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It is a false god to say that something is "official". It is common among specialists to allow creeping capitalisation, which is harmless if kept within the specialism. It then becomes a slight badge of honour to show that one knows how "it is done". We should resist the push to use specialist structures, where they aren't necessary, whether it is phraseology, grammar or capitalisation. They obscure meaning for the non-specialist user.
Rich
Farmbrough, 05:14, 28th day of January in the year 2011 (UTC).
From: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Animals/Draft capitalization guidelines#Horse breeds. Thought this was worth preserving here as background. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 13:44, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't think " strawman" is being used in the normal manner here, where it seems the term refers to a weak, unsupported argument in favor of a position. Usually a strawman argument is a debating technique that refutes the opposition's position by framing it in its worst possible (and most easily knocked down) way.
Instead I think the specialist argument is simply a weak, fallacious argument. Maybe just call this the "Specialist fallacy". Joja lozzo 03:13, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Can't this argument be generalized to the "Reliable source style fallacy", i.e. the sources we use for content are not necessarily our best sources for style? Joja lozzo 02:04, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
For a good example of the MOS vs. tradition with job titles, see Talk:Chief Mechanical Engineer. Joja lozzo 17:07, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Another bad case: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Lead section#A lead is not a lede: Despite several clear consensus discussions against referring to Wikipedia leads as journalist ledes, because the words have exactly opposite meanings, journos and journo students keep editwarring the incorrect term back into WP:LEAD. This has been going on for at least 4 years. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 21:06, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
Even worse, possibly the most asinine case ever: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Equine/Archive 5#RFC: what units should be used for horse and pony heights?. Horse specialist proposes that we refuse to convert weird units like Hand (unit) to inches as well as to metric, despite US readers largely needing such a conversion, just because specialists never use inches to measure horses (worse, actually - they do use inches for small horses, but never for big ones. Yes, really.). If it weren't stale, I would hand out a WP:TROUT over that user-hateful idea. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 03:02, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
Wow. The author is a bit angry. No? I bet you're glad you got that off your chest. IMO, the best thing you can to is (metaphorically) scrumple up the paper and write it again. There's probably some good stuff in here but it (a) is TLDR at 3000+ words and (b) comes across as "I'm right and you're not only wrong but really stupid too (and to emphasise how stupid you are, I've wikilinked all the logical fallacies and common WP misbehaviours you've committed)". I don't follow all the goings-on at WP so perhaps there are some really bad specialist style disputes going on. Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation is all I can find. As a opinion essay, it doesn't have to be balanced of course, but it descends into the gutter when it paints all-who-disagree as evil, stupid and troublesome. Do the folk you disagree with have no good points?
I found this essay because WP:MEDMOS was quoted temporarily as a case of 'of specialists "getting it"'. I was initially confused. The sentence quoted concerned capitalisation, for which MEDMOS merely repeats the MOS guidance of sentence-case for article titles. However, the sentence goes on to say "For punctuation, e.g., possessive apostrophes and hyphens, follow the use by high-quality sources", which is exactly the sort of "specialist style fallacy" this essay seems to be written against.
As background, the above sentence was added to WP:MEDMOS by WhatamIdoing ( talk · contribs) after some heated discussion at WikiProject Medicine which moved onto MEDMOS. The discussion concerned the hyphenation of various carciomas vs WP:MOS and "English hyphenation rules". I don't want to open up old wounds on that one. I can't speak for WhatamIdoing but I support the sentence if it puts an end to edit warring over trivia. Otherwise, I'm not fussy about keeping it.
Our guidelines on naming, spelling and grammar are a right mix, sometimes deferring to published works, seeking the common usage, or obeying some written rule. The most important virtues of any guideline in these matters is that it minimises the risk of picking a stupid choice and that it provides a means of settling disputes among editors.
The author could do with swallowing an AGF pill. If the folk who live in Milngavie where told that they are stupid for not spelling their town "Mulguy", they'd probably respond with hostility, commit a few logical fallacies and if pushed hard enough, start breaking some WP guidelines. The same goes for our precious specialist writers. We need to keep them, not point them at essays that seem to be written to make them feel inadequate and unwelcome. Colin° Talk 21:55, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
(outdent) I think we're going round in circles now. Specialist sources and general dictionaries/style/grammar guides all have their place. It is a fallacy to assume either of these sources always give the best advice for our naming/style rules in articles. Being fundamentalist about naming/style is wrong. This isn't maths. Editors will vary as to how much weight they give to sources. Specialists will tend to give more weight to specialist sources and generalists to generalist sources. Extremist in one camp view the extremists in the other camp as fundamentally wrong, rather than respecting their opinions. This essay is harmful in the sense that it can be used by members of one camp to ridicule all the members of the other by describing only the beliefs/behaviours of the extremists. That in itself is a fallacy. Colin° Talk 12:59, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
''Homo sapiens''
, not Homo Sapiens
or homo sapiens
or ''Homo'' '''Sapiens'''
, etc.).It's not just about individual extremists.
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You say "The most reliable sources on ... in a general-interest work like an encyclopedia are reliable generalist works on style and grammar. Specialist works are notoriously unreliable for this purpose..." To me this fairly clearly says that the generalist sources always trump the specialist ones.
The balance between general sources and specialist sources has to be found and does it really matter if you come at it from one direction or the other? You will always find some cases where the other side has a better argument.
For example, our article naming policy gives Heroin as an example of a common name choice over the INN name. It is a good choice but not because we should use everyday brand names rather than INN names. In fact Wikipedia always uses the INN names for medical drug articles. There are only two drug articles I can think of on Wikipedia where the brand name is used. Heroin and Aspirin. Both are ex Bayer trademarks and aspirin is actually the INN. Folk read the heroin article because it is an illegal drug and not because it is a painkiller medicine (it is only used as such rarely and in a few countries). The caffeine example in that policy page is similarly flawed – people read about the drug in their coffee, not about some chemical compound. The name is chosen here because it suits the audience for the article, and their expectations, not because it is more commonly used. So for medical drugs, it is actually better to default to the INN name, because brand names would give us no end of problems, and to accept the very few exceptions to the rule where the everyday name is better. Colin° Talk 16:07, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
I think the essay needs to drop the issue of naming. It is covered by our policy. Stick to “capitalize, italicize, hyphenate or otherwise style the name of a subject”. I don’t think “layout” is an issue either, unless there really are folk insisting that articles in their speciality are double-spaced or right-justified? And the horse-measurement issue noted above is covered by our guideline on jargon – you need to explain technical terms to an unfamiliar audience. It isn’t one of style and anyway the editors involved didn’t display any of the misbehaviours listed in this essay. Colin° Talk 16:07, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
I made some copy edits in the lead to seek a more neutral tone and, according to my personal style, near- Joe Friday brevity. If you find that these contributions are helpful I will make time to work on the rest. Joja lozzo 19:42, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Help talk:Citation Style 1#RfC: Use "Vol.", "pp.", etc. consistently between citation templates, instead of ambiguous formatting like "9 (4): 7". The talk page at
Help talk:Citation style 1 is where the discussion about most of our citation templates is centralized. —
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ
Contrib.
20:48, 19 March 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ships#Hyphens. Fortunately this is snowballing against the ungrammatical specialist usage. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 00:28, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
At Talk:Cultivar#Following MOS and the thread immediately above it there's been some (not entirely collegial) discussion of use or misuse of capitalization of the term "group" in botany, what is called the " cultivar group" in long form. The actual official ICNCP standard in botanical literature is to capitalize the word as "Group" when it appears in a name (just like Genus is capitalized and italicized, species is italicized but not capitalized, etc.; there are real rules for scientific nomenclature of organisms). An example would be "Brassica oleracea Italica Group 'Calabrese'" for Calabrese broccoli (note "Group" not "group").
The issue: At least one editor has insisted on always capitalizing this word, everywhere, if it refers to cultivar group, e.g. "As Group names are used with cultivar names it is necessary to understand their way of presentation." By contrast, at least one other editor feels that this is a WP:SSF problem, and is the same error as always capitalizing "president" simply because it is capitalized when used as an job title with someone's name, or always capitalizing "corporation" because it is capitalized when included as part of the official name of a company. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 23:39, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Airports#New RfC, David1217 and Apteva launched another "hyphens vs. en dashes" RfC with regard to airports, after one RfC and various requested moves have already declined to override WP:MOSDASH on this. Someone seems not to have noticed WP:LOCALCONSENSUS and WP:OWN. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 02:37, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
At both Talk:Relative strength index and Talk:True strength index are various very typical SSF debates, where specialists (in this case, financial ones) repeatedly demand capitalization of these common noun phrases, which are non-proper-name terms of art in their field. No one else bought it. As usual, those insisting on their stylistic quirk (that people who are not specialists in that field will just interpret as a typo) fail to understand the difference between a specialist source being reliable on matters of fact about that specialty, vs. being a reliable source on English usage in a general-audience encyclopedia. The usual "follow the sources!" refrain is repeated, without realizing that for style, the overwhelming majority of reliable sources – newspapers, magazines, dictionaries, other encyclopedias, etc. – never capitalize these specific phrases nor other common nouns and noun phrases of similar sort, regardless of field/speciality. The specialist sources that do so are dwarfed by the standard-English practice used everywhere else, which has been turning away firmly from German-style noun capitalization since the late 18th century. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 08:40, 1 November 2012 (UTC)
Another classic example: Talk:Theater District, New York is overrun by people from the theatrical wikiproject trying three times back-to-back – [1] [2] [3] – to get this article to be at Theatre District, New York, despite the facts that:
And so on. "We're theatre people and this is a theatre topic, so WP must use the spelling preferred by theatre sources and the theatre project" is the entire real basis of the rename/move putsch, which has rapidly hit WP:DEADHORSE level.
Hi. Would this be a case of "specialist style" that in normal language should be inverted? See Threskiornithidae and "The family Lymantriidae includes ...". Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia ( talk) 17:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
I think it worth adding a paragraph or two bring a bit of balance to I think looks like an attack page.
-- PBS ( talk) 11:51, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
I agree that "homogenisation of style" is not the goal. But there are many issues of style that have widespread support for consistent application across WP, and these are the things that the MOS documents. Many discussions have found wide support for consistency over exceptions, in many areas, including the general principles of MOS:CAPS for example, even though many "local" groups like to try to capitalize their own stuff. I don't think MOS advocates ignoring usage in reliable sources; but where there are styling choices to be made, the MOS provides guidance, which we generally prefer over letting the styles of others vote. This gives us a little bit of "homogenization" of some style points, if you want to call it that, and making exceptions for titles has generally impressed most editors as a silly idea. And nobody would ever propose "Comet Hale—Bopp" I'm sure, and your characterization of the logic for choosing an en dash is faulty (and many many sources do as we do on that one, the "official" naming org's recommendations notwithstanding -- hence it's a perfect example of the SSF). Dicklyon ( talk) 15:00, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
{{
ATandMOS}}
, but it's erroneous no matter how persistent some people are in believing it. The very idea that reliable sources on the facts of some science topic or historical event or whatever have gotten style matters right, no matter what, is the very crux of the SSF. A history book about the Mexican–American war, like a journal about astronomy, are not style authorities. For WP (only), the MOS is. MOS serves one single purpose: Providing a style guide for Wikipedia, to stop recurrent style/grammar/punctuation debates so we can get back to content creation and sourcing. It is not a style guide for the rest of the world. It is not a linguistic description of the most common usage. It is not an insider guide in any field about usage within that field in it's own topical publications. It's our way of moving on, with compromises (sometimes uneasy ones), for our publication, which is written for everyone, not just people in particular specialities. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
11:33, 5 June 2015 (UTC)As one example among many, it has come up repeatedly whether to capitalize "marine" in reference to an individual member of the U.S. Marine Corp, when the word is not attached to their name as a title. It's yet another specialized-style fallacy. Marines like to capitalize the word, in constructions like "The Marine [sic] returned to the U.S. in July 2014 after a second tour of duty." Journalists will often also do this (having been collectively berated by retired marines, in ranty letters-to-the-editor, for several decades) out of deference or at least a desire to stop being brow-beaten. Linguistically it's nonsense, and is pure politics and spin. It's from the same logic as "There is no such thing as a former Marine!", a common saying among retired marines. It's special exceptionalism, and a soup of several paired-up classic fallacies, including: appeal to accomplishment/ appeal to authority ("This is the U.S. Marine Corps we're talking about here! And it's they way they officially do it."); appeal to emotion/ appeal to flattery ("Marines are exempt from normal English language usage rules because of their importance and their heroic service"); and appeal to tradition/ argumentum ad populum ("It just how we've always done it in the Marines, and so does anyone who respects the Marines.") This grammar-school reasoning has no place here, but the exact same pattern can be observed again and again with regard to alleged proper names in Wikipedia articles and their titles, from vernacular names of species and other groups of animals, to government and corporate job titles, descriptive names of events and periods, and on and on. It's especially prevalent in cases that can be summarized as "anything some government office likes to capitalize". Our failure to get our Proper name article right, and failure to watchlist it enough to keep it from being POV-pushed, are leading to a negative feedback loop, in which WP:RM is getting worse and worse on questions relating to alleged proper names, while that slide into the mire is causing the article to degrade further, right along with RM. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:35, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
Dicklyon, this is a personal essay. To call it a supplement implies that it has consensus and simply elaborates in a factual way on a policy or guideline. The difference is described at WP:HOWTOPAGES (bold added):
Informative and instructional pages are typically edited by the community; while not policies or guidelines themselves, are intended to supplement or clarify Wikipedia guidelines, policies, or other Wikipedia processes and practices that have communal consensus. Where " essay pages" offer advice or opinions through viewpoints, "information pages" supplement or clarify technical or factual information about Wikipedia in an impartial way.
SarahSV (talk) 04:48, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
Which Nutshell wording more accurately reflects the content of this essay?
After reading the entire essay I came up with the #2 wording which I think reflects what this essay says. It does not support #1. For example, here is the first sentence from Why the SSF's underlying assumption about reliability is wrong which supports #2: The sources we use to verify content are not necessarily our best sources for style, even in cases where they may be reliable on certain style matters in specialized publications. Wikipedia and its Manual of Style, article titles policy, and related guidance draw primarily upon reliable general-purpose, broad-scope sources for editing guidelines.
Note that it's not saying style decisions do not follow sources as #1 states; it says they follow "reliable general-purpose broad-scope sources", which is exactly what #1 says.
--
В²C
☎
21:31, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
How content is styled should follow WP:MOS, not the style used in sources specialized to the topic in question.
The Wikipedia community supports specialized publications' stylistic recommendations when they do not conflict with widespread general spelling, grammar, and other expectations. We side with general, not specialized, practice when there is a conflict. -- В²C ☎ 21:53, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
WP does not actually have any principle anywhere to look at what general-audience sources are doing and ignore specialized ones; rather, we do what MoS says to do unless general and specialized sources agree on something different for a specific case. What MoS says to do, in turn, is what is usually based on what general-audience RS are doing, but across entire categories of things, not a zillion topical nit-picks, or MoS would have to be at least as large as Chicago Manual of Style combined with New Hart's Rules and Scientific Style and Format. The only way MoS is readable and practical as a set of guidelines is to be very general, with a "when RS are consistent in making an exception" escape valve.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
03:30, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
Leaving aside the bias in this essay which enables editors to smugly ignore WP:RELIABLESOURCES if they so wish and instead impose a self-created "style" , even the title doesn't stack up. Specialised literature exists. We may not like it, we may wish to ignore it if it uses language in ways we don't like, but one thing it is not is a "fallacy" i.e. a lie or untruth. Specialist literature is important and should always be taken into account in deciding, not how we lay articles out, but what language we use and how it's presented, including spelling, Latin/English/native language, hyphenation, terminology and capitalisation. Notice I said "take into account" not "follow slavishly". This essay, however, strongly argues that it may be dismissed out of hand if we don't like it. Despite that it is frequently quoted in support of "style" changes that, based on the literature, are wholly unjustifiable. Bermicourt ( talk) 13:29, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This page was nominated for deletion on 9 January 2019. The result of the discussion was keep. |
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Essays Low‑impact ![]() | |||||||||
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It is a false god to say that something is "official". It is common among specialists to allow creeping capitalisation, which is harmless if kept within the specialism. It then becomes a slight badge of honour to show that one knows how "it is done". We should resist the push to use specialist structures, where they aren't necessary, whether it is phraseology, grammar or capitalisation. They obscure meaning for the non-specialist user.
Rich
Farmbrough, 05:14, 28th day of January in the year 2011 (UTC).
From: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Animals/Draft capitalization guidelines#Horse breeds. Thought this was worth preserving here as background. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 13:44, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't think " strawman" is being used in the normal manner here, where it seems the term refers to a weak, unsupported argument in favor of a position. Usually a strawman argument is a debating technique that refutes the opposition's position by framing it in its worst possible (and most easily knocked down) way.
Instead I think the specialist argument is simply a weak, fallacious argument. Maybe just call this the "Specialist fallacy". Joja lozzo 03:13, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Can't this argument be generalized to the "Reliable source style fallacy", i.e. the sources we use for content are not necessarily our best sources for style? Joja lozzo 02:04, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
For a good example of the MOS vs. tradition with job titles, see Talk:Chief Mechanical Engineer. Joja lozzo 17:07, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Another bad case: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Lead section#A lead is not a lede: Despite several clear consensus discussions against referring to Wikipedia leads as journalist ledes, because the words have exactly opposite meanings, journos and journo students keep editwarring the incorrect term back into WP:LEAD. This has been going on for at least 4 years. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 21:06, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
Even worse, possibly the most asinine case ever: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Equine/Archive 5#RFC: what units should be used for horse and pony heights?. Horse specialist proposes that we refuse to convert weird units like Hand (unit) to inches as well as to metric, despite US readers largely needing such a conversion, just because specialists never use inches to measure horses (worse, actually - they do use inches for small horses, but never for big ones. Yes, really.). If it weren't stale, I would hand out a WP:TROUT over that user-hateful idea. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 03:02, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
Wow. The author is a bit angry. No? I bet you're glad you got that off your chest. IMO, the best thing you can to is (metaphorically) scrumple up the paper and write it again. There's probably some good stuff in here but it (a) is TLDR at 3000+ words and (b) comes across as "I'm right and you're not only wrong but really stupid too (and to emphasise how stupid you are, I've wikilinked all the logical fallacies and common WP misbehaviours you've committed)". I don't follow all the goings-on at WP so perhaps there are some really bad specialist style disputes going on. Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation is all I can find. As a opinion essay, it doesn't have to be balanced of course, but it descends into the gutter when it paints all-who-disagree as evil, stupid and troublesome. Do the folk you disagree with have no good points?
I found this essay because WP:MEDMOS was quoted temporarily as a case of 'of specialists "getting it"'. I was initially confused. The sentence quoted concerned capitalisation, for which MEDMOS merely repeats the MOS guidance of sentence-case for article titles. However, the sentence goes on to say "For punctuation, e.g., possessive apostrophes and hyphens, follow the use by high-quality sources", which is exactly the sort of "specialist style fallacy" this essay seems to be written against.
As background, the above sentence was added to WP:MEDMOS by WhatamIdoing ( talk · contribs) after some heated discussion at WikiProject Medicine which moved onto MEDMOS. The discussion concerned the hyphenation of various carciomas vs WP:MOS and "English hyphenation rules". I don't want to open up old wounds on that one. I can't speak for WhatamIdoing but I support the sentence if it puts an end to edit warring over trivia. Otherwise, I'm not fussy about keeping it.
Our guidelines on naming, spelling and grammar are a right mix, sometimes deferring to published works, seeking the common usage, or obeying some written rule. The most important virtues of any guideline in these matters is that it minimises the risk of picking a stupid choice and that it provides a means of settling disputes among editors.
The author could do with swallowing an AGF pill. If the folk who live in Milngavie where told that they are stupid for not spelling their town "Mulguy", they'd probably respond with hostility, commit a few logical fallacies and if pushed hard enough, start breaking some WP guidelines. The same goes for our precious specialist writers. We need to keep them, not point them at essays that seem to be written to make them feel inadequate and unwelcome. Colin° Talk 21:55, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
(outdent) I think we're going round in circles now. Specialist sources and general dictionaries/style/grammar guides all have their place. It is a fallacy to assume either of these sources always give the best advice for our naming/style rules in articles. Being fundamentalist about naming/style is wrong. This isn't maths. Editors will vary as to how much weight they give to sources. Specialists will tend to give more weight to specialist sources and generalists to generalist sources. Extremist in one camp view the extremists in the other camp as fundamentally wrong, rather than respecting their opinions. This essay is harmful in the sense that it can be used by members of one camp to ridicule all the members of the other by describing only the beliefs/behaviours of the extremists. That in itself is a fallacy. Colin° Talk 12:59, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
''Homo sapiens''
, not Homo Sapiens
or homo sapiens
or ''Homo'' '''Sapiens'''
, etc.).It's not just about individual extremists.
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You say "The most reliable sources on ... in a general-interest work like an encyclopedia are reliable generalist works on style and grammar. Specialist works are notoriously unreliable for this purpose..." To me this fairly clearly says that the generalist sources always trump the specialist ones.
The balance between general sources and specialist sources has to be found and does it really matter if you come at it from one direction or the other? You will always find some cases where the other side has a better argument.
For example, our article naming policy gives Heroin as an example of a common name choice over the INN name. It is a good choice but not because we should use everyday brand names rather than INN names. In fact Wikipedia always uses the INN names for medical drug articles. There are only two drug articles I can think of on Wikipedia where the brand name is used. Heroin and Aspirin. Both are ex Bayer trademarks and aspirin is actually the INN. Folk read the heroin article because it is an illegal drug and not because it is a painkiller medicine (it is only used as such rarely and in a few countries). The caffeine example in that policy page is similarly flawed – people read about the drug in their coffee, not about some chemical compound. The name is chosen here because it suits the audience for the article, and their expectations, not because it is more commonly used. So for medical drugs, it is actually better to default to the INN name, because brand names would give us no end of problems, and to accept the very few exceptions to the rule where the everyday name is better. Colin° Talk 16:07, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
I think the essay needs to drop the issue of naming. It is covered by our policy. Stick to “capitalize, italicize, hyphenate or otherwise style the name of a subject”. I don’t think “layout” is an issue either, unless there really are folk insisting that articles in their speciality are double-spaced or right-justified? And the horse-measurement issue noted above is covered by our guideline on jargon – you need to explain technical terms to an unfamiliar audience. It isn’t one of style and anyway the editors involved didn’t display any of the misbehaviours listed in this essay. Colin° Talk 16:07, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
I made some copy edits in the lead to seek a more neutral tone and, according to my personal style, near- Joe Friday brevity. If you find that these contributions are helpful I will make time to work on the rest. Joja lozzo 19:42, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Help talk:Citation Style 1#RfC: Use "Vol.", "pp.", etc. consistently between citation templates, instead of ambiguous formatting like "9 (4): 7". The talk page at
Help talk:Citation style 1 is where the discussion about most of our citation templates is centralized. —
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ
Contrib.
20:48, 19 March 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ships#Hyphens. Fortunately this is snowballing against the ungrammatical specialist usage. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 00:28, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
At Talk:Cultivar#Following MOS and the thread immediately above it there's been some (not entirely collegial) discussion of use or misuse of capitalization of the term "group" in botany, what is called the " cultivar group" in long form. The actual official ICNCP standard in botanical literature is to capitalize the word as "Group" when it appears in a name (just like Genus is capitalized and italicized, species is italicized but not capitalized, etc.; there are real rules for scientific nomenclature of organisms). An example would be "Brassica oleracea Italica Group 'Calabrese'" for Calabrese broccoli (note "Group" not "group").
The issue: At least one editor has insisted on always capitalizing this word, everywhere, if it refers to cultivar group, e.g. "As Group names are used with cultivar names it is necessary to understand their way of presentation." By contrast, at least one other editor feels that this is a WP:SSF problem, and is the same error as always capitalizing "president" simply because it is capitalized when used as an job title with someone's name, or always capitalizing "corporation" because it is capitalized when included as part of the official name of a company. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 23:39, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Airports#New RfC, David1217 and Apteva launched another "hyphens vs. en dashes" RfC with regard to airports, after one RfC and various requested moves have already declined to override WP:MOSDASH on this. Someone seems not to have noticed WP:LOCALCONSENSUS and WP:OWN. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 02:37, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
At both Talk:Relative strength index and Talk:True strength index are various very typical SSF debates, where specialists (in this case, financial ones) repeatedly demand capitalization of these common noun phrases, which are non-proper-name terms of art in their field. No one else bought it. As usual, those insisting on their stylistic quirk (that people who are not specialists in that field will just interpret as a typo) fail to understand the difference between a specialist source being reliable on matters of fact about that specialty, vs. being a reliable source on English usage in a general-audience encyclopedia. The usual "follow the sources!" refrain is repeated, without realizing that for style, the overwhelming majority of reliable sources – newspapers, magazines, dictionaries, other encyclopedias, etc. – never capitalize these specific phrases nor other common nouns and noun phrases of similar sort, regardless of field/speciality. The specialist sources that do so are dwarfed by the standard-English practice used everywhere else, which has been turning away firmly from German-style noun capitalization since the late 18th century. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 08:40, 1 November 2012 (UTC)
Another classic example: Talk:Theater District, New York is overrun by people from the theatrical wikiproject trying three times back-to-back – [1] [2] [3] – to get this article to be at Theatre District, New York, despite the facts that:
And so on. "We're theatre people and this is a theatre topic, so WP must use the spelling preferred by theatre sources and the theatre project" is the entire real basis of the rename/move putsch, which has rapidly hit WP:DEADHORSE level.
Hi. Would this be a case of "specialist style" that in normal language should be inverted? See Threskiornithidae and "The family Lymantriidae includes ...". Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia ( talk) 17:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
I think it worth adding a paragraph or two bring a bit of balance to I think looks like an attack page.
-- PBS ( talk) 11:51, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
I agree that "homogenisation of style" is not the goal. But there are many issues of style that have widespread support for consistent application across WP, and these are the things that the MOS documents. Many discussions have found wide support for consistency over exceptions, in many areas, including the general principles of MOS:CAPS for example, even though many "local" groups like to try to capitalize their own stuff. I don't think MOS advocates ignoring usage in reliable sources; but where there are styling choices to be made, the MOS provides guidance, which we generally prefer over letting the styles of others vote. This gives us a little bit of "homogenization" of some style points, if you want to call it that, and making exceptions for titles has generally impressed most editors as a silly idea. And nobody would ever propose "Comet Hale—Bopp" I'm sure, and your characterization of the logic for choosing an en dash is faulty (and many many sources do as we do on that one, the "official" naming org's recommendations notwithstanding -- hence it's a perfect example of the SSF). Dicklyon ( talk) 15:00, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
{{
ATandMOS}}
, but it's erroneous no matter how persistent some people are in believing it. The very idea that reliable sources on the facts of some science topic or historical event or whatever have gotten style matters right, no matter what, is the very crux of the SSF. A history book about the Mexican–American war, like a journal about astronomy, are not style authorities. For WP (only), the MOS is. MOS serves one single purpose: Providing a style guide for Wikipedia, to stop recurrent style/grammar/punctuation debates so we can get back to content creation and sourcing. It is not a style guide for the rest of the world. It is not a linguistic description of the most common usage. It is not an insider guide in any field about usage within that field in it's own topical publications. It's our way of moving on, with compromises (sometimes uneasy ones), for our publication, which is written for everyone, not just people in particular specialities. —
SMcCandlish ☺
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11:33, 5 June 2015 (UTC)As one example among many, it has come up repeatedly whether to capitalize "marine" in reference to an individual member of the U.S. Marine Corp, when the word is not attached to their name as a title. It's yet another specialized-style fallacy. Marines like to capitalize the word, in constructions like "The Marine [sic] returned to the U.S. in July 2014 after a second tour of duty." Journalists will often also do this (having been collectively berated by retired marines, in ranty letters-to-the-editor, for several decades) out of deference or at least a desire to stop being brow-beaten. Linguistically it's nonsense, and is pure politics and spin. It's from the same logic as "There is no such thing as a former Marine!", a common saying among retired marines. It's special exceptionalism, and a soup of several paired-up classic fallacies, including: appeal to accomplishment/ appeal to authority ("This is the U.S. Marine Corps we're talking about here! And it's they way they officially do it."); appeal to emotion/ appeal to flattery ("Marines are exempt from normal English language usage rules because of their importance and their heroic service"); and appeal to tradition/ argumentum ad populum ("It just how we've always done it in the Marines, and so does anyone who respects the Marines.") This grammar-school reasoning has no place here, but the exact same pattern can be observed again and again with regard to alleged proper names in Wikipedia articles and their titles, from vernacular names of species and other groups of animals, to government and corporate job titles, descriptive names of events and periods, and on and on. It's especially prevalent in cases that can be summarized as "anything some government office likes to capitalize". Our failure to get our Proper name article right, and failure to watchlist it enough to keep it from being POV-pushed, are leading to a negative feedback loop, in which WP:RM is getting worse and worse on questions relating to alleged proper names, while that slide into the mire is causing the article to degrade further, right along with RM. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:35, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
Dicklyon, this is a personal essay. To call it a supplement implies that it has consensus and simply elaborates in a factual way on a policy or guideline. The difference is described at WP:HOWTOPAGES (bold added):
Informative and instructional pages are typically edited by the community; while not policies or guidelines themselves, are intended to supplement or clarify Wikipedia guidelines, policies, or other Wikipedia processes and practices that have communal consensus. Where " essay pages" offer advice or opinions through viewpoints, "information pages" supplement or clarify technical or factual information about Wikipedia in an impartial way.
SarahSV (talk) 04:48, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
Which Nutshell wording more accurately reflects the content of this essay?
After reading the entire essay I came up with the #2 wording which I think reflects what this essay says. It does not support #1. For example, here is the first sentence from Why the SSF's underlying assumption about reliability is wrong which supports #2: The sources we use to verify content are not necessarily our best sources for style, even in cases where they may be reliable on certain style matters in specialized publications. Wikipedia and its Manual of Style, article titles policy, and related guidance draw primarily upon reliable general-purpose, broad-scope sources for editing guidelines.
Note that it's not saying style decisions do not follow sources as #1 states; it says they follow "reliable general-purpose broad-scope sources", which is exactly what #1 says.
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21:31, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
How content is styled should follow WP:MOS, not the style used in sources specialized to the topic in question.
The Wikipedia community supports specialized publications' stylistic recommendations when they do not conflict with widespread general spelling, grammar, and other expectations. We side with general, not specialized, practice when there is a conflict. -- В²C ☎ 21:53, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
WP does not actually have any principle anywhere to look at what general-audience sources are doing and ignore specialized ones; rather, we do what MoS says to do unless general and specialized sources agree on something different for a specific case. What MoS says to do, in turn, is what is usually based on what general-audience RS are doing, but across entire categories of things, not a zillion topical nit-picks, or MoS would have to be at least as large as Chicago Manual of Style combined with New Hart's Rules and Scientific Style and Format. The only way MoS is readable and practical as a set of guidelines is to be very general, with a "when RS are consistent in making an exception" escape valve.
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SMcCandlish
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03:30, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
Leaving aside the bias in this essay which enables editors to smugly ignore WP:RELIABLESOURCES if they so wish and instead impose a self-created "style" , even the title doesn't stack up. Specialised literature exists. We may not like it, we may wish to ignore it if it uses language in ways we don't like, but one thing it is not is a "fallacy" i.e. a lie or untruth. Specialist literature is important and should always be taken into account in deciding, not how we lay articles out, but what language we use and how it's presented, including spelling, Latin/English/native language, hyphenation, terminology and capitalisation. Notice I said "take into account" not "follow slavishly". This essay, however, strongly argues that it may be dismissed out of hand if we don't like it. Despite that it is frequently quoted in support of "style" changes that, based on the literature, are wholly unjustifiable. Bermicourt ( talk) 13:29, 24 August 2021 (UTC)