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So I was happy to find the
MOS:SERIESTITLE section, which includes: Those [media franchise series] with official names from the publisher are capitalized (in the singular, not in plural and other genericizing constructions), without quotation marks or italics: Marvel Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and DC Universe, but the Marvel and DC comics universes.
But then it goes on in what I can't help but feel is a contradiction:
However, the following should be set in italics:
- Actual titles of a series declared by the author or publisher: Les Rougon-Macquart, The Chronicles of Narnia
So... official names from the publisher are not italicized... unless an actual title is declared by the author or publisher?
Don't get me wrong... I don't think we should be italicizing series titles, especially the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Disney/Marvel does refer to their movies as the MCU, so I don't see how that's not an "actual title" as declared by the publisher. Can someone point out the distinction between how we treat The Chronicles of Narnia and the MCU to me? — Joeyconnick ( talk) 17:48, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
In the section Neither, it says to not italicise "Exhibitions, concerts, and other events". So we end up with Dangerous World Tour instead of – what I believe is logical – Dangerous World Tour. Why, then, do we have list of Game of Thrones characters, list of South Park episodes, etc.? Mac Dreamstate ( talk) 13:03, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
Here, under MOS:ITALICTITLE, laws are not in the list of works that should have their titles italicized. This was clarified at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Titles of works/Archive 3#Italics for legislation. However, at MOS:CANLAW, it's stated, "in Canada, per the McGill Guide, titles of acts are italicized". Which of these opposing instructions governs? ₪ MIESIANIACAL 01:39, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
I've taken this to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting. -- ₪ MIESIANIACAL 00:20, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
In a list of music videos in which a person appears (perhaps singing, but perhaps not), should the names of the music videos use double quotation marks or be italicized? As a video, I normally would have italicized the name as an example of a short film
, which is covered under
MOS:MAJORWORK; but since the subject matter of the video is a single song, I am wondering if double quotation marks (per
MOS:MINORWORK) are more appropriate. Here's an example:
Yash_(actor)#Music_videos. —
Archer1234 (
t·
c) 22:19, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
The "Minor works" section recommends double quotation marks for "Exhibits (specific) within a larger exhibition". The rationale seems to be that as the titles of (some) exhibitions take italics per MOS:MAJORWORK, the exhibits within them must correspondingly follow MOS:MINORWORK, like chapters within a book or songs within an album. I think this is extending that logic too far. In reality, if an exhibit within an exhibition is a painting the title will take italics per MOS:MAJORWORK, if it's an archaeological artefact it will take neither italics nor quotation marks per MOS:NEITHER, and so on. There's no need to have a guideline for exhibits as there are guidelines for the specific kinds of objects those exhibits are, and they conflict with it.
Also, in MOS:NEITHER, the final clause should be removed from "Names of buildings and other structures, aside from statues (artworks)." Public statues are often treated as having names rather than titles (see MOS:ART/TITLE) and so take neither italics nor quotation marks. Ham II ( talk) 19:55, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
exhibition: an event at which objects such as paintings are shown to the public ...", but
exhibit: an object that is shown to the public in a museum, etc. ... a collection of objects that is shown to the public in a museum, etc.(i.e. a discrete part of an exhibition). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:19, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
[A] collection of objects that is shown to the public in a museum, etc.": that's saying that "exhibit" is a synonym of "exhibition" in American English. (From SMcCandlish's source, dictionary.cambridge.org: "
US (UK exhibition)". The example it gives is "
Let's go see the new dinosaur exhibit".) It doesn't say anything about that collection of objects being within an exhibition at a museum, etc. Also, WP:AGF; it should be clear that I did look for evidence of the "sub-exhibition" definition in both an American dictionary (Merriam-Webster) and a British one (Collins). Ham II ( talk) 11:01, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
At this edit, Editor SMcCandlish added this sentence:
That sentence has seen minor tweaks but remains essentially the same today. What I want to know is how that sentence accords with the unordered list of items that should be quoted. Is there a conflict here? Surely all of those things in the list are intended to stand alone and to be kept for later reference
and have content likely to be seen as having merit as ... stand-alone [works]
. So, to me
MOS:MINORWORK is saying 'quote titles of these things' but on the other hand is saying 'italicize the titles of these things'. They both can't be right, so which is it?
The issue has been raised at
Help talk:Citation Style 1 § what to do with {{cite document}}? where I have proposed a new template to replace the current {{cite document}}
which (improperly) redirects to {{
cite journal}}
.
— Trappist the monk ( talk) 23:49, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Hi. No guidance is given on photographs here. Is an individual photo majorwork or minorwork, please? E.g. here individual photos are italicized identically with the collection they are in. Thanks. Spicemix ( talk) 13:49, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
A question I raised at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (television)#Style for name of longer work appearing a part of a series may be of interest for watchers of this guideline. older ≠ wiser 13:57, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
Currently the guideline says they should be, but actual practice is rather inconsistent. There also is not consistent guidance in other style guides, nor in media reporting on games. Want to make sure there's a clear consensus in favor of capitalization before editing hundreds of pages to standardize, in whatever direction. It also seems clear that some non-published games (e.g. Chess, Go, Reversi) shouldn't be capitalized, but this is not stated in the guideline either. Elli ( talk | contribs) 23:14, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
The guidelines state that "books... and booklets" are, but that short stories take quotation marks instead. Where do novellas fall? They are sometimes published in book form, but so are short stories.
My suggestion is that they should take quotation marks, as they are closer to short stories than novels. I can see an exception if a) they are usually published independently and b) they are clearly shorter than novels, which in this context probably means "well under 50,000 words", but I don't think this exception would be invoked very often.
If this suggestion is agreed, by the way, Template:infobox novella should be edited so that it does not automatically italicise titles. CohenTheBohemian ( talk) 14:15, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
This guideline currently states:
So, the way I'm reading it, this should be correct:
However, look at this page:
List of highest-grossing media franchises.
And these pages:
Winnie the Pooh (franchise),
Disney Princess,
Mario (franchise),
The Lion King (franchise).
All those names are italicized. The only two pages that seem to follow the rule are Wizarding World and Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The confusing part for me here is the term descriptive title. This is apparently different from the official title?
If so, then this would be correct:
But if you look at these two articles, you'll see that the term Star Wars is italicized in both cases.
There is another thing I don't get: the paragraph in the guideline is named "Series titles", with MOS:SERIESTITLE as the shortcut. But the text appears to be about media franchises and fictional universes, not series.
- Manifestation ( talk) 17:31, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
It presently states: Short coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor ; also for, yet, so when used as conjunctions)
[are not capitalized]. Immediately after is a similar rule about short prepositions, and it specifies four letters or fewer. I.e., we capitalize if 5 or longer. I think the conjunction rule should be specific in this regard as well, just for consistency's sake, and to remove any doubt or fighting about what "short" means. E.g., there are conjuctions of four letters (such as that in "We Eat that We Should Not Starve"; it's a bit obsolescent, but still encountered. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 00:02, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#RfC on capitalization after a colon or dash – involves MOS:TITLES. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:08, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
I noted that Camp: Notes on Fashion is italicised, and our guidance here ( MOS:NEITHER) says that as an exhibition, it should not be:
* Exhibitions, concerts, and other events: the world's fairs, Expo 2010, Cannes Film Festival, Burning Man, Lollapalooza
I was going to change the article, but I hesitate. While it feels like that line makes sense for the exhibitions that are events, especially collective events like the ones listed, for an exhibition that behaves more like an essay or a thesis—a creative output—italics feel more appropriate. Do editors here have opinions? — HTGS ( talk) 21:56, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Named exhibitions (artistic, historical, scientific, educational, cultural, literary, etc. – generally hosted by, or part of, an existing institution such as a museum or gallery), but not large-scale exhibition events. So Camp: Notes on Fashion seems to fit this. Gonnym ( talk) 22:03, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Short films are italicized. TlonicChronic ( talk) 01:13, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
At {{
IMDb title}}, the instructions for the quotes
parameter claim that
MOS:TITLE states that quotes should be used for short films. Can I assume that it did say that at one point, but has since been updated to recommend italics, in which case {{
IMDb title}} is in need of an update? If so, I am unable to perform it myself. It seems to be the sole reason for the existence of the quotes
parameter. Thanks!
1980fast (
talk) 18:55, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion about the proper formatting of the title of an article about a song. It's at Talk:Sex (I'm A...)#Proposed rename. Interested editors are encouraged to contribute their views on this question. Please post there instead of here, to keep the discussion all in one place. Thanks. — Mudwater ( Talk) 11:16, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
The rule on compound prepositions is not a part of any style guide outside of Wikipedia that I've seen, and I believe it should be removed. The example given, Time Out of Mind, seems incorrect to me: it implies a noun phrase "Time Out" that is "of Mind". I believe the correct capitalization should be "Time out of Mind". It seems like someone possibly misremembered a rule they were taught on compound prepositions, which can either mean a preposition that is a compound word consisting of two prepositions (such as "within"), which are generally capitalized as they are longer than four letters. "Compound preposition" here is being used to refer to any to adjacent adpositions, in which case normal title casing rules should apply. NYT has an exception for emphasized words, but in cases such as "Time out of Mind" or "Fish out of Water", out is not emphasized. TlonicChronic ( talk) 01:11, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
— HTGS ( talk) 00:34, 11 December 2023 (UTC)If you lower-cased all phrases people have called compound prepositions, you'd have The World according to Garp, which is clearly wrong. – Peter Shor Jul 25, 2018 at 21:02
Apply our five-letter rule (above) for prepositions except when a significant majority of current, reliable sources that are independent of the subject consistently capitalize, in the title of a specific work, a word that is frequently not a preposition, such as "Like" and "Past". The use of those two words was as examples not as a complete list, and out is "a word that is frequently not a preposition", and in most work titles we're going to encounter is going to qualify under "a significant majority of current, reliable sources that are independent of the subject consistently capitalize [it] in the title of [that] specific work". That is to say, the MoS rules already have this covered, and they defer to independent RS usage regarding a specific work, even if some of us would have preferred a more hard-line consistency being imposed on short prepositions. That horse is simply long out of the barn (or "out the barn" if you prefer).Testy aside: This "follow the sources" exceptionalism sometimes has stupid results when applied to style instead of to facts, like Spider-Man: Far From Home with an over-capitalized from, which happened only because almost all the "reliable sources" are not truly independent, but are entertainment press, beholden entirely to the entertainment industry's advertising money, and who bend over backward to mimic stylizations preferred by trademark holders. It's dumb because if this were a work of great cinema, it would garner coverage in film and media and other academic journals, and they would near-universally render it Spider-Man: Far from Home. The "From" result we're stuck with at least for now is a classic WP:Common-style fallacy, of mistaking the style of one tiny segment of sources, mostly following the same style guide (AP Stylebook) or derivatives that track it closely, while ignoring all other style approaches across all other publication types, and doing so simply because the head-count number of such publications in that one sector that bothered covering the subject more often is larger. This is closely related to the WP:Specialized-style fallacy, under the confusion of which, as just one example, birders tried to force Wikipedia to capitalize all common (vernacular) names of bird species because it was typically done that way by ornithological publishers, never mind that nearly no one else (newspapers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, not even general-science journals when publishing ornithological papers) did so. And that was 8 solid years of drama and disruption. People like to complain that "style doesn't matter" and "this MoS stuff is a distraction" and "it's all just trivia", but the ones who do so are usually the first to latch onto a personal style pecadillo and fight half to death to get their way. End screed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:53, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
[[Einstein]]'s
versus [[Einstein's]]
versus [[Einstein|Einstein's]]
; it's the first, because the second won't work for most names (depends on someone having created a redirect for that case specifically), and the third is redundant markup. Same with basic plurals: [[cat]]s
not [[cats]]
or [[Cat|cats]]
; complex plurals, where the base word changes, have to be piped: [[Dichotomy|dichotomies]]
. Other suffixes are supported by the short format: [[patron]]ize
. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 03:27, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
While not the norm, it is common for published materials to have titles and the names of subdivisions in all caps. Are there wiki tools for changing such text in citations to sentence case? If such tools exist, should this article mention them? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul ( talk) 14:57, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#"The" and periodicals. There are at least four different change proposals floating around in that not very coherent thread, all predicated on the notion that it's confusing to use The New York Times but Los Angeles Times to match the actual titles of the publications (plus a claim that it's somehow too hard to figure out what the actual title of the publication is). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:15, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
MOS:TITLECAPS says (in part):
Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:
- The first and last word of the title (e.g. A Home to Go Back To)
The proposal here is to add a foonote to address unusual cases that MOS presently does not account for, leading to some confusion about what "word" means in the above instruction:
Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:
- The first and last word of the title (e.g. A Home to Go Back To) [a]
[... rest of page ...]
[... other footnotes ...]
- ^ The first "word" of the title may consist of a symbol (letter, numeral, emoji, etc.) standing for one or more words; do not capitalize the first word after this if it would not normally be capitalized. The same applies to the last word before such a symbol that ends the title. Examples: "6 to Go", "U in the Back", "Shooting for the 8", "A Pain in the ❤️", "From Me to U". Symbols in series are treated the same way: "4 U to Know". A partial symbol substitution that starts with a letter is treated as the word it represents, e.g. "Fate" represented by "F8", "the" represented by "th3". An ellipsis (...) or dash (– or —) indicating a truncated expression at the end of a title is treated as the last "word", so a word before it is treated as mid-sentence usage: "What in the Name of ...?" or "What in the Name of –?". An exception is when this indicates a mid-word truncation, in which case treat the word fragment as the last "word": "Hey, Watch Thi—".
This follows on from a fairly extensive discussion at Talk:Sex (I'm A...)#Proposed rename – to "Sex (I'm a ...)" and "Talk:Sex (I'm a ...)", to comply with both MOS:ELLIPSIS and the actual intent of MOS:TITLECAPS (which was never to capitalize mid-sentence usage of the indefinite or definite articles, or short prepositions). It is desirable to clarify the MoS on this point before the WP:RM discussion, since MoS's lack of clarity on the question would likely result in the RM's failure to come to consensus in the first place, though the pre-RM discussion there has been productive. I've attempted to account for every variation of this sort of thing, so that no other edge cases come up without MoS addressing them already (including emoji, which are increasingly showing up in titles of songs, videos, social media posts, even articles).
The one thing it does not do is recommend that a title that starts with an ellipsis should treat that ellisis as the first word: "... and Justice for All". This is because "... And Justice for All" clearly dominates in independent source material (when it bothers to include the ellipsis at all) [3], most likely because it is more recognizable as a title that way, and it does not lead to the problem of lower-cased "... and" beginning a sentence about the song. Someone has already semi-researched matters like this [4] with Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, and usage in The New York Times, which all agree on the "What in the Name of ...?" format given above, i.e. treating "the" as not the last "word" – but without addressing a leading ellipsis. The author of that particular article suggested using "...and Justice for All". However, the case for doing that seems very weak when independent source usage is examined; the only thing it has going for it is a rather artificial consistency with ellipsis at the end (which no one would notice except in a weird two-ellipses title like "... The Lambs, and Sloths, and Carp, and Anchovies, and Orangutans, and..."), but coming at the very high cost of consistency with all other titles which of course start upper-case (even in sentence-case citations, in which a final word in a title would not). PS: Our own article on the Metallica song is at " ...And Justice for All (song)", but should move to "... And Justice for All (song)", with a space, to comply with MOS:ELLIPSIS. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:53, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
I would like to encourage other editors to take the time to read through SMcCandlish's proposal above. It's actually pretty straightforward. An example would be the article title that started this discussion. "Sex (I'm A...)"
should be renamed to "Sex (I'm a ...)"
, with a lowercase "a", and a space after the "a". The three periods stand in for a word, so it's as if "a" is not the last word of the title. The rest of the proposal elaborates on this and covers other, similar situations. —
Mudwater (
Talk) 23:25, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
I recently ran across a permissible (call it WP:IAR) exception to not capitalizing "a" "an" or "the" in mid-title: It is Index, A History of the, in which the first word has been transparently moved to the middle for humorous effect. Per WP:MOSBLOAT, we have no reason to codify this in MOS:TITLES even as a footnote, since there is not likely to be another case of this any time soon, and there's no evidenced dispute about it. Just thought it worth mentioning here "for the record". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:15, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
What case should the titles of newspaper articles be in - title or sentence? And does it make a difference if they are quoted in an article or used as a source? Examining MOS:TITLECAPS hasn't helped me decide, so perhaps that could be tweaked, to help those like me who are slow of wit. Thanks. Gog the Mild ( talk) 16:46, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
§ Neither lists "Dangerous World Tour" as an instance where the word "Dangerous" should be italicised, but the Dangerous World Tour page does not italicise it. This page or the DWT page should be edited to reflect the other. LightNightLights ( talk • contribs) 18:55, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
Current guidance is
MOS:NEITHER italics nor quotation marks for software other than games and
MOS:ITALICTITLE for video gaming software. There is an old undiscussed
complaint about the arbitrariness between the two software types. The current guidance is insufficient because often software titles are common or short words that need special formatting for proper interpretation, such as in
compress: "Files compressed by compress..." Without a reasonable guidance, we're seeing other types of formatting being adopted in practice, such as in
traceroute
(using code tags) or
ed (using small letters). I'd like to propose amending the style guide to recommend using {{
codett}}
, which is less visually intrusive that {{
code}}
and semantically richer than {{
mono}}
: compress
, tracerout
, ed
.
fgnievinski (
talk) 14:57, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
The redirect Mos:TITLES has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 April 25 § Mos:TITLES until a consensus is reached. Utopes ( talk / cont) 21:49, 25 April 2024 (UTC)
Manual of Style | ||||||||||
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This page has archives. Sections older than 365 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present. |
So I was happy to find the
MOS:SERIESTITLE section, which includes: Those [media franchise series] with official names from the publisher are capitalized (in the singular, not in plural and other genericizing constructions), without quotation marks or italics: Marvel Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and DC Universe, but the Marvel and DC comics universes.
But then it goes on in what I can't help but feel is a contradiction:
However, the following should be set in italics:
- Actual titles of a series declared by the author or publisher: Les Rougon-Macquart, The Chronicles of Narnia
So... official names from the publisher are not italicized... unless an actual title is declared by the author or publisher?
Don't get me wrong... I don't think we should be italicizing series titles, especially the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Disney/Marvel does refer to their movies as the MCU, so I don't see how that's not an "actual title" as declared by the publisher. Can someone point out the distinction between how we treat The Chronicles of Narnia and the MCU to me? — Joeyconnick ( talk) 17:48, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
In the section Neither, it says to not italicise "Exhibitions, concerts, and other events". So we end up with Dangerous World Tour instead of – what I believe is logical – Dangerous World Tour. Why, then, do we have list of Game of Thrones characters, list of South Park episodes, etc.? Mac Dreamstate ( talk) 13:03, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
Here, under MOS:ITALICTITLE, laws are not in the list of works that should have their titles italicized. This was clarified at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Titles of works/Archive 3#Italics for legislation. However, at MOS:CANLAW, it's stated, "in Canada, per the McGill Guide, titles of acts are italicized". Which of these opposing instructions governs? ₪ MIESIANIACAL 01:39, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
I've taken this to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting. -- ₪ MIESIANIACAL 00:20, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
In a list of music videos in which a person appears (perhaps singing, but perhaps not), should the names of the music videos use double quotation marks or be italicized? As a video, I normally would have italicized the name as an example of a short film
, which is covered under
MOS:MAJORWORK; but since the subject matter of the video is a single song, I am wondering if double quotation marks (per
MOS:MINORWORK) are more appropriate. Here's an example:
Yash_(actor)#Music_videos. —
Archer1234 (
t·
c) 22:19, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
The "Minor works" section recommends double quotation marks for "Exhibits (specific) within a larger exhibition". The rationale seems to be that as the titles of (some) exhibitions take italics per MOS:MAJORWORK, the exhibits within them must correspondingly follow MOS:MINORWORK, like chapters within a book or songs within an album. I think this is extending that logic too far. In reality, if an exhibit within an exhibition is a painting the title will take italics per MOS:MAJORWORK, if it's an archaeological artefact it will take neither italics nor quotation marks per MOS:NEITHER, and so on. There's no need to have a guideline for exhibits as there are guidelines for the specific kinds of objects those exhibits are, and they conflict with it.
Also, in MOS:NEITHER, the final clause should be removed from "Names of buildings and other structures, aside from statues (artworks)." Public statues are often treated as having names rather than titles (see MOS:ART/TITLE) and so take neither italics nor quotation marks. Ham II ( talk) 19:55, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
exhibition: an event at which objects such as paintings are shown to the public ...", but
exhibit: an object that is shown to the public in a museum, etc. ... a collection of objects that is shown to the public in a museum, etc.(i.e. a discrete part of an exhibition). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:19, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
[A] collection of objects that is shown to the public in a museum, etc.": that's saying that "exhibit" is a synonym of "exhibition" in American English. (From SMcCandlish's source, dictionary.cambridge.org: "
US (UK exhibition)". The example it gives is "
Let's go see the new dinosaur exhibit".) It doesn't say anything about that collection of objects being within an exhibition at a museum, etc. Also, WP:AGF; it should be clear that I did look for evidence of the "sub-exhibition" definition in both an American dictionary (Merriam-Webster) and a British one (Collins). Ham II ( talk) 11:01, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
At this edit, Editor SMcCandlish added this sentence:
That sentence has seen minor tweaks but remains essentially the same today. What I want to know is how that sentence accords with the unordered list of items that should be quoted. Is there a conflict here? Surely all of those things in the list are intended to stand alone and to be kept for later reference
and have content likely to be seen as having merit as ... stand-alone [works]
. So, to me
MOS:MINORWORK is saying 'quote titles of these things' but on the other hand is saying 'italicize the titles of these things'. They both can't be right, so which is it?
The issue has been raised at
Help talk:Citation Style 1 § what to do with {{cite document}}? where I have proposed a new template to replace the current {{cite document}}
which (improperly) redirects to {{
cite journal}}
.
— Trappist the monk ( talk) 23:49, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Hi. No guidance is given on photographs here. Is an individual photo majorwork or minorwork, please? E.g. here individual photos are italicized identically with the collection they are in. Thanks. Spicemix ( talk) 13:49, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
A question I raised at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (television)#Style for name of longer work appearing a part of a series may be of interest for watchers of this guideline. older ≠ wiser 13:57, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
Currently the guideline says they should be, but actual practice is rather inconsistent. There also is not consistent guidance in other style guides, nor in media reporting on games. Want to make sure there's a clear consensus in favor of capitalization before editing hundreds of pages to standardize, in whatever direction. It also seems clear that some non-published games (e.g. Chess, Go, Reversi) shouldn't be capitalized, but this is not stated in the guideline either. Elli ( talk | contribs) 23:14, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
The guidelines state that "books... and booklets" are, but that short stories take quotation marks instead. Where do novellas fall? They are sometimes published in book form, but so are short stories.
My suggestion is that they should take quotation marks, as they are closer to short stories than novels. I can see an exception if a) they are usually published independently and b) they are clearly shorter than novels, which in this context probably means "well under 50,000 words", but I don't think this exception would be invoked very often.
If this suggestion is agreed, by the way, Template:infobox novella should be edited so that it does not automatically italicise titles. CohenTheBohemian ( talk) 14:15, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
This guideline currently states:
So, the way I'm reading it, this should be correct:
However, look at this page:
List of highest-grossing media franchises.
And these pages:
Winnie the Pooh (franchise),
Disney Princess,
Mario (franchise),
The Lion King (franchise).
All those names are italicized. The only two pages that seem to follow the rule are Wizarding World and Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The confusing part for me here is the term descriptive title. This is apparently different from the official title?
If so, then this would be correct:
But if you look at these two articles, you'll see that the term Star Wars is italicized in both cases.
There is another thing I don't get: the paragraph in the guideline is named "Series titles", with MOS:SERIESTITLE as the shortcut. But the text appears to be about media franchises and fictional universes, not series.
- Manifestation ( talk) 17:31, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
It presently states: Short coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor ; also for, yet, so when used as conjunctions)
[are not capitalized]. Immediately after is a similar rule about short prepositions, and it specifies four letters or fewer. I.e., we capitalize if 5 or longer. I think the conjunction rule should be specific in this regard as well, just for consistency's sake, and to remove any doubt or fighting about what "short" means. E.g., there are conjuctions of four letters (such as that in "We Eat that We Should Not Starve"; it's a bit obsolescent, but still encountered. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 00:02, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#RfC on capitalization after a colon or dash – involves MOS:TITLES. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:08, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
I noted that Camp: Notes on Fashion is italicised, and our guidance here ( MOS:NEITHER) says that as an exhibition, it should not be:
* Exhibitions, concerts, and other events: the world's fairs, Expo 2010, Cannes Film Festival, Burning Man, Lollapalooza
I was going to change the article, but I hesitate. While it feels like that line makes sense for the exhibitions that are events, especially collective events like the ones listed, for an exhibition that behaves more like an essay or a thesis—a creative output—italics feel more appropriate. Do editors here have opinions? — HTGS ( talk) 21:56, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Named exhibitions (artistic, historical, scientific, educational, cultural, literary, etc. – generally hosted by, or part of, an existing institution such as a museum or gallery), but not large-scale exhibition events. So Camp: Notes on Fashion seems to fit this. Gonnym ( talk) 22:03, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Short films are italicized. TlonicChronic ( talk) 01:13, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
At {{
IMDb title}}, the instructions for the quotes
parameter claim that
MOS:TITLE states that quotes should be used for short films. Can I assume that it did say that at one point, but has since been updated to recommend italics, in which case {{
IMDb title}} is in need of an update? If so, I am unable to perform it myself. It seems to be the sole reason for the existence of the quotes
parameter. Thanks!
1980fast (
talk) 18:55, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion about the proper formatting of the title of an article about a song. It's at Talk:Sex (I'm A...)#Proposed rename. Interested editors are encouraged to contribute their views on this question. Please post there instead of here, to keep the discussion all in one place. Thanks. — Mudwater ( Talk) 11:16, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
The rule on compound prepositions is not a part of any style guide outside of Wikipedia that I've seen, and I believe it should be removed. The example given, Time Out of Mind, seems incorrect to me: it implies a noun phrase "Time Out" that is "of Mind". I believe the correct capitalization should be "Time out of Mind". It seems like someone possibly misremembered a rule they were taught on compound prepositions, which can either mean a preposition that is a compound word consisting of two prepositions (such as "within"), which are generally capitalized as they are longer than four letters. "Compound preposition" here is being used to refer to any to adjacent adpositions, in which case normal title casing rules should apply. NYT has an exception for emphasized words, but in cases such as "Time out of Mind" or "Fish out of Water", out is not emphasized. TlonicChronic ( talk) 01:11, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
— HTGS ( talk) 00:34, 11 December 2023 (UTC)If you lower-cased all phrases people have called compound prepositions, you'd have The World according to Garp, which is clearly wrong. – Peter Shor Jul 25, 2018 at 21:02
Apply our five-letter rule (above) for prepositions except when a significant majority of current, reliable sources that are independent of the subject consistently capitalize, in the title of a specific work, a word that is frequently not a preposition, such as "Like" and "Past". The use of those two words was as examples not as a complete list, and out is "a word that is frequently not a preposition", and in most work titles we're going to encounter is going to qualify under "a significant majority of current, reliable sources that are independent of the subject consistently capitalize [it] in the title of [that] specific work". That is to say, the MoS rules already have this covered, and they defer to independent RS usage regarding a specific work, even if some of us would have preferred a more hard-line consistency being imposed on short prepositions. That horse is simply long out of the barn (or "out the barn" if you prefer).Testy aside: This "follow the sources" exceptionalism sometimes has stupid results when applied to style instead of to facts, like Spider-Man: Far From Home with an over-capitalized from, which happened only because almost all the "reliable sources" are not truly independent, but are entertainment press, beholden entirely to the entertainment industry's advertising money, and who bend over backward to mimic stylizations preferred by trademark holders. It's dumb because if this were a work of great cinema, it would garner coverage in film and media and other academic journals, and they would near-universally render it Spider-Man: Far from Home. The "From" result we're stuck with at least for now is a classic WP:Common-style fallacy, of mistaking the style of one tiny segment of sources, mostly following the same style guide (AP Stylebook) or derivatives that track it closely, while ignoring all other style approaches across all other publication types, and doing so simply because the head-count number of such publications in that one sector that bothered covering the subject more often is larger. This is closely related to the WP:Specialized-style fallacy, under the confusion of which, as just one example, birders tried to force Wikipedia to capitalize all common (vernacular) names of bird species because it was typically done that way by ornithological publishers, never mind that nearly no one else (newspapers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, not even general-science journals when publishing ornithological papers) did so. And that was 8 solid years of drama and disruption. People like to complain that "style doesn't matter" and "this MoS stuff is a distraction" and "it's all just trivia", but the ones who do so are usually the first to latch onto a personal style pecadillo and fight half to death to get their way. End screed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:53, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
[[Einstein]]'s
versus [[Einstein's]]
versus [[Einstein|Einstein's]]
; it's the first, because the second won't work for most names (depends on someone having created a redirect for that case specifically), and the third is redundant markup. Same with basic plurals: [[cat]]s
not [[cats]]
or [[Cat|cats]]
; complex plurals, where the base word changes, have to be piped: [[Dichotomy|dichotomies]]
. Other suffixes are supported by the short format: [[patron]]ize
. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 03:27, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
While not the norm, it is common for published materials to have titles and the names of subdivisions in all caps. Are there wiki tools for changing such text in citations to sentence case? If such tools exist, should this article mention them? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul ( talk) 14:57, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#"The" and periodicals. There are at least four different change proposals floating around in that not very coherent thread, all predicated on the notion that it's confusing to use The New York Times but Los Angeles Times to match the actual titles of the publications (plus a claim that it's somehow too hard to figure out what the actual title of the publication is). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:15, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
MOS:TITLECAPS says (in part):
Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:
- The first and last word of the title (e.g. A Home to Go Back To)
The proposal here is to add a foonote to address unusual cases that MOS presently does not account for, leading to some confusion about what "word" means in the above instruction:
Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:
- The first and last word of the title (e.g. A Home to Go Back To) [a]
[... rest of page ...]
[... other footnotes ...]
- ^ The first "word" of the title may consist of a symbol (letter, numeral, emoji, etc.) standing for one or more words; do not capitalize the first word after this if it would not normally be capitalized. The same applies to the last word before such a symbol that ends the title. Examples: "6 to Go", "U in the Back", "Shooting for the 8", "A Pain in the ❤️", "From Me to U". Symbols in series are treated the same way: "4 U to Know". A partial symbol substitution that starts with a letter is treated as the word it represents, e.g. "Fate" represented by "F8", "the" represented by "th3". An ellipsis (...) or dash (– or —) indicating a truncated expression at the end of a title is treated as the last "word", so a word before it is treated as mid-sentence usage: "What in the Name of ...?" or "What in the Name of –?". An exception is when this indicates a mid-word truncation, in which case treat the word fragment as the last "word": "Hey, Watch Thi—".
This follows on from a fairly extensive discussion at Talk:Sex (I'm A...)#Proposed rename – to "Sex (I'm a ...)" and "Talk:Sex (I'm a ...)", to comply with both MOS:ELLIPSIS and the actual intent of MOS:TITLECAPS (which was never to capitalize mid-sentence usage of the indefinite or definite articles, or short prepositions). It is desirable to clarify the MoS on this point before the WP:RM discussion, since MoS's lack of clarity on the question would likely result in the RM's failure to come to consensus in the first place, though the pre-RM discussion there has been productive. I've attempted to account for every variation of this sort of thing, so that no other edge cases come up without MoS addressing them already (including emoji, which are increasingly showing up in titles of songs, videos, social media posts, even articles).
The one thing it does not do is recommend that a title that starts with an ellipsis should treat that ellisis as the first word: "... and Justice for All". This is because "... And Justice for All" clearly dominates in independent source material (when it bothers to include the ellipsis at all) [3], most likely because it is more recognizable as a title that way, and it does not lead to the problem of lower-cased "... and" beginning a sentence about the song. Someone has already semi-researched matters like this [4] with Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, and usage in The New York Times, which all agree on the "What in the Name of ...?" format given above, i.e. treating "the" as not the last "word" – but without addressing a leading ellipsis. The author of that particular article suggested using "...and Justice for All". However, the case for doing that seems very weak when independent source usage is examined; the only thing it has going for it is a rather artificial consistency with ellipsis at the end (which no one would notice except in a weird two-ellipses title like "... The Lambs, and Sloths, and Carp, and Anchovies, and Orangutans, and..."), but coming at the very high cost of consistency with all other titles which of course start upper-case (even in sentence-case citations, in which a final word in a title would not). PS: Our own article on the Metallica song is at " ...And Justice for All (song)", but should move to "... And Justice for All (song)", with a space, to comply with MOS:ELLIPSIS. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:53, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
I would like to encourage other editors to take the time to read through SMcCandlish's proposal above. It's actually pretty straightforward. An example would be the article title that started this discussion. "Sex (I'm A...)"
should be renamed to "Sex (I'm a ...)"
, with a lowercase "a", and a space after the "a". The three periods stand in for a word, so it's as if "a" is not the last word of the title. The rest of the proposal elaborates on this and covers other, similar situations. —
Mudwater (
Talk) 23:25, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
I recently ran across a permissible (call it WP:IAR) exception to not capitalizing "a" "an" or "the" in mid-title: It is Index, A History of the, in which the first word has been transparently moved to the middle for humorous effect. Per WP:MOSBLOAT, we have no reason to codify this in MOS:TITLES even as a footnote, since there is not likely to be another case of this any time soon, and there's no evidenced dispute about it. Just thought it worth mentioning here "for the record". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:15, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
What case should the titles of newspaper articles be in - title or sentence? And does it make a difference if they are quoted in an article or used as a source? Examining MOS:TITLECAPS hasn't helped me decide, so perhaps that could be tweaked, to help those like me who are slow of wit. Thanks. Gog the Mild ( talk) 16:46, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
§ Neither lists "Dangerous World Tour" as an instance where the word "Dangerous" should be italicised, but the Dangerous World Tour page does not italicise it. This page or the DWT page should be edited to reflect the other. LightNightLights ( talk • contribs) 18:55, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
Current guidance is
MOS:NEITHER italics nor quotation marks for software other than games and
MOS:ITALICTITLE for video gaming software. There is an old undiscussed
complaint about the arbitrariness between the two software types. The current guidance is insufficient because often software titles are common or short words that need special formatting for proper interpretation, such as in
compress: "Files compressed by compress..." Without a reasonable guidance, we're seeing other types of formatting being adopted in practice, such as in
traceroute
(using code tags) or
ed (using small letters). I'd like to propose amending the style guide to recommend using {{
codett}}
, which is less visually intrusive that {{
code}}
and semantically richer than {{
mono}}
: compress
, tracerout
, ed
.
fgnievinski (
talk) 14:57, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
The redirect Mos:TITLES has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 April 25 § Mos:TITLES until a consensus is reached. Utopes ( talk / cont) 21:49, 25 April 2024 (UTC)