Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 40

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Archive 35

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Quotation marks

I would like the quotation mark wording to be changed to:

As there is currently no consensus on which should be preferred, either is acceptable. If straight quotes are converted to curved quotes in an article, this change should be accepted.

Also, the Quotations and Quotation marks sections cover the same thing, and should be merged. — Omegatron 22:16, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Strongly oppose. There's absolutely no point in allowing inconsistency on a point so immaterial to the content. Deco 22:12, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Inconsistency? — Omegatron 00:46, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes. When some articles use one type of quote and others use others, we have less consistency of presentation and the articles become more products of independent authors and less part of an integral whole. This is a small issue, but I fear it may become a slippery slope — the web demonstrates the unfortunate result of allowing each author to choose all aspects of their own style. It might have been better to consistently use "smart" quotes throughout, but it'd be far too difficult to fix them all now, and I'd favour consistency over making a few people a little happier in this case. Deco 00:58, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

If there was concensus to use smart quotes, I'm sure someone could write a bot to mass-change all the normal quotes. I would prefer one or the other though for consistency. Kaldari 01:07, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

The current wording is inconsistent. The current wording says that both are acceptable. Both types of quotes are currently in use, and the MoS currently says we have to accept either. I am asking to change the wording so that we are allowed to change them all to "smart" quotes with bots and scripts and such. — Omegatron 02:14, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Oops. I hadn't read that part in a while — it changed on me. I submit that we change it back to a strict requirement for straight quotes throughout. Besides the fact that less time and effort would be involved in expunging the violations this way, it's a lot easier for users adding new content with standard keyboards to use straight quotes. Deco 06:21, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Strongly oppose. :-) — Omegatron 18:16, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Strongly support to move back to straight quotes only. The difference is invisible anyway and much easier to edit. −Woodstone 08:39, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Strongly oppose straight quotes. The difference is not invisible. Felicity4711 03:16, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Please don't let's have a straw poll on this again. We've been there before, everything has been said, and clearly there is no consensus. Arbor 10:09, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

But please look above, at #Disputed. There was no consensus at the last several repolls, sure, but at some prior point in the past, there was consensus for straight quotes only. Somebody changed the guideline on 26 September 2005 to say there was no consensus anymore. I've observed a lot of policy strawpolls, and have never heard of any other case before where a prior consensus, being repolled and resulting in no consensus, results in a change to "editor's preference" rather than status quo ante. I'm still very confused about how this came about, and just from the historical record, it looks to me like that editor last September was sneaking a fast one past everyone in a flurry of edits. I'd like to be proven wrong, but I think this is a case where everyone watching the MoS just managed to miss this change. --TreyHarris 18:58, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, before Wipikedia-EN switched to UTF-8 there was a pretty sound technical reason to prefer straights. Curlies would either have been an enormous mess (being coded and/or interpreted wrong), or led to unreadable source-code (using HTML entities). After the switch, that reasoning went the way of the Dodo, which explains the sudden shift in many editors' attitude. Arbor 19:46, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Fleminra's sentiment here that we should use the correct characters in the markup and downgrade them for display for the people who don't want them.

Another alternative is the wiki way; change Mediawiki to display curly quotes when the wikitext has straight ones, and use nowiki tags for the exceptions. Other markup languages like textile do this. — Omegatron 20:09, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Curly quotes are more correct, but I oppose any non-automated requirement for all editors to use curly quotes because it would be unenforcable - nobody would do it. People just don't go out of their way to type fancy characters that aren't on their keyboard. The result would be a massive workload on our laps for little more than an aesthetic touch. Deco 23:39, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

My original proposal was:

Either style is acceptable for editors to enter.
If straight are turned into curly, this change should be accepted.

That way people who care can use bots or scripts or whatever to change them, and everyone else can just enter straight. Ideally this would be completely automated, though. — Omegatron 20:10, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree completely with that proposal. It’s not that hard to edit source containing curly quotes, and it makes a huge difference to how professional the article looks. Felicity4711 03:16, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

If curly quotes aren’t allowed on Wikipedia, I might as well delete my account. Straight quotes are just so hideous and unprofessional that I wouldn’t even be able to read Wikipedia, much less edit it. If it’s a question of consistency, I have no objection to going through Wikipedia one article at a time and curling all the quotes. Felicity4711 03:16, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

I have no objection to going through Wikipedia one article at a time and curling all the quotes. Once you get done, many will have straight quotes again, and you'll have to start all over. The best way to handle this would be with a MediaWiki software change, much the same way date preferences are handled. Unfortunately, that's a nontrivial change.

If allowing curly quotes means I have to see and/or type ‘ “ ’ ” (or, even worse, their equivalent HTML entities) when in editing mode, then I'm against curly quotes entirely. android 79 03:33, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Having software to automatically handle a conversion between straight quotes in the edit box and "smartquotes" in the article might be nice, but to have it never make an error, you'd basically need full artificial intelligence... ;-) AnonMoos 01:52, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

I’m prepared to accept the possibility of never being finished replacing all the quotes on Wikipedia. Felicity4711 03:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

That's the spirit! I support Omegatron's proposal, with the following caveats:

Never use HTML entities (be it ’ kind of stuff, or even worse Unicode codes)—and by the way you don't need to reprogram your keyboard either, there is a handy symbols insertion table right there. Click-click. (Or tab-tab.)
Strive for consistency within the page—i.e. if you change a straight quote in a curly one, take it upon yourself to make sure that all instances are curly.
Don't use bots or any kind of automated insertion (too cumbersome, too intransparent, too dangerous)

My only concern is that text searches will be broken, but I think that's a technical limitation we can live with, until browsers catch up and become curliness-tolerant. Google searches already are. PizzaMargherita 10:45, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

By the way, the Times Online now uses curly quotes. PizzaMargherita 09:09, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Smartquotes

Copied from User talk:Felicity4711#Why attempting to force the broad general use of "smartquotes" is not advisable at this time:

1) They're a pain from the point of view of article maintenance. People editing the article after a conversion to smartquotes may not always use them, and this will result in an inconsistent mixture of quoting styles, which somebody will have to eventually come along and fix.

2) There are technical issues. Some web-browsing software (older versions, it's true, but still used by many people, and by no means antediluvian) won't display "smartquotes". Some web-browsers will display them correctly when a user views an article, but won't handle them correctly when a user tries to edit an article. More generally, adding "smartquotes" to an article in many cases transforms it from using only 7-bit ASCII characters or 8-bit ISO 8859-1 characters into using Unicode characters with a variable-width UTF-8 encoding, and this drastically increases the number of things that can potentially go wrong. It's not really desirable to unnecessarily force an article to use Unicode when its subject matter doesn't require it. AnonMoos 12:35, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Gods. We have discussed this for a year now. Reiterating some of the most basic points is not going to get us anywhere, merely invite endless arguments that we already had. Ad 2: you are wrong. Do your homework first---don't spread FUD if you cannot back it up. A gazillion Wikipedia pages in Really Many languages, including English, use UTF-8 every day. Some of those things are difficult (combined diacritics, strange font selection for Really Weird Characters), and Very Clever People do a lot of good work here to address and remove those issues. Don't waste their time. Read up about all of this in the archives, please. Arbor 17:02, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

That's nice -- the Wikipedia developers can do absolutely everything correctly at their end, but they have no control over what software people are using to browse with, and sometimes it won't work correctly at the user end. People have been banned from editing Wikipedia because they persist in editing using browsers which don't handle UTF-8 correctly.Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Louis Epstein#Statement by third party I have Chinese fonts installed in my system, but I don't see Chinese characters (just blank boxes) when using one Wikipedia skin, but do see the characters when using another Wikipedia skin. Etc. etc. etc. It's not a life-or-death issue, and yes there are many millions of page views where UTF-8 is displayed correctly and many thousands of edits where UTF-8 is handled perfectly correctly. But on the other hand, it's simply a fact that there are many more ways that things can go wrong with characters greater than 255, and the "Keep It Simple" principle would suggest that you don't complicate things if there's no particularly compelling reason to do so... AnonMoos 02:01, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Directed quotes are the compelling reason. Felicity4711 03:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the technical argument isn't relevant, but AnonMoos is correct that smartquotes make it a pain for people who want to edit articles. You should be able to type in a Wikipedia article using only your keyboard. Rhobite 22:37, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Mediawiki should add the smartquotes for you. Textile does it, why can't Mediawiki? We have nowiki tags for the few exceptions. — Omegatron 02:24, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, developers don't grow on trees. :o) android 79 02:28, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Developer trees! What an interesting idea! *Off to genetic engineering lab* — Omegatron 04:00, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Your operating system doesn’t let you put whatever characters you want on your keyboard? I’ve had both “smartquotes” and — I guess — “smartdashes” on my keyboard for years. They’re really easy to reach, too. It’s quite “smart”, if I may say so myself. It’s okay if you can’t be bothered to type the nice quotes, though. Someone else will come along and clean it up for you. That’s the power of wiki. — Daniel Brockman 04:57, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

We can't count on housewives using old PCs knowing how to reprogram their keyboards. Don't be silly. Remember we are supposed to be editable by anyone.

Agreed on the point of other people cleaning up things for you, though.

Can't we just come up with some simple rules for when straight quotes should be converted to smart quotes by the software? In general, most style issues like this should be handled by software. — Omegatron 15:03, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Someone else will come along and clean it up for you. That’s the power of wiki. Exactly. :-) Felicity4711 03:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

You can type directed quotes in a Wikipedia article using only your keyboard—I’m doing it right now. To make that last directed apostrophe, I used the ampersand, the r, the s, the q, the u, the o, and the semicolon. Easy. Felicity4711 03:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

But how would you get the software to accurately correct them? I mean look at Microsoft Word, which is horrible at it. Try typing (not copy/pasting) [ '90 ]--the apostrophe should be an apostrophe, but it puts an opening single quote instead. There are many other instances of this, and if software that's been under development for practically forever can still not do it right (granted, it is microsoft, so it's not the best thing to compare it to), then how do you expect this to do it correctly? The only thing that would make sense is something like "tagging" things to be one thing when the software would normally render it some other way, but isn't this the same as typing in the html or whatever codes for it? It does not seem feasable. (By the way, I (partically since I haven't bothered to find out) have no clue how to use smartquotes, and I'd considermyself pretty apt at computer-related stuff, much more able than that "housewife" with that "old PC" as mentioned above. I know & + quot; = an html quote, but that's it... So if you can't easily get people who know how to use computers (at least much more than the average person, even though it's nowhere near the level of some coder or programmer or developer or whatever) to do it, how do you get everyone to do it? Plus, I'm assuming it's a lot more work than using the lovely ". (Is there even a link to smartquotes in the symbol insert box below this edit textarea? //MrD9 18:48, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Automatically entering typographic quotation marks is a tricky problem, but just because Microsoft hasn't implemented it right, doesn't mean it's impossible. I think Smartypants does it right, for example.

But we now have a UTF-8 edit field which is used for entering everything, including dozens of different languages and special symbols for math and pronunciation, and there's no reason to let (again, Microsoft's) inadequate keyboard arrangements to hold us back (it's been relatively easy to type these on a Mac English keyboard since 1984). Is there not a relatively simple way to make a keyboard layout for windows, which could then be offered it for download at Wikipedia:Browser notes? —Michael Z. 2006-03-04 19:08 Z

Just because we can enter any character in the edit box by pressing unusual key combinations or links doesn't mean we shouldn't make an easier method if we can. Expecting users to modify their computers to enter information into our encyclopedia that anyone can edit is silly. — Omegatron 20:49, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

I think it’s as simple as this:

Pairs of ASCII double quotes ("foo" "bar") characters turn into matching double quotation marks (“foo” “bar”). In case you ever need to actually produce an ASCII double quote, you’d probably have to use <nowiki>.
Single ASCII apostrophes ("Don't, don't, don't let's start.") turn into right single quotation marks (“Don’t, don’t, don’t let’s start.”).
Single ASCII backticks (`Here's a "British-style" quote.') turn into left single quotation marks (‘Here’s a “British-style” quote.’).

The backtick is the hardest to type on most regular keyboards, but it’s also one you’ll very seldomly have to type. — Daniel Brockman 19:34, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

To write a program to convert automatically, you need many more rules and details than this, on dealing with a mix of single quotation marks and apostrophes in different contexts, as well as nested quotations. For example, possessives, plural possessives, omitted letters and figures, and primes for degrees, minutes & seconds:

He said 'Here's a British-style writers' quote about "This 'n' That", at latitude 30° 34' 12" N, in the 1980s and '90s,' loudly.

Correct rendering:

He said ‘Here’s a British-style writers’ quote about “This ’n’ That”, at latitude 30° 34′ 12″ N, in the 1980s and ’90s,’ loudly.

Probably better just to make it easier for editors to type the quotation marks correctly.

It may also be necessary to deal with editors' mistakes like unbalanced quotation marks. And please, let's leave the "backtick" out of wikitext: it is a solitary grave accent, not any kind of punctuation mark, and looks terrible when used as a substitute. —Michael Z. 2006-03-04 19:49 Z

Those are the best exceptions you can think of? There aren't very many, are there? And they can be easily handled by nowiki tags, just like the very few exceptions that double brackets are used in a non-linking way or asterisks are used at the beginning of a line. How many times do people use 'n' in encyclopedia articles? Latitude and longitude could easily be ignored by the auto-conversion feature. Feet and inches could, too, but you're supposed to write those out as words anyway. :-) — Omegatron 20:49, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

But the problem with that is that it would require every editor to start adding <nowiki> tags into the text, just to be able to write plain English without incorrect quotation marks showing up. It's okay if quotation marks stay "dumb" if you don't do anything special, but I don't think it's okay for a smart-quote converter to convert acceptable typewriter quotes to incorrect typographic quotation marks.

In other words, it doesn't matter how rare the word ’n’ is, the wikitext renderer shouldn't be wrecking it on those occasions when it occurs. —Michael Z. 2006-03-06 04:35 Z

Re.: the ‘90s/’90s problem: I just do it manually. Felicity4711 03:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

True, this is a rare enough case that it can just be done manually when it occurs. Still, as I mentioned above, that means when an editor doesn't enter the typographic quotes, an automatic quote-educator will probably be making the text worse. This is a case that's probably easy enough to auto-convert reliably anyway—it's safe to assume that the combination space–single quote–digit–digit–s is a decade. —Michael Z. 2006-03-06 04:35 Z

I agree with Michael Z. There are too many hairy exceptions to overload both opening single quote, closing single quote, and apostrophe on a single character. The more complex such a disambiguating auto-convertor would become, the more unpredictable the result of one’s wikitext would become (and, as indicated by Michael Z. and others, the problem is hard enough for a really good solution to have to approach artificial intelligence).

I’d strongly favor choosing a different character for opening single quotation mark. That would make conversion trivial: translate ASCII apostrophes into right single quotation marks, and ASCII grave accents into left single quotation marks. Double quotation marks are also trivial, because there’s no “double apostrophe” to complicate matters.

And please, let's leave the "backtick" out of wikitext: it is a solitary grave accent, not any kind of punctuation mark, and looks terrible when used as a substitute. First of all, what the hell is the point of a “solitary grave accent”? Second of all, I hate to point out the obvious, but the “backtick” usage has a long history and widespread acceptance (look at the Lisp and Unix communities). Thanks to TeX, the “solitary grave accent” has probably seen a million times more usage as a left quotation mark than as any kind of “solitary accent”. But you know all this already. So, anyway, what character do you suggest? — Daniel Brockman 03:25, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

I suggest the character opening single quotation mark (‘) or opening double quotation marks (“). It's a pretty unambiguous code.

I can live with that. You don’t think it’s a problem that most people won’t be able to type them? — Daniel Brockman 05:26, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

I have no idea why on Earth it's on the keyboard, but the back-tick is a grave accent with no letter under it (in a mechanical typewriter one could backspace and type it over a letter, but that doesn't explain the absence of the much more useful acute accent of café, résumé, détente, etc.). The key becomes useful enough on a Mac, because it acts as a dead key (e.g., type option-backtick, then e, and the system enters an e-grave: è). —Michael Z. 2006-03-06 04:35 Z

And I have no idea why on Earth the Unicode standard doesn’t acknowledge the mixed usage of the ASCII grave accent character like it does for the ASCII apostrophe. Why is the latter allowed to be what history has made it, but not the former? It seems so ridiculously prescriptivist. They should admit that the “grave accent” is now in mixed usage, is often called a “backtick”, may or may not look like a grave accent, and may or may not form a symmetrical pair with the ASCII apostrophe. Just allocate a new codepoint for the oh-so-useful “solitary grave accent”. Trying to force useless semantics on such a heavily used character is counter-productive to the adoption of Unicode and just catalyzes arguments like these. Interesting point about “the abscence of the much more useful acute accent,” by the way. — Daniel Brockman 05:26, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Unicode characters

The use of UTF-8 characters in Wikipedia is starting to become rather popular (which I think is wonderful). However, Unicode is a complex subject and there are lots of pitfalls. I believe the Manual of Style should start to address these. In particular, I have recently seen some Unicode-enthusiasts overdoing it a bit, for example replacing the perfectly appropriate unit symbol °C with the obsolete Unicode legacy character ℃. The latter has been included into Unicode for the sole reason of round-trip compatibility with some existing Chinese character set, of which Unicode wanted to be a superset. It was never intended to be used in new texts. Unicode is full of so-called legacy characters that are in Unicode solely for backwards compatibility with huge East Asian character sets, but that were never intended to be used in English publications. These compatibility characters should clearly be avoided in Wikipedia (especially the English version), and it would be useful to have some guidance on what subset of Unicode is deemed appropriate for Wikipedia. Should we make this just a new section of this article, or should we start a new MoS sub-article? A separate page would also provide space to collect advice for authors on how to enter Unicode characters conveniently. Suggestions welcome! Markus Kuhn 19:04, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

The MoS is primarily a dispute resolution tool. Have there been any disputes on this issue? I.e., have you attempted to change an incorrect glyph into a correct one, and had someone revert you or disagree with you on a talk page? If using the correct Unicode glyphs is simply a matter of "{{sofixit}}", I don't think it belongs here. --TreyHarris 19:24, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Gender pronouns

Occasionally, I've noticed articles referring to entities of unknown or undetermined gender using just male or female pronouns, which has been interpreted as sexist. There's at least a written tradition for the use of male pronouns, but the use of female pronouns is about as silly and about as widely accepted in formal writing as the word "womyn". In particular, style guides such as Strunk and White explicitly recommend against this backlash usage. I personally favour the use of conversion to plural language and/or the use of singular they (which is informal, but widely accepted in spoken speech and I think fitting to Wikipedia's generally informal style). Is there any particular policy or past discussion on this issue? Should there be a policy or should this be left to individual penchants? Thanks. Deco 22:16, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Here is one of the previous discussion of this issue: Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_37#Gender_Pronouns. I feel like I'm becoming the memory of the Style Guide :) Kaldari 01:11, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Conclusion seems vague. Of course we should say "reword where possible", but it's not always possible. Do we need a guideline for this? Deco 06:31, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I, of course, have voiced (?) this opinion before. I am strongly against using "they" as a singular pronoun. Wikipedia's style may be informal, but should we encourage incorrect grammar? JJ 21:38, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Grammar is as grammar is spoken. The singular "they" has a long pedigree, including Shakespeare. It is "incorrect" only insofar as you choose to follow the dictums of prescriptivists. See singular they.--TreyHarris 23:01, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I dunno if an encyclopedia should sound like common speech, eh? Like, what if Britannica did it. Wikipedia, ’tis not Shagespeare, forsooth.

It's often possible to use the indeterminate pronoun one, but not always. She sounds a bit self-concious, but it doesn't bother me if not overused—in some writing I alternate examples using he and she. Singular they in formal writing just sounds wrong to me, or if obviously used to avoid accusations of sexism, then it seems even more self-conciously politically correct than she does.

In the end though, there's nothing wrong with sticking to the formal "he"—people should find more important things to get uptight about. [cringes in anticipation of a flame] —Michael Z. 2006-01-18 23:20 Z

You make my point in your own comment. What is considered "formal speech" today would have been considered quite casual 100 years ago. Generally speaking, the mechanism in English (and many other languages) for many hundreds of years has been for formal writing to gain new locutions from casual speech after such locutions are extant for a few decades. Singular they—specifically as a mechanism for avoiding the implied sexism of indeterminate he—has been in the speech for at least four decades. Its use as the referent of a bound variable (e.g., "Will everyone please return to their seat?") has existed for centuries. It seems like only a matter of time until it is as well-accepted as split infinitives are — still railed against by the curmudgeons, but for the most part in unremarkable and widespread use. There's no English Academy to make a big announcement when this has become the case; at some point, it simply will be undeniably true. I think it's already good enough for Wikipedia, whose "formality" has never been to the point of stuffiness. (I'm not taking the bait as to what's "wrong" with indeterminate he.) --TreyHarris 00:27, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I realise there have been enough flamewars over the use of singular they. Perhaps we can have a policy similar to American/British English - reword to avoid it where possible, and otherwise just be consistent within an article and don't go changing stuff around for no good reason. Deco 23:21, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I just read "singular they"—good article. It gives a number of good examples using they/their/them to refer back to an indeterminate number. But I think it can't replace he/she/one in every instance. Let's not over-specify grammar—it all depends on the specific circumstances and the editor's writing ability. —Michael Z. 2006-01-18 23:30 Z

Lest we forget

47 rules for writers. "The passive voice should never be used," "Avoid cliches like the plague," and my all-time favorite "No sentence fragments." -- Jmabel | Talk 09:01, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Hear, hear! Neonumbers 10:07, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I didn't see any references to passive voice in the Manual of Style (aside from a single one in passing). I feel that this is a fairly important issue for writers. Even though this isn't the simple English wikipedia, if writers avoid passive voice, their writing becomes clearer. Perhaps more importantly, it would only be a good thing for attribution of information--most of the time when I read "it is said..." I want to ask "who said that?" CommanderFalafel 18:06, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

I find nothing wrong with the passive voice. There are times when it does a better job than the active voice ... I guess that's why it exists at all. Jimp 15:37, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Amen! Passive voice can become like a diseases when used poorly; however, when passive voice is used well, it can be more effective than the active voice. (For example, to provide the same subject for clauses or in such cases as "The ambassador was shot by an unknown assailant." where the passive voice empahasizes the importance of the ambassador rather than the assailant. ) Cool3 02:46, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Quotation marks

Smartquotes

Unicode characters

Gender pronouns

Lest we forget

See Also section