia practice in several sports.
To deal with this gap between MOSNUM and Wikipedia practice, an explanatory clause like the engineering clause could be helpful. Perhaps it could read like this:
This would support present UK practice in sports, whether imperial or metric, and also support the predominant Wikipedia practice. Also, as any adjustment in the order of UK units would still have to be approved in advance, the good order achieved by the General Sanctions on UK units would not be overturned.
What do others think of this proposal? Michael Glass ( talk) 02:03, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
You appear to be labouring under the misunderstanding that we do not already have an overwhelming preference for metric in sporting contexts as the TSG suggests. The problem comes when "sporting contexts" means a completely different thing in the real world (such as the TSG) compared with Wikipedia unit discussions. The TSG clearly advises metric in general for sport but prefers imperial units for personal dimensions in general. Neither MOSNUM nor the TSG requires that all sports articles use imperial. MOSNUM actually basically says that all UK sporting contexts (in the Real World meaning) use metric.
There has always been this bizarre absolutist fallacy, in UK units discussion, that the fact that the MOS prefers one set of units means either:
This is very rarely argued with any other part of the MOS. For every other part of the MOS, the rules are (to quote the template at the top of the page) "a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply." I do not understand why people refuse to acknowledge that this applies to UK-related units just as it does the rest of the MOS.
For example, we do not have any language anywhere in the MOS at all that would allow US weightlifters' dimensions to be given in metric units. Nothing at all. Yet if you go on United States records in Olympic weightlifting the dimensions of the linked weightlifters are metric-first. There is a good topic-specific reason to go against the MOS rule, so editors have. This can apply to British articles too, if there is a good topic-specific reason, (bearing in mind - and I shouldn't have to say this but I do - that a user's preference for source-based units does not count).
I note with interest Michael's first bullet point. I never actually mentioned weightlifting before this message. I acknowledge that it is probably fully metric-first, but that can be handled within the current rules. Of course, his document does not "prove" anything - it happens to use metric units, which is a different thing - and even if it did all the contexts that it gives would already be metric-first according to even the most absolutist application of our existing rules. Kahastok talk 11:48, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
Point taken about the walls of text, EEng! That's why I have inserted a subheading below.
The present wording says:
This policy is honoured more in the breach than in the observance in the UK sporting context.
The proposed wording modifies the general policy only in the case of UK sporting articles:
Could I just ask people what they think of the actual wording.
I think if we concentrate on the wording it might not take a huge wall of text to decide YES or NO, or to revise it. Michael Glass ( talk) 23:42, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
England accounts for almost 83 per cent of the population of the UK and this gives it considerable weight in discussions about British usage. However, English data is not evidence of usage in Scotland, Ulster and Wales. On that basis I withdraw my proposal and will check the data of sporting usage in Scotland Northern Ireland and Wales.
However, I feel it is necessary to state the following:
On the evidence I supplied:
I also wish to make the following points:
Michael Glass ( talk) 02:47, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
I'm not going to claim that I am all right and Kahastok is all wrong. However, I really do consider that his call for a topic ban is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
I would also like to draw attention to some of Kahastok's odd lapses immediately above.
Kahastok's response is as out of line as his foul language was. I condemn it. Michael Glass ( talk) 14:36, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Are star and cross (* 1905; † 1974) allow? According to Special:Search/insource:/\(\*\ 19/ we have over 800 of these. — Dispenser 13:35, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
Would it be possible to add a specific clause addressing the notation for display resolutions? There are some editors arguing that the only acceptable forms are the following:
and that any other forms, such as:
are in fact all prohibited by the MOS, due to the following clauses:
I would like to note a reminder at this time that I am not arguing about what the MOS currently says, I am asking for a change to the MOS to address this topic specifically. Since "1920x1080" is read aloud as "1920-by-1080" and represents the dimensions of a display (in pixels, generally), I am forced to agree the MOS does currently endorse only those two forms explicitly. However, these are essentially the two least readable forms. Either using a multiplication sign or adding spaces (or both) improves readability, but neither is explicitly allowed unless units are also included, which decreases readability again, is cumbersome when discussing many resolutions in a sentence, and is not consistent with real-world usage of these terms (it is rare for one to state the units when writing a resolution).
My personal feeling is that the multiplication sign with spaces, but without units (i.e. 1920 × 1080), should be explicitly allowed for display resolutions. The combination of spaces and multiplication sign is the most readable and most professional form in my opinion. The spaces are also consistent with the style set by the MOS for mathematical usage of the multiplication sign, just without the requirement for units after the numbers when dealing with display resolutions (which is consistent with how resolutions are written and encountered normally). I don't think that the "1920x1080" unspaced letter x form should be explicitly prohibited for resolutions (though I would not mind), I just think this alternative more professional form should be explicitly allowed by the MOS for resolutions. It would allow a more readable style without resorting to the cumbersome "full form" with both spaces and units. GlenwingKyros ( talk) 05:39, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
1920x1080looks absolutely awful, and
1920×1080looks still kind of awful, but maybe just acceptably so.
As cost-per-pixel dropped, screen sizes of 2400 x 3600 became common
Eggs are often sold in dozens, typically in 2 x 6 cartons, though 3 x 4 cartons are often seen
Regarding the two changes https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Allosaurus&oldid=750736819 and https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Allosaurus&oldid=750737130 , please explain your justification to support non-standard measure units/regionalism in the English Wikipedia which is not US Wikipedia.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.235.229.22 ( talk • contribs)
I just want draw people's attention to Template:Floruit. Through a series of IP edits (possibly the same person from multiple IPs), the template has gone from a very simple shortcut for adding fl. to dates to something extremely complicated to look at. It's in need of a look at from an expert on templates. I've never seen this kind of thing from an IP before. McLerristarr | Mclay1 13:38, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Is it really necessary to have 2 different unit symbols for nautical mile? I don't see the benefit of the duplication, and have the impression that nmi is in more widespread use than NM. Would anyone object to removing NM is an option? Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 21:05, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
References
It's not clear in MOS:TIME what cases "usually" refers to in "Usually, use noon and midnight rather than 12 pm and 12 am;". What is everyone's thoughts on if this applies to tables that have other dates in them, such as in this table here: 2016 Western Michigan Broncos football team#Schedule. In my opinion, "noon" is acceptable to use here because the intent to clarify "noon" outweighs the desire for all rows to be consistent, but I'm curious what the MOS experts think. — X96lee15 ( talk) 14:09, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
12:00 is ambiguous, but 12:00AM is not ambiguous, and neither is 12:00PM. But it's something people do get confused about, so noon or midnight seems to me always better where possible. The only problem situation I can think of is a sortable table, but I suspect there's some technical trick to get around that too. E Eng 21:46, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
Should the headings on a multi-season TV series page be "season one" or "season 1"? The former appears to comply with the MoS but the latter appears to be in common use. IanB2 ( talk) 07:49, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
MOS:NUMERAL gives recommended abbreviations for million (M) and billion (bn) but not trillion. Should that not be recorded as "tn"? Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison ( talk) 09:43, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
found here. I changed the sum towhile energy bonds make up 15.7% of the $1.3tn junk bond market
on the next commit. I hope that satisfies EEng. Is there a consensus on my suggestion? Does the main page need to be modified? Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison ( talk) 21:57, 9 November 2016 (UTC)$1.3 trillion
Here is an example of a change to a cite web template. Another editor objected to the change. I sometimes find it less than obvious what exact punctuation was used on a web page, and I don't think Wikipedia is obliged to keep the original punctuation if a web page uses a hyphen, minus sign or em dash in a date range. Even harder to tell what kind of dash/hyphen is on the cover of a book. What do others think? Chris the speller yack 15:38, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
To quote the policy: "BP years are given as 18,000 BP or spelled out as 18,000 years before present (not 18,000 YBP, 18,000 before present, 18,000 years before the present, or similar)."
If this is a scientific notation, there should be no room for making assumptions. We should be saying either 18,000 years BP, or we should be accepting 18,000 YBP after first defining it in an article.
Does anyone have an opinion on this before I amend the policy, please? Regards, William Harris | talk 04:30, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for your support, and forgiving my initial lack of clarity above. We also have scientific articles quite comfortably using YBP after it has been initially defined, of which this is one of many examples: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4446326/ It is often used in ancient DNA studies, and I can see no reason why Wikipedia should not be doing the same rather than banning the term "YBP" with no reason provided. Regards, William Harris | talk 03:09, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
At Uncertain, incomplete, or approximate dates, we have:
[[Floruit|fl.]]
, or {{
fl.}}
may be used:
That last bit has apparently been there for some time. A year or two ago I added the html comment, <!-- Huh? As opposed to kings, queens, and clergymen, who sit around all day? What about mathematicians – do they have an "occupation"? --> but there has been no reply to date. Any thoughts? E Eng 07:32, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
See #Unit_names_and_symbols, the 29kg example. I propose to split example into two independent issues: 1. When to use a space, 2. What kind of space to use (NBSP or simple)? As it is presented now, it is confusing by mixing things up. Also the word "but" is used incorrectly, as there is no contradiction just a different situation; consider reading "and" instead. In split rows:
Use a nonbreaking space ({{
nbsp}} or ) between a number and a unit symbol, or use {{
nowrap}}. Certain symbols with which no space is used are shown in the "Specific units" table below.
|
29 kg Markup: 29 kg or {{nowrap|29 kg}}
|
29kg |
Use a normal space ( ) between a number and a unit name. | 29 kilograms Markup: 29 kilograms
|
Just wanted to share with my esteemed fellow editors that anagrams of Manual of Style incude Of, um, anal style; Foul, lame, nasty; and Lame! Flay us not!.
And the winner is... A muse? Flatly, no! E Eng 15:54, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
The international standard unit symbols for the pound force and avoirdupois pound are lbf and lb, respectively. I have encountered many articles that use non-standard symbols such as lbm, lb_m, lb_f and lb_F. My attempts to harmonise (by following the international standard) are met with claims that it is somehow clearer to use these non-standard symbols. I have made a text proposal at mosnum in the spirit of WP:BRD. Please also feel free to comment at Lbm and Slug (mass). Thanks, Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 12:02, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
I suggest the phrase "The international standard unit symbols" at the beginning of this section is nonsense. If the people who still use customary British and American units were interested in following international standards, we'd all be using SI. The fact that these older units persist proves that international standards have made limited headway in this realm. Jc3s5h ( talk) 15:44, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
I'm afraid I do object, on the grounds that I'd first like to see actual arguments on both sides, emanating from actual discussions on actual articles. Otherwise we're working in a vacuum. E Eng 22:00, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
References
Dondervogel, I agree with you in general, that we should use lb for mass and lbf for force, and should make those changes in articles and templates that do otherwise, and then if someone objects, invite them to discuss it there, or more centrally here. But not just let it lie, since it's clearly a mess. On the other hand, I think that lb can sometimes be used where lbf is what is meant, as long as it's not ambiguous what is intended. Perhaps in constructs such as foot pounds and pounds per square inch, where including the f would seem unconventional? Dicklyon ( talk) 05:57, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
OK, looking back to where this came up, and particularly at the IP's opinion in Template_talk:GravEngAbs#Eliminate_pound_mass_because_it.27s_not_part_of_a_real_system_of_units, I can see more clearly the issue that Dondervogel is struggling with there. Apparently in aviation they like the system of lb always being a force, and sometimes go so far as to claim that there's no such thing as a pound mass, and so propose one radical approach. Most "modern" systems go the other way and define a pound as only a mass. In typical usage, it might be either, and usually nobody cares which; whether you buy you cheese using a spring scale or a balance, a pound is a pound unless you're extra terrestrial. So the right thing to do is probably dependent on the context, and I admit that in a context where the difference is relevant or under discussion, using both lbf and lbm or some such is a good idea. In most contexts, however, just using lb is probably fine; if the interpretation is important, linking the first use to the appropriate article Pound (mass) or Pound (force) should be enough to remove any problem. Using lbf in general where lb is conventional would be horrible for the general audience. If one or more article or template discussions could be resolved along such lines (or some other consensus), I'd support saying something about it here, too. Invite me to relevant discussions please. Dicklyon ( talk) 18:31, 14 December 2016 (UTC) A half-pound of Newtons
The purpose of mosnum is to promote uniformity of style in units and numbers. There are several templates used to harmonise symbols for the pound (mass) and pound (force) across articles. One of these uses lbf and lbm, one uses lbf, and another uses lbm. Mosnum is not doing its job. Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 23:24, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
site:wikipedia.org +kbps
" yields "About 146,000 results", and similar sorts of results for the others. Good luck "promoting clarity and cohesion, while helping editors write articles with consistent and precise language, layout, and formatting" in those articles. --
RexxS (
talk) 17:56, 31 December 2016 (UTC)References
When I made this edit [26] it seemed perfectly obvious, but on reflection I realize I just don't know. In other words, which are correct?
6 foot 5 inchesand
6 foot 1 inchor
6 feet 5 inchesand
6 feet 1 inch
(Obviously there's no issue about the inch/inches.) Our current text on mixed units
old version doesn't explicitly address the question. Thoughts?
E
Eng 01:57, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
6 gallon 5 ouncesand
6 gallon 1 ounce
6 gallons 5 ouncesand
6 gallons 1 ounce
OK, good. I think Primergrey's comment is the key: I often hear "six foot two", never "six feet two", but "six feet two inches" and never "six foot two inches"
. Clearly we're never going to say merely "A six foot two man" in an article, so that decides it: we're agreed that (B) and (D) are correct, (A) and (C) wrong?
E
Eng 03:43, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
I'd appreciate it if a few of you could take a look
old version.
E
Eng 04:03, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
Actually, we would say "a six-foot man" because it's being used as an adjective directly in that sort of construction: "a four-inch stick"; a "ten-ton weight"; etc. The colloquialism is when it's used as a predicate: "the man was six foot tall" - I never hear "the man was six feet tall", although it's technically correct. -- RexxS ( talk) 17:13, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
What we need to do is:
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 23:59, 1 January 2017 (UTC)
So I come here for reassurance and get soooo confused. This edit back in March 2014 tried to shorten the (apparently) obnoxiously long list of examples:
in section Numbers as figures or words. Currently the complete examples of the rule are
Now I may be dysfunctional but reading that says to me that the examples of "larger ones" includes both 'fifty-six' and 'five hundred'.
The original examples included one example hyphenated and three examples not hyphenated. This lent itself to comparison between the examples, eliciting understanding that 'fifty-six' should be hyphenated, the others not. This was lost in the attempt at neatening up.
Which would be better? Changing this to "(fifty-six, but not five hundred)" or simply restoring the original list of four examples? I feel having more examples is nearly always better, and especially apt when reading comprehension is impaired. (Shenme says 'hiya!') Shenme ( talk) 06:11, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
Which dates do we use for departures at midnight? For example, Maggie Hassan's resignation as Governor of New Hampshire took effect at midnight 3 January 2017. Do we use 2 January or 3 January, as the departure date? GoodDay ( talk) 14:33, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
According to MOS:FOREIGNITALIC, foreign terms that aren't commonly used in English should be italicised. This probably applies to foreign units such as the Japanese tsubo or the Thai rai. This isn't spelled out in MOSNUM, however, and there's the possibility of conflict with preferred style for units, whose symbols are generally set in roman (as opposed to variables, which are in italics).
I've been discussing adding italics to some such units in Template:Convert, and it's been suggested that further input be requested here first. So, should foreign units be italicised, following the above? Or is there more reason not to? -- Paul_012 ( talk) 08:08, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
{{convert|100|arpent|lk=in}}
→ 100
arpents (34 ha){{convert|100|pyeong|lk=in}}
→ 100
pyeong (330 m2){{convert|100|rai|lk=in}}
→ 100
rai (160,000 m2){{convert|100|dunam|lk=in}}
→ 100
dunams (0.10 km2; 0.039 sq mi){{convert|100|shaku|lk=in}}
→ 100
shaku (30 m){{convert|100|viss|lk=in}}
→ 100
viss (160 kg)Please see Template talk:Infobox unit#RfC: capitalization rule for name parameter, about whether a unit name that appears at the top of an infobox should be capitalized or not. Jc3s5h ( talk) 20:24, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
In all seriousness, I want to thank WikiOriginal-9 for taking the time to reduce the GDQ (gloom-and-doom quotient) of this guideline [28]. E Eng 21:58, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
This is your only warning; if you invent a new acronym again, you may be asked to write a date format essay without further notice. Kendall-K1 ( talk) 03:50, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
A reader writes in at WP:OTRS ticket:2017020210016846. This reader released their email with a free license, specifically, "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported and GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts)".
This has always bothered me, and I'm not sure how to fix the issue outside of going in and editing each of the 366 days of the year pages, so I'm hoping you have a way of correcting this easier than I can.
At the top of each of these pages (such as today's - /info/en/?search=February_2 ) , wikipedia states the frequency of that day being on a particular day of the week (for a 400 year period). for example, today states
This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Sunday or Monday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Wednesday or Friday (56).
While this may be true for some arbitrary selected span of 400 years, if you took a different span of 400 years, the results would be different. This is similar to stating that February 2 always falls on Thursdays (when observing for one year - 2017)
The day of the week in which a specific date falls on rotates through a 28 year rotation. so every 28 years, any day of the year will land on a Sunday 4 times, Monday 4 times, Tuesday 4 times, etc.
If instead of a 400 year period, you had selected a multiple of 28, and used either 392 or 420, you would have found that each day would have fallen equally on each day of the week.
I realize I say "you" when I know that wikipedia is edited by people all over the world, but I think this error should be corrected from each of the date pages as it is incorrect.
This article is the subject of a request emailed to the
Volunteer Response Team (VRT). Issues identified are: reader writes in |
Anyone with comments should reply here, and I will direct the person to read here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:47, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
"While this may be true for some arbitrary selected span of 400 years, if you took a different span of 400 years, the results would be different."Turns out that is NOT a problem, because the Gregorian system (including the proleptic Gregorian calendar which goes back in time indefinitely albeit counterfactually/ahistorically), you can select an arbitrary span of *any* set of consecutive 400-years-duration, and get the same result. Above I used the span from 2000-thru-2399, which started on a Wednesday for 2/2/2000... but if I shifted up a notch, and used the span from 2001-thru-2400, the counterintuitive 58+57+56 outcome would still hold with no changes, because we dropped 2/2/2000 from the span, but replaced it with 2/2/2400, which is also a Wednesday since it is exactly 400 years away, and the Gregorian calendar *has* a 400-year-cycle. As pointed out by Kahastok, this is always the case: 2017 matches 2417, and also matches 1617, and so on, in terms of what the days-of-the-week look like. However, if you go back to 1217, you HAVE to use the proleptic Gregorian, otherwise things will get seriously out of whack mathematically speaking.
"The day of the week in which a specific date falls on rotates through a 28 year rotation."And that *is* in fact the case, for some calendrical systems, as explained at the Solar cycle (calendar) article. As Jc3s5h mentioned above, the result for the Julian calendar would differ, since it uses a different leapday-scheme from the Gregorian. While it is true that February_2 and the other on-this-day articles in wikipedia have an intro-paragraph which only covers the Gregorian calendar, that does not mean wikipedia should ignore the Julian calendar. The very first thing in the February_2#Events section is the Breviary of Alaric which is traditionally dated to February 2nd during 506 Anno Domini. There is no cite for that 2/2/0506 datestamp in the February_2 article, but if you click on the Breviary of Alaric article there is a cite to a couple of sources published in the late 1800s. So the question becomes, were those sources using the proleptic Gregorian calendar, for the year 506 A.D.? Probably they were not, is my guess, although the source doesn't specifically say if they were using old-style (Julian) dates, or new-style (Gregorian) dates.
"The dating method used should follow that used by reliable secondary sources (or if reliable sources disagree, that used most commonly, with an explanatory footnote)."So probably the February_2 article, and other on-this-day articles, should follow the example set by WP:RS. What is the tactic most commonly used by On This Day type of publications, that are WP:RS? I would assume they use a mixture of Julian and Gregorian, but they might do something different. In particular, I'd really like to know whether or not the WP:RS utilize the strange-sounding
"...but the start of the Julian year should be assumed to be 1 January..."thing that MOS:JG guideline recommends. That would impact our specific use-case, since we are usually listing the year in which an event/birth/death happened. So for instance, George Washington was born "February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731]" and we only list him at February_22#Births with 1732 as the year-of-birth. Is that normal/proper/etc? Do some WP:RS crossref him On This Day: February 11th (for G.W. see Feb 22nd), and also, do some RS use 1731 rather than 1732 for Washington's birth-year? Agree that we should get the exact wording hammered out, for footnotes and intro-text, before we go WP:BOLDly changing all 366 entries 47.222.203.135 ( talk) 16:01, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
Should this be clarified here? It seems it's not widely understood, and at least one of our articles put the year 0 in the mouth of a source that said year 1 until a moment ago. Maybe say Some sources refer to a year 0; where it is necessary to use such sources, try to find a way to work around this
(say, using "the beginning of the year" or "the turn of the era", or rounding up to "year 1"), or at least say the converse Do not insert a year 0 if a source uses wording like "turn of the era", etc.
?
Hijiri 88 (
聖
やや) 12:44, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict) When one is exclusively using AD and BC notation (or equivalently, CE and BCE) there is no year 0. But if one is using astronomical year numbering or the version of ISO 8601 adopted in 2004, there is a year 0. Also, in astronomical works, it is common to use several ways of designating time in the same text, and the reader is expected to keep them straight. So unless 聖 tells us exactly which article and which source are at issue, it's impossible to say if there is an error or not. Jc3s5h ( talk) 14:57, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
In the "Uncertain, incomplete, or approximate dates" section, {{ c.}} is used in one of the examples, but this template is now deprecated and is being replaced (has been already?) by {{ circa}} with the nolk=yes parameter. I remember some time ago reading the preference that we use {{ circa}} in the first occurrence, and {{ c.}} subsequently to avoid over-linking. I'm not sure I know all of the ins and outs here, so can someone more knowledgeable update the advice in this section - at least change the example, and restore the advice about second and subsequent uses? David Brooks ( talk) 01:06, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
In aircraft articles, specifications are given in metric and imperial. Template:convert is often used between units, but can imply errors by rounding when it shouldn't, when conversion are made backwards, with the wrong source unit. The best thing to do is to retain the manufacturer specs, as in Airbus_A330neo#Specifications where the template isn't called but the manufacturer conversions are used, with its deliberate rounding. To avoid confusing it with the output of Template:convert, I separate units with a slash instead of giving one or the other inside brackets, I don't even know which is preferred : obviously Airbus engineering works in metric, but its marketing is often in imperial units as it is customary. Do you think this agnosticism, not choosing a preferred unit and showing it, can be useful for the reader? -- Marc Lacoste ( talk) 14:01, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
I posted this 19 February 2014 and it was archived 12 March 2014 without generating any useful discussion, but it remains an issue.
In section Julian and Gregorian calendars it says, "Dates of events in countries using the Gregorian calendar are given in the Gregorian calendar." For example, Greece did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1923, so events in Greece prior to 1923 are supposed to be given with the Julian date. Presumably this rule applies generally, but it does not specifically state that this rule applies in Days of the Year articles. A reader looking at a Days of the Year article (e.g. January 1) would assume that two events or births in the same year both happened the same day. This would suggest that all events, births, and deaths in Days of the Year articles should be in the Gregorian calendar starting in 1582. The downside of this would be that articles about people and events relating to countries that adopted the Gregorian calendar after 1582 would have different dates from the Days of the Year article. This could be confusing!
I think WP:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Julian and Gregorian calendars should be modified to clarify the application of "Dates of events in countries using the Gregorian calendar are given in the Gregorian calendar" to Days of the Year articles. Whichever way the decision goes, I would suggest that events, births and deaths after 1582 in countries that still used the Julian Calendar should have clarifications in Days of the Year articles. For example, Ioannis Kapodistrias (11 February 1776 – 9 October 1831) is listed in February 11 as
His Gregorian birthday is February 22, 1776. So if it is ruled that the use of Gregorian dates goes by country in Days of the Year articles, I would modify his listing in February 11 to something like
And if it is ruled that Days of the Year articles list Gregorian dates starting in 1582, I would suggest listing Ioannis Kapodistrias in February 22 something like
— Anomalocaris ( talk) 16:17, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
How should a date that uses multiple seasons be entered? An issue of a certain journal ("Medieval Life," used on the Pioneer Helmet page) is dated "Autumn/Winter 1997/8." I've changed the years in the citation to "1997–98," but can't find a workaround for the seasons (e.g., "Autumn–Winter," "Autumn-Winter," or "Autumn/Winter") that doesn't tell me to "Check date values in: |date=." Thanks in advance for any suggestions! -- Usernameunique ( talk) 21:51, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
Please come participate in the discussion at WP:VPP#Date links on portal date-specific pages. Thank you. ··· 日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:48, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
Is it Cretan Revolt (1866–1869) or Cretan Revolt (1866–69); Ecuadorian–Peruvian territorial dispute of 1857–60 or Ecuadorian–Peruvian territorial dispute of 1857–1860? The examples use different styles.-- Zoupan 03:23, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
The style guide states the following rule: “A comma follows the year unless followed by other punctuation”. It then provides the following sentence as an example:
The weather on March 12, 2005, was clear and warm
This sentence actually demonstrates that the rule is wrong (quite apart from the fact that the official style guide cannot even punctuate its own examples correctly with a final period). Remove the date from the sentence, and one is left with:
The weather, was clear and warm
The comma within the date (12,) is part of the date format, whereas the comma following the date (2015,) is part of the sentence structure, not part of the date. So removing the date from the sentence leaves us with a misplaced comma. The other way of trying to explain this concept is to reverse the above. A date is formatted thus:
March 12, 2015
Now create a sentence:
The weather was clear and warm.
Now add the date to that sentence:
The weather on March 12, 2015 was clear and warm.
Finally, the best way to avoid this issue altogether is to refrain from interrupting the natural flow of the sentence in the first place simply by writing the sentence thus:
The weather was clear and warm on March 12, 2015.
Therefore, I urge that we remove the above incorrect rule from the style guide altogether.
— Dilidor ( talk) 18:18, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
following the rule to always put a comma after the year never causes confusion and seldom offends. I'll show you where it offends:
I completely agree with EEng, but I also think there is value in consistency within an article. As Chris the speller said above, s/he added two commas after the year to make those two dates consistent with all the other dates that had a comma after the year. Before undoing those edits, Dilidor should have checked to see what style was used throughout the article. If s/he had, s/he would have seen that the style was to use a comma, and should have left Chris' edits alone. I'd like to add that, in my experience, Americans are taught to use the comma after the year – witness the Chicago Manual of Style. This is, of course, in the American date style format. The comma has nothing to do with pausing or not pausing; it is a visual marker to set the date off from the rest of the sentence. I don't think a comma is needed after a year in the British date style format. You are free, Dilidor, to start a discussion at the MoS, but I think you will come up against a lot of resistance to a new rule requiring, or a new guideline recommending, leaving out the comma after the year in the American date style format. I suggest leaving it as it is, and in a way similar to determining the variant of English used by searching the article and the article's history, we look for the preferred or dominant date style used in an article and work for consistency. I do recommend using the comma after the year in the American date style format, though. – Corinne ( talk) 01:59, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
January 1, 1920 started like any other day.
Before we discuss the events of January 1, 1920, I'd like to set some ground rules.
Dilidor: Thank you for your interest in improving Wikipedia. The rule "A comma follows the year unless followed by other punctuation" is not wrong. It agrees with the Chicago Manual of Style and other style guides. Please notice that the rule is footnoted, and the footnote links to Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Commas, where it details it:
Incorrect: | He set October 1, 2011 as the deadline for Chattanooga, Oklahoma to meet his demands. |
Correct: | He set October 1, 2011, as the deadline for Chattanooga, Oklahoma, to meet his demands. |
In the Incorrect example, "2011" binds more tightly to the words "as the deadline" than it does to "October 1"; the comma after "2001" helps bind the date together. And in the same example, "Oklahoma" binds more tightly to "to meet his demands" than it does to "Chattanooga"; the comma after "Oklahoma" helps bind the "city, state" construction together. (Notice that I put "city, state" in quotes; without the quotes, the word "state" would bind more closely to "construction" than to "city"!) There are numerous online sources that support this comma, including:
Rule 9. Use a comma to separate the day of the month from the year, and—what most people forget!—always put one after the year, also.
Example: It was in the Sun's June 5, 2003, edition.
When the date appears in the middle of a sentence, commas should appear both before and after the year.
Her arrival on April 10, 1988, was considered a turning point for the company.
— Anomalocaris ( talk) 17:20, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
EEng, acknowledging that you've been editing here longer than I have and that I wouldn't tell you anything that I was certain you already knew, I have to question your fairly regular statements about "MOS commandments" and various synomolies (I know). Speaking only of the style guidelines, there is no mechanism, codified or unwritten, to "deal with" editors who write section headers in title case, link France three times in one article, or break any other MOS "rule". That edits being brought into line with a house style should be seen as "micromanaging" or any other disparaging term, seems to me to be the result of some sort of vanity, as though one's edits were already perfect as written. Certainly many readers do not care about consistency, which is to say, they are not bothered by inconsistency. Some are bothered by it, though, and I think I can safely say that no one is bothered by consistency. So really, these gnoming edits are an improvement for some and a lateral move for others. I can't see a negative aspect of it. Primergrey ( talk) 04:04, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
Possibly the best solution would be a line at the beginning of each article containing a couple dozen commas, and also some semicolons, quotation marks, and so forth. The reader could then be instructed to mentally sprinkle them throughout the text in whatever manner she finds pleasing. Herostratus ( talk) 02:35, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
The page currently says:
I think this is fine advice for four-digit years, and maybe even for three-digit ones, but not for one- and two-digit years. It is not very intuitive for most people to interpret a bare small number as a year, in a phrase like Sextus Aelius Catus (consul in 4). Consul in four what?
It's true that the advice allows an exception to avoid ambiguity, but I'm not sure the phrase is ambiguous. It's not that there's another available meaning; it's that many readers may struggle to find even one meaning. But if you say consul in 4 AD, then it's clear.
On a possibly related note, there was a convention until not too long ago that articles on AD/CE years appeared at the bare number (like 1972). That was confusing for small numbers, many of which were more intuitive as articles about the numbers themselves rather than the years. So now all one- and two-digit bare-number links are either to the article about the number, or to a disambig page including links to the number and the year.
I propose that the guidance be amended to allow (and possibly even encourage) AD/CE for one- and two-digit years, even if not "ambiguous" per se. -- Trovatore ( talk) 09:58, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
On Bibliography of biology#Zoology, I'm still seeing an error, no matter what I do to the Pliny reference. Any help? = paul2520 ( talk) 18:32, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
"Context determines whether the 12- or 24-hour clock is used ... " says the guideline, and that's all. This has been used as an excuse by Europeans from non-English speaking countries, when writing in English on enWP, generally to impose 14:35 rather than 2:35 PM pm (for example) upon all of us working with this project, no matter what the actual context. Being bi-continental, and a translator, I have grown up with these problems and worked with them for over 50 years. It is my firm conviction that military time, aka the 24-hour clock, normally is confusing to people in English-speaking countries and is not normally used (knowledgeably) in English text. Even in Britain, that time format is only used on a few formal documents and a bits of rare transportation information. Google seems to clearly bear me out on that. Couldn't our guideline be more specific as to what is meant by "context", since "context" is now being interpreted as "do as you please even if most people will be confused". --
SergeWoodzing (
talk) 11:20, 4 May 2017 (UTC)
is confusing to American readers probablyI doubt it. -- Izno ( talk) 12:20, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
This has been used as an excuse by Europeans from non-English speaking countries, when writing in English on enWP, generally to impose 14:35 rather than 2:35 pm– where's the evidence that it's people from non-English speaking countries who use the 24 hour clock here? I would always do so in formal writing because it removes ambiguity.
Even in Britain, that time format is only used on a few formal documents and a bits of rare transportation information– nonsense; it's used on every bus, railway and flight electronic information board I've ever seen in the UK and in the corresponding printed timetables, as is easy to demonstrate by searching online. The guideline is fine as it is; if it were changed it should move towards suggesting the least ambiguous format, namely the 24 hour clock. Peter coxhead ( talk) 13:05, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
there's no point in talking about this until we see some actual examples in actual articles. Until then it's just the usual MOS philosophizing, I meant that we need to see examples of article editing situations where either "the wrong outcome" was arrived at, or excessive editor time was consumed before arriving at the "right" outcome, and changing the guideline would fix that. If it's not possible to give such examples, there's no point in changing the guidelines. E Eng 16:07, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Nobody [...] uses 24 hour notation in America, since I have not disputed that statement. The statement I disputed was
is confusing to American readers probably. And then you get wormy about Americans having to do the translation. You seem to continue changing your goalposts. -- Izno ( talk) 17:06, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
On the other hand, if people are writing stuff like "By 15:30, the fire had spread to the main building..." in articles, that's a problem even if people aren't fighting over it. Well, if people are writing that stuff, and it's a problem, and someone can shows us examples of it, why hasn't that person attempted to change it in those articles? If not, then for all we know this could just be fixed in those articles, with no debate and no need for a guidelines change. That's what I mean by
Until then it's just the usual MOS philosophizing. "Problems" that were never even the subject of talk page discussion aren't problems. E Eng 17:13, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Searching on "at 15:30" randomly I found that:
I think these latter, at least, are wrong. It's not crisis, but it a low-level degradation of the accessibity of the material. I understand where they probably came from: source documents from weather scientists in the first case, military people in the second. IMO it's lazy to not fix these these.
"The race was held over a duration of 24 hours, starting at 3:30pm on Saturday, January 28" at 2012 24 Hours of Daytona, would, if changed to "at 15:30", be even worse. However, it doesn't say that, and no point inventing theoretical problems.
IMO MOS:COMMONALITY would tend to indicate use of 12 hour time generally if it is common in Britain (and Canada etc.). If a British person were to read ""At 3:30 pm on 26 May, Hitler ordered the panzer groups to continue their advance" and think "well that just looks odd" MOS:COMMONALITY might not apply. If they had to think "OK... that means... hold on... yes, 15:30" to understand the time of the event, then MOS:COMMONALITY would definitely not apply. I don't know if this is the situation or not.
Indian and other non-Anglosphere readers might matter some. They're a secondary consideration, but many of our readers are ESL cases, some of whom might have enough trouble already accessing the material, and if "3:30 pm" makes them pause and stumble, that's a data point.
@ User:Izno, I guess we just disagree. Have you graduated college perhaps? That could be the problem right there. Most people have not graduated college. This is something to keep in mind I think. And Americans are pretty provincial. Most speak only the one language and know less about the world than outsiders realize, I think. Herostratus ( talk) 00:27, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
I'm aware there are a few topic areas (hurricanes/weather events, military history, maybe others) where guidelines (maybe informal) call for use of 24-hr format. Can someone point to examples of other articles where there was argument over which format to use? I agree that 12-hr format should be universally understandable, if not always the natural format for some readers for some topics. E Eng 15:22, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
Over at Japanese_units_of_measurement, one user has added precise unit conversions in the form of what seem to be astonishingly large fractions, such as "62,500,000/158,080,329" (n.b., commas are part of what that user included). Is there a formal MoS position on such fractions? Editors here are invited to weigh in on the talk page there. Rhialto ( talk) 20:05, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Overcapitalization of "vol." and "no.", which is also relevant to MOS:NUM (including proposal of merging some material to this page), but is addressing material presently in the main MOS page. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 23:21, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
Has anyone noticed the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(plurals)#.27Measurements_involving_two_or_more_units_.28such_as_pounds_per_square_inch_or_miles_per_hour.29_should_usually_have_the_first_word_in_the_plural.27? The question is whether units like metre per second and foot-pound should be renamed as metres per second and feet-pound. The discussion has far reaching consequences and could result in widespread renaming of units from singular to plural (or limited renaming from plural to singular, depending on the outcome). Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 14:14, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
In section 3.5, Dates and numbers#Decimals/Grouping of digits/Grouping with narrow gaps, the following sentence appears to contain a typo:
Shouldn't the 'or' be a 'not'?
It seems that it should, but I didn't want to make a change on an important guide like this one without double checking. Thanks! - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) 11:38, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
* Digits are generally grouped into threes. Right of the decimal point, you may use a final group of four instead of leaving an 'orphaned' digit at the end of the sequence, e.g. 99.1234567. However, one or two digits at the end of a sequence are also acceptable, e.g., 99.1234567.
- Mark D Worthen PsyD
(talk) 14:59, 24 June 2017 (UTC)What's the guideline for "one-and-a-half" in article prose -- to use words, or numbers? I've read the "Fractions and ratios" section of this page but I'm still not clear on which is recommended. "these single-family homes are narrow, one-and-a-half story brick structures", or "these single-family homes are narrow, 1+1⁄2-story brick structures"? (Pinging @ Chris the speller:, re this edit.) — Mudwater ( Talk) 21:10, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
The Kipper Kids article mentions a duo where one is from the U.S. and one is from the UK. Which date format should be used? Right now the DOB is in the format for the particular person. AngusWOOF ( bark • sniff) 03:33, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
A question about this sentence from MOS:DATERET: Where an article has shown no clear sign of which format is used, the first person to insert a date is equivalent to "the first major contributor".
Does this mean the first person to insert a date in the article's text, or does it mean the first person to insert a date anywhere, even citations? MOS:DATEUNIFY seems to say that the format used in the article's text may influence the format used in citations, but not necessarily the other way around. Bmf 051 ( talk) 01:10, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
In Chrome on Mac OS, I'm seeing an error in the table (but have not gone and fixed it, in case others do not see it on other platforms).
The "Do not use a leading zero in month or day, except in all-numeric (yyyy-mm-dd) format" cell in the Comments column is spanning the "2007-4-15" example in the "Unacceptable" column, which is not an example of what the comment proscribes.
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SMcCandlish ☺
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¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 19:02, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
09 June | 9 June | Do not use a leading zero in month or day, except in all-numeric (yyyy-mm-dd) formats |
June 09 | June 9 | |
2007-4-5 | 2007-04-05 | Do not omit leading zeros in all-numeric (yyyy-mm-dd) formats |
For the sake of simpler English, may I suggest that the instructions be re-written as positive statements rather than negatives?
09 June | 9 June | Remove leading zeros in date formats that have months written out as words. |
June 09 | June 9 | |
2007-4-5 | 2007-04-05 | Include leading zeros in all-numeric (yyyy-mm-dd) date formats |
Rhialto ( talk) 21:28, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
Currently the manual states that if a specific page has dates set using a certain era notation (BC vs. BCE) then it should remain that way unless their is a specific reason for this. I do not understand the motivation behind this and think it should be amended. If a user is willing to take the time to change a page to have more modern and proper notation (BCE-CE) then that should be appropriate and encouraged, specifically on pages regarding mathematical or scientific topics which should use the most current notation and be devoid of any of the religious connotation that BC-AD holds. Lessconfusedthanbefore ( talk) 16:59, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
-Jc3s5h, I'm not interested in whether a "majority" believe one way or another. Rather, respectable organizations like Chicago Manual of Style and Smithsonian declare a prefrence for CE and it seems that in order for Wikipedia to be a more inclusive and credible resource, it would behoove us to follow in their stead. Lessconfusedthanbefore ( talk) 01:02, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
As for the central quetsion: EEng is correct that this topic is a stylistic warzone and has been one for a long time. However, the assertion by JohnBlackburne that "there is no religious connotation [to] using BC/AD" is absurd on its face, since the religious connotations of it are the source of the recurrent controversy, on and off Wikipedia, and were the very reason that CE/BCE alternatives were ever implemented. Etymological arguments about "Wednesday" are
false equivalence through analogies that are not actually analogous. No analogies are ever going to get around the demonstrable fact that people on and off WP object to BC/AD specifically because of its tie to Christian dogma. The recurrent dispute here (which is a rather obvious
WP:Systemic bias matter) is never going to go away until we revise MOS to use BCE/CE by default and to reserve BC/AD for topics in which those are especially appropriate (biblical and Christian church matters, and the history of Christendom before the modern era, including its interactions, e.g. the Crusades, with neighboring cultures). Whenever I encounter BC/AD used in articles that are not within the appropriate purviews (i.e. "there are reasons specific to [the article's] content" for a change), I change it to BCE/CE dating (especially in science articles, including archaeology), and am very rarely reverted on it. There appears to me to be a general editorial consensus on the matter, which we've simply not updated MOSNUM to include. I generally oppose substantive (versus clarifying) changes to MoS at this stage of its development, but we should continue to make those that tie off disputatious loose ends and which will curtail recurrent strife.
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SMcCandlish ☺
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¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 20:09, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
There is a discussion at WP:AN#Appeal my topic ban regarding a topic ban which I have suggested could still apply to MOS/MOSNUM, but active editors here may think that unnecessary. 92.19.24.150 ( talk) 22:08, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
I did a search through the MOS talk archives. I can't say I read through every thread, but I have not yet seen a clear explanation of "strong national ties". It seems like I regularly see people act as though any person, place, thing, event, idea, company, etc. that was born, formed, created, invented, or otherwise primarily existed in a given country has "strong national ties" to that country such that WP:DATERET does not apply. "Strong national ties" suggests it's also possible to have "weak national ties" or "moderate national ties" that would not be sufficient to change the date format on the basis of such ties. I would not say that being born in the United States gives me "strong national ties" to the United States, for example. If I were also an employee of the Federal Government, if I were a Founding Father, or if I ran for President of the United States, then there would be "strong national ties". Similarly (at the risk of belaboring my point), a book that happens to be published here has no strong national ties unless, say, it's a book about American exceptionalism or the Constitution. I'm intentionally omitting the specific examples that led me to ask this question, since I'm looking for best practices rather than dispute resolution. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 18:17, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
Here Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Military_history#BL_article_naming Primergrey ( talk) 06:55, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
I know it's been there since the year dot (thoughtfully trashed by an anon recently), but I hate most of it—especially that weird rule about not starting a sentence with a numeral. I disregard it in my professional editing and writing. Tony (talk) 13:17, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
However, this rule is common to most style guides, and WP and its readers are probably best served by sticking to it for consistency, comprehensibility, and avoidance-of-chaos reasons. If it were excised, we'd end up in a year or less with probably hundreds of thousands of pointless cases of people beginning sentences with numerals out of sheer laziness, not because they had any contextually important reason to do so. It really doesn't take much writing practice to avoid starting sentences with numeric figures that (e.g. in a maths or science article) shouldn't be converted to spelled-out number words like "twenty-three". And the rule really has no effect on editors; those who don't want to follow the rule or aren't aware of it don't get yelled at; WP:GNOMEs just fix it after the fact as part of their general copyediting maintenance. We already have an exemption for formal and proper names. Are there any other variances that really seem needed?
Another way of looking at it is that so many people are familiar with and certain of this rule as a general English usage matter (outside of specific contexts that permit sentence-initial numerals, familiar to some writers) that eliminating the rule here would probably manufacture a tremendous amount of dispute over a long period of time, which is the opposite of what MoS is for. To the extent non-trivial changes are still being made to MoS, they're mostly to address: disputes that were once rare and have in time become recurrent and tendentious; poor wording that needs clarification because some subset of editors misinterpret it; and (rarely and often contentiously, as at
MOS:JR and
MOS:IDENTITY) actual shifts in real-world usage. There are aspects of MoS that are weird, like our list-item style (start with capital letter, do not end with semicolon – a habit borrowed from Powerpoint presentations and probably not found in any major style guides). But we've had them so long that changing them would cause a lot of strife and a lot of content churn over trivia without objectively improving articles. The "sentences don't start with numerals" rule is surely in that category.
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SMcCandlish ☺
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¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 05:04, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
Here's the sentence in question from the article Toronto Maple Leafs:
Between October 17, 1992, and October 15, 2016, the Maple Leafs took a unique approach to retired numbers.
The general rule is that, with that date format, there is always a comma after the year. There's no exception to that in a range spelled out with "and" instead of a dash, is there? — C.Fred ( talk) 20:11, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Between October 17, 1992 and October 15, 2016, the Maple Leafs took...
Between 17 October 1992 and 15 October 2016, the Maple Leafs took...
After 2016 the Maple Leafs took...
After October 17, 1992, the Maple Leafs took...
After October 17, 1992 the Maple Leafs took...
Is there a credible rationale for why ordinals, e.g. the 1st of November, etc., are deprecated; and if there is, is it worth inclusion in the article? Graham.Fountain | Talk 10:17, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
I don't think it's about the (pointless) effort to save characters -- it's about clarity. Even when directly quoting a verbal speech, we don't write "...cost three hundred dollars", but "...cost $300", even though that makes the "dollars" appear out of the spoken order. We do this to make it quicker and easier for the reader to understand, even if that ignores a technical detail of quoting accuracy. Does adding ordinals in dates make things easier to read? I don't see how. "31st August" just adds a couple letters of clutter over "31 August"; if reading this out loud, I'd bet most people would say it the same either way. Numerals are preferred over spelling out numbers for a reason. That same reasoning should discourage inserting character hints of ordinals in dates, where they are assumed to be ordinals anyway.
I'm not sure that means our MOS should banish these ordinals, but I think it's one argument to do so. -- A D Monroe III ( talk) 17:27, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
My understanding is that this was a regional English thing, with US English tending to prefer cardinals, and UK English traditionally preferring ordinals, although some UK manuals of style (eg Guardian, UK gov, and Oxford) seem to be switching over to ordinals for days of the month (while keeping cardinals for century numbers). Rhialto ( talk) 09:29, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
To address a comment (by Graham.Fountain) that I missed: "there might be room for the personal taste and style of the contributor" –
WP:NOT#BLOG. WP doesn't exist for personal expressive catharsis, it exists for readers, and providing them with information in the clearest and least ambiguous way.
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SMcCandlish ☺
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¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 23:41, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
Fellow editors,
It's likely that we'll be living with increasing amounts of Wikidata-generated text on the English Wikipedia. Yet it's being generated in Berlin by developers and programmers in the German chapter without reference to the stylistic consensus that has painstakingly evolved on this site over the past 14 years.
I believe we should be taking more than a little interest in the style and formatting of Wikidata outputs. I've sounded a warning at the Wikidata state of affairs discussion that has been playing out during September. That page contians many expressions of caution, dismay, and alarm at the potential pitfalls of Wikidata's ability to roll out text at its whim, and at the lack of control we will have over the inevitable encroachments on en.WP.
Wikidata is an important project that will be riding the transition from biological algorithms (that's us, as creative editors) to electronic algorithms (that's machines that generate and read WP text). It's the latter that will slowly grow to dominate WMF sites from the mid-2020s onward, in a process that will be occurring in the economy at large in the first half of the century.
I urge editors to keep abreast of the developments, and to be ready to insist that Wikidata consult us on style and formatting before releasing on our site each displayed text that it proposes. This should be a matter of established protocol, in my view.
Tony (talk) 10:23, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
I have begun an RFC about accurate dates in citation metadata: Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#RFC: Accurate dates in citation metadata. Jc3s5h ( talk) 15:00, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
Does WP:DATERANGE apply to the titles of sources, i.e. those linking to Wikisource? Please see Template talk:Cite DNB#Hyphens and dashes again.-- Nevé – selbert 06:11, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
In the section Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers #Numbers as figures or words, there are examples of markup that have no reason behind them. In particular:
21{{nbsp}}million
I fail to see why "million" is any different in general from any other word.
The guidance at MOS:NBSP is "It is desirable to prevent line breaks where breaking across lines might be confusing or awkward." If you examine the sentence "Over 60 million people live in the UK", what is confusing or awkward about breaking after the 60? It does not impart any alternative meaning, so is not confusing; and starting the next line with "million" is no more awkward than any other word. Of course starting a line with an abbreviation or unit symbol, or punctuation like an ellipsis would be awkward, but we have MOS guidance already asking us to avoid those circumstances.
I do understand that sentences like "She sold the company for £5 million." would benefit from having a non-breaking space before the million. But that is simply because the currency unit appearing before the ordinal allows the fragment "She sold the company for £5" to have a very different meaning and a cognitive dissonance occurs if the reader then encounters "million" at the start of the next line. Nevertheless, those cases are already covered by MOS:NBSP's "prevent line breaks where breaking across lines might be confusing", so why should we be requiring a non-breaking space in all cases of an ordinal followed by "million" (or "billion", etc.)? -- RexxS ( talk) 18:29, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
{{
ns}}
. This should probably be merged with {{
nbsp}}
since they serve the same purpose (including spans of multiple non-breaking spaces). —
SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 03:42, 11 October 2017 (UTC)"The average weight of a [car make and model] in kilograms is approximately 1.5 |
thousand." |
"She sold the company for £5 |
million." |
"In 2014, between 9 and 29 million people between the ages of 15 and 64 used ecstasy". -- RexxS ( talk) 15:51, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
There does not seem to be any guidance in this Manual of Style on what units to use in prose writing and whether to convert them (such as this edit: "they used bamboo pipelines to transport and carry both brine and natural gas for many miles" to "they used bamboo pipelines to transport and carry both brine and natural gas for many kilometres."). WP:UNITS seems to state use SI (kilometers) "In all other articles" without "strong national ties", but it seems to just cover actual unit measurement, not prose. Using the unit "miles" without converting in prose seems to be supported by this Manual because it is cited twice as an example, "He walked several miles", "Miles of trenches were dug". Fountains of Bryn Mawr ( talk) 18:44, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
Please see
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting#Mathematics variables section is wrong and needs updating
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SMcCandlish
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¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 05:40, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
The example given "1960s Boston" - since it is referring to "Boston of the 1960s" I believe it should be written with an apostrophe in this case! i.e., "1960's Boston." Be good! 238-Gdn ( talk) 07:39, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
Let's stop arguing this through edit summaries.
It seems we have three separate concerns. Stanton doesn't like changing between singular and plural in the same sentence. EE notes that the other entries in the table are plural, and points out that you can say "letters other than X". My concern is that "hyphen" is not the name of the hyphen in the same sense that X is the name of the letter X.
Is that an accurate summary? If we agree on the problem, we might have a better chance of finding a solution. -- Trovatore ( talk) 16:40, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Do not use separators other than hyphensI probably won't unthinkingly change it years from now. E Eng 21:33, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Do not use separators other than hyphens? E Eng 04:25, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
I notice that the page says "Sport scores and vote tallies should be given as figures, even if in the zero-to-nine range (a 25–7 victory; ...)". Can I interpret this as expressing a preference for an en-dash as the preferred punctuation mark in such instances – versus, for example "a 25-7 victory" or "a 25:7 victory" or "a 25 : 7 victory"? — BarrelProof ( talk) 20:38, 20 November 2017 (UTC)