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Beyond My Ken has invoked WP:IGNOREALLRULES to override the guidance in MOS:DATE to editwar over date formatting at Joey Gibson (political activist). He apparently has an issue with the trailing comma in American-style MDY date formats, declaring them "still not needed", "when a comma is not needed, it's not needed".
Ignoring the editwarring violations, under what conditions can WP:IGNOREALLRULES legitimately be invoked to override the MoS, and does this case fall within them? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:12, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
More seriously, and as to the case at hand, this simply isn't an IAR matter, it's someone editwarring to impose a style quirk that reliable sources consider substandard English. IAR is invoked when a rule impedes someone from objectively improving the encyclopedia. Defying punctation norms to suit personal whims is objectively a detriment to our content, and subjectively an improvement only to someone who shares the exact same peccadillo and who is apparently in a class of people who do not read or absorb style guides (not just ours, but "real world" ones, which are consistent: parenthesizing commas always come in pairs except when the second one is replaced by other punctuation like "." or "?"). That's actually a fairly large class of people, but they're still in the wrong on this and have no business insisting on style changes, against either general English norms as codified in major style guides, or against our own style guidelines (based on the former). There simply is no IAR to be found anywhere in that. There's no rule against saying "IAR!" in your revert, but it will not save you from a 3RR block, etc. No one takes IAR claims seriously when the rule is not being defied to actually make an improvement.
[I decline to comment on whether there's a specific
tendentiousness pattern with BMK in particular, since WT:MOS isn't a disciplinary venue. If this sort of thing seems habitual, and user- and article-talk discussion has no effect on it, it may be a
WP:ANI or
WP:ANEW matter, or even
WP:AE if they've received a {{
Ds/alert|mos}}
within the last 12 months and are being genuinely disruptive.]
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 06:44, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
This user has done the same removing a comma following a state name: [1]. Reywas92 Talk 19:55, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I can't see a reason that we'd treat a noun-phrase adjunct (an NP acting as an adjectival modifier of another noun) differently; there's nothing broken about "They sold their Clovis, California, home in 2014." It doesn't structurally make sense as "They sold their Clovis, California home in 2014.", though most people's brains wouldn't melt. But trying to lay out a rule for editors to drop the second comma in that but retain it in "They bought a house in Clovis, California, in 1998" would be a WP:CREEP nightmare of the kind we've already had to wrestle with before: lots of "I just can't get it" problems, and people disputing it as nonsense or at best as an attested style that's too complicated to employ here.
When such a place name is used in a larger compound construction (the adjectival noun phrase being just part of the compound modifier), like "They sold their Clovis, California-based business in 2014", the hyphen is a replacement for the second comma, just as would be terminal punctuation ("They moved to Weed, Texas.") I don't think even Chicago spells all this out very clearly (as it does for actual terminal punctuation), though their examples illustrate such cases. But we don't seem to have any active problem of editors doing daft things like "They moved to Weed, Texas, – a much smaller community – the same year." (or "... –, the same year"). We just intuitively know that things like ", –" are not idiomatic in English writing. [They actually used to be, in the 1800s;
Emerson used such patterns, as illustrated at
WP:EMERSON, an essay created for an unrelated reason.]
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 04:09, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
May I suggest that this section be kept at the top of the page? It's a losing battle keeping it at the bottom. BTW I added a hidden "Do not archive until 2029" tag so that problem's handled. E Eng 08:05, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm asking for the general case, but my question arises more specifically from treatment of Thailand-related proper nouns. The current convention is to include the Thai spelling of a name after the bold title, followed by the pronunciation. But this leads to words which aren't part of the English name appearing in the transcribed version. Take Chulalongkorn University, for example. The name in Thai is Thai: จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย, RTGS: Chulalongkon Mahawitthayalai. The IPA pronunciation is given for the entire name, but the Mahawitthayalai part means "university", and is actually redundant. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation says, "If the name consists of more than one word, include pronunciation only for the words that need it (all of Jean van Heijenoort but only Cholmondeley in Thomas P. G. Cholmondeley)." But is [ma.hǎː.wít.tʰa.jāː.lāj] needed here? Readers who look at the bold title Chulalongkorn University will expect to only find the pronunciation for Chulalongkorn, and will be confused where the Mahawitthayalai comes from. But readers who are looking at the Thai name would also presumably want to know the pronunciation in its entirety. How should this be dealt with?
Another example is Charoen Krung Road. It's ถนนเจริญกรุง in Thai, RTGS: Thanon Charoen Krung. But the {{ RTGS}} template isn't needed here, since the article title already follows the RTGS transcription. So the appearance of [tʰā.nǒn] in the pronunciation guide is even more confusing to reader who doesn't know Thai. There are also thousands of other streets, bridges railway stations, etc. Would repeating the pronunciation of the same few words for all of them be too redundant? Should they be included or omitted? -- Paul_012 ( talk) 02:36, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Requests for comment are sought at Talk:2010–2017 Toronto serial homicides § RfC on drug name on how to state the name of a drug mentioned in court documents about a living person. – Reidgreg ( talk) 16:34, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Very simple question: should it be Deer Park–West Werribee railway line, or Deer Park – West Werribee railway line?
I moved it to its current location a while ago after noting "Los Angeles–New York flight" was preferred by MOS:DASH, but now I’m not sure if it falls into the category of ranges with spaces in the elements. Any advice is appreciated. Triptothecottage ( talk) 09:41, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
a New York–Los Angeles flight
The en dash in a range is always unspaced, except when either or both elements of the range include at least one space
Christmas 2001 – Easter 2002
a New York – Los Angeles flight
Here the ranges are ranges of numbers, dates, or times.... I change my objection to that it's inconsistent and counter-intuitive to have different styles depending on the use case, even acknowledging there may be underlying reasons for it. MOS should not be just (or even primarily) for use by experts – they don't need it. —[ AlanM1( talk)]— 20:05, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
Good grief. Thanks for the answers – I was not interested in upsetting anyone's apple cart, I just wanted to know what the correct interpretation of the consensus guideline was. I missed the hatnote too, which makes it quite plain. Triptothecottage ( talk) 11:28, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
The MOS is also quite clear with regards to certain image placement: "Each image should be inside the level 2 section to which it relates, within the section defined by the most recent ==Heading== delimited by two equal signs, or at the top of the lead section. Do not place images immediately above section headings."
The same user as above believes that because "MOS is not policy, it is not mandatory" that this should be ignored for no clear reason. He claims it provides "VISUAL BALANCE" to the article, but in this case the images are cleanly alternating left and right with no excess images stacking on top of each other so putting the images within the relevant sections is perfectly visually balanced. I think they look bad being in the wrong section and breaking the horizontal header line. What would be a good reason to ignore the MOS for image placement? Reywas92 Talk 19:55, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Meta: We (the entire community, or rather the image and layout geeks in it, who care) may need to revisit
MOS:IMAGE,
Help:Pictures, and image-related parts of
MOS:ACCESS to make sure they all still make sense in 2019 and on mobile devices. I'm not sure all of this material has kept pace with display issues, former display issues possibly no longer being issues, changes to MediaWiki, and so on. A lot of this stuff probably needs a round of focused test-casing to see what actually happens today under what circumstances, on the desktop and mobile sites, and on different devices.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 04:25, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Apparently my bringing Daniel Burnham into compliance with the MOS is "harassment". User:Beyond My Ken has placed the images back above the header lines in the previous section, claiming "better layout" with no explanation why this is better. Thoughts? @ SMcCandlish: Reywas92 Talk 08:11, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Hi Wikipedia folks, I would like to know why my addition to the article with the section titled “Word Variation and Repetitiveness” was reverted/deleted. Repetitiveness is a problem I see in Wikipedia pages sometimes, and there’s no mention of it on this article, even though this would be the perfect place to have it. As the spirit of that addition would be productive and helpful for the article, at the very least we should talk about it here instead of reverting it. Or I can make the addition, and the other users who are more knowledgeable about how these pages work can tweak and edit it as they see fit. I greatly welcome and appreciate any feedback, insights, or comments. Thanks everyone! Thanks Mrbeastmodeallday ( talk) 21:44, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
Is the way that birthplaces are described in the infoboxes at Gandhi, Miloš Zeman and Andrej Babiš described in a MOS somewhere? Gråbergs Gråa Sång ( talk) 09:28, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
AlbanGeller ( talk · contribs) and myself had a discussion on his talk page regarding when/where/whether to use commas where title(s) and honorific suffixes occur (such as in the article Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington), and he suggested that I bring the subject up here to see if there could be more input.
HandsomeFella ( talk) 08:49, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Circling back to the compound modifier question from above once more, it seems I have been "corrected" here, when someone said should be "First magnitude star" rather than "First-magnitude star". Does that qualify as a valid exception? Usage in sources seems mixed. Pinging @ Modulus12: who made the change. — Amakuru ( talk) 23:44, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
There seem to be two contradictory lines in the manual of style:
It seems to me that Japanese American would count as a proper name in the smae way that "Middle Eastern" would. This became an issue at WP:ERRORS, regarding today's OTD entry "African-American teenager Trayvon Martin was killed while walking...". Should "African-American" be hyphenated? I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but it seems like one or other of the above lines needs amending. Thanks — Amakuru ( talk) 09:23, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
I have absolutely no horse in this race and couldn't care less on whether the Mormons call themselves "LDS" or "COJC", but, as pointed out here, the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Latter Day Saints#changes based on recent style request from LDS Church? has fizzled out without any kind of consensus as to what Wikipedia should be calling these people, so there are minor good-faith back and forth changes and reverts going on all over the project. While I normally feel the MOS is too overreaching, this is something Wikipedia should micromanage to the extent of coming up with a single approved name otherwise people will be changing "Mormon", "Latter-day Saint" and "Church of Jesus Christ" back and forth for eternity; if people have a spare few minutes can they pop over there and try to get this settled on one name or another? ‑ Iridescent 09:11, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
back and forth for eternity. Does this proves the True Eternity for ever ? Or do we have Jesus cries, but the caravan goes further ? Pldx1 ( talk) 09:48, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
Is Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy an explanatory supplement to this guideline? If yes, it should be linked prominently. If no, that page should not be making the claim. — SmokeyJoe ( talk) 14:43, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
{{
Essay}}
is fine. {{
Supplement}}
is just a kind of essay (as is {{
information page}}
, {{
WikiProject style advice}}
, etc., etc.). Of course it should remain linked here, since it's pertinent, and frequently referenced (not just in MoS discussions but especially often in
WP:RM ones, which often hinge on MoS-related matters). Even our policy pages routinely link to useful essays. The essay is being subjected to what appears to be a coordinated attack by "usual suspects" in anti-MoS activism; see the (snowball opposed)
MfD opened one day earlier. Cf.
WP:FORUMSHOPPING,
WP:MEATPUPPET,
WP:FACTION, and
WP:GAMING. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 04:17, 18 January 2019 (UTC)SmokeyJoe: So where have the proposed links been placed, specifically? I couldn't find any new links, despite this discussion and its contributors seeming to agree on the need for them. cherkash ( talk) 02:16, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
It seems there's no clear guidance on which of the two alternatives should be used in geographic names. E.g. in the case of Austria-Hungary, a hyphen is advised by the MOS. Whereas, logically and per closer reading of the en-dash/hyphen policies, even this case is not so clear. Specifically, Austria and Hungary were essentially two parts joined together, and so per most other similar cases there should be an en-dash (Austria–Hungary). On the other hand, it has also been known as Austro-Hungary (where it's clearly the combining form that's intended here, and hence the hyphen).
Other recently discussed cases are:
In the case of KC and KB, the original Russian versions of their names both use the combining form (similar to Greco-Roman or Anglo-American), namely Russian transliterations are Karachayevo-Cherkesiya for KC (I'm ignoring -siya to -ssia transition as not relevant to the subject) and Kabardino-Balkariya for KB. But then somehow KB is the only one that retains this Russian form in English: KC changes what should have been "Karachayevo-" to "Karachay-", whereas KB forms what seems to be a combining adjectivial form "Kabardino-" from the noun "Kabardin" (a variation of the name for Kabardians).
Other cases from the fairly modern history include:
And so by looking at these examples, it seems that the choice between hyphen and en-dash should be guided by the grammatical/semantical meaning of the compound name in question, instead of applying a hard and fast "always use hyphen" exception rule (as seems to be superficially prescribed by MOS).
Pinging editors from other related recent discussions to opine on this: SMcCandlish, Dicklyon, Tony1. cherkash ( talk) 02:57, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedia style guidelines is confusing. It lists both legitimate guidelines and essays. Essays are not guidelines, yet are listed there. They are two: 1 and 2. I suggest making them separate from the legitimate guidelines for the sake of preventing new users' confusion.-- Adûnâi ( talk) 12:11, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
[[:Category:Wikipedia style guidelines|style guidelines]]
. It wasn't an intentional attempt to mark the page as a style guideline. I also added
Category:Wikipedia essays on style to it. I did find another essays in there,
Wikipedia:Use feminine pronouns, which was intentionally mis-categorized, and I've fixed that. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 14:46, 12 March 2019 (UTC){{
Style}}
navbox for years. I've just
WP:BOLDly put the MoS header tag on it.{{
Proposal}}
header.Let's preclude the first example in MOS § Other uses (em dash only) with a clarification that a hair space will be used. It may prevent readers from unnecessarily looking up the HTML character code mentioned— . Turns out it's explained in the very next sentence, yet this is easily overlooked when a reader's first inclination may be to immediately look it up without reading on, as was the case for me. Perhaps it's barely worth suggesting, but I believe it will be an improvement, slight though it may be.
Current paragraph:
An indented em dash may be used before a name or other source when attributing below a block quotation, poem, etc. For example, {{ in5}}— Charlotte Brontë will produce:
— Charlotte Brontë
This dash should not be fully spaced, though it is best for metadata and accessibility reasons to hair-space it from the name with the HTML character code  . Most of Wikipedia's quotation templates with attribution-related parameters already provide this formatting.
Amended:
An indented em dash may be used before a name or other source when attributing below a block quotation, poem, etc. This dash should not be fully spaced, though it is best for metadata and accessibility reasons to hair-space it from the name with the HTML character code  . Most of Wikipedia's quotation templates with attribution-related parameters already provide this formatting.
For example, {{ in5}}— Charlotte Brontë will produce:
— Charlotte Brontë
I can't imagine anyone would object. Nothing's rewritten and the only difference is that I moved the example to end of the paragraph. I'd do it myself, but I'm hesitant. Prior MOS edits I thought were minor and non-controversial have been reverted nonetheless.
Anyways, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Regards, Jay D. Easy ( talk) 19:23, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
Many are cold, but few are frozen.
— Matthew 22:14
{{Quote box |salign=right|quote = Many are cold, but few are frozen.|author = {{mdash}}{{hsp}}Matthew 22:14}}
{{
quote}}
(which supports the parameter he mentioned, and which we already explain will do this markup for you), or <blockquote>...</blockquote>
, which does not (thus the explanation). {{
Quote box}}
isn't one of our standardized quotation templates, but old detritus that should probably be merged out of existence, or at best confined to use outside mainspace, like on people's talk page or whatever. We don't have a reason to use it in an example. And {{
in5}}
isn't "debris", it's one of the recommended ways of indenting, unlike abuse of :
description list markup to produce a broken d-list just to get the visual appearance of an indentation. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 16:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC){{
Quote box}}
usage in any article that could not be replaced with another template that behaved more consistently. We would "ever" use {{
in5}}
any time we wanted to indent a short line (there's another template, {{
block indent}}
, for larger material); this is covered at
MOS:INDENT. We don't have any reason to try to force people to use templates when HTML <blockquote>
works fine and is easier for some of them and more flexible in some situations (various block templates don't behave well inside other blocks, next to images, etc.). I.e., basically you're doing
WP:CREEP to try to avoid doing WP:CREEP. :-) — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
SMcCandlish (
talk •
contribs) 16:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
{{
quote box}}
has inconsistent output (if you want to cite the source below the quotation, you have to manually include the em dash, and this makes it difficult to convert between quotation templates, requiring manual re-editing, not just a template replacement. [I think the fix for this would be to create a temporary copy that auto-dashed like all the rest of these templates, then use AWB or something to first point all extant calls to the new copy, then change then original to use the same in-built dash code as the other templates, then tediously replace all the extant calls to the temporary template to now not have manual dash markup and to call the (repaired) original template again, finally redirect the copy to the original (or just remove the copy). That would fix the issue without there ever being instances of in-article content both having a manual dash and a template-provided one, and it would preserve the page history of the original template. More of a pain in the butt than I would take on personally.] Articles with {{
in5}}
include:
Lyndon B. Johnson,
Supreme Court of the United States,
Methylphenidate,
Community (TV series),
2017 NFL Draft (and other articles in that series),
1966 FIFA World Cup (and other articles in that series),
Bengal cat,
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
O Canada,
San Francisco,
DNA virus,
Mars Science Laboratory, etc.. There's still lots and lots of abuse of :
(i.e, of <dd>...</dd>
) for visual indentation to fix in mainspace, and that might be something a bot can do. It needs to be fixed since it generates invalid markup (as in actually fails validation). A perhaps simpler fix would be to have MediaWiki generate different HTML when :
is used, depending on whether it's preceded by a ;
(<dt>...</dt>
) line, but over a decade after the devs were asked to do this, zero progress has been made, and we're left with working around it directly. Talk pages are pretty much a lost cause, though fixing this at the MW level would also make our talk pages much more palatable for blind editors. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 13:44, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
For anyone interested, please see Talk:Chairman#Requested move 22 March 2019. SarahSV (talk) 20:56, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
There's a discussion at Talk:Chairman#Requested move 22 March 2019 in which one issue is how to interpret or apply MOS:GNL, so it may be of interest to editors here. Peter coxhead ( talk) 22:23, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Why don't the standards for italicizing publication names (such as The New York Times) appear anywhere here? Am I missing something?-- MainlyTwelve ( talk) 19:52, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I ran across Template:Goshen, New York today with images and have never seen such a Navbox before. My first inclination was just to remove them as distractions that have nothing to do with the navigational purpose of the box. The closest policy I could find was WP:Navigation template#Navigation templates are not arbitrarily decorative and the "implied" standard format from the examples and common usage. Any other comments? MB 23:07, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
There's a discussion over at Talk:Sonia Burgess.
Sonia Burgess was a trans woman who it seems had started socially transitioning - among friends and family and in public. At the time of her death she was still presenting male and using her old name at work. Her friends and family used her new name and pronouns when quoted by the press after her death.
Some are arguing that the article name should not be changed because she continued to use the old name at work, and that she hadn't made a statement herself in a reliable source about which name she preferred to be called.
I believe this to be abiding by the letter but not the spirit of MOS:GENDERID, and I wonder if the guideline could be improved to account for situations like this where the wishes of the article subject are obvious and clear but they never made a "self-designation" in a reliable source. -- Wickedterrier ( talk) 12:10, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Off-topic flame-fest that's all predicated on a mistaken assumption about who created the article:
|
---|
|
This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the subject has indicated a preference otherwise. This subject clearly had a delineated preference - private vs. professional. This means that in the portions of the article which discuss their professional setting, we should firmly use the male name and identification. In sections about their personal life, we use the female. And in portions which are mixed, we can avoid awkward constructions - like using only their last name, etc. As far as the title, it should be based strictly on the context of their most solid basis of notability and most likely search vector - in this case, their professional legal identity. -- Netoholic @ 17:23, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Just wanted to reiterate that there is a RM discussion happening right now over on the Burgess talk page: Talk:David_Burgess_(immigration_lawyer)#Requested_move_12_March_2019 WanderingWanda (they/them) ( t/ c) 18:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
it was noted that she supported "female pronouns [being] used for only post-announcement material"This comes from one single statement from Manning's lawyer, while she was still imprisoned, and the lawyer prefaced it by saying
Here is what I would recommendand not, say, "here is what Manning has told me she prefers". WanderingWanda (they/them) ( t/ c) 17:29, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Are you doubting that Manning's lawyer presented the matter accurately?
And Manning is not the only case of a famous transgender person preferring different pronouns for two different phases of their life.
When should Wikipedia respect a trans person's identity? Always and without exception.
That doesn't mean that Wikipedia should never repeat a trans person's deadname. In order to fufill its mission of being a comprehensive, neutral, and uncensored encyclopedia sometimes it needs to repeat deadnames, in the same way that sometimes it needs to repeat other unpleasant or offensive things like racist or queerphobic slurs.
But a trans person's preferred name should always be the primary way an article refers to them. That goes for for biographical articles, non-biographical articles, titles, infoboxes, prose. Everything. If that contradicts Wikipedia's current policies and guidelines then the policies and guidelines need to be changed.
The 1976 Summer Olympics article should say that Caitlyn Jenner won the gold medal for the decathlon. But that's falsifying history! No it's not. Referring to someone's past using their current name is a normal practice. There is nothing incorrect or weird about the sentence "Michelle Obama went to Princeton."
My position on this is perfectly mainstream and middle-of-the-road. Go ask Google or Wolfram Alpha "who won the 1976 olympic men's decathlon" and see who pops up in the infobox. Look at what
the Reuters style guide says: Always use a transgender person's chosen name....If you are not sure which gender pronoun to use, ask. If you can't ask, then use the one that is consistent with the way a person presents himself or herself.
Look at this
New York Times Insider piece which talks about how the Times is a perfectly boring and mainstream publication that is not looking to lead the discussion, set the rules or break new ground
and yet chooses to use people's preferred pronouns and names when reporting on transgender subjects.
Earlier someone complained about trans activists, but who are the real trans activists here? Mainstream publications decided years ago it's not acceptable to misgender transgender people. Calling trans people what they want to be called is mainstream. Finding any excuse to misgender trans people is activism. WanderingWanda (they/them) ( t/ c) 07:41, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
7) Fæ has responded to good faith concerns by attempting to link the people with concerns to the campaign against him.. -- Netoholic @ 10:01, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Social change does not happen without people getting "fired up" and "vocal" and "activist" and "aggressive". Making this remark here looks like a logical fallacy. When some people are "vocal", "activist", "aggressive", this doesn't prove that said people are concurring to any valuable social change. This only proves that they are "vocal", etc. while trying to play a trump card. Going back to what is discussed, one can see that the wp:en article is less and less about the professional accomplisments of lawyer David Burgess, and more and more about his private life. But if you really want to put the focus on the said private life, you will have to discuss how a distinguished transgender 63 years old British lawyer was behaving towards an 35 years old Sri Lankan person, poor and isolated, whose capacity to have an educated consent was questionned in court (diminished responsibility). Moreover, you shouldn't forget that Nina Kanagasingham ended
found dead in her cell with a plastic bag on her head, and each hand tied to the bed frame... and doesn't got a funeral service in any impressive, grey-stone, porticoed place overlooking Trafalgar Square. Indeed, some social changes are long overdue. Pldx1 ( talk) 10:31, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
I am wanting some clarification from the Wikipedia community on an aspect of the MOS which, in my view, is in some confusion and conflict. Another editor has been changing the article names for some British churches to include a full stop / period with the abbreviation of "Saint" ("St." instead of "St") on the basis of both MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH. However, as POINTS states, full stops at the end of contractions in British English is "optional". It has also, in my experience, long and overwhelmingly been the usual style in modern British English to not use full stops in common contractions such as "St". Both POINTS and CHURCH seem to me to reflect a North American bias about such abbreviations which has not considered the fact that contraction abbreviations without a full stop is not only optional but also the much more common modern use in British English. I would appreciate other editors views about this and the application of the MOS to British church names in articles. If this is not the correct place to discuss these matters then please advise me where this is. Thank you. Anglicanus ( talk) 00:50, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
I hadn't realised what I was doing was likely to be controversial, as it appeared to me that I was following consensus as outlined in MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH. Indeed, I explained to a user who had moved St. Paul's, Deptford to St Paul's, Deptford, why I was restoring the page to St. Paul. For me this is like the disagreement over using The Beatles or the Beatles. Either way is fine, and neither way alters meaning, but is purely stylistic. Such stylistic usage will vary with time, location, editorial and publication preference, etc. Given the guidance in MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH I had assumed that the community had settled on using St. Paul rather than St Paul, especially as St. Paul is widely considered outside of Wikipedia to be the modern usage, and is used, albeit inconsistently, in the UK. It is useful to have a house style, and to stick with it. I don't think it is helpful to say that whoever first writes an article gets to determine future punctuation or layout as that leads to inconsistency. And I would much prefer there were a central guideline that people could follow, rather than having random ad-hoc local discussions, let alone having to wait for some kind of response from people on articles which don't get much editorial attention. Personally I'm OK with either St. Paul or St Paul. But I would rather it were consistent. I'd rather we said all such usage should be St. or St across Wikipedia as that is our house style (and once that was established there should be no need for anyone to make any page moves let alone ask others for consensus to make such moves), or we established clearly in guidelines that we use St. for all articles other than UK articles where St would apply. Actually, my real preference would be for the Foundation to write software that allowed UK readers by default to see St Paul (and colour) and non-UK readers by default to see St. Paul (and color), and allowed users to over-ride those defaults if they wished. SilkTork ( talk) 09:56, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Common modern British usage is not to use the full stop. If you look at British church categories, the vast majority of the articles therein (and there are many hundreds) do not use the full stop and this has been our clear convention for years. That is our house style with regard to Commonwealth articles (except Canada, of course). If we had consistent house styles for everything across Wikipedia, then we would doubtless use American English for everything; we do not per WP:ENGVAR. House style depends on the national origin of the article. What we do want is consistency between classes of article (i.e. all British articles should use common British style, which is obvious from looking at the relevant categories). These edits should be ceased and reverted immediately and the relevant guidelines rewritten to rid them of the American bias that seems to have crept into them. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 10:31, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Do folks feel there is enough interest to open a RfC? And, if so, are the options I listed the appropriate ones? SilkTork ( talk) 13:38, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
I came across a particular egregious case of mass scarequoting and wanted to reference the MOS, but found that the most complete treatment (with examples), here at Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation point of view (new anchor I added to avoid linking to only the subsection "Point of view"), was not the target of MOS:SCAREQUOTES. I would like to change MOS:SCAREQUOTES to link the same place as MOS:QUOTEPOV, the section here. Seems like if the main MOS covers it in most detail, that should be the location of the shortcut. Objections? —DIYeditor ( talk) 05:07, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Is this appropriate on Wikipedia? It seems wrong to me, so I changed a sentence here to avoid it beginning with ka. I've tried searching for any mention of this here, but it is difficult to parse any discussion of this topic from the many other capitalization discussions. 文法楽しい ( talk) 22:14, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
I proposed this cleanup at the end of a longer thread on hyphens and en dashes, and confusion about place-naming. It was not opposed, but was archived not long after, so I'm re-opening it for discussion rather than just doing it:
It looks to me like "Wrong: Austria–Hungary; the hyphenated Austria-Hungary was a single jurisdiction during its 1867–1918 existence" was added by someone to encapsulate some kind of personal opinion or to rationalize an existing article title instead of moving it, and without any consideration of conflict with the rest of the dashes guideline and with actual practice (virtually all of our articles on places that are merged polities and whose names have a horizontal line in them separating the two formerly separate place names use an en dash, and RM regularly moves them to do so). All such places are "single jurisdictions during [their] existence" under the compound name, so the rationale in that quoted bit just doesn't work.
I think this line should simply be removed. I'd been wondering why we keep getting recurrent confusion about dashes and hyphens in place names, and this is clearly the source of it. (Or most of it. Odd cases like Guinea-Bissau, "the Guinea of Bissau", and Wilkes-Barre, a town named in remote honor of people with no connection to the place, generate some questions. However, they reflect patterns of hyphen usage that no longer survive in contemporary English. They're nomenclatural fossils, like all the "St James Church"-style locations in the UK and Ireland without a possessive apostrophe or apostrophe-s.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:35, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
MOS:RETAIN and MOS:DATERET say that the initial variety of English and the date format, respectively, should be retained. Assuming no national ties or special circumstances, does the initial use of a date format establish the variety of English for an article, and vice-versa? Does the first use of a DMY date require subsequent use of British (or other Commonwealth) English? Does the use of American spelling preclude or discourage the use of DMY dates? If an article is found to have developed a mix of American English with DMY dates, assuming each is consistent, does that justify changing one of them to comply with the other? If so, is this explained somewhere in the MOS? I've read various style articles and template documentation, and found these discussions: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers/Archive 151#DATETIES: Is DMY format now acceptable for the U.S.? and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 195#Question about ENGVAR, date formats, and metric vs. imperial, but it's still not clear to me. Are there other discussions, principles, or consensus that are easier to understand?
An example case is Sahle-Work Zewde (let's leave aside national ties to Ethiopia). The first version of the article had a DMY date, but no other identifiable variety of English. Several years later, someone added the word "center". Several months later, someone else changed "center" to "centre". Despite my revert on the basis of MOS:RETAIN, they reinstated the change and added a "{{Commonwealth English}}" template on the basis that the DMY date had established it. I haven't commented yet on the talk page there, because I'm not sure whether it's usual practice or not, so I wanted to ask here.
My personal preferences are:
The first is mainstream - am I in the minority on the second? -- IamNotU ( talk) 15:24, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Date format and English variety are treated very separately, and one should not go to change one based on the state of the other." ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 20:08, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
The article Seabee previously had its images labeled as figures with "Fig. #" in each caption, with references to them in the text. This is not explicitly mentioned at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Captions but it is clearly nonstandard. I see this as quite unnecessary if the images are appropriately placed in the relevant section. My removal of these apparently " amounts to vandalism" because one must be "academically advanced" to understand the relationship between an image and the adjacent text it relates to. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 11 is another example, and Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133 shows how easily these can get out of order when images are reorganized. This is a rare enough case that the MOS doesn't appear to explicitly mention this, other than perhaps "The text of captions should not be specially formatted", but does anyone have thoughts on it? Reywas92 Talk 23:59, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
I believe the distinction made between "figures" (diagrams, "graphics", etc.) and photographs (images, etc.) is an older one, arising from technical aspects of printing, also evidenced in the older practice of printing photographs on separate stock that was then bound in a book. Modern printing technology does not require such separate handling, and the modern practice is, as Jmar67 says, to simply and generically call all non-text illustrative material "figures". On that basis I see no objection to calling an "image" a "figure".
But the issue raised is not so much the term used – would "images labeled as
" not be an issue? – as the labeling of each image, and particularly, labeling with a serial index number. While images generally stand apart from the text (with any explanations needed done in the caption), occasionally there is a need to refer unambiguously to a specific image (such as a map), and therefore some kind title or label is needed. It might be helpful to provide some guidance on this, perhaps with a suggestion that labels can also be anchors.
figures images with "Fig. Images #" in each caption
Journals and technical documents routinely serially number all figures (a serial number being easier to locate than arbitrary text). The problem with doing this with explicit numbering is that additions or deletions of figures may require extensive renumbering. Note that there is a similar situation in regard of numbering equations. For equations we have the {{ NumBlk}} and {{ EquationRef}} templates, which provide automatic serial numbering of equations similar to how the <ref> system handles notes. I don't know that we have anything similar for figures. In lieu of some similar automated system (and at the risk of establishing a "customary style" such that future editors will object to any other way) I think we should provide some guidance for labeling or titling figures ("images"). ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 20:02, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I requested a change to the MP for a sentence ending with " Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.." (quotation marks just to highlight the string here), asking to eliminate the second period and citing MOS:CONSECUTIVE. The admin challenged the request by saying that the first period was "abbreviation punctuation" and not "terminal punctuation". Surely the intent is to cover this situation as well, i.e., do not duplicate a character (period) that serves as terminal punctuation, regardless of the character's function. At least that was what I learned in school. Does anyone think that the quoted phrase is correct and should not be changed? It definitely looks strange. Jmar67 ( talk) 02:58, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Unless this is handled somewhere in the MoS I haven't found, I propose that we add to the MoS that if the first use of an acronym occurs within a quotation, the "expanded" acronym should be added in brackets after the acronym; and that if a link is appropriate, that the link occur on the expansion rather than the acronym. As an example, taken from this article section I've edited, the first-use acronym "CRM" would look like this:
This proposal resolves a discrepancy between:
Supporting my proposal:
(I originally posted about this at the help desk here, where User:Teratix suggested I bring this up on an MoS talk page.) On Sober Reflection ( talk) 12:19, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
in-quotation expansion is better" than anything. If the quoted material includes an expansion, but for some reason it is not suitable (too cumbersome?) for direct quotation, then brackets might be used for a summary paraphrase. But if the expansion was elsewhere in the source (or nowhere), then it should be presented prior to the quotation. Surely there are very few cases (if any) where this cannot be done. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 19:54, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
Please see
MOS:GENDERID is the focus of intense discussion in many places. This topic is overdue for having its own subarticle in the Wikipedia Manual of Style.
To establish this article, I attempted to avoid even presenting guidance, and instead compiled a list of many prior discussions on which basis we will collectively establish consensus.
If anyone has something to say about this then please comment on the talk page there at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Gender identity. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:36, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
{{
Essay}}
, which would definitely mean move it somewhere else, like under
Wikipedia:WikiProject Gender Studies or something. I've changed this to {{
Draft proposal}}
, since the intent appears to be actually drafting new language and proposing it, after the listed discussions are analyzed. I could see that living under "WP:Manual of Style" temporarily (several other draft proposals have).However, only about a year or two ago we had a discussion about another draft of an identity-related MoS addition (which actually had a lot of input into it and substance to it, unlike this one). I even proposed integrating parts of it into
MOS:IDENTITY, but the entire thing was rejected, moved somewhere else, and tagged with {{
Failed proposal}}
. A repeat is fairly likely. Back around 2016 or so there were also a slew of competing "harassment"-related proposals (all also deeply entwined with gender-identity politicking), and they all also came to nought. I don't think this will work either, because it's yet another attempt to
WP:POLICYFORK instead of to propose a small incremental change to the existing guideline, and see if the community will accept it, and whether it has any longer-term fallout; then propose another small change. This kind kind of "suddenly remake Wikipedia in my own image, as drafted off on some other page by me and my buddies" stuff never works.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 05:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm curious why this is called Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Gender identity rather than simply Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Identity, where we can document all of the various ways people self-define and self-identify and how we should defer to those. Gender, sexual orientation, racial identity, ability status, political persuasion, social class, religion, and so many more ways that people can identify which may contradict older reliable sources. To devote a MOS guideline to only one aspect of intersectional identity is exclusionary. -- Netoholic @ 19:26, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
{{
Rejected proposal}}
. (It began as "WP:Naming conventions (identity)" which now just redirects to MOS:IDENTITY. The draft is archived at
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Identity (failed proposal); the discussion about it is archived at
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 194#Merge draft WP:Naming conventions (identity) to MOS:IDENTITY?). Even MOS:IDENTITY's material on Arab/Arabic/Arabian and other such terms was relocated to
MOS:WTW, and only after a lot of wrangling to keep any of it at all. There's a general community hostility to "legislating" about this stuff in the guidelines. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 01:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
if a broader identity guideline has failed to gain consensus, then its probably a waste of time and resources to deal with a more specific subset- This makes no sense to me at all. In general, broader proposals are naturally going to be harder to get consensus on than narrower proposals. WanderingWanda (they/them) ( t/ c) 15:40, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 205 | ← | Archive 210 | Archive 211 | Archive 212 | Archive 213 | Archive 214 | Archive 215 |
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Beyond My Ken has invoked WP:IGNOREALLRULES to override the guidance in MOS:DATE to editwar over date formatting at Joey Gibson (political activist). He apparently has an issue with the trailing comma in American-style MDY date formats, declaring them "still not needed", "when a comma is not needed, it's not needed".
Ignoring the editwarring violations, under what conditions can WP:IGNOREALLRULES legitimately be invoked to override the MoS, and does this case fall within them? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:12, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
More seriously, and as to the case at hand, this simply isn't an IAR matter, it's someone editwarring to impose a style quirk that reliable sources consider substandard English. IAR is invoked when a rule impedes someone from objectively improving the encyclopedia. Defying punctation norms to suit personal whims is objectively a detriment to our content, and subjectively an improvement only to someone who shares the exact same peccadillo and who is apparently in a class of people who do not read or absorb style guides (not just ours, but "real world" ones, which are consistent: parenthesizing commas always come in pairs except when the second one is replaced by other punctuation like "." or "?"). That's actually a fairly large class of people, but they're still in the wrong on this and have no business insisting on style changes, against either general English norms as codified in major style guides, or against our own style guidelines (based on the former). There simply is no IAR to be found anywhere in that. There's no rule against saying "IAR!" in your revert, but it will not save you from a 3RR block, etc. No one takes IAR claims seriously when the rule is not being defied to actually make an improvement.
[I decline to comment on whether there's a specific
tendentiousness pattern with BMK in particular, since WT:MOS isn't a disciplinary venue. If this sort of thing seems habitual, and user- and article-talk discussion has no effect on it, it may be a
WP:ANI or
WP:ANEW matter, or even
WP:AE if they've received a {{
Ds/alert|mos}}
within the last 12 months and are being genuinely disruptive.]
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 06:44, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
This user has done the same removing a comma following a state name: [1]. Reywas92 Talk 19:55, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I can't see a reason that we'd treat a noun-phrase adjunct (an NP acting as an adjectival modifier of another noun) differently; there's nothing broken about "They sold their Clovis, California, home in 2014." It doesn't structurally make sense as "They sold their Clovis, California home in 2014.", though most people's brains wouldn't melt. But trying to lay out a rule for editors to drop the second comma in that but retain it in "They bought a house in Clovis, California, in 1998" would be a WP:CREEP nightmare of the kind we've already had to wrestle with before: lots of "I just can't get it" problems, and people disputing it as nonsense or at best as an attested style that's too complicated to employ here.
When such a place name is used in a larger compound construction (the adjectival noun phrase being just part of the compound modifier), like "They sold their Clovis, California-based business in 2014", the hyphen is a replacement for the second comma, just as would be terminal punctuation ("They moved to Weed, Texas.") I don't think even Chicago spells all this out very clearly (as it does for actual terminal punctuation), though their examples illustrate such cases. But we don't seem to have any active problem of editors doing daft things like "They moved to Weed, Texas, – a much smaller community – the same year." (or "... –, the same year"). We just intuitively know that things like ", –" are not idiomatic in English writing. [They actually used to be, in the 1800s;
Emerson used such patterns, as illustrated at
WP:EMERSON, an essay created for an unrelated reason.]
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 04:09, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
May I suggest that this section be kept at the top of the page? It's a losing battle keeping it at the bottom. BTW I added a hidden "Do not archive until 2029" tag so that problem's handled. E Eng 08:05, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm asking for the general case, but my question arises more specifically from treatment of Thailand-related proper nouns. The current convention is to include the Thai spelling of a name after the bold title, followed by the pronunciation. But this leads to words which aren't part of the English name appearing in the transcribed version. Take Chulalongkorn University, for example. The name in Thai is Thai: จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย, RTGS: Chulalongkon Mahawitthayalai. The IPA pronunciation is given for the entire name, but the Mahawitthayalai part means "university", and is actually redundant. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation says, "If the name consists of more than one word, include pronunciation only for the words that need it (all of Jean van Heijenoort but only Cholmondeley in Thomas P. G. Cholmondeley)." But is [ma.hǎː.wít.tʰa.jāː.lāj] needed here? Readers who look at the bold title Chulalongkorn University will expect to only find the pronunciation for Chulalongkorn, and will be confused where the Mahawitthayalai comes from. But readers who are looking at the Thai name would also presumably want to know the pronunciation in its entirety. How should this be dealt with?
Another example is Charoen Krung Road. It's ถนนเจริญกรุง in Thai, RTGS: Thanon Charoen Krung. But the {{ RTGS}} template isn't needed here, since the article title already follows the RTGS transcription. So the appearance of [tʰā.nǒn] in the pronunciation guide is even more confusing to reader who doesn't know Thai. There are also thousands of other streets, bridges railway stations, etc. Would repeating the pronunciation of the same few words for all of them be too redundant? Should they be included or omitted? -- Paul_012 ( talk) 02:36, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Requests for comment are sought at Talk:2010–2017 Toronto serial homicides § RfC on drug name on how to state the name of a drug mentioned in court documents about a living person. – Reidgreg ( talk) 16:34, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Very simple question: should it be Deer Park–West Werribee railway line, or Deer Park – West Werribee railway line?
I moved it to its current location a while ago after noting "Los Angeles–New York flight" was preferred by MOS:DASH, but now I’m not sure if it falls into the category of ranges with spaces in the elements. Any advice is appreciated. Triptothecottage ( talk) 09:41, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
a New York–Los Angeles flight
The en dash in a range is always unspaced, except when either or both elements of the range include at least one space
Christmas 2001 – Easter 2002
a New York – Los Angeles flight
Here the ranges are ranges of numbers, dates, or times.... I change my objection to that it's inconsistent and counter-intuitive to have different styles depending on the use case, even acknowledging there may be underlying reasons for it. MOS should not be just (or even primarily) for use by experts – they don't need it. —[ AlanM1( talk)]— 20:05, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
Good grief. Thanks for the answers – I was not interested in upsetting anyone's apple cart, I just wanted to know what the correct interpretation of the consensus guideline was. I missed the hatnote too, which makes it quite plain. Triptothecottage ( talk) 11:28, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
The MOS is also quite clear with regards to certain image placement: "Each image should be inside the level 2 section to which it relates, within the section defined by the most recent ==Heading== delimited by two equal signs, or at the top of the lead section. Do not place images immediately above section headings."
The same user as above believes that because "MOS is not policy, it is not mandatory" that this should be ignored for no clear reason. He claims it provides "VISUAL BALANCE" to the article, but in this case the images are cleanly alternating left and right with no excess images stacking on top of each other so putting the images within the relevant sections is perfectly visually balanced. I think they look bad being in the wrong section and breaking the horizontal header line. What would be a good reason to ignore the MOS for image placement? Reywas92 Talk 19:55, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Meta: We (the entire community, or rather the image and layout geeks in it, who care) may need to revisit
MOS:IMAGE,
Help:Pictures, and image-related parts of
MOS:ACCESS to make sure they all still make sense in 2019 and on mobile devices. I'm not sure all of this material has kept pace with display issues, former display issues possibly no longer being issues, changes to MediaWiki, and so on. A lot of this stuff probably needs a round of focused test-casing to see what actually happens today under what circumstances, on the desktop and mobile sites, and on different devices.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 04:25, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Apparently my bringing Daniel Burnham into compliance with the MOS is "harassment". User:Beyond My Ken has placed the images back above the header lines in the previous section, claiming "better layout" with no explanation why this is better. Thoughts? @ SMcCandlish: Reywas92 Talk 08:11, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Hi Wikipedia folks, I would like to know why my addition to the article with the section titled “Word Variation and Repetitiveness” was reverted/deleted. Repetitiveness is a problem I see in Wikipedia pages sometimes, and there’s no mention of it on this article, even though this would be the perfect place to have it. As the spirit of that addition would be productive and helpful for the article, at the very least we should talk about it here instead of reverting it. Or I can make the addition, and the other users who are more knowledgeable about how these pages work can tweak and edit it as they see fit. I greatly welcome and appreciate any feedback, insights, or comments. Thanks everyone! Thanks Mrbeastmodeallday ( talk) 21:44, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
Is the way that birthplaces are described in the infoboxes at Gandhi, Miloš Zeman and Andrej Babiš described in a MOS somewhere? Gråbergs Gråa Sång ( talk) 09:28, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
AlbanGeller ( talk · contribs) and myself had a discussion on his talk page regarding when/where/whether to use commas where title(s) and honorific suffixes occur (such as in the article Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington), and he suggested that I bring the subject up here to see if there could be more input.
HandsomeFella ( talk) 08:49, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Circling back to the compound modifier question from above once more, it seems I have been "corrected" here, when someone said should be "First magnitude star" rather than "First-magnitude star". Does that qualify as a valid exception? Usage in sources seems mixed. Pinging @ Modulus12: who made the change. — Amakuru ( talk) 23:44, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
There seem to be two contradictory lines in the manual of style:
It seems to me that Japanese American would count as a proper name in the smae way that "Middle Eastern" would. This became an issue at WP:ERRORS, regarding today's OTD entry "African-American teenager Trayvon Martin was killed while walking...". Should "African-American" be hyphenated? I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but it seems like one or other of the above lines needs amending. Thanks — Amakuru ( talk) 09:23, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
I have absolutely no horse in this race and couldn't care less on whether the Mormons call themselves "LDS" or "COJC", but, as pointed out here, the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Latter Day Saints#changes based on recent style request from LDS Church? has fizzled out without any kind of consensus as to what Wikipedia should be calling these people, so there are minor good-faith back and forth changes and reverts going on all over the project. While I normally feel the MOS is too overreaching, this is something Wikipedia should micromanage to the extent of coming up with a single approved name otherwise people will be changing "Mormon", "Latter-day Saint" and "Church of Jesus Christ" back and forth for eternity; if people have a spare few minutes can they pop over there and try to get this settled on one name or another? ‑ Iridescent 09:11, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
back and forth for eternity. Does this proves the True Eternity for ever ? Or do we have Jesus cries, but the caravan goes further ? Pldx1 ( talk) 09:48, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
Is Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy an explanatory supplement to this guideline? If yes, it should be linked prominently. If no, that page should not be making the claim. — SmokeyJoe ( talk) 14:43, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
{{
Essay}}
is fine. {{
Supplement}}
is just a kind of essay (as is {{
information page}}
, {{
WikiProject style advice}}
, etc., etc.). Of course it should remain linked here, since it's pertinent, and frequently referenced (not just in MoS discussions but especially often in
WP:RM ones, which often hinge on MoS-related matters). Even our policy pages routinely link to useful essays. The essay is being subjected to what appears to be a coordinated attack by "usual suspects" in anti-MoS activism; see the (snowball opposed)
MfD opened one day earlier. Cf.
WP:FORUMSHOPPING,
WP:MEATPUPPET,
WP:FACTION, and
WP:GAMING. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 04:17, 18 January 2019 (UTC)SmokeyJoe: So where have the proposed links been placed, specifically? I couldn't find any new links, despite this discussion and its contributors seeming to agree on the need for them. cherkash ( talk) 02:16, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
It seems there's no clear guidance on which of the two alternatives should be used in geographic names. E.g. in the case of Austria-Hungary, a hyphen is advised by the MOS. Whereas, logically and per closer reading of the en-dash/hyphen policies, even this case is not so clear. Specifically, Austria and Hungary were essentially two parts joined together, and so per most other similar cases there should be an en-dash (Austria–Hungary). On the other hand, it has also been known as Austro-Hungary (where it's clearly the combining form that's intended here, and hence the hyphen).
Other recently discussed cases are:
In the case of KC and KB, the original Russian versions of their names both use the combining form (similar to Greco-Roman or Anglo-American), namely Russian transliterations are Karachayevo-Cherkesiya for KC (I'm ignoring -siya to -ssia transition as not relevant to the subject) and Kabardino-Balkariya for KB. But then somehow KB is the only one that retains this Russian form in English: KC changes what should have been "Karachayevo-" to "Karachay-", whereas KB forms what seems to be a combining adjectivial form "Kabardino-" from the noun "Kabardin" (a variation of the name for Kabardians).
Other cases from the fairly modern history include:
And so by looking at these examples, it seems that the choice between hyphen and en-dash should be guided by the grammatical/semantical meaning of the compound name in question, instead of applying a hard and fast "always use hyphen" exception rule (as seems to be superficially prescribed by MOS).
Pinging editors from other related recent discussions to opine on this: SMcCandlish, Dicklyon, Tony1. cherkash ( talk) 02:57, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedia style guidelines is confusing. It lists both legitimate guidelines and essays. Essays are not guidelines, yet are listed there. They are two: 1 and 2. I suggest making them separate from the legitimate guidelines for the sake of preventing new users' confusion.-- Adûnâi ( talk) 12:11, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
[[:Category:Wikipedia style guidelines|style guidelines]]
. It wasn't an intentional attempt to mark the page as a style guideline. I also added
Category:Wikipedia essays on style to it. I did find another essays in there,
Wikipedia:Use feminine pronouns, which was intentionally mis-categorized, and I've fixed that. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 14:46, 12 March 2019 (UTC){{
Style}}
navbox for years. I've just
WP:BOLDly put the MoS header tag on it.{{
Proposal}}
header.Let's preclude the first example in MOS § Other uses (em dash only) with a clarification that a hair space will be used. It may prevent readers from unnecessarily looking up the HTML character code mentioned— . Turns out it's explained in the very next sentence, yet this is easily overlooked when a reader's first inclination may be to immediately look it up without reading on, as was the case for me. Perhaps it's barely worth suggesting, but I believe it will be an improvement, slight though it may be.
Current paragraph:
An indented em dash may be used before a name or other source when attributing below a block quotation, poem, etc. For example, {{ in5}}— Charlotte Brontë will produce:
— Charlotte Brontë
This dash should not be fully spaced, though it is best for metadata and accessibility reasons to hair-space it from the name with the HTML character code  . Most of Wikipedia's quotation templates with attribution-related parameters already provide this formatting.
Amended:
An indented em dash may be used before a name or other source when attributing below a block quotation, poem, etc. This dash should not be fully spaced, though it is best for metadata and accessibility reasons to hair-space it from the name with the HTML character code  . Most of Wikipedia's quotation templates with attribution-related parameters already provide this formatting.
For example, {{ in5}}— Charlotte Brontë will produce:
— Charlotte Brontë
I can't imagine anyone would object. Nothing's rewritten and the only difference is that I moved the example to end of the paragraph. I'd do it myself, but I'm hesitant. Prior MOS edits I thought were minor and non-controversial have been reverted nonetheless.
Anyways, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Regards, Jay D. Easy ( talk) 19:23, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
Many are cold, but few are frozen.
— Matthew 22:14
{{Quote box |salign=right|quote = Many are cold, but few are frozen.|author = {{mdash}}{{hsp}}Matthew 22:14}}
{{
quote}}
(which supports the parameter he mentioned, and which we already explain will do this markup for you), or <blockquote>...</blockquote>
, which does not (thus the explanation). {{
Quote box}}
isn't one of our standardized quotation templates, but old detritus that should probably be merged out of existence, or at best confined to use outside mainspace, like on people's talk page or whatever. We don't have a reason to use it in an example. And {{
in5}}
isn't "debris", it's one of the recommended ways of indenting, unlike abuse of :
description list markup to produce a broken d-list just to get the visual appearance of an indentation. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 16:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC){{
Quote box}}
usage in any article that could not be replaced with another template that behaved more consistently. We would "ever" use {{
in5}}
any time we wanted to indent a short line (there's another template, {{
block indent}}
, for larger material); this is covered at
MOS:INDENT. We don't have any reason to try to force people to use templates when HTML <blockquote>
works fine and is easier for some of them and more flexible in some situations (various block templates don't behave well inside other blocks, next to images, etc.). I.e., basically you're doing
WP:CREEP to try to avoid doing WP:CREEP. :-) — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
SMcCandlish (
talk •
contribs) 16:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
{{
quote box}}
has inconsistent output (if you want to cite the source below the quotation, you have to manually include the em dash, and this makes it difficult to convert between quotation templates, requiring manual re-editing, not just a template replacement. [I think the fix for this would be to create a temporary copy that auto-dashed like all the rest of these templates, then use AWB or something to first point all extant calls to the new copy, then change then original to use the same in-built dash code as the other templates, then tediously replace all the extant calls to the temporary template to now not have manual dash markup and to call the (repaired) original template again, finally redirect the copy to the original (or just remove the copy). That would fix the issue without there ever being instances of in-article content both having a manual dash and a template-provided one, and it would preserve the page history of the original template. More of a pain in the butt than I would take on personally.] Articles with {{
in5}}
include:
Lyndon B. Johnson,
Supreme Court of the United States,
Methylphenidate,
Community (TV series),
2017 NFL Draft (and other articles in that series),
1966 FIFA World Cup (and other articles in that series),
Bengal cat,
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
O Canada,
San Francisco,
DNA virus,
Mars Science Laboratory, etc.. There's still lots and lots of abuse of :
(i.e, of <dd>...</dd>
) for visual indentation to fix in mainspace, and that might be something a bot can do. It needs to be fixed since it generates invalid markup (as in actually fails validation). A perhaps simpler fix would be to have MediaWiki generate different HTML when :
is used, depending on whether it's preceded by a ;
(<dt>...</dt>
) line, but over a decade after the devs were asked to do this, zero progress has been made, and we're left with working around it directly. Talk pages are pretty much a lost cause, though fixing this at the MW level would also make our talk pages much more palatable for blind editors. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 13:44, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
For anyone interested, please see Talk:Chairman#Requested move 22 March 2019. SarahSV (talk) 20:56, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
There's a discussion at Talk:Chairman#Requested move 22 March 2019 in which one issue is how to interpret or apply MOS:GNL, so it may be of interest to editors here. Peter coxhead ( talk) 22:23, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Why don't the standards for italicizing publication names (such as The New York Times) appear anywhere here? Am I missing something?-- MainlyTwelve ( talk) 19:52, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I ran across Template:Goshen, New York today with images and have never seen such a Navbox before. My first inclination was just to remove them as distractions that have nothing to do with the navigational purpose of the box. The closest policy I could find was WP:Navigation template#Navigation templates are not arbitrarily decorative and the "implied" standard format from the examples and common usage. Any other comments? MB 23:07, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
There's a discussion over at Talk:Sonia Burgess.
Sonia Burgess was a trans woman who it seems had started socially transitioning - among friends and family and in public. At the time of her death she was still presenting male and using her old name at work. Her friends and family used her new name and pronouns when quoted by the press after her death.
Some are arguing that the article name should not be changed because she continued to use the old name at work, and that she hadn't made a statement herself in a reliable source about which name she preferred to be called.
I believe this to be abiding by the letter but not the spirit of MOS:GENDERID, and I wonder if the guideline could be improved to account for situations like this where the wishes of the article subject are obvious and clear but they never made a "self-designation" in a reliable source. -- Wickedterrier ( talk) 12:10, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Off-topic flame-fest that's all predicated on a mistaken assumption about who created the article:
|
---|
|
This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the subject has indicated a preference otherwise. This subject clearly had a delineated preference - private vs. professional. This means that in the portions of the article which discuss their professional setting, we should firmly use the male name and identification. In sections about their personal life, we use the female. And in portions which are mixed, we can avoid awkward constructions - like using only their last name, etc. As far as the title, it should be based strictly on the context of their most solid basis of notability and most likely search vector - in this case, their professional legal identity. -- Netoholic @ 17:23, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Just wanted to reiterate that there is a RM discussion happening right now over on the Burgess talk page: Talk:David_Burgess_(immigration_lawyer)#Requested_move_12_March_2019 WanderingWanda (they/them) ( t/ c) 18:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
it was noted that she supported "female pronouns [being] used for only post-announcement material"This comes from one single statement from Manning's lawyer, while she was still imprisoned, and the lawyer prefaced it by saying
Here is what I would recommendand not, say, "here is what Manning has told me she prefers". WanderingWanda (they/them) ( t/ c) 17:29, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Are you doubting that Manning's lawyer presented the matter accurately?
And Manning is not the only case of a famous transgender person preferring different pronouns for two different phases of their life.
When should Wikipedia respect a trans person's identity? Always and without exception.
That doesn't mean that Wikipedia should never repeat a trans person's deadname. In order to fufill its mission of being a comprehensive, neutral, and uncensored encyclopedia sometimes it needs to repeat deadnames, in the same way that sometimes it needs to repeat other unpleasant or offensive things like racist or queerphobic slurs.
But a trans person's preferred name should always be the primary way an article refers to them. That goes for for biographical articles, non-biographical articles, titles, infoboxes, prose. Everything. If that contradicts Wikipedia's current policies and guidelines then the policies and guidelines need to be changed.
The 1976 Summer Olympics article should say that Caitlyn Jenner won the gold medal for the decathlon. But that's falsifying history! No it's not. Referring to someone's past using their current name is a normal practice. There is nothing incorrect or weird about the sentence "Michelle Obama went to Princeton."
My position on this is perfectly mainstream and middle-of-the-road. Go ask Google or Wolfram Alpha "who won the 1976 olympic men's decathlon" and see who pops up in the infobox. Look at what
the Reuters style guide says: Always use a transgender person's chosen name....If you are not sure which gender pronoun to use, ask. If you can't ask, then use the one that is consistent with the way a person presents himself or herself.
Look at this
New York Times Insider piece which talks about how the Times is a perfectly boring and mainstream publication that is not looking to lead the discussion, set the rules or break new ground
and yet chooses to use people's preferred pronouns and names when reporting on transgender subjects.
Earlier someone complained about trans activists, but who are the real trans activists here? Mainstream publications decided years ago it's not acceptable to misgender transgender people. Calling trans people what they want to be called is mainstream. Finding any excuse to misgender trans people is activism. WanderingWanda (they/them) ( t/ c) 07:41, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
7) Fæ has responded to good faith concerns by attempting to link the people with concerns to the campaign against him.. -- Netoholic @ 10:01, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Social change does not happen without people getting "fired up" and "vocal" and "activist" and "aggressive". Making this remark here looks like a logical fallacy. When some people are "vocal", "activist", "aggressive", this doesn't prove that said people are concurring to any valuable social change. This only proves that they are "vocal", etc. while trying to play a trump card. Going back to what is discussed, one can see that the wp:en article is less and less about the professional accomplisments of lawyer David Burgess, and more and more about his private life. But if you really want to put the focus on the said private life, you will have to discuss how a distinguished transgender 63 years old British lawyer was behaving towards an 35 years old Sri Lankan person, poor and isolated, whose capacity to have an educated consent was questionned in court (diminished responsibility). Moreover, you shouldn't forget that Nina Kanagasingham ended
found dead in her cell with a plastic bag on her head, and each hand tied to the bed frame... and doesn't got a funeral service in any impressive, grey-stone, porticoed place overlooking Trafalgar Square. Indeed, some social changes are long overdue. Pldx1 ( talk) 10:31, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
I am wanting some clarification from the Wikipedia community on an aspect of the MOS which, in my view, is in some confusion and conflict. Another editor has been changing the article names for some British churches to include a full stop / period with the abbreviation of "Saint" ("St." instead of "St") on the basis of both MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH. However, as POINTS states, full stops at the end of contractions in British English is "optional". It has also, in my experience, long and overwhelmingly been the usual style in modern British English to not use full stops in common contractions such as "St". Both POINTS and CHURCH seem to me to reflect a North American bias about such abbreviations which has not considered the fact that contraction abbreviations without a full stop is not only optional but also the much more common modern use in British English. I would appreciate other editors views about this and the application of the MOS to British church names in articles. If this is not the correct place to discuss these matters then please advise me where this is. Thank you. Anglicanus ( talk) 00:50, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
I hadn't realised what I was doing was likely to be controversial, as it appeared to me that I was following consensus as outlined in MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH. Indeed, I explained to a user who had moved St. Paul's, Deptford to St Paul's, Deptford, why I was restoring the page to St. Paul. For me this is like the disagreement over using The Beatles or the Beatles. Either way is fine, and neither way alters meaning, but is purely stylistic. Such stylistic usage will vary with time, location, editorial and publication preference, etc. Given the guidance in MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH I had assumed that the community had settled on using St. Paul rather than St Paul, especially as St. Paul is widely considered outside of Wikipedia to be the modern usage, and is used, albeit inconsistently, in the UK. It is useful to have a house style, and to stick with it. I don't think it is helpful to say that whoever first writes an article gets to determine future punctuation or layout as that leads to inconsistency. And I would much prefer there were a central guideline that people could follow, rather than having random ad-hoc local discussions, let alone having to wait for some kind of response from people on articles which don't get much editorial attention. Personally I'm OK with either St. Paul or St Paul. But I would rather it were consistent. I'd rather we said all such usage should be St. or St across Wikipedia as that is our house style (and once that was established there should be no need for anyone to make any page moves let alone ask others for consensus to make such moves), or we established clearly in guidelines that we use St. for all articles other than UK articles where St would apply. Actually, my real preference would be for the Foundation to write software that allowed UK readers by default to see St Paul (and colour) and non-UK readers by default to see St. Paul (and color), and allowed users to over-ride those defaults if they wished. SilkTork ( talk) 09:56, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Common modern British usage is not to use the full stop. If you look at British church categories, the vast majority of the articles therein (and there are many hundreds) do not use the full stop and this has been our clear convention for years. That is our house style with regard to Commonwealth articles (except Canada, of course). If we had consistent house styles for everything across Wikipedia, then we would doubtless use American English for everything; we do not per WP:ENGVAR. House style depends on the national origin of the article. What we do want is consistency between classes of article (i.e. all British articles should use common British style, which is obvious from looking at the relevant categories). These edits should be ceased and reverted immediately and the relevant guidelines rewritten to rid them of the American bias that seems to have crept into them. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 10:31, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Do folks feel there is enough interest to open a RfC? And, if so, are the options I listed the appropriate ones? SilkTork ( talk) 13:38, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
I came across a particular egregious case of mass scarequoting and wanted to reference the MOS, but found that the most complete treatment (with examples), here at Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation point of view (new anchor I added to avoid linking to only the subsection "Point of view"), was not the target of MOS:SCAREQUOTES. I would like to change MOS:SCAREQUOTES to link the same place as MOS:QUOTEPOV, the section here. Seems like if the main MOS covers it in most detail, that should be the location of the shortcut. Objections? —DIYeditor ( talk) 05:07, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Is this appropriate on Wikipedia? It seems wrong to me, so I changed a sentence here to avoid it beginning with ka. I've tried searching for any mention of this here, but it is difficult to parse any discussion of this topic from the many other capitalization discussions. 文法楽しい ( talk) 22:14, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
I proposed this cleanup at the end of a longer thread on hyphens and en dashes, and confusion about place-naming. It was not opposed, but was archived not long after, so I'm re-opening it for discussion rather than just doing it:
It looks to me like "Wrong: Austria–Hungary; the hyphenated Austria-Hungary was a single jurisdiction during its 1867–1918 existence" was added by someone to encapsulate some kind of personal opinion or to rationalize an existing article title instead of moving it, and without any consideration of conflict with the rest of the dashes guideline and with actual practice (virtually all of our articles on places that are merged polities and whose names have a horizontal line in them separating the two formerly separate place names use an en dash, and RM regularly moves them to do so). All such places are "single jurisdictions during [their] existence" under the compound name, so the rationale in that quoted bit just doesn't work.
I think this line should simply be removed. I'd been wondering why we keep getting recurrent confusion about dashes and hyphens in place names, and this is clearly the source of it. (Or most of it. Odd cases like Guinea-Bissau, "the Guinea of Bissau", and Wilkes-Barre, a town named in remote honor of people with no connection to the place, generate some questions. However, they reflect patterns of hyphen usage that no longer survive in contemporary English. They're nomenclatural fossils, like all the "St James Church"-style locations in the UK and Ireland without a possessive apostrophe or apostrophe-s.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:35, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
MOS:RETAIN and MOS:DATERET say that the initial variety of English and the date format, respectively, should be retained. Assuming no national ties or special circumstances, does the initial use of a date format establish the variety of English for an article, and vice-versa? Does the first use of a DMY date require subsequent use of British (or other Commonwealth) English? Does the use of American spelling preclude or discourage the use of DMY dates? If an article is found to have developed a mix of American English with DMY dates, assuming each is consistent, does that justify changing one of them to comply with the other? If so, is this explained somewhere in the MOS? I've read various style articles and template documentation, and found these discussions: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers/Archive 151#DATETIES: Is DMY format now acceptable for the U.S.? and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 195#Question about ENGVAR, date formats, and metric vs. imperial, but it's still not clear to me. Are there other discussions, principles, or consensus that are easier to understand?
An example case is Sahle-Work Zewde (let's leave aside national ties to Ethiopia). The first version of the article had a DMY date, but no other identifiable variety of English. Several years later, someone added the word "center". Several months later, someone else changed "center" to "centre". Despite my revert on the basis of MOS:RETAIN, they reinstated the change and added a "{{Commonwealth English}}" template on the basis that the DMY date had established it. I haven't commented yet on the talk page there, because I'm not sure whether it's usual practice or not, so I wanted to ask here.
My personal preferences are:
The first is mainstream - am I in the minority on the second? -- IamNotU ( talk) 15:24, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Date format and English variety are treated very separately, and one should not go to change one based on the state of the other." ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 20:08, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
The article Seabee previously had its images labeled as figures with "Fig. #" in each caption, with references to them in the text. This is not explicitly mentioned at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Captions but it is clearly nonstandard. I see this as quite unnecessary if the images are appropriately placed in the relevant section. My removal of these apparently " amounts to vandalism" because one must be "academically advanced" to understand the relationship between an image and the adjacent text it relates to. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 11 is another example, and Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133 shows how easily these can get out of order when images are reorganized. This is a rare enough case that the MOS doesn't appear to explicitly mention this, other than perhaps "The text of captions should not be specially formatted", but does anyone have thoughts on it? Reywas92 Talk 23:59, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
I believe the distinction made between "figures" (diagrams, "graphics", etc.) and photographs (images, etc.) is an older one, arising from technical aspects of printing, also evidenced in the older practice of printing photographs on separate stock that was then bound in a book. Modern printing technology does not require such separate handling, and the modern practice is, as Jmar67 says, to simply and generically call all non-text illustrative material "figures". On that basis I see no objection to calling an "image" a "figure".
But the issue raised is not so much the term used – would "images labeled as
" not be an issue? – as the labeling of each image, and particularly, labeling with a serial index number. While images generally stand apart from the text (with any explanations needed done in the caption), occasionally there is a need to refer unambiguously to a specific image (such as a map), and therefore some kind title or label is needed. It might be helpful to provide some guidance on this, perhaps with a suggestion that labels can also be anchors.
figures images with "Fig. Images #" in each caption
Journals and technical documents routinely serially number all figures (a serial number being easier to locate than arbitrary text). The problem with doing this with explicit numbering is that additions or deletions of figures may require extensive renumbering. Note that there is a similar situation in regard of numbering equations. For equations we have the {{ NumBlk}} and {{ EquationRef}} templates, which provide automatic serial numbering of equations similar to how the <ref> system handles notes. I don't know that we have anything similar for figures. In lieu of some similar automated system (and at the risk of establishing a "customary style" such that future editors will object to any other way) I think we should provide some guidance for labeling or titling figures ("images"). ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 20:02, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I requested a change to the MP for a sentence ending with " Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.." (quotation marks just to highlight the string here), asking to eliminate the second period and citing MOS:CONSECUTIVE. The admin challenged the request by saying that the first period was "abbreviation punctuation" and not "terminal punctuation". Surely the intent is to cover this situation as well, i.e., do not duplicate a character (period) that serves as terminal punctuation, regardless of the character's function. At least that was what I learned in school. Does anyone think that the quoted phrase is correct and should not be changed? It definitely looks strange. Jmar67 ( talk) 02:58, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Unless this is handled somewhere in the MoS I haven't found, I propose that we add to the MoS that if the first use of an acronym occurs within a quotation, the "expanded" acronym should be added in brackets after the acronym; and that if a link is appropriate, that the link occur on the expansion rather than the acronym. As an example, taken from this article section I've edited, the first-use acronym "CRM" would look like this:
This proposal resolves a discrepancy between:
Supporting my proposal:
(I originally posted about this at the help desk here, where User:Teratix suggested I bring this up on an MoS talk page.) On Sober Reflection ( talk) 12:19, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
in-quotation expansion is better" than anything. If the quoted material includes an expansion, but for some reason it is not suitable (too cumbersome?) for direct quotation, then brackets might be used for a summary paraphrase. But if the expansion was elsewhere in the source (or nowhere), then it should be presented prior to the quotation. Surely there are very few cases (if any) where this cannot be done. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 19:54, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
Please see
MOS:GENDERID is the focus of intense discussion in many places. This topic is overdue for having its own subarticle in the Wikipedia Manual of Style.
To establish this article, I attempted to avoid even presenting guidance, and instead compiled a list of many prior discussions on which basis we will collectively establish consensus.
If anyone has something to say about this then please comment on the talk page there at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Gender identity. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:36, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
{{
Essay}}
, which would definitely mean move it somewhere else, like under
Wikipedia:WikiProject Gender Studies or something. I've changed this to {{
Draft proposal}}
, since the intent appears to be actually drafting new language and proposing it, after the listed discussions are analyzed. I could see that living under "WP:Manual of Style" temporarily (several other draft proposals have).However, only about a year or two ago we had a discussion about another draft of an identity-related MoS addition (which actually had a lot of input into it and substance to it, unlike this one). I even proposed integrating parts of it into
MOS:IDENTITY, but the entire thing was rejected, moved somewhere else, and tagged with {{
Failed proposal}}
. A repeat is fairly likely. Back around 2016 or so there were also a slew of competing "harassment"-related proposals (all also deeply entwined with gender-identity politicking), and they all also came to nought. I don't think this will work either, because it's yet another attempt to
WP:POLICYFORK instead of to propose a small incremental change to the existing guideline, and see if the community will accept it, and whether it has any longer-term fallout; then propose another small change. This kind kind of "suddenly remake Wikipedia in my own image, as drafted off on some other page by me and my buddies" stuff never works.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 05:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm curious why this is called Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Gender identity rather than simply Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Identity, where we can document all of the various ways people self-define and self-identify and how we should defer to those. Gender, sexual orientation, racial identity, ability status, political persuasion, social class, religion, and so many more ways that people can identify which may contradict older reliable sources. To devote a MOS guideline to only one aspect of intersectional identity is exclusionary. -- Netoholic @ 19:26, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
{{
Rejected proposal}}
. (It began as "WP:Naming conventions (identity)" which now just redirects to MOS:IDENTITY. The draft is archived at
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Identity (failed proposal); the discussion about it is archived at
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 194#Merge draft WP:Naming conventions (identity) to MOS:IDENTITY?). Even MOS:IDENTITY's material on Arab/Arabic/Arabian and other such terms was relocated to
MOS:WTW, and only after a lot of wrangling to keep any of it at all. There's a general community hostility to "legislating" about this stuff in the guidelines. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 01:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
if a broader identity guideline has failed to gain consensus, then its probably a waste of time and resources to deal with a more specific subset- This makes no sense to me at all. In general, broader proposals are naturally going to be harder to get consensus on than narrower proposals. WanderingWanda (they/them) ( t/ c) 15:40, 4 April 2019 (UTC)