Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Archives and see also

Archives are at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style--Archive Directory

See also:

• Wikipedia talk:Establish context
• Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization)
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dashes)
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (titles)
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (Quotation marks and apostrophes)

External links question

For external links, should the entire line be linked (e.g., "The Rochdale article from the OSCA website" or "The Rochdale article from the OSCA website")? Is either one correct or incorrect? -Danspalding 18:26, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

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. android79 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) android79 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)

See Also section

The See Also section should be exemplary, after all, this is the manual of style -- the style used is not uniform and sets a bad example for See Also sections. If I knew enough about accepted style, I would edit it. But I don't.

Maybe I'm missing something but...

... was there consensus on the large, recent excisions from this document? - Jmabel | Talk 05:32, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

The edit summery says they were moved, and cites a talk page discussion but I don't see any such discussiuon and i am not convinced that this move is a good idea. DES ^(talk) 22:31, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Be stronger about unnecessary Latin

I'm fairly sure it's not good Wikipedia style to use unnecessary Latin phrases and abbreviations when a perfectly good English version is available. The most common examples are e.g. and i.e.. These should be replaced with "for example" and "that is". Alternatively, the sentence containing the abbreviation should be rewritten entirely, because these abbreviations also seem to serve as flags that the writing around them is unclear and the writer is trying desperately to clarify things by sounding more important.

Would it be reasonable to add a note warning against e.g. and i.e. under the paragraph about unnecessary foreign phrases?

rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 20:39, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, e.g., i.e., and etc. in particular are rather debatable when used properly, since they're widely understood, although I try to eliminate them. I think less controversial would be elimination of all other Latin, such as N.B., viz., and other Latin terms that have become unfamiliar among many audiences. Deco 20:45, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd disagree about "widely understood" as I often ask folks whose work I'm reviewing what they stand for and mean, and so far I've met very few who had any idea. OTOH, I do spell out Nota Bene from time to time. Yes, I'd like a strong warning, and agree that it usually means it was copied without undertanding (often from an academic source, or here the 1911 encyclopedia), and is therefore a strong indication of need to re-write.

--William Allen Simpson 00:05, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

There is already a note about not using Latin abbreviations in the usage section. I don't know if it would be appropriate to move it to the foreign phrases section, as the latin terms in questions aren't really "foreign", they're just academic. And yes, I've met plenty of people who have no idea what "i.e." or "e.g." mean, much less "n.b." or "viz.". I think "etc." might be the lone exception. Kaldari 00:14, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree it's not really "foreign". As for how well people understand i.e. and e.g., it's true that people often have at best a vague sense of where the two are used and often mix them up in their own writing, but at least they aren't bewildered on seeing them. I still prefer "for example" and "that is", though — they're usually short enough. Deco 00:46, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I have never met a person who did not know what e.g means in practice, even if they did not know the words behind the letters. Frankly, if they don't, they should sue their teacher for incompetence. They are used universally in English worldwide (and no, not academic English. They feature in The Sun, Britain's leading tabloid). Dumbing down language to the standard of a comic is not an option in an encyclopaedia. Perhaps you might like to request that people don't use colons and semi-colons, given that many people seem not to understand what they are too. And while we are at it, why not ban commas altogether, given how few people seem to understand them. In addition many people don't seem to know capitalisation rules. So lets abolish capitalisation also. Then there's pesky words with more than two syllables. This really is the most astonishing conversation. How it could ever feature in an encyclopaedia is mind-boggling. If people are so illiterate that they do not know what i.e. and e.g. are, then link them to articles in the same way footnote citations are linked. Even tabloids use both of them. Are we seriously suggesting that people are so illiterate that we should aim for a sub-tabloid standard of English? Or has the education system in the US really sunk to such a level of ignorance of basic language? Even if it has, English speakers on the rest of the language still use NB, e.g., i.e., etc. As Wikipedia policy has made clear, US standards of English do not set the standards of Wikipedia contributions. British-English, English-English, Hiberno-English and the many other forms of English, all of which still use i.e., e.g. et al are perfectly valid on Wikipedia and will continue to be used on Wikipedia. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 00:49, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I do not see how using plain English phrases such as "for example" is "dumbing down" Wikipedia. It is simply using the more commonly known expressions. And just because the U.S. does not use latin abbreviations does not mean we are ignoramuses. I suppose you think we spell things differently out of sheer stupidity as well. You should appreciate that cultural differences do not necessarily equal inferiority. Kaldari 01:01, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I think what we're seeing here is yet another collision between American English and Commonwealth English. E.g. and i.e. are rarely used in American newspapers and periodicals, but are common in formal academic journals and legal documents written by lawyers and judges. It sounds like as if Commonwealth English is using e.g. and i.e. in what Americans would consider to be informal contexts.

There may also be a collision going on between the early onset of the American Plain English movement and its delayed spread to the rest of the English-speaking world. --Coolcaesar 01:23, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I do not contest that ignorance of the exact mechanics of a construction are unnecessary for reading comprehension, or that most readers are at least vaguely familiar with i.e. and e.g.. I don't think these abbreviations should be prohibited, but in the many situations where plain English is applicable, it's often easier to read and less stilted. Latin abbreviations are also often a flag for long-winded or overly-complicated language. Additionally, many of our readers only read at an intermediate level of English, and avoiding advanced constructions can help them out (although that's more the mission of the Basic English Wikipedia). Deco 02:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Just for reference, here are my estimations of the popularity of various latin abbreviations in the U.S.:

• etc. - Very common and universally understood. Used more often than any equivalent phrases.
• e.g., i.e. - Not common in popular media. Usually understood. Almost no one knows what they actually stand for. Other phrases or abbreviations are far more common.
• et al. - Almost exclusively used in academic or legal contexts. Most Americans with college degrees probably understand what it means.
• n.b., cf., q.v., viz. - Never used outside of academic or legal contexts. Few Americans, even among those with college degrees, are familiar with these abbreviations.

Kaldari 03:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Sounds about right to me, with the notable exception that people with legal or medical degrees tend to be more familiar with Latin abbreviations than most. Deco 03:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree that we should be more firmly against it, but I've already said this on my user page. It's not dumbing down; it's removing pointless archaisms. — Omegatron 04:05, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I think you are probably not very familiar with the publishing world. "Archaisms" like "i.e.", "etc." and "e.g." are around because they convey well understood terminologies in a minimal amount of (print) space. I'm not sure conserving space is any real concern at Wikipedia (seems like it should be), but all sorts of abbreviations exist in print for the reason that space usually always eventually becomes a premium in information transfer. Your assessment that these are pointless simply rerflects a lack of knowledge of the subject. That these are latin abbreviations seems archaic, but latin occupies a rather special place in the world languages. I do agree with Kaldari's assessment of common understanding of these latin abbreviations, as most come from specific fields (like the biology, or library science, or literature). There is no doubt that, at the expense of creating a longer phrase, most could be replaced, but that does seem a shame and a bit dumbing down to me. But I'd agree with the guidelines that Kaldari seems to be suggesting. - Marshman 04:55, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

That's the other thing. Wikipedia isn't paper. These abbrevations were made for publications in which space is at a premium. With two million words per penny, conserving space isn't important at all. There's no reason to use dead language abbrevations when whole english words will convey the exact same meaning. — Omegatron 06:23, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I use i.e. and e.g. all the time, but I don't much mind using that is and for example instead. I do somewhat worry about that is being misinterpreted, though. For example, "I often use neologisms (that is, words that have recently come into the lexicon) and then explain what they mean in a parenthetical." I could see that sentence getting changed by a well-meaning copyeditor to "I often use words that have recently come into the lexicon and then explain what they mean in a parenthetical.", where I think it would be less likely had I used i.e. instead. I.e., to me, has not only the denotation of "that is", but also the connotation of "i am intentionally defining something in-place at this point."

Is it safe to assume that etc. is still fair game? "A, B, and so on" sounds painfully informal to my ears. --TreyHarris 05:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm a fan of "and so on", but even I occasionally use etc.. In your example, you might consider "defined as", "meaning", "in other words", or simply omitting the connector: "I often use neologisms (words that have recently come into the lexicon) and then explain what they mean in a parenthetical." The Simple English Wikipedia has made a common practice of the last of these. Deco 07:47, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

In my experience with Wikipedia articles, Latin abbreviations, especially "etc.", are a sort of linguistic shortcut that more often than not are a manisfetation of muddled thinking on the part of the writer. I find that most of the time I encounter abbreviations like "etc.", and "i.e.", they are red flags that indicate that the entire paragraph needs to be carefully looked at to make sure it is sensical. I think that encouraging editors to write sentences that would sound equally fluid when read aloud—and Latin abbreviations never sound fluid when read aloud—would be an excellent way to generally improve the writing quality of articles. The argument that the abbreviations are shorter than their English equivalents is completely inapplicable on Wikipedia because Wikipedia Is Not Paper. So basically they amount to little more than phrases that are understood by a smaller group of people than that the group that can understand the equivalent English translations. As such, I don't see that they serve any purpose other than to reduce the clarity and therefore the accessibility of the articles they are used in. However, whenever this is pointed out, the response is that we shouldn't "dumb down" articles—a response which completely misunderstands the concept of clarity. Being clear does not mean simplifying or "dumbing down" ideas. Being "clear" just means expressing ideas in a way that is not muddled by unnecessary ellipsis, fancy vocabulary, and foreign phrases, including those hidden behind abbreviations. It seems no amount of appealing to the fact that articles are invariably better when Latin abbreviations have been removed is sufficient to dissuade editors from using them. So the Manual of Style doesn't recommend against them (although it should), but whenever I edit text that contains them, I always recast the sentences so as to exclude them, and I encourage everyone else to do likewise. Nohat 07:55, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

No offense, but virtually every use of X is a sort of linguistic shortcut that is a manifestation of muddled thinking is a defense used for almost every linguistic prescriptivism; just replace X with "split infinitive", "singular they", "passive voice", "dangling preposition", or any other grammatical bugaboo. Provide some URLs to sample diffs, please, showing where you corrected "muddled thinking" by eliminating etc. or i.e.? (Sorry to be so blunt, but I'm a linguist by training and I don't believe anything said about language without data.  :-) --TreyHarris 18:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Right on. I have no problem with avoiding latinized abbreviations in favor of "clearer" sentenence structure, but do not buy the argument that what most regard as "clearer" writing (avoiding all that "difficult" vocabulary) is not a form of dumbing the language. Sure, in many cases, too many flowery statements obscures; but in many other cases avoiding certain words because they sound high-brow misses a clarity that people with poor vocabularies do not have. We should not make simplyfying the language a major goal here - Marshman 18:20, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I consider "etc." to be an exception as "et cetera" has become a normalized English phrase. Of all the latin phrases we use abbreviations for, it is the only one to be used in spoken English, and quite commonly in fact. Kaldari 16:34, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Not "only"—I speak and hear "i.e." and "e.g." with some frequency, though certainly not as often as "etc." Of course, unlike "et cetera", people say "eye ee" and "ee gee", not "id est" and "exempli gratia". --TreyHarris 16:41, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

And this is where the nail meets the head: "i.e." and "e.g." are English words, and they mean "that is" and "for example". Yes, they do have an etymological history as Latin abbreviations, but they are almost certainly not "foreign words" - e.g., in particular, seems to be replacing "for example" in both speech and print because it is shorter to say. Scott Ritchie 09:39, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the latest comments. I use i.e. and e.g. quite often, and they are indeed part of the English language, like it or not. I appreciate that one shouldn't use them ad nauseam, but that applies to any word/phrase/expression. PizzaMargherita 14:59, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

They aren't part of the English language. Not even as loanwords like "bonus" or "virus". The vast majority of people do not "speak and hear" these abbreviations as words. The vast majority of people do not use them in normal conversation, or even in highly technical or specialized conversation.

Even if they were English words, would you advocate using "callipygian", "defenestrated", and "molendinaceous" in articles where their written-out English equivalents could be used with no loss of information or connotation? They're part of the English language, too.

Articles in Wikipedia should be accessible to the widest possible audience. For most articles, this means accessible to a general audience.

See Make technical articles accessible, meta:Reading level — Omegatron 16:07, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Don't you mean:

Even if they were English words, would you support using "callipygian", "defenestrated", and "molendinaceous" in articles where their written-out English twin could be used with no loss of facts or hidden meanings? They're part of English, too.

Articles in Wikipedia should be easy to understand for the biggest possible audience. For most articles, this means easy to understand for a general audience.

See Make hard articles easy to understand, meta:Reading level

C'mon. The idea that a word, just because it's a cognate with Latin, is therefore harder to understand is condescending. Oops, I mean just because it's a sound-alike with Latin, saying it's harder to understand is a put-down. --TreyHarris 18:26, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Both m-w and Cambridge report e.g. and i.e. on par with virus, so I'd say they are part of the English language, unless you can provide references that state otherwise. No, I would not advocate using the words you mention, but we do not have a separate list for them, do we? So for the same reason, even if i.e. and e.g. should be black-listed (which I moderately disagree with), that should not be done explicitly. PizzaMargherita 17:12, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

First, I think the goal is to make articles well-written, readable and easy to understand. I don't think there's any point making a special issue of Latin. Use/avoidance of Latin-derived words and abbreviations is not all that strongly correlated with ease of understanding. "A sheaf of germs" isn't any easier to understand than "a canonical symplectic 2-form." They're both highly technical terms and I don't personally have a clue as to what either of them means.

Second, the writing style ought to vary within an article. Introductions should be comprehensible to a very wide audience. As one proceeds deeper into more technical sections, the writing should become more technical. Dpbsmith (talk) 18:46, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Ahh, here we go again. Long discussions keep coming up on this subject. They boil down to "We LIKE the abbreviations" vs. "We don't." As a person with a master's degree in journalism and 10 years as a technical writer, I'll give my 2 cents: Use plain English. The style guide should say to avoid all latin abbreviations (i.e., e.g., etc.) because they serve no useful purpose in the context of this encyclopedia, many people don't understand them, and they represent lazy or academic-toned writing. They are always avoidable, at no cost in time, space, or meaning, and IMO they hamper readability.

Often, there's no need to include either "e.g." or "for example" if punctuation is used correctly:

Several states (including Florida, Illinois, and California) have state capitals located far from their major cities.

Compare that to:

Several states, e.g. Florida, Illinois, and California, have state capitals located far from their major cities.

"i.e." in particular, seems like just an affectation, a tic, or a feeble signifyer of "serious content."

There are almost no arguments I consider valid for encouraging use of these abbreviations, so the argument always comes down to whether (or how strongly) the MOS should discourage their use. To me, it's one of the basic rules for clear, common, non-fussy, readable articles: Don't use latin abbreviations, especially i.e., e.g., n.b., and etc. I know others disagree, but I'm forced by my deepest copyeditor instincts to remove them from articles I work on. DavidH 17:55, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Bulleted items

Do bulleted items have to have periods to end them? Some bulleted items are sentence fragments and don't look proper with a period to end them such as:

• 1997.
• Academy Award.

Should the rule be that if it is more than one sentence then it should get a period? Such as:

• Academy Award and Golden Globe (fragment with no period)
• He won the Academy Award that year. He also won the Golden Globe. (full sentence with period)

What do you think? How do other style guides handle them? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 05:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

No periods always seems to work best, since they are not sentences. It's also probably best not to mix bulleted points with and without periods; so rewrite the last one, or just use a period in the middle but not at the end. Bulleted points are best if they're brief; if you need too much punctuation, consider rewriting the list as a paragraph or removing some information to the text or footnotes. —Michael Z. 2006-01-20 18:39 Z

• In some cases, including discussion on talk pages, a bulleted list where each entry is a paragraph works well. When most items in a list are naturaly short, making some into sentances is probably a poor idea. DES ^(talk) 18:45, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

In some cases bulleted lists have all but the last ending in a comma or semicolon, and the last ending in a period. But more conventionally I either see all periods or no periods, based on whether or not the items are complete sentences. Deco 22:52, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

• Hi. I hope you don't mind my grabbing a bullet and jumping in here. My question is also about bullets but, in a way, is sort of the question directly after the one you address: what else can you lose after you lose that period, comma or semicolon? I think I'd already conceded to myself that punctuation may as well be dropped from the end of each bullet. I might have asked this page about it myself if I hadn't also begun running into bigger questions about how to field sentence structures in bulleted lists (Talk:Ignacio_Zuloaga). I started to break down my sentences for "bullet-ization" and became concerned about how much might be too much--then stopped to reassess. There came a level where what was just bearable in a paragraph ("He does this ... He does that ...") becomes a string of personal pronouns all in a vertical line--and then its obvious that they have got to go. So then you have a bunch of verb-object/(prepositional-phrase) constructs. Would it be accurate enough to just say that a bulleted item need be no more than a cogent phrase (or even one word, say "birth"?) adequately describing some event, and that this criterion trumps other conventional structures? I feel like I could draw the line somewhere this side of the pale, but I want a better idea of where the bounds/conventions are. Do any style manuals address this? I have a couple of lesser ones that don't mention it. -cheers,  EN1-UTE- (Talk) 19:37, 30 August 2024 UTC [refresh] </nowiki> -->Onceler (Talk) (Mail)   09:42, 24 January 2006

PS: (Another posting on this page reminds me to ask: where does that old proscription of "no sentence fragments" fit in here? -Onceler 10:20, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I just saw the new W:MOS bullets section. I guess it clears up my concerns in in as much as degree of fragmentation is not the right question. It's more important to be consistent one way or the other, whether by bits or bytes. -thanks, Onceler 12:02, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

• I propose a change to recommending punctuation at the end of all bullet points regardless of sentence completeness on the grounds of accessibility. Many screen readers that I have tested only see the rendered text, not the underlying structural markup, and are therefore dependent on punctuation to set phrasing. In these, unpunctuated lists end up run together as a single nonsensical sentence. More expensive products such as Jaws may not behave this way, but not everyone in need of assistive technology can afford commercial products. dramatic 07:16, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Removed paragaph on date linking

I just removed the following paragraph "In a biography, for example, Wikipedia only requires that the birth date and year and death date and year be wikified in biographies. Ask yourself: will clicking on the year bring any useful information to the reader?" The first sentace is not correct -- there is no current guideline (mich less a policy) which requires such links -- it is in fact much disputed whether they should even be standard, and until recently the MOS dates & numbers page pretty celarly reccomended agaisnt them. I myself tend to remove them whenever I find them. DES ^(talk) 22:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Odd, though I didn't write that text. I would have thought that most biographies would include day, month, and year, in which case the MoS is pretty clear that you wikilink. Otherwise user preferences for date formats do not work. So you're referring only to cases where the day of birth or death are not known, only the year? --TreyHarris 22:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes i am refering to cases where the only date given in the lead is the year, which is not at all uncommon for birthdates, particualarly for people born a long time ago. (Prefs also do not work if the month and year, but no day, is given, which is less common but does happen.) There is an ongoing debate about this on the talk page of the relevant MoS page -- see that for more details. DES ^(talk) 23:07, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I am confused. Here is the entry: [[1]]

I was saying that biographies require the birth and death dates wikified. I was trying to convey that there is no need to wikify every year you see in an article. Such as:

He moved to Jersey City in 1928, then in 1930 his parents moved to Hoboken. By 1935 he was working as a lawyer, and he married in June of 1941. In 1942 he enlisted in the Navy, where he won the Navy Cross.

I ask: will clicking on the link be useful, or is part of the wiki-clutter? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 23:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

There is a poll now ongoing on the talk page about whether those examples should remain linked, since the paragraph above says that years not part of full dates generally should not be linked. The examples show biography lead dates as being linked, but nothing in the text says that such links are required (asming that no full date is present) DES ^(talk) 23:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Usage of links for date preferences. See also Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Year links in examples (year of birth/death) and subsequent discussion. DES ^(talk) 23:31, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Spelling proposal

Consensus has led to the following widely accepted "rule":

"Articles that focus on a topic specific to a particular English-speaking country should generally conform to the spelling of that country."

But what about "neutral" articles, articles that are not related to any English-speaking country, like dream or fish?
I think we need a simple rule for these articles. What do you think about the following proposal?

Generally, articles should use Oxford spelling (see OED, section "Spelling"). Oxford spelling is based on British conventions, but it deviates from common practice in several ways: The most important difference from usual British spelling is the use of -ize instead of -ise. At first glance, one might think: "It's basically British spelling with -ize". However, the -ize-suffixes are very common. In fact, they are the most common spelling variations in academic texts. Oxford spelling is used by the majority of international organizations, because it is often considered the best compromise. Many will now think: this approach favours British spelling too much, and they are right. That's why I propose the following "counterweight": All neutral articles with titles that have multiple spelling should conform to Webster's preferred spelling: color, honor, defense... It think that would be a fair approach and would give a clear answer to the question what kind of spelling should be used for any given article:

- Related to any English-speaking country? -> That country's spelling. Example: United States

- Neutral and title with variant spelling -> US spelling. Example: Honor

- Neutral and title without variant spelling -> Oxford spelling. Example: Dream

NeutralLang 23:42, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

• An intersting idea, but I oppose this. It is just asking for too many edit wars if we try to prescribe a particular set of speeligns from among valid regonal alternatives. DES ^(talk) 23:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

• I also oppose it. Gene Nygaard 16:20, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

But what about "neutral" articles, articles that are not related to any English-speaking country, like dream or fish?

Original contributor rule. — Omegatron 20:37, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Oppose: An interesting idea, yes, but why would the following not be just as acceptable?

- Related to any English-speaking country? -> That country's spelling. Example: United States

- Neutral and title with variant spelling -> Oxford spelling. Example: Metre

- Neutral and title without variant spelling -> US spelling. Example: Blue

I don't quite see the rational behind it and, as DES suggests, it would be asking for trouble. Jimp 16:59, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Question re normally italicized text in already italicized block?

Greetings.

How should one treat text that one would want to italicize (parenthesized literal text in a foreign language) within a block of text that is already italicized (translation from that language)? Currently I am using (a) parenthesized "scare" quotes, but I don't know whether I should (b) UN-italicize without quotes or (c) only parenthesize ... or maybe anything goes? I was looking for a mention of this case in the MOS but didn't happen to see one. I don't think I have a strong preference myself, right now, but it would be nice to know if there is any consensus about it. -thanks, Onceler 00:20, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

The usual convention is to unitalicize italicized text in an italicized block. This isn't exactly the most visually effective form of emphasis, but I've seen it used a lot and it jibes nicely with the wikisyntax for it, which is the same as ordinary italics. Deco 00:38, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

That's what LaTeX's \em command does: it toggles between italics and upright for nested emphases. PizzaMargherita 14:57, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Since asking this question, I also wondered whether there were other applications of it--good enough to warrant adding something to the WMOS--and I have not been able to think of any. The admittedly awkward motivation for my question was that there was a word in a block quote of translated text that was ambiguous--various interpretations would serve the same purpose and some license by the translator was unavoidable. I had included this word within the italicized block but have since moved it to a Notes section indexed via footnote. This seems to be a more conventional way to treat such cases and I expect go this route from now on. Thanks all for your feedback. -regards,  EN1-UTE- (Talk) 19:37, 30 August 2024 UTC [refresh] </nowiki> -->Onceler (Talk) (Mail)  21:59, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Generally, block quotes should not be italicized or quoted. The indention and spacing already serves to indicate that they are quotes. Deco 22:10, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

I used the italics not just because this is a quote, but because it is a quote that I translated, as part of translating an entire article. Though this does not fall under the sense of being a "foreign word" per the WMOS, there is no mention of how to treat translations, and so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. If they are misapplied I'll remove them. So, just to confirm: one should go without italics even for a translated quote? -thanks,  EM1-UTE- (Talk) 19:37, 30 August 2024 UTC [refresh] </nowiki> -->---Onceler  18:44, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Parenthetical information

I removed this recently added edit. I don't see any basis for it and there was no discussion of this that I can discern. I don't necessarily object to the examples given, but I think it could easily be interpreted as deprecating any parenthetical information. older ≠ wiser 15:45, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Which do you think should be the preferred method of adding new information to the text of an article? Adding it in parenthesis, or integrating it directly into the text:

Charles M. Vest (President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) said ...

Charles M. Vest, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said ...

or

In 1954 he attended MIT (and graduated in 1958)

He started at MIT in 1954 and graduated in 1958

Wikipedia should standardize on a single way. People tend to add new information parenthetically rather than attempting to integrate it into the narrative of the article. When I find parenthetical information I integrate it so that the article reads as a single continuous narrative. What do you think? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 16:18, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

In the examples you cite, the latter. However, there are cases where I think a parenthetical aside is fine (can't think of an example just now though). The wording seems that it could apply to ANY sort of parenthetical information, even say DOB and DOD in bios. older ≠ wiser 17:16, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Correct in that it is used in the following:

• "Richard Arthur Norton (1958- )" for year of birth and death
• "Richard Arthur Norton (born September 1958- )" in biographies
• "Head of Research (1990-2005)" but I prefer: "Head of Research from 1990 through 2005" so as to not confuse birth and deaths with lengths of reign
• In acronyms: "Department of Justice (DOJ)"

Absolutely not. This is a matter of style, and a single way should not be mandated. Parenthetic phrases can be set off with commas, dashes, or parentheses in good English writing. Sometimes they can be integrated without being set off, as in the second graduation example above. By the way, the Vest comma example above is missing its second parenthetic comma. —Michael Z. 2006-01-23 16:51 Z

Hear, hear! Puffball 17:11, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

And that is why this section is called "Manual of Style". We have to make the difficult, and often arbitraty style decisions, so that Wikipedia has a consistent "look and feel". So the question is: Should new information be added parenthetically or should it be integrated into the narrative? Does anyone else have an opinion on which style should become canonical? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk • contribs)

Yes, and for consistency, let's just always write "double-plus" instead of very, extremely, acutely, amply, profoundly, terribly, or extraordinarily. This is a guide to style, not the elimination of style. —Michael Z. 2006-01-23 17:34 Z

It is true, it is a guide to style and not its elimination. However, this isn't one of those instances where it'd be elimination — actually, let me rephrase that; with care taken it shouldn't be.

Then again, this is probably one of those things where if you do include it, it'll probably get misinterpreted as a hard-and-fast; and to actually come up with a detailed, proper guideline (e.g. acronyms should use parentheses) might be a bit long. I'd say it's one of those things where, if it's right, you should just go and change it because sometimes, it's better writing, and sometimes, it's not.

With respect to those examples, I agree with the latter in both, but do people actually write things like that? That's shocking style.

If people do, then an addition would work, as long as it was kept specific which as I said can be difficult. Neonumbers 04:22, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

We don't require that editors pass a composition examination before editing. Some editors will always be more stylistically trained and inclined than others. I just took a look through my past few weeks of contributions for various parentheticals—whether using round brackets, em dashes, commas, or semicolons. It strikes me that Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) has set up a bit of a strawman here with his example. Surely there are cases where parentheses are misused (and you won't hear me disputing this). But a blanket rule, such as that proposed, seems to miss the point; the language is rich in nuance, which cannot be captured in a few bullet points in the MoS. (To the contrary: any such list of bullet points is liable, as Neonumbers and Mzajac point out, to be read as inviolate law leading to the elimination rather than furtherance of style.) If you find a stylistically inappropriate use of parentheses, or em dashes, or question marks for that matter, edit the page and fix it. You don't need the blessing of the MoS to do so. --TreyHarris 06:33, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Removal

I think the following part of the MoS should be deleted:

1. When abbreviating United States, please use "U.S."; that is the more common style in that country, is easier to search for automatically, and we want one uniform style on this. When referring to the United States in a long abbreviation (USA, USN, USAF), periods should not be used.
2. When including the United States in a list of countries, do not abbreviate the United States (for example, "France and the United States", not "France and the U.S.").

Reason: Too specific. These two points would appear in a U.S. English style guide. I agree that both guidelines are preferable for articles using American English, but they should not be a general "rule". In British and Australian English, "US" without periods/full stops is preferred. One might argue that if the guidelines above are included, the following should be included as well:

1. When abbreviating United Kingdom, please use "UK"; that is the more common style in that country, is easier to search for automatically, and we want one uniform style on this.
2. When giving a percentage in an article related to the United Kingdom, please use "per cent" instead of "percent" because it is the more common spelling in that country.

... and so on. NeutralLang 14:03, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

These should stay, because they are very common and the best way to do it is not obvious to a new editor. Regarding the counter-examples:

1. UK and other abbreviations are covered by Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Acronyms and abbreviations (currently missing in action); the treatment of U.S. is an exception to the rule, because it's similar to the word us
2. This is not a hard-and-fast rule; both are acceptable British English usage (correct me if I'm wrong)

—Michael Z. 2006-01-23 17:41 Z

I agree with the original comment. There's no particularly good reason to have such a specific rule in there, other than that lots of Wikipedians are Americans. It just makes the MoS seem even more US-biased. The "it is easier to search for automatically" is spurious - who searches Wikipedia for "U.S."? Why not just go to United States and see what links there? I also doubt the "We want one uniform style on this" - who does? Americans? We have different styles on lots of other things, including spelling. Stevage 19:09, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I totally agree with Stevage. These rules are US-biased. In reply to Michael's comments: U.S. is more common in the U.S. than "US" just as "per cent" is more common in the UK than "percent".

I wanted to show how similar the "per cent" argument is. In the U.S. both "US" and "U.S." are used, but for some reason, it is tolerated that the MoS prescribes that "U.S." should be used throughout Wikipedia ("we want one uniform style on this"). By the way, the latest edition of the "Chicago Manual of Style", the most influential American English style guide, even prefers "US" to "U.S."! The other point about when to spell out United States is too specific and too US-centred as well. If we allow guidelines like this, the MoS will continue to grow. The MoS should be short, details can be discussed on sub-pages. NeutralLang 20:13, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I also agree with the original comment. And by the way, yet another problem that this proposal could solve once and for all. PizzaMargherita 20:26, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I disagree, but this goes in two different ways.

I don't see this as "too specific", and for the record, I'm not American. We list this because it is an exception to the rule, "never use full-stops in acronyms". It is perfectly acceptable for every acronym except for "U.S." to not have dots and for every "U.S." to be written so — you still get consistency, because the same "rule" can be applied to everything. ("Rule plus exception" still counts as "rule".)

As for whether or not the rule should exist, well, people, flip a coin. Honestly. The abbreviation stands for "United States", so of course it's allowed to be United States-centric — compare this to how the U.S. is probably the last country not to switch to the metric system: measurement is not American. The arguments "to avoid confusion with 'us'" and "it's in all-caps anyway so it shouldn't matter" are both logical, even if they contradict.

If the Americans want control over their own name, so be it; 'cos otherwise, they'll just go see what other places they can gain control of ;-) (just joking.)

But seriously, it doesn't matter which way, it really doesn't, and this isn't "it shouldn't be debated", this is "it really doesn't matter because either way works". Neonumbers 04:12, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm not from the U.S. either, in case you thought so. If you're so worried about Wikipedia becoming U.S.-centric then why quote the Chicago Manual of Style? —Michael Z. 2006-01-24 06:54 Z

Are you referring to my comment? Because Neonumbers didn't quote the Chicago Manual of Style, I did. I think this style guide shouldn't prescribe the spellings of single words. The rule is not followed anyways, at least in UK-related articles, there are even five "US" in the United States article! I doubt there is consensus about the "U.S." rule. It makes sense for US-related articles, so I propose moving it to a sub-page of the MoS NeutralLang 13:48, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Stupid question: Why is so much time wasted on these issues if they don't matter? PizzaMargherita 08:13, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Let me rephrase myself: "it doesn't really matter as long as one is chosen and stuck to because either way works". Meaning, one should be chosen, but we needn't spend three decades deciding which. Neonumbers 10:02, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

We've debated the issue of U.S. v. US twice before. The last time I checked, U.S. is still preferred by the Bluebook, and nearly all U.S. lawyers and judges are trained in Bluebook style. As I have stated before, articles on American law and government should use U.S. simply because that is how the vast majority of American lawyers (and law-trained government bureaucrats) do it — or else we will have huge edit wars. But I concede that allowing US in articles not specifically relevant to American law and government may be a good idea. --Coolcaesar 03:39, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

I suggest that we allow both U.S. and US in articles, as long as each article is consistent, except in contexts where "US" in ambiguous. I suggest article titles exclusively use "U.S." for consistency. This seems to fit more with what's actually current practice. Deco 22:13, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

No-no. Nay. No. That's not why we're here. That's not why this document exists.

This thing exists to make recommendations, to leave no-one in doubt as to what's best. While writers and editors aren't required to follow these, articles are.

This matter is a trivial enough one to be able to pick one and stick to it very little cost. Unless there are actually circumstances where U.S. works better, and circumstances where US is the better alternative, we can pick one, and we should. Now, let's not have any "compromise" or lack of specification with this one — the consequences of not having a preference in this case are far more disastrous than that of just picking one — any one — and sticking by it. Neonumbers 03:38, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't perceive any disastrous consequences, but I agree that it's probably better to be consistent where there's no clear advantage for one. On the other hand, people will continue to use both no matter what we say - someone has to be responsible for cleaning up the articles to match the guideline. Deco 02:04, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Maybe not so much "disastrous" as "worse"... slight mishap in selection of wording, whoops. Neonumbers 11:04, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I will move the guideline to the abbreviation section and add "In U.S.-related articles". I think that's a fair approach. It's inappropriate to impose "U.S." in UK-related articles for example. The rule clashes with the widely accepted rule that articles related to a specific country should conform to that country's spelling and usage. On top of that, in an otherwise very neutral MoS, it's the only guideline that tries to prescribe a certain US-specific usage for all articles. That's why this guideline shouldn't have been included in the first place. Both justifications of the rule ("we want unform style" and "it's easier to search for") cannot be taken seriously. NeutralLang 16:23, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I repeat, as I've said before, the United States have a right to specify their own abbreviation. There is no benefit either way, the benefit comes from having one consistent style. I say again, we may as well flip a coin, but the coin is not allowed to land on its side.

This a very very important principle. The manual has that very principle stated at the top, "One way is often as good as another, but if everyone does it the same way, Wikipedia will be easier to read and use, not to mention easier to write and edit." This is one of those cases.

One is to be preferred for all cases, for this reason. Consistency is half if not most of the reason for this manual's existence. Incidentally, this case of consistency is not a foolish one.

I'm sorry, I cannot accept that change because I don't see enough support in this discussion, for the moment, it looks very much split. A change to this rule must be to prefer "US" in all cases, which as people have said, is not ideal. Neonumbers 11:04, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

"Consistency is half if not most of the reason for this manual's existence." ...and what a miserable failure the current guidelines for National varieties of English are at that. Not only do they fail preventing WP articles from being inconsistent, they are themselves inconsistent. Again, you may want to look at this proposal for one possible solution. PizzaMargherita 11:53, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

By the way, I thought the edit by NeutralLang was good. PizzaMargherita 21:18, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Yep, the National varieties of English guideline is a failure at that, but it's one of the few there's no way around (unless there's a way to standardise either British or American usage — and I have seen the proposal to incorporate it into markup so that user preferences can be set, and I'd support that because it's a solution and not a compromise.)

(For that matter, I'd also support a change to mandate "US", but I never support changes to allow either or either-in-certain-situations where consistency is a better option, whichever way.) Neonumbers 09:47, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

(You say you would support the proposal—so why don't you? There's plenty of opposers in denial or even in complete contradiction with their own "mission statement" on that proposal, we really don't need any shy supporters...) :) PizzaMargherita 17:45, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

(lol... I guess I was a bit too lazy to actually get into that debate... I'll try and get round there sometime, just to drop a word... (I admit though that I wouldn't recommend using that idea for this particular issue because I don't perceive this as a spelling difference, of course that is a trivial and unimportant issue and I couldn't care less if people perceive this otherwise.)) Neonumbers 05:42, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I understand your point, Neonumbers, you seem to like consistency and that's of course what a style guide is about. But the rule that articles related to an English-speaking country should conform to that country's usage and spelling is one of the oldest consensus-based rules. Prescribing "U.S." for all articles challenges that rule. Try to change several "US" to "U.S." in a UK-related article (virtually all UK-related articles use "US") and somebody will revert the changes and will tell you to stop doing that because it's a UK-related article. NeutralLang 21:34, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Colouring in tables

Have a look at the table in National Football League championships#List of Championships by Team; take note of the coloured backgrounds. Compare to New Zealand general election, 2005#Official election results table.

Now, I know that maybe the NFL has two colours per team, but that's not the point. Does anyone find the colouring in the NFL page hard to read? Personally, even though I can read it fine, I find it annoying.

I don't plan on actually doing anything about this or adding a provision to the manual unless someone else wants to. I'd just like to get opinions on it, to get a general idea of whether it is or isn't a good idea.

Note that even though the manual asks for no colour-coding, this isn't really "colour-coding" as such, because the colours aren't "codes". Neonumbers 04:25, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I've used colour coding in the past in situations where I thought it was really helpful, but this is simply horrifying. Just changing the background colour between teams might be okay, but changing both the text and background colour makes it look like a rainbow exploded all over the page. Deco 02:21, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

What an unprofessional eye sore, get rid of it. You can always add a small column that just contains the colours. PizzaMargherita 13:47, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. That is dreadful. this is still an encyclopaedia, isn't it? The colour-box approach used in Canada, UK and NZ elections could be employed effectively here. The secondary colour could even be incorporated by putting an initial letter in the colour box, e.g., "D" for Dallas. Ground Zero | t 14:00, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

• See what I've done: National Football League championships#Championships by Team. Ground Zero | t 14:24, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Nice. Very nice. I'd go as far as to remove the colouring in NFL, AFL, etc. at the top, and just link them all, the colouring there's so not needed — in fact, I'll do that now. But the table looks way better now. Neonumbers 10:03, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

See also section

I could swear there used to be a section in the MoS about what is/isn't appropriate for inclusion in a "See also" section... however, I can't find anything here or on Wikipedia:Links. Help? -- Visviva 08:13, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Try Wikipedia:Section#"See also" for the whole article. I'll look through the history to see whether there used to be additional language here.

--William Allen Simpson 11:53, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Not as of 1,500 edits over a couple of years, other than removing synonymous names for the section. Some niggling over language, but nothing substantive.

--William Allen Simpson 12:38, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

ALL CAPITAL LETTERS

When are all capital letters to be used if ever? I see some companies listed as all capital letters and wonder what the rule is. (other than acronyms like "IBM"). As I look at the official listings of the companies in Hoovers and others they are listed with just a single capital. What shall we standardize on? Do we agree that all capitals should not be used FOR EMPHASIS. My rules of thumb are:

• reduce newspaper headlines and book title from all caps to the title case: "War Begins Today"

Examples of this type:

• • I Want to Hold Your Hand#Notes and references
  • Wesley_Clark#Noteworthy_Speeches
  • NYT reduces ALL CAPS to the Title Case
• reduce court decisons from all caps to the title case: "Richard Norton v. Allen Simpson"
  • Most original court decisions are released as all caps
  • see Roe v. Wade for Wikipedia standard
• reduce emphasis from ALL CAPS and bold to italics

What do you think? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 21:45, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I've seen quite a number of requested moves over time to make the name of a company all upper case or to change from all caps to normal mixed case. Every single one that I saw reached consensus to use normal mixed case. (Names that are or were initialisms, such as AT&T and IBM, are exceptions, of course.) Jonathunder 22:03, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

• IMO when all-caps are used for emphasis withign quoted content, they should be left unchanged as in general quoted content should be reproduced as exactly as possible. Otherwise the use of caps for emphasis should be discouraged. It might be acceptable for a single isolated word which might otehwise be overlooked with a major change of meaning (for example "not") but even there italics or bold should be enough. In some cases a corporation or institution may have an all-capitols name as its official style, in which case we should probably use that style when using the full name. All this IMO of course. DES ^(talk) 22:06, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

• All caps should generally be used only for acronyms (with exceptions like scuba) or in quotes. Never ever for emphasis - if you see these, fix them. If this isn't already in the Manual it should be. It might also be okay for subjects whose name is normally written that way. Deco 22:17, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

• Rule of thumb: Don't use all caps for emphasis, fully agreed. (Exceptions may arise, but they are very very few and far apart, and that's true with any guideline, really.) (Acronyms don't count, of course) Neonumbers 09:59, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

---

Today, RAN just made changes to his hastily written start of this topic, partly cleaning it up. To keep the conversation in sync, I've reverted the changes, and bring the new text here for discussion.

--William Allen Simpson 13:30, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

1. reduce newspaper headlines from all caps such as "WAR BEGINS TODAY" to: "War Begins Today"
2. reduce court decisons from all caps such as "NORTON v. EVERYONE ELSE" to: "Norton v. Everyone Else"
3. reduce emphasis from all caps to italics

There appears to be a consensus that all caps should not be used for emphasis. That's the purpose of bold.

(#1) is incorrect. Quotes should reflect the original. We already have a section on that.

rebuttal: ALL CAPS are not used in the New York Times in their transcriptions even if they appeared as headlines NYT reduces ALL CAPS to the Title Case

(#2) is incorrect. There are extensive manuals of style for legal citations. They should be followed. In the US, the Federal style is most prevalent, although each state usually has its variants. But the gist is "Norton v Everyone" with "Else" eliminated or reduced to et alia or et al. where there is confusion. Additional parties are rarely cited except in the opinion itself.

rebuttal: Wikipedia itself uses the title case for most legal opinions despite the court releasing all documents in ALL CAPS for the name of the court case. Please see Roe v. Wade

(#3) is incorrect. Italics are used to emphasize "words as words" and we already have a section on that.

rebuttal: The first line in the guide under italics says: "Editors mainly use italics to emphasize certain words"

--William Allen Simpson 13:30, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

If you dont agree with the week of discussion above, you should have participated in the discussion, but that is ok. Please write the William Allen Simpson rules so we can have something for the MoS. I don't mind you writing the rules, I just want some rules to follow, so I can get my editing done. And if italics are not to be used for emphasis please rewrite the first rule on italics in the MoS: "Editors mainly use italics to emphasize certain words" (emphasis added). Perhaps its clear to the person who wrote it, but I take it to mean "italics are used for emphasis".

• I don't believe we need to follow the rules of legal publications and use all caps. We should follow how Wikipedia is already written: see Roe v. Wade. We should not be editorial activists or be forced to follow antiquated rules for paper publications. Other style guides are good references, but Wikipedia needs to have a "look and feel" best suited for screen reading and an international audience. Thats why we abandoned italics for quotations. When quoting an all capital headline the New York Times reduces it to what is called the "title case". See this example [2]. I don't see why we should not be doing the same. All capitals seems out of place in an encyclopedia. I repeat, conventions that were developed for print 100 years ago don't have to be repeated here in Wikipedia, just because they have a noble pedigree. We should look at what looks best for Wikipedia "on screen" and standardize on that. Please let me know what you are all thinking, and I hope I wasn't too preachy. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 20:25, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I support Richard's proposal in full and I think that the reversion was uncalled for. PizzaMargherita 18:33, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

The added section is, to put it gently, imperfectly written. I have no problem with the substance of what I think he's trying to say, though. Mark^{your words} 20:18, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I haven't a clue which of the three people writing you are supporting. Can you be more specific about who "he" is? Also which of the 6 added sections above are you referring to? I am not sure whether to nod in support or viciously attack you. I believe these options are the two modes of Wikipedia discourse I have so far witnessed in my tenure here. Have you noticed that humour doesn't translate well in ascii text?

--Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 10:20, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I have a feeling that we may be overspecifying here. RAN, can you give some examples (links to diffs are fine if you've already repaired them) where you feel that all capitals have been used incorrectly (other than the emphasis case, which I think there's consensus to specify—I have added a sentence to do so). The Manual of Style does not need to specify every case—merely to set style for common cases in which there is dispute and for which consistency is desired. --TreyHarris 10:42, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I share your concern. The MoS seems to include both useful and common style rules and petty rules that style lawyers push in the MoS and then use to resolve disputes—or as an excuse for their nazi reversions. I think the latter should be confined in a "Worthless MoS", or "Advanced MoS" to make it sound important. PizzaMargherita 11:48, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Proposed rules

• reduce newspaper headlines and other titles from all caps to the title case: "War Begins Today"
• reduce court decisons from all caps to the title case: "Richard Arthur Norton v. William Allen Simpson"
• reduce emphasis from all caps to italics

The only dissent is whether italics or bold should be used for emphasis. If we decide on bold, then the rules under italics need to be reworded. My personal preference is reserving bold for: 1) the title of the article 2) the name of the person in the biography, and the varations of the name as in E. E. Cummings. 3) headings and subheadings. What do you think? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 01:38, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

• Most browsers render <em> (for emphasis) as italics. TeX renders \emph (for emphasis) as italics. Who emphasises with bold? I thought only Microsoft Word users did. PizzaMargherita 08:52, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  • I resent you making fun of Microsoft Word users as always placing things in bold. It is a slanderous stereotype and has no place in Wikipedia. Wikipedia deals with truths, and the truth is that Microsoft Powerpoint users also add bold to everything. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 09:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
    • They also make use of witty animations to introduce every single word in their slides. Interesting how the number of animations used and the magnetism of the subject matter are usually highly correlated. PizzaMargherita 09:39, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I can't tell who's being serious and who's being sarcastic here (emoticons are allowed on talk pages, and can help in these cases ;-) but I think there's consensus that boldface should not be used for emphasis. I'm surprised this isn't explicitly spelled out in the MoS. Shouldn't it be? --TreyHarris 10:45, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

• I think if we don't make a decision now, it will just come up again later, and all this thinking will have to done again. The MoS is broken into two parts: The opening page and the individual subpages. The opening page contains the answers to the most common questions and the individual subpages have more detailed answers. Just look at the list of things to be italicized for an example of letting a person know everything. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 18:29, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

No. The MoS does not "[let] a person know everything"; not for italics, not for anything else. It specifies common cases in which there is liable to be disagreement and a consistency across the project is desired. We do not, for instance, specify in the MoS that you should use the usual dictionary spelling of words raðer ðan a meðod of your own devising. The fact that I just used a method of my own devising doesn't mean that, before correcting it, you now need to add a rule to the MoS first specifying that we prefer dictionary spellings to spellings made up on the fly. Just fix it; the MoS is not a playbook that has to cover every case of editing for non-content-related purposes. Now, if you can show that these cases of capitals-misuse you want to include in the MoS are widespread and disputed, we'll have something to talk about; but thus far, you haven't done that. Imagining that it might be a case of dispute sometime in the future is insufficient reason to add it to the MoS now. --TreyHarris 00:44, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

• Thank you for that clever example of reductio ad absurdum. Do I have your permission to quote it on the article page for that entry? I am sure if I could search for all capitals using a PERL script, I would find examples. For now, all are corrected. deliberate mispellings, as you point out are obvious and everyone but the writer will agree that it is incorrect. But the ALL CAPS rules have already been challenged by William Allen Simpson. He listed all three rules as incorrect. He said that court cases should be written as they appear in legal documents. He also cited the rule that ALL CAP headlines be quoted as ALL CAPS. We now have two versions of what is acceptable. Make a decision. If there is no more room on the MoS page then we can keep it a secret between you and me. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 01:24, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

• What is the objective criteria of what deserves to be in the MoS and what doesn't? Here is the entry in Chicago Manual of Style:

Q. What would you say to a translator who says that an author’s use of all caps for EMPHASIS should stand? I tried to invoke house style but she is claiming it is, well, LITERARY. I’d like to explain to the author and translator this looks AMATEUR at best, and to say, look, WE JUST DON’T DO THAT. A. If it’s not a lot of text, I would just put it in small caps without discussing it further. If it’s a lot, I would press on in my arguments, e.g., “I feel I must more strenuously insist on the use of italics for emphasis instead of all caps. Chicago style avoids the use of artificial emphasis in any form, including italics, which are sometimes perceived by readers as a writer’s crutch and (heaven forbid) a result of careless editing. We are also conscious of the wide influence of e-mail etiquette, in which the use of all caps is criticized as the equivalent of shouting. I’m afraid there is rarely a place for all capitals in published work these days.”

Why don't we just follow one of the guides that is already written and avoid "reinventing the wheel". (See: cliche) Any comments? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 01:55, 13 February 2006 (UTC) --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 01:55, 13 February 2006 (UTC) --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 01:55, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

There have only been three actual articles referenced in this thread up to now: IBM, AT&T, and E.E. Cummings. None of these are on-point to the rules you are proposing. All I'm asking is that you produce actual examples of disputes in progress that your rules will help to resolve. The MoS is essentially a dispute-resolution and consensus-saving tool, not a manual of style to rival Strunk & White or Chicago in covering all cases. Where there is general agreement about a point of style, or when a point has not actually risen to being disputed in the article space, this MoS can and should remain silent about the point. --TreyHarris 01:59, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Trey, certainly on the first two proposals. On the third, I think it highly unlikely that anyone who uses all caps for emphasis should ever be quoted, but if it should happen we should not change his usage. We should of course not use all caps or bold for emphasis ourselves, but again I've never come across someone attempting to do so. Mark^{your words} 20:50, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

As has been pointed out before, use of all caps is pretty rare and, MoS or no, most careful users will probably lowercase it unless there is a compelling use for it. Therefore, I would suggest keeping the rule simple: "Avoid using all caps unless there is a compelling reason to do so." We don't need to go into detail about corporate logos, headlines, typographic exercises, or the like; trying to come up with a list of times when all caps is acceptable is probably a bit futile, and is probably decided on a case-by-case basis. You could add to this the corollary "Never use bold." ProhibitOnions 21:55, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

RAN, you've made several edits to your earlier comments in the past couple days, but it looks like lawn-chair rearrangement to me. Your last edit had the edit summary "where do we stand?" which I'll take as a question you meant us to respond to. As far as I'm concerned, we still stand where we did a week ago: you haven't produced any example pages where use of all caps is currently in dispute. Lacking an actual dispute, any additional language to the MoS is superfluous and speculative. I have not exhaustively scrutinized the edit history of Roe v. Wade, but in a casual reading of it and its talk page, I haven't seen any signs of a dispute over capitalization—I note that ROE V. WADE and ROE V WADE do not even exist as I type this. This is the only page other than IBM, AT&T, and E.E. Cummings that you have referenced here, and we've already established that those three are not on-point to your proposed rules.

The MoS needs to be reigned in and made more minimal, in my opinion, not expanded to cover ever more esoteric cases. If there's no dispute over a given point of style, the MoS can and should remain silent on it. RAN, if you want us to budge on this point, stop tweaking your comments and instead point us at some actual editing disputes within articles in the Wikipedia that we can consider. --TreyHarris 09:11, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I personally think direct quotations should reflect the source directly - after all, we don't correct spelling or grammar errors, so why should we correct capitalization? Titles of Wikipedia articles, however, should follow our standard conventions. Paraphrases you can capitalise however you like. Deco 05:57, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

US vs UK Capitalization

This change was good. We should keep the MoS short, else nobody will read it. There, we've discussed it now and it's pretty much consensual. Could you possibly stop reverting now sheriff? Thanks. PizzaMargherita 00:40, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually, that change would make the whole paragraph a general one about use of capitals, not specific about titles. Therefore I propose we move it (as edited by ProhibitOnions) as an intro to the Capital letters section. PizzaMargherita 10:22, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Agree. Martin 10:59, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Agree. User:Noisy | Talk 11:11, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks,PizzaMargherita, I originally removed that sentence ("Commonwealth English uses capitals more widely than American English does," etc.) from the MOS, as it seemed both inaccurate and superfluous. There was, furthermore, no discussion of the matter on the talk page (and thus no "consensus version"), so its immediate reversion without comment wasn't terribly helpful. While I would abstain in a vote that concerned only my own edit, I like your suggestion about turning the paragraph into a general one about capitalization, thus I Agree. ProhibitOnions 11:54, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

standard and consistent internal formatting

At [3] Omegatron and I have discussed which standard for section headings and external link lists to choose as the preferred baseline standard. Basically the options we have discussed so far would be, for section headings, either

== Heading 1 ==

Text 1

== Heading 2 ==

Text 2

or

==Heading 1==
Text 1

==Heading 2==
Text 2

and for lists either

== External links ==

* [http://www.whatever.org Caption for the link]

or

== External links ==

*[http://www.whatever.org Caption for the link]

(emphasis on the space character after the "*" either being present or not)

I'd like to get a consensus here, for either one of these alternatives, or perhaps some other baseline for section headers and External links list items. There is also some recent discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Bevo#.22std_fmt.22, and also at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rdsmith4#.22std_fmt.22_edits - Bevo 16:45, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

There was also a discussion here at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_39#Improving_the_source_text. If we can't agree on a style, then we all have to stop what we're doing, because it will be counterproductive. I think this is what the MoS currently says; "don't change other peoples' styles". And this is probably exactly why it says that.  :-)

I would prefer, though, if we could decide on one that is best and use scripts/bots/Mediawiki itself to keep the formatting consistent and readable.

My preferred spacing format is as follows:

== Heading 1 ==

[[Image:image.png|thumb|caption]]

Text goes here.  [[here here|Here]] is a link.

== Heading 2 ==

=== Heading 3 ===

Here is some more text, and a list:

* List item 1
* List item 2
*# Numbered list as part of that list
*# Numbered list item 2
* List item 3

== External links ==

* [http://www.example.com First link]
* [http://www.example.com 2nd link]
* [http://www.example.com 3rd link]

My rationale:

• Whitespace is good for separating things visually; makes it easier to parse each object with your eyes
• Headings are spaced the way the Mediawiki software spaces them when you press + on a Talk: page or use the &section=new function in the URL.
• Lists always work with the spaces. Without spaces there are a small number of cases that don't work, like list items that start with a colon, asterisk, or number sign:
• :-) — Omegatron 16:49, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree completely with Omegatron. — Dan | talk 19:21, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Looks great to me, except where a section contains only a list, omitting the line space seems clear and compact. I also often omit the line space after a sub-heading. These conventions help reinforce the relationship of headings and sub-headings, but maybe it's not worth codifying exceptions which complicate the rule. —Michael Z. 2006-01-29 21:10 Z

== Main section ==

=== Sub-section ===
Starting right into the text. . .

== External links ==
* [[Example 1]]
* [[Example 2]]
* [[Example 3]]

I think the extra white space looks awful and is confusing (relatively speaking of course). Plus a few clicks of the random page button shows that no white space under headings is much more popular. Martin 21:32, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I also prefer the least amount of whitespace necessary. Apparently for lists, there may be times when the extra space after the "*" is needed to avoid ambiguity. The extra whole lines of whitespace after section headings may be largely a matter of personal opinion as to readability. I prefer the section headings that occur before actual text to not be separated from that text in the markup. - Bevo 21:57, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I used to agree about not having a newline after the headings. Then I was writing a script to remove extra newlines, and had to decide which heading style to use. I checked and Mediawiki itself puts a newline after the heading, so that's what I used. Now that I've started using it, I like it better. — Omegatron 00:40, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Then again, we do realise that this is behind the scenes (differences can't be seen from the "outside" and so is less important than other guidelines here.

Personally, I'm lazy, and I just can't be bothered sticking those extra spaces in the wiki-syntax, but of course I don't mind when someone changes it to make it more readable or whatever. (Similar idea goes for double spaces after full stops.)

So, I am going to express a small opposition to any standardisation of this; I don't expect to be recognised if no-one's with me. While this might make things easier to edit, in my opinion, because it can't be seen by readers, it's not important. Neonumbers 00:44, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

A related idea is that no matter the particular style in use in an article, I believe it important that the article be formatted with a consistent internal style. - Bevo 02:10, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

What's visible on the outside is more important (comparative not positive) than what's hidden behind the scenes — this is my only statement that I hold undeniable. I can't say that this is a stupid or crazy idea, it's not; as I've said above, I can only express a personal distaste for it and wonder who's in my position. There's no need to answer this wondering for me, if I'm the only one, I'll know. Neonumbers 05:41, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm not against this level of standardisation if:

• It ends up in a separate page from the main MoS
• People don't complain too loudly when "fixing" other editors' "bad" wikitext
• Any robots used to enforce it are tested thoroughly

PizzaMargherita 07:29, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Instead of bots, I don't see why Mediawiki itself couldn't do the formatting. Be as lazy as you want typing, and when you save, it is automatically parsed and formatted according to a certain style. Same as "pipe trick" links and the like. For now, I'm just using a javascript on pages that are especially messy. — Omegatron 16:33, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

That, Omegatron, is a good idea — I like it because I'm lazy and I can't be bothered with that extra whitespace. I said earlier that, despite having a mild opposition, I can't deny this is a good idea; I should also mention that, despite having a mild personal opposition, I can't deny that whitespace in the instances above except for directly beneath headers is probably better, if I don't have to do anything about it. Neonumbers 06:00, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I am always in favor of menial human labor being offloaded onto computers. Hail laziness!

Ideally, we wouldn't have to worry about any of this Manual of Style stuff. The computers would take care of it for us and we could concentrate on content. — Omegatron 18:39, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

So far I don't see any concensus developing regarding even the broad issue of minimal -vs- maximal whitespace preferences in the internal formatting style for the Wiki markup for section heading and External links internal formatting. For now, I'll edit towards keeping whatever style already exists in the majority of headings and External links list items in an article, and edit towards the goal of simple consistency. That way I won't be disturbing any person's strong preference (who initially used a particular style, or who took the time to impose a certain style on an existing article). - Bevo 23:44, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

The current system (no standardization) is excellent; people who edit the article -- the vast majority of articles have just a few or one major editors -- use whatever style they prefer. Mediawiki ensures that it looks the same no matter which style is used. It seems that standardization would make many people unhappy with zero apparent benefit; what is the motivation for it? Christopher Parham (talk) 08:12, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

It makes the markup easier to parse visually if it's always styled the same way. If there are many different styles, you have to spend more time looking at it to figure out what it is. If an article uses my recommended style above with maximum whitespace, and then someone else adds a paragraph or two with some headings in it and everything crammed together, it won't look like headings until you really look at it. When the markup is really complicated and an article is long, it can be hard to find things. ... I'm getting wordy. How about this:

It's nicer if everything's consistent.

This is why things like GNU Coding Standards exist; the compiler ignores the whitespace, but it's a lot easier for many humans to work on the same source code when it's formatted consistently. See also Indent style, Programming style, and especially Programming style#Spacing — Omegatron 18:39, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that in this case, most articles are not worked on by many humans, they are worked on by just a few humans, aside from fairly minor editing. What you're saying is that hundreds of thousands of articles that you will never touch should be standardized not with the editors of those articles in mind, but with the general population in mind, which is a mistake. With no standardization each article's source is in a style that is convenient for its major editors; why would we change our technology to deliberately eliminate this useful feature. Christopher Parham (talk) 21:10, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand your argument. All articles should be equally accessible to everyone. That's the whole point of wiki. We shouldn't be forming cliques of "major editors" who control certain articles.

How does whitespace (which is all this is about) have anything to do with differing subject matter, anyway? — Omegatron 20:21, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Almost daily experiences with the issues of Programming style at work, make me sensitive to the value of consistency. - Bevo 19:55, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

For those who don't perceive words quickly, having a space between the "==" markup and the actual heading content is very helpful. Also good is the space after the bullet. For those who don't need the whitespace, I would think they could read it pretty much as well with the space, although I couldn't say for sure.

The blank line after a heading does not seem so necessary to me; it is easy enough to spot a heading with or without one, as long as there is a blank line preceeding the heading.

Apparently some people are running 'bots that remove the "== heading ==" spaces; I suppose they think it is a good thing, but it makes it worse for some of us. -R. S. Shaw 05:59, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Are they?? I'm doing the exact opposite with a script. As I said before, we either need to both stop, or standardize.

(And considering that the spaces are added there by the Mediawiki software, they probably shouldn't be removed.) — Omegatron 20:21, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

• Contrast (internally has blank line after heading)

==Lyrics==

{{listen|filename=Dixie (1916).ogg|title="Dixie"|description=1916 Dixie rendition|description=1916 rendition of Dixie by the Metropolitan Mixed Chorus, with [[Frank Stanley]], [[Ada Jones]], and [[Billy Murray (singer)|Billy Murray]]|format=[[Ogg]]}}

The lyrics of "Dixie" reflect the mood of the United States in the late 1850s.

with (no blank line after heading in internal markup)

==Lyrics==
{{listen|filename=Dixie (1916).ogg|title="Dixie"|description=1916 Dixie rendition|description=1916 rendition of Dixie by the Metropolitan Mixed Chorus, with [[Frank Stanley]], [[Ada Jones]], and [[Billy Murray (singer)|Billy Murray]]|format=[[Ogg]]}}

The lyrics of "Dixie" reflect the mood of the United States in the late 1850s.

Actual article with this construction is found at Dixie (song).

Is there something in the "listen" template that causes the difference in the external formatting that results from the two alternatives? Can "listen" be changed to allow both internal markup styles to give the same external format? - Bevo 20:17, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I think that's a bug in the pipe table markup rendering. Check the source code for User:Omegatron/Sandbox/ExtraBR. Sometimes things get an extra <p><br></p> before them. — Omegatron 19:31, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I was thinking of changing {{listen}} to not use a table for visual formatting anyway... — Omegatron 20:51, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

My tests show that {{listen}} is now fixed to give the same presentation with or without the blank line. Thanks! - Bevo 20:01, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah. It's just a kludge, though. The bug should really be fixed. — Omegatron 20:22, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Special Care with Mormonism

I removed the following sentence from the section about religions, deities, and etc: "Mormonism requires special care — see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Mormonism)."

If Wikipedia will maintain a NPOV in regard to religions, there is no need to single out Mormonism as a religion that needs special care when being referenced in a Wikipedia article. -- backburner001 00:16, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I can see your point about the wording, but shouldn't it be mentioned that there is a rather extensive set of guidelines for Mormonism? Dforest 05:12, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Bold article titles

I have boldly went and mentioned the normal practice of putting alternative article titles in bold: this is particularly important when the alternatives link to an article by a redirect, but as the River Plate demonstrates it can also be appropriate when the link is by a disambiguation page....dave souza: talk 21:45, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Language indicator for external links

There is a discussion going on Template talk:Languageicon about what style the language indicator should be. I suppose there may also be room to debate whether template is even desireable. -- Netoholic @ 22:53, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Colon Spaces

In the section dealing with colons, there is an example given to show that there should not be a space before a colon. In looking at the example, I do not see any use of a colon. Is this a typographical error? It seems confusing as written 12.17.140.8 11:45, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

The colon is after the word 'example'. It's not entirely clear where the example starts, though. Mark^{your words} 12:15, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

It originally had two examples but they were deleted for the current version, which is amusing but not clear in its demonstration.

Captions

I wonder if some style guides for captions should be made more explicit, e.g.:

• Dates should be fully wikified (contrary to the style example currently given)
• Caption should not be all in italic, as is common with journal captions (some wikipedia captions are in all italic - tends to make less easy to read, problem with book titles etc.)
• in the first picture caption in an article, if words in the caption exactly match the article's title, then those words should be in bold ? -- not sure if this is true??

All comments welcome, mervyn 19:34, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Second point - no problem with book titles, just enclose them with '' as normal, and the title is no longer italic. This is (I belive) the accepted style, and is used e.g. when italicising a quote from a text with italics in original.

Third point - I would guess that the default is no bolding, because leading pictures are usually right-aligned and therefore occurs later in the page than the start of the article (despite being first in the source).

SeventyThree^(Talk) 04:32, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

re your second point, do you mean that you think correct style is to be in italics -- I was trying to say that I thought this was incorrect, though often found. re your third point, I was trying to say (incoherent again!) that I thought it would be good style if the first pic caption word was bolded in addition to the intro word being bolded. An example is at Charles Dickens and I think it makes for a crisp presentation, but doesn't seem a widely used style. mervyn 16:43, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Italics - I was mainly pointing out that there isn't a problem with double-italics or somesuch. I don't know what the 'right' answer is, but I agree with you that all italic captions can be difficult to read. I find the box round captions (in the skin I'm using) is enough to distinguish the caption from the rest of the text, so I don't italicise captions I make.

Bolding - after looking at Charles Dickens, I agree with you here. The bolding looks good! SeventyThree^(Talk) 06:35, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Currency

I have moved this from the WP:NOT page as I have come to realise it would be better suited to this policy.

I have come across a problem that occurs on a few articles and that is the quoting of multiple currencies in an example of a price. An example would be a previous incarnation of the Warhammer 40,000 article which at one point had USD, GBP and Euro listed for each price. Would it not be advantageous to have a section in this policy regarding this? In my opinion, if a price must be quoted as an example, it should be in the currency that is most likely in line with the form of English (ie US English, USD. British English, GBP). There could be exceptions such as historical comparisons - ie people can include an old currency value and include a new currency value (as in present day an example being 1000GBP from 1900 being ~100,000GBP now (figures made up).-Localzuk ^(talk) 18:34, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I would suggest using local currency wherever possible. Jimp 16:15, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I have recently added the section to the article. -Localzuk ^(talk) 16:51, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

External links embedded in text

I have been coming across more external links embedded in the text of articles not as a numbered note, but linking a large swath of text:

It is extremely unlikely that Anne would have been over thirty at the time of her marriage, because such an age was considered unhealthy for a first-time mother. There is, however, a letter from Anne in about 1514 which, some people believe, suggests she was a teenager when she wrote it.

I think its a bad idea. External links should be at the end of articles or as embedded footnotes in parentheses:

It is extremely unlikely that Anne would have been over thirty at the time of her marriage, because such an age was considered unhealthy for a first-time mother. There is, however, a letter from Anne from about 1514 which, some people believe, suggests she was a teenager when she wrote it. [[4]

What do you think?

--Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 00:57, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

WP:CITE says both embedded footnotes and full references are required.

--William Allen Simpson 03:52, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure which of the two choices you are endorsing, or are you saying both should be treated equal? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 06:11, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, in fact, I'd go a step further and use a footnote for the external link (so that the number goes to the footnote). Big chunks of text as external link = badness. Neonumbers 11:33, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Proposed rule

• External links should not appear embedded as words or as large swaths of text but as a footnote at the end of the sentence after the period

Improper: There is, however, a letter from Anne in about 1514 which, some people believe, suggests she was a teenager when she wrote it.

Proper: There is, however, a letter from Anne in about 1514 which, some people believe, suggests she was a teenager when she wrote it. [5]

Location wikilinks

Should there be any rule regarding linking to London, Ontario, Canada versus London, Ontario, Canada? Discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Location Format. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-02-09 10:27Z

The latter.

• The current guidelines at WP:MOS-L say: "For example, "Rome, Italy" rather than "[[Rome, Italy|Rome]], [[Italy]]", and...."

• The current guidelines at WP:CONTEXT say: "Go for the more specific reference. Instead of linking individual words, e.g. Latin phrases, consider linking the more detailed concept: Latin phrases."

--William Allen Simpson 03:39, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Bold font

Bolding by the writer is reserved for the title of the article when it is repeated in the first sentence of the article. Bolding should not be used for emphasis. Italics should be used for emphasis.

This was added without discussion. It is third person. It is incorrect.

Italics are not used for emphasis, they are used for publication citations, and to indicate words as words, or words in other languages. These uses are already detailed in this MoS.

Bold is frequently used for emphasis — in journalism, legal briefs and opinions, and technical publications.

I don't believe this should be added without a thorough citation from multiple manual of style sources.

--William Allen Simpson 05:50, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Above says: "Italics are not used for emphasis, they are used for publication citations, and to indicate words as words, or words in other languages. These uses are already detailed in this MoS." (emphasis added)

So does this mean I am misinterpreting this rule from MoS under italics: "Editors mainly use italics to emphasize certain words. They also use them in these other cases." (emphasis added) Can someone knowledgeable explain? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 11:54, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Italics are used for emphasis and should be used sparingly.

Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., 7.49: Italics for emphasis. Good writers use italics for emphasis only as an occasional adjunct to efficient sentence structure. Overused, italics quickly lose their force. Seldom should as much as a sentence be italicized for emphasis, and never a whole passage. In the first example below, the last three words, though clearly emphatic, do not require italics because of their commanding position in the sentence.

The damaging evidence was offered not by the arresting officer, not by the injured plaintiff, but by the boy's own mother.

In the following examples, the emphasis would be lost without the italics.

Let us dwell for a moment on the idea of conscious participation.

How do we learn to think in terms if wholes? —Wayward ^Talk 20:23, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Suggested rules

• Bold is reserved for the article title when repeated in the first sentence
• Bold is reserved for the variations on the person's name (see E.E. Cummings)
• Bold is reserved for headings and subheadings
• Bold is not to be used for emphasis, italics are to be used sparingly for emphasis

--Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 08:04, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Capitalization of unusual proper names

There are recently many new proper names being introduced into the language that are "officially" spelled with an inital lowercase letter. Of course, Wikipedia does not permit initial capitals in the titles of articles, so the titles of these articles are contrary to the "official" spelling, but anything goes in the body of articles. There is a very old rule of written English that sentences have to being with a capital letter. Many style guides even require that sentence-initial numbers must be written out in words, even if they would elsewhere be written using numerals. The reason for this is clear—finding sentence boundaries is important to scanning, which is an essential part of reading, and if sentences don't begin with capital letters, they are harder to find. I can't seem to find any style guides that rule specifically on this topic—these kinds of names are so new—but I have seen in the Wall Street Journal e.g. sentences begin with "IPod" rather than "iPod". To my mind, we would be best off respecting the norms of written English rather than the trendy typographical whims of the modern marketer. Can anyone cite a style guide that rules on this issue either way? Nohat 09:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Its a tough one. I have been going through conservative business publications to see how they handle odd company names. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 19:43, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

IMHO we should avoid starting sentences with these words altogether, since either way it looks odd. Use 'Sales of the iPod...' rather than 'IPod/iPod sales...'. Incidentally, the Economist style guide section on the fairly analogous 'e-expressions' says they are lower case except when beginning a sentence.[6] Mark^{your words} 20:22, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree, clever rewording can eliminate almost every violation. We still have to decide about usage such as all capitals: NUCOR (where it is not a true acronym); and other variations such as: BioPharma. Who wants first swing at this tough one? Should we eliminate mid-capitalization? We have the Hoovers vs the Economist style. Fill in your opinions below. Maybe we can settle this in just a few days. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 20:48, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I remember reading an extensive discussion of this issue somewhere on Wikipedia. Can't remember if it was here or elsewhere though. But then again, virtually every topic that gets discussed here has already been discussed 10 times before in the archives. Oh well. I can't wait for MediaWiki 2.0! Kaldari 21:39, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

ALL CAPITALS (but not a true acronym)

Reduce to title case. I think they look best this way, and business publications have a mixed record on which to use.

MidCapitals

Keep I don't think they look bad, and most business publications keep them. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 20:48, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, neither of these are quite what I was looking for: I have now been reverted on both iPod and iTunes on this matter, and I think we need to make a project-wide decision on whether to allow this. (I think we strictly should only allow sentences to begin with capital letters). However, on these two issues, I agree with all-caps names being reduced to title case except where the capitals are actually an acronym, and with keeping InterCaps. There was a long discussion on Talk:Lego about this. I think a balance between respecting the official spellings and obeying the norms of written English warranted. I would suggest wording in the MoS of the following sort:

For business and other names that have an "official" spelling which is not normal title case, use the following treatment:

• ALL CAPITALS: If a name is "officially" represented in all capitals, and the name is not an acronym—that is, each letter doesn't officialy stand for a separate word—then the names should be reduced to title case—only the first letter should be capitalized. Other letters should be lowercase. Exception: in the article concerning the name, there should be a mention and example of the "official" spelling. Examples: Lego, Beer Nuts, but IBM, NATO, AIDS.
• InterCaps: Where a name is a formed by compounding other words or morphemes, and where the "official" representation has capitalized the compound parts, even though there is no preceding space, the internal capitals should be maintained. Examples: WordPerfect, TiVo, GameCube.
• lowercase initials: Where a name is "officially" spelled with an initial lowercase letter, the initial lowercase should be maintained. However, as with all words that are not normally spelled with an initial capital letter, they should be capitalized when they begin a sentence. Examples: iPod, eBay, craigslist, but "IPod is a brand name owned by Apple Computer", "EBay is a online auction site", "Craigslist is a network of online urban communities".

Do not use the trademark ™ and registered trademark ® symbols, except when quoting.

Nohat 21:53, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Aha! There is Wikipedia:Manual of Style (trademarks). This discussion should be continued at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (trademarks). Nohat 22:08, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Remove sections here that have been made final

Can we remove sections that are listed here when we have come to agreement on a set of rules? That way instead of blanking the page when it fills, only active discussions remain on the active talk page. What do you think? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 00:56, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Erm, I think that's called archiving... Mikker ^... 01:43, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Thats great, but I am not asking for it to be defined, I am asking for it to be implemented. The individual topics should be removed from the active page at the time each is added to the actual MoS article. It has not been done since I have been contributing. This way only open discussions appear on the talk page. Does anyone agree or disagree?

I think it's pretty standard practice. If you see anythng here that needs archiving, why not go ahead and move it? There's a link to the archives at the top of the page. Jimp 15:50, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Italics

The italics section has become pretty big. Anyone else think it should become its own topic? It should be Wikipedia:Manual of Style (italics). I am going to move it and leave a summary at main MoS page. It can always be reverted. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 08:19, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Emphasis

Suggested rules:

• ALL CAPS should not be used for emphasis
• Bold should not be used for emphasis
• "Quotation marks" should not be used for emphasis but to show that the exact word used is correct
• Italics should be used sparingly for emphasis

Should we standardize on bold or italics for emphasis or have a laissez-faire attitude? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 07:47, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Emphasis -> italics. PizzaMargherita 18:07, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I vote for italics. Ground Zero | t 18:11, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Your proposed rules are unnecessary, except perhaps for "use italics, not bold, for emphasis." We have to assume a certain baseline level of common ground here among editors; certainly a working knowledge of the English language is one such assumption—we don't specify the rules of English grammar in the Manual of Style, exhorting editors, for instance, to "make verbs agree with their subjects". A working knowledge of the basic rules of typesetting should also be assumed. Italics are used for emphasis. Boldface is used only for specialized purposes, such as for marking a topic or for providing for an additional binary dimension of data in a table. The only case of boldface ever being used for emphasis is when the writer wants to essentially scream at the reader, laying on an additional layer of emphasis for which italics is insufficient: "I will not be ignored!" In an encyclopedia, we never have a use case for the writer screaming at the reader (since the "writer" should be fading into the background as much as possible), so boldface is never to be used for emphasis.

Your other rules are just exhorting editors to not be ignorant of typesetting rules they are apparently already ignorant of. Edit their errors, and if they persist, leave a note on their talk pages explaining their errors. If they continue, adding a rule to the MoS will be no more helpful than adding a rule on subject-verb agreement will be for editors who don't speak English well. --TreyHarris 01:36, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

• You are confusing a styleguide with a grammarguide. Lets please stay on topic and discuss style. The point of a style guide is to set the rules out ahead of time, so we don't have to have endless debate each time the question comes up again. If we don't select a standard style then the look and feel of the completed work is not consistant. The Manual of Style does not have to be difficult to navigate anymore than a 1M entry encyclopedia called Wikipedia would be difficult. When a page gets too big and takes to much time to load, split it into its own entry and leave a link on the main page. It works for every other long entry. And I have no problem searching the Chicago manual of style to see how they do it. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 21:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Is there a rule for naming places outside the U.S. using the form "Venice, Italy" ?

I often see places outside the U.S. mentioned as e.g. "Venice, Italy" or "Paris, France". I am aware that this usage is perfectly correct within the U.S., but as far as I know it is not used anywhere else. When used for, say, European places, it strikes the reader as comical at best, but often even as silly or slightly insulting. Sorry for explaining the obvious, but somebody who uses that form might be perceived as perhaps a little illiterate or provincial, as one would generally expect people to know that Venice is in Italy, Paris is in France, etc.; also, what is appropriate for a country with fifty individual states and probably a similar number of places named "Jefferson" is not appropriate for a sovereign nation with a capital named "Paris" or a world-famous city named "Venezia". In short, most readers would be annoyed to find that usage in an encyclopedia. Do we have a policy, recommendation or similar for this? 145.254.36.150 15:21, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I think that the general rule-of-thumb is not to add the region/country for places outside of USA and Canada unless it is necessary for disambiguation. However, within USA, and possibly Canada, a placename is often felt to be incomplete without this added information. --Gareth Hughes 16:15, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Most stylebooks (such as the AP Stylebook) contain a list of major cities that can stand alone in datelines, such as London or Tokyo; you will not usually find "Paris, France" in an AP news report. Stylebooks are usually written with a nation-specific audience in mind, but there are obviously a lot of places that do not require clarification. Disambiguation is important, of course, but I would suspect that the "New York" on the east coast of the USA would never need a modifier to distinguish it from the area of the same name in North Tyneside (which, conversely, would need to be explained). However, locations other than major cities will generally need a country reference after them. ProhibitOnions 12:24, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Isn't it simple enough? As ProhibitOnions indicates; what needs disambiguation, disambiguate; & what doesn't, don't. What's the deal with inside verses outside the US? Wikipedia is not, as far as I'm aware, by Americans & for Americans. Jimp 00:31, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

The United States has a fairly regular scheme of state, county, and local governments, and many recurring placenames. For those reasons it makes sense to have a consistent style for cities in the U.S. -Will Beback 00:42, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Then we'll often find that we need to disambiguate. I see your point, however, as ProhibitOnions points out, no qualifier should be required for a place like New York. Nor, I'd argue, need anything be added to such well-known place names as Boston, Chicago, Ottowa, etc. Instead of prescribing one style for U.S. (or U.S. & Canadian) place names and another style for other place names, why not recomend disambiguation if and only if necessary? Jimp 03:36, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

As long as people link to the correct city, I don't think disambiguation in the text is necessary. It also becomes very complicated in historical contexts, when a city has belonged to different countries at different times. Avoiding to force editors to specify the country name could help to avoid edit wars (look at Gdansk and Frombork or Copernicus if you want a taste of the German-Polish edit wars over names and the status of Royal Prussia). Kusma (討論) 03:56, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

This issue has been repeatedly debated (and voted on) numerous times within the past two years at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names). Last time I checked, the consensus was to remain with the American convention of using city, state, because (1) this is how Americans (like me) are accustomed to referring to distant cities; (2) we already have about 30,000 articles whose titles are in this format; and (3) it minimizes silly debates about which Portland is more important. The problem is that there are literally hundreds of small and midsize cities in the United States that happen to share the same name. There are also thousands of neighborhoods whose name happens to be the name of some city somewhere. --Coolcaesar 03:58, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to have quoted New York as an example; the City, State convention is perfectly fine for the U.S., including its cities that might otherwise stand alone in datelines, as there are no duplications if we use it; there are redirects in most cases from the city names by themselves. As has been mentioned, there has already been a lot of discussion on this issue, and the question raised pertained to cities outside the U.S. ProhibitOnions 10:08, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

(heavy sigh) This is a tired topic, not appropriate to this MoS. Instead, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places), Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names), and Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context: "Go for the more specific reference. Instead of linking individual words...." If the context is the word "Venice" followed by the word "Italy", then link to Venice, Italy.

--William Allen Simpson 17:19, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Right-facing portraits

It says under the Pictures section that most pictures should be on the right of the page near the top, except for right-facing portraits of people. Is it acceptable to flip a right-facing portrait instead of putting it on the left?

Cdmarcus 00:08, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Not if they're wearing a written-on T-shirt. Unless it says "AMBULANCE", in which case it's acceptable, but only if it's all uppercase. I think we should put this in the MoS. PizzaMargherita 01:03, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I assume "POLICE" and "FIRE DEPARTMENT" will also be acceptable. But what about pictures of that infamous mirror-writer, Leonardo da Vinci, in his favourite T-shirt? -- Puffball 10:02, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Disposition of the Wikipedia Manual of Style

From recent commentary here and at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), it seems that there may not be consensus on two points which are pretty vital to the purpose and disposition of the Manual of Style (both this page and all the related MoS pages):

1. Should the Wikipedia Manual of Style be enforceable in article editing disputes?
2. Should the Wikipedia Manual of Style strive to be a complete manual of style, to rival published manuals of style?

Perhaps we should have a straw poll soon about these questions. My take is that the answer to #1, enforceability, should be "yes", but the current state of the MoS, with its contradictions and great differentials in amount of detail and relevance from section to section, makes it the rational course for many editors to ignore the MoS in some cases. I think we should strive to fix these shortcomings, so that the MoS can be enforceable as a guideline. (Remember the difference between guideline and policy: policies are more inviolate than guidelines, but both are actionable.)

I think the answer to #2, completeness, should be "no". Many editors have complained that the sprawl that is already the MoS is impossible to keep tabs on if you want to do anything else in the encyclopedia. I think this is getting to be true, and recent expansions of this page and associated MoS pages have only worsened the problem. I think this MoS should strive for minimalism, taking up matters of actual ongoing dispute and cases where Wikipedia has a need for special-purpose guidelines (for example, naming conventions, linking, formatting, etc.). It should not take up matters where other style guides are in agreement, or where the rules of English grammar and typesetting are undisputed. It should also allow for editor's choice in most matters that are more presentation than content.

I would like to start discussion on these points, perhaps moving to a straw poll in a few days to try to resolve them. I will create two sections below so that the two questions can be dealt with separately. If we can get different viewpoints, that will help to determine if there is already rough consensus, and if not, what the options in the poll should be. --TreyHarris 02:31, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I think that both of your points are valid ones, but I am not sure if it will be possible to achieve complete agreement on style issues unless the English Wikipedia is forked — one for American English and one for Commonwealth English. There are simply too many differences between the various English dialects to have one style guide that will be satisfactory for all. Standardizing on American English makes the English WP look too American (look at the perennial U.S. v. US debate), standardizing on British English makes it look too British (Americans like me find "honour," "cheque," "trade-mark" and "trading estate" to be so quaint), and standardizing on neither looks just weird (as in the massive ongoing mess with regard to the placement of punctuation and quotation marks). I think PizzaMargherita's proposal for dynamic dialect display a while back was a good idea but I am not sure if it can be implemented in an efficient fashion in the MediaWiki software. --Coolcaesar 04:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I think the concern is valid, but overstated, if the desire is to write a minimal MoS rather than a complete one. The number of places Wikipedia cares about standardizing where American versus Commonwealth English diverge is not really that large. The problem can look to be larger than it is, though. Since most of us work only with the English we're familiar with, it's tempting to ascribe any style guidance that we're not familiar with to being from "that other English."

For instance, there was a rather huge debate a couple years ago over whether headings should be written in title case or sentence case. Many people, I'm tempted to say most of those in the dispute, believed that this was an American/Commonwealth issue—even though there were people on both sides who were claiming that the other way was American. It was only after we documented dozens of cases of all four possibilities (American sentence case, American title case, Commonwealth sentence case, Commonwealth title case) did people realize that it wasn't a dialect issue at all (which by long-standing tradition should not be standardized) but a stylistic one (which we can standardize), which allowed us to settle on standardizing on sentence case.

But if the consensus is to write a complete style guide, you're probably correct—it would be easier just to fork everything into the American and Commonwealth Manuals of Style. I think that's another reason to avoid going in that direction. --TreyHarris 04:51, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I think forking WP over varieties of English is overkill and out of the question. I'm pretty sure the proposal Coolcaesar refers to is not too difficult to implement and not a resource hog. By the way, Coolcaesar, your vote is missing! :-) Once enough editors register their interest, we can look deeper into the details of the implementation. Thanks. I'll be back with some comments on the other points. PizzaMargherita 07:20, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

With the database problems of the past few days, I have no idea how some 60 edits were applied to this talk. Generally, I don't bother responding again until folks have had at least a day to think about it. I agree with Trey that we have an over-specification problem here. Especially where the recent proposals for this MoS contradict other pages at Italic type and Bold (currently a redirect to Emphasis (typography), for those of you who think bold is not used for emphasis).

--William Allen Simpson 22:41, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Should the MoS be enforceable?

Support

1. weak support — note the use of bold — and italics — given that this MoS frequently describes differences between regional usage, and advises to leave them alone! --William Allen Simpson 22:41, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Oppose

1. oppose. Non-professional editors won't memorize and adhere to a style guide; only publishing professionals are aware of the intracacies and importance of a house style. Also, the U.K. contingent is particularly unyielding in insisting that their national conventions be the rule; I don't want to see a style guide that's grounds for solving disputes when I know it's going to wind up full of unfamilar (to U.S. readers) U.K. style and typographical conventions. I would support a very small core policy on coding or special characters that might interact very badly with MediaWiki software (not sure what those would be), but that's about it. DavidH 00:20, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
2. Oppose on the grounds of agreement with the intro to WP:MOS: The following rules do not claim to be the last word on Wikipedia style and supporting this would be a contradiction to the intro and not allow for variation of the MOS on a per article basis. It also doesn't make sense to enforce the MOS when the 2nd question of "Should the MoS be a complete style guide?" is posed indicating that it's not. Cburnett 00:32, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Should the MoS be a complete style guide?

Support

1. Support for only the reason that I don't see why it shouldn't. Just like WP won't ever be finished doesn't mean we shouldn't give it (WP & MoS) a go and see how complete it gets. I guess I support because I don't want the opposite to happen: stuff not added for fear of making it complete. Cburnett 00:32, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
2. If anyone wants to embark on that monolithic task, more power to them. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 07:09, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Oppose

1. strong oppose — when would such a thing ever be finished? --William Allen Simpson 22:41, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
2. Oppose — Such a product would belong in Wikibooks, not in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Manual of Style should be a style guide for the special issues that come up here. --TreyHarris 07:21, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Use of imperatives

Does the Manual of Style say anything about the use of imperatives in articles? For example, the article earwax states:

Never irrigate the ear if the eardrum is not known to be intact, because irrigation with a ruptured eardrum may cause ear infection or acoustic trauma. Never irrigate if the ears have burning, bleeding, pus discharge, or pain, without calling a doctor first. Never irrigate the ear with a jet irrigator designed for cleaning teeth (such as a WaterPik) because the force of the irrigation may damage the eardrum.

All those "Never" statements seem to amount to medical advice and imply that Wikipedia is the authority telling the reader what not to do. I believe they should be restated in a non-imperative form, such as "It is advised never to irrigate the ear if the eardrum is not known to be intact." However it seems it would be difficult to read if all those statements were rephrased in that way.

I would like to hear your suggestions about this. Is it necessary to explicitly proscribe the use of imperatives in articles? In my opinion, they should be avoided in most cases. --Dforest 16:06, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I think there should probably be a cleanup template along the lines of "this article contains instructions or advice, and needs to be cleaned up to meet encyclopedia standards" or some such; I've also noticed many articles like this (often on technical subjects where they read like an instruction manual). I don't think the MoS needs to injuct against imperatives; they're a content issue, not a stylistic one. --TreyHarris 04:28, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

This comes under the spirit, if not the letter, of Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Avoid_the_second_person. Mark^{your words} 10:35, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

s after apostrophe in possessives of words ending in s

Should there be an s after the apostrophe in possessives ending in s?

Example:
The genome project would not be the same without Francis Collins' contributions. or
The genome project would not be the same without Francis Collins's contributions.

Please drop a note on my talk page if you reply, as I may forget to check back here.

Thanks,
Wulf 20:33, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

The MOS (helpfully) says: "Possessives of singular nouns ending in s may be formed with or without an additional s. Either form is generally acceptable within Wikipedia. However, if either form is much more common for a particular word or phrase, follow that form, such as with "Achilles' heel"." Rmhermen 21:11, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Both styles are acceptable. Standard practice has been 's, since it conforms both to standard pronunciation and the rule for forming the possessive. Exceptions would be for words and names ending in unpronounced s and for a name of two or more syllables ending in an eez sound. —Wayward ^Talk 21:40, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

?? I thought standard English rules were any noun that ends in an 's' has its possessive formed by adding a "'" after the "s". Examples: Jones, Jones' blanket ; dogs, dogs' tails. Has standard English changed in some way? Thanks Hmains 20:21, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

No, that's incorrect—the rule is actually quite complicated. The important thing to know is that this is not an orthographic rule—that is, the rule is not based on what letters are on the written page. You can't say something as simple as, "if the word ends in s, add an apostrophe, otherwise add an apostrophe plus s". Rather, the rule is a morphological one—based on word forms. You write based on what people say, not the other way around.

The plural possessive of regular singular verbs is sounded the same as the plural, and is written with a terminal apostrophe, so the dogs' tails is correct as you said. But the rule for writing the singular possessive of words ending in s or z sounds depends on how the possessive is pronounced. If the possessive is silent, then it should be written with just a terminal apostrophe, as in Jones' opinion. If the possessive is pronounced, then it should be written with 's, as in Harris's opinion or the bass's amplifier. (As someone with the last name of Harris, I can testify that the pronunciation Harris' opinion is definitely incorrect, and the writing should follow the pronunciation.)

Usually, you can deduce whether the possessive is pronounced or not by whether the singular form ends voiced (that is, with a z sound) or unvoiced (with an s sound). Jones ends voiced, so we get Jones' opinion. Harris is unvoiced, so we get Harris's opinion. Unfortunately, this rule is not inviolate: in Jesus' name is most common, even though Jesus ends unvoiced.

So basically, you just have to sound it out, and if there's an extra iz sound attached, then you write it apostrophe plus s, if there's not, you write it just with an apostrophe. This is complicated by the fact that not everyone says it the same in every case; some people would say Jones's opinion, not Jones' opinion. (I haven't done any statistical analysis to verify this, but my intuition is that you'll do better, not knowing whether the possessive of a given word is pronounced or not, to assume that it is, and write apostrophe plus s.)

As far as the Wikipedia is concerned, the most important thing is that within a single article that there be consistency with the use of the possessive form for a given word. For people, if there is evidence as to how the person pronounces the possessive of his or her own name, that form should be used. In any case, one shouldn't go around "fixing" apostrophe plus s to just apostrophe or vice versa without good reason to do so. (Apologies for the long-winded answer; linguists just can't shut up when talking about stuff like this. ;-) --TreyHarris 22:22, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

History Articles

Recently I submitted a history article to FAC, and resulted in only recieving disputes over what the content of a history article should be. The problem is, that as far as I can see we have very little guidence on what should and should not make up a history article.

Some of the issues raised on the FAC were,

• Should all History articles aim to have a Historiography section?
• Should History articles cover Current Events as well as Historticaly Settled ones?
• How to ballence 'comprehensive' with 'consice' when covering what can be a wide scope?

I think we're well in need of a Wikipedia:Manual of Style (history) to adress these issues and any others. --Barberio 10:56, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

I think we need to better define what we're talking about. Are we referring specifically to articles of the type "History of XXXX", or to all articles with historical subjects? The first type tends to follow a certain structure; the second is so varied that I can't see a single guideline being meaningful (not to mention the fact that, for specific types of historical articles, guidelines exist under the purview of various WikiProjects). —Kirill Lokshin 16:50, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

This would be for "History of XXXX" articles. (Actualy, how we name them should be a topic for discussion. 'History of XXXX'? 'XXXX in History'? 'Historical uses of XXXX'?) --Barberio 10:27, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Those are really questions for Wikipedia:WikiProject History. Mark^{your words} 19:04, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

That's not a particularly active project, in my experience; posting a question there is likely to be as helpful as a message in a bottle. —Kirill Lokshin 19:07, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

At the moment Wikipedia:WikiProject History simply links off to the manual of style. Wikipedia:WikiProject History was originaly Wikipedia:History standards, and I assume originaly intended as a style document, and currently it has a grand total of two participents. I think History as a subject is far to wide of scope for a WikiProject to be the only source of style and content guidence. As with Biography writing, History writing needs its own style guide. --Barberio 10:30, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

The solution is to revive the Wikiproject, not to ignore it. The content of history articles is something that people interested in history articles should discuss, not people interested in colons (which is all you'll get here). Mark^{your words} 12:18, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I can see a lot of problems with this idea. For example, should history of rugby union be formatted as a history project article or as a Wikipedia:WikiProject Rugby union? Also a global history project, which does more than lay out an high level description, cuts across other more specific areas were there is active participation in a project see Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history as an example. --Philip Baird Shearer 12:32, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Is there any reason why seperate history projects should continue to have to re-invent the wheel, when a central guideline for all can give the general guidelines. Individual projects should decide for themselves if they need to make special exceptions.

The argument you give against Wikipedia:Manual of Style (history) could also have been given against Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies). Since the Biograph guidelines are usefull, I think History ones would be too.

This also adresses the current problems that there are no clear guidelines for what can constitute a 'History of' Featured Article. As I mentioned, there no clarity as to if Historiography should be a requirement, and if current events should be included. These are both general and global issues that should be adressed as an issue in the Manual of Style guideline, not as a WikiProject. --Barberio 11:29, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

I'll point out that Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) addresses questions of style and formatting, not content. If you create content guidelines that do not match current practice, they are likely to be ignored; and, given the lack of any top-level coordination in this field (WikiProject History is dead, at least as a editorial group), the best place to find out about current practice is via the appropriate second-tier WikiProjects. —Kirill Lokshin 14:25, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Precedence of national varieties rules

I have added the qualifier:

The following guidelines are roughly in order; guidelines earlier in this list will usually take precedence over guidelines later.

This came out of a question I got on #wikipedia noting that the rules appeared to conflict with one another. I thought it was pretty clear that they should be read in order, or from most-specific to least (which happens to be roughly the order they're already in), but apparently there was confusion on the point. I think this should be non-controversial. --TreyHarris 10:57, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

The national varieties rules are a complete mess of arbitrary kludges, no wonder people are confused. I actually have another one to add: when a dialect has a choice between its localised version and the version that the rest of the world is using, the latter should be used. PizzaMargherita 11:05, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Interesting. So you would say to use "football" instead of "soccer", even in a distinctly American article? --TreyHarris 11:10, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, it depends how deep in the list of kludges we want to put it, doesn't it? What a mess.

Anyway, I don't think "football" is an appropriate example here. I was thinking more in terms of Gray/Grey. PizzaMargherita 11:18, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I also think that your "qualifier" is too vague and doesn't make the mud any clearer. IMHO "roughly" and "usually" should be dropped. PizzaMargherita 12:07, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I tend to agree. Either it's a hierarchy with the most important rules first or it isn't. Roughly and usually sound a bit like weasel words; of course, this raises the issue of whether rules are even called for. ProhibitOnions 12:16, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the stricture against weasel words applies in the guideline space—Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines itself uses, "sometimes", "generally", and "usually". Do you really want to start a dispute over the exact ordering of these rules? Because if the words "roughly" and "usually" are removed, we're going to have to decide on an exact order. (I'm not 100% happy with the current order if we insist on preciseness here, and I already know from previous comments that we're not going to exactly agree on that new order.) --TreyHarris 14:40, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

No, my point was the exact opposite. ProhibitOnions 15:20, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry.... When PizzaMargherita said, 'IMHO "roughly" and "usually" should be dropped', and you said 'I tend to agree", you weren't agreeing with me, right? I think you need to be a little bit more verbose to help me to understand your point. --TreyHarris 17:10, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I didn't make myself particularly clear, sorry. I'm not sure that a list of points, from most to least important, is necessarily the best way to present this information; it consists of one broad rule, several guidelines, some suggestions and a couple of helpful hints; the use of "roughly" and "usually" imply that this is intellectually less than rigorous. I think it might be better to reduce the number of points and combine several things mentioned here, for example:

• Whenever possible, write for a international audience. That's who reads Wikipedia. Use vocabulary and phrasing that will be understood by readers outside the context of the article. Never assume readers understand jargon, or omit country references.

• Strive for consistency. While Wikipedia is agnostic as to national or other spelling, punctuation, or vocabulary preferences, articles themselves should be written in a single style to avoid jarring the reader. Articles that focus on a topic specific to a particular English-speaking country should generally conform to the spelling of that country; US-British treaties usually use British spelling by convention and articles about them should probably follow. However, proper names always retain their original spellings, for example, United States Department of Defense and Australian Defence Force.

• Article names should reflect widespread use. Redirects should accommodate other title variants, as with Artefact and Artifact, or if possible and reasonable, a neutral word might be chosen as with Glasses. Choose a word that does not have multiple spellings if there are synonyms that are otherwise equally suitable. In extreme cases of conflicting names, a contrived substitute (such as fixed-wing aircraft) is acceptable.

Now, I'm not suggesting that these examples are necessarily the best way of phrasing these points, and you may think that they are better reorganized some other way. (I do, however, think that "Whenever possible, write for a international audience" is an important point that should be made.) But reducing the number of points to three with an overarching principle for each makes them easier to remember, and we don't have to worry about adding a hierarchy. Regards, ProhibitOnions 18:34, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Did I mention that there is a solution to all this? PizzaMargherita 19:40, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

As soon as it goes into effect, I'll be happy to change the section to fit. What is the ETA for it getting installed on en? --TreyHarris 20:32, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Hopefully never. It's not a very good solution to anything, except maybe making the markup impossible to read. — Omegatron 21:40, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, then, it seems we need to strive to make these rules workable assuming it's not going to be installed, unless and until there's a firm ETA. --TreyHarris 22:16, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Your request for "a firm ETA" sounds pretextuous. First of all, even if there was an ETA, as you point out, it wouldn't make the current rules any less ambiguous and cumbersome, and we would need to put up with them until the proposal is implemented. Second, you know very well that there can be no ETA without a consensus. I find it very unfortunate that people who oppose the proposal don't bother reading it properly (if at all) and leave a drive-by "oppose", producing arguments that have been addressed in the proposal itself. My hopes to engage the opposition in a discussion, as you can see in the discussion section, are constantly and invariably shattered.

Anyway, I'm glad you admit that the current rules are not workable. What is your solution to this problem? PizzaMargherita 18:14, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Changes to Cite.

I'd like to propose a few style changes to the output of the <ref> and <reference> tags used for references, footnotes and citations.

An example of how it looks now:

AIDS is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Most researchers believe that HIV originated in sub-Saharan Africa ; it is now a global epidemic. Some authorities estimate that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized on December 1, 1981, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history.

References

An example of how I think it should look:

AIDS is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)¹.

Most researchers believe that HIV originated in sub-Saharan Africa²; it is now a global epidemic. Some authorities³ estimate that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized on December 1, 1981, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history¹.

References

1. ^{a b} Marx, J. L. New disease baffles medical community. Science. 1982;217(4560):618-621.

2. New York Times. January 2010 issue, page 16

3. UNAIDS

Proposed changes:

1. No brackets around the in text ref numbers. It's visually cleaner without them, and the brackets don't serve a purpose that I can see.
2. Regarding multiple links to a single note, for subsequent <ref>s to the same <reference> line (as in the note after "history" in the text) it should only be nessessary to put "<ref="name">" and not "<ref="name">something random that doesn't display</ref>". (Is there a use for the text within the <ref> tags on subsequent links to the same reference?)
3. No carats for backlinks. Just link from the number, or if there is more than one backlink, link from the letters.
4. No italics for the lettered backlinks. Plain text is easier to read in small font sizes.
5. Re. reference #2, if there is only one backlink from the reference don't display a letter. (Note: this proposal (#5) has now been implemented)

Thoughts, anyone? Dv82matt 16:01, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Note that for your problem #2, I believe you just need <ref name="name"/> (note the xml-style closing "/") in subsequents refs. As far as the styling goes, the current look was chosen for consistency with the {{ref}} {{note}} footnoting system. (Not that that makes it good, but it's a consideration.) —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 16:12, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

I also dislike the carets. Linking the numbers is a good idea. Agree with everything else, too. Looks much nicer. — Omegatron 16:21, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the reference link: I like the look of the clean link without brackets, but the brackets help make it a larger mouse target. I find that especially the number 1 takes an extra split second to aim and click, and for a computer novice or someone with a motor disfunction it could be very frustrating. That said, it doesn't actually break any accessibility guidelines that I know of, so it's a judgement call. Bracketed numbers are a common convention on the Internet and on Wikipedia (for external links). If they remain bracketed, I don't think there's a need to make them superscripts. Superscripts¹, bracketed superscripts^[2], or bracketed in-line links [3] are all acceptable to me.

Back-link location: I think the back-link should be made subordinate to the note by being at the end of it, possibly with an up-arrow to help identify its function. The row of carats or numbers at the front of the line looks like a redundant note bullet, and adding a/b links to some of the items spoils the clean alignment of the first word of each note. Example at the end of this line. ↑1

Backlink format: definitely drop the carat (^), which is a diacritical mark, an accent, not an arrow at all. Fortunately, Unicode provides us with an up-arrow (↑) which displays fine on most visual browsers.

I've also discussed this, with some more style examples, at template talk:Ref#^ revisited, template talk:Ref#^ primacy, and meta:talk:Cite/Cite.php#HTML format, and see also

• Daring Fireball: About the Footnotes
• Daring Fireball: Notes on Notes
• Joe Clark: There's no such thing as a footnote

—Michael Z. 2006-02-22 16:45 Z

Bunchofgrapes, thanks for the clarification on #2 I didn't realize you could close the tags that way. Obviously it's not a problem so I'll strike it out.

Michael Z., regarding the bracketed refrence links, you make a good point that I hadn't thought of. Certainly there's no point in sacrificing usability for a slightly cleaner look.

Regarding the backlink location, although your solution is elegant having the links at the front of the note seems more intuitive. Putting the link at the end makes it feel like a nested footnote to me, even in spite of the up arrow. That said, if your solution were adopted universally across wikipedia I could certainly live with it.

As long as we lose that carat :-) --Dv82matt 17:23, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

I prefer the current formatting. It looks clean and is easily accessible. The suggested arrow, with or without brackets, looks spindly. There is no need for an arrow to actually point up, surely. The caret is simply an icon, to set references apart from ordinary lists.

Linking the number will probably confuse people (which is why we don't generally link like this (people expect the linked word to be the name of the linked article, or something close to it)).

As for the reference link, I strongly feel that the brackets should stay. Again, it looks like an icon, instead of an oddly formatted number. -- Ec5618 17:44, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Number 1 and 2 were originally intended for accessibility, it seems to me: Brackets make the (rather small) number a much easier target to click, while, carets are a clear indication that there is a backlink, and are an element of nearly all the other systems already present on Wikipedia prior to Cite.php.

On the other hand, the letters are not generated by number of references, but my labelling the references. It relies (which makes sense) on assuming that the users will only label references that are used multiple times. I think it is the user'sresponsibility to use the system as it was intendedto be in the forst place before requiring the system to change. Circeus 17:47, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

• Footnote styling has been (hotly :-)) discussed many times in the past. FWIW, I think removing the brackets certainly makes it more visually appealing, although I can live with the current version. I agree about the carat: it is the least aesthetically pleasing arrow, and it's not intuitive to many newbies (I remember taking more than a moment to figure out what that thing was when I first came across them in ref-noted articles, many moons ago). The an-anb system, in fact, was initially used because it had a much nicer arrow; however, it didn't render properly in IE. Whether or not the backlink letters are italicized, they should probably be emboldened. ENCEPHALON 18:37, 22 February 2006 (UTC) NB. IMHO, the most aesthetically pleasing footnoting system is the {{rf}}-{{ent}}, by Paul August. See for example [7]. ENCEPHALON 18:37, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

I dislike the carets; they confuse. I also dislike the superscripting of the [1]; why can't it just be normal text (like an inline link)? (I also prefer inline links to footnotes, but thats another story...) William M. Connolley 18:47, 22 February 2006 (UTC).

In Apple's Safari 1.3, v312, a superscript character disrupts the display by putting extra space above the line in which it occurs. Makes the text look ugly. It's not a problem with Firefox and Macintosh IE, but may affect other browsers. I'd vote for inline links myself, not least because they'd make a bigger target for a mouse-click. -- Puffball 19:19, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I'm the author of Cite.

Aside from linking from the number instead of from ^ all and treating named references as anonymous references these changes can be made by changing the relevant MediaWiki messages.

I don't think the former is a good idea because that would mean manually maintaining an ordered list instead of using the standard (X)HTML facilities to do so. Modifying the code to make this possible would be very easy however, it would just require passing one more variable that would contain a number indicating the position in the list, incremented from 1.

I don't have any strong opnions on the latter, I didn't expect that people would use named references when they only needed to use them once since there's no practical benifit, but I can see how it's easier to read. That change too is easy to implement. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:54, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

As for the superscript numbers being small mouse targets, you can make them bigger by increasing the padding of the link element in CSS, without the ugly brackets. — Omegatron 20:57, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Ec5618, your point regarding descriptive links seems like a non sequitor to me for two reasons. Firstly footnotes are a special case and using a descriptive link is not really an option. Secondly a carat isn't particularily descriptive either. As for the value of carats in setting references apart from ordinary lists, references would still be easy to distinguish from lists. First in most cases they will be clearly labled. Second, the numbers (or letters) will appear as links.

Circeus, Re. only labeling references used more than once, that does make sense. My concern is that as references get added and deleted many references with only a single backlink will end up having a letter in the link. Not a big deal, but worth considering I think.

Encephalon, why do you think the backlink letters should be bold? Does it help emphasize the fact that they are links? Not disagreeing, just asking.

Puffball, I'm surprised that some browsers still have problems with superscript. Do we know how common this kind of thing is?

Omegatron, I like the idea of increasing the padding. I'm all for it, provided it works without glitching on too many browsers.

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, sorry, are you saying that linking from the number would nessessarily mean manually maintaining an ordered list, or just that you would need to modify the code to accomodate automatic numbering in this case? If it's the former then I think that nixes the idea of linking from the numbers.

Dv82matt 22:56, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Both, you can't do that with standard (X)HTML list syntax, but to be able to work around it I'd have to pass another variable indicating the list position. You can't do what you're proposing in standard (X)HTML, when you make a standard list e.g. like:

<ol><li>item</li></ol>

Then you can't control the list index character in any way (well, some ways, but that's not relevant here), the above becomes:

1. item

Working around that limitation and inserting a link where the digit is would mean scrapping standard lists alltogather and using something like:

<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">[[1]].</span><span style="margin-left: 1em">item</span>

And of course it wouldn't be semantic markup anymore if you do that since there would be no way for the user agent to know that it was dealing with a list and that it should present it as such. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:13, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, well bearing in mind that I'm certainly no coder, losing the <ol><li>item</li></ol> element doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. As for it not being semantic markup, I'm pretty sure the W3C will promptly comply with whatever schema we deem fit. :-D --Dv82matt 03:28, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Just trust me on this one, it's a horrible idea;) --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:34, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. A list should remain an HTML list, for standards compliance and accessibility. —Michael Z. 2006-02-23 15:40 Z

Okay, well I like the idea of linking from the numbers but not if it means manually maintaining an ordered list. So I guess that means linking from something else. --Dv82matt 01:27, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Real arrows

Would anyone object to changing the semantically-meaningless carats (^) to real up-arrows (↑) in the current version of Cite, and still leave open the possibility of changing the format according to the resolution of the discussion above? —Michael Z. 2006-02-23 15:45 Z

I think that was chosen because not all browsers are Unicode enabled and so it would show as a blank box for some. Rmhermen 18:11, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't using character entities (&uarr; to ↑) usually solves that? Circeus 18:14, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I think boxes or even question marks wouldn't be much worse than the circumflex. I don't think my first thought is “upwards” when I see one.

AFAICS, using character entities wouldn't make much of a difference. Another problem is that some users may simply not have a font on their system that contains arrows.—Wikipeditor

The up-arrow displays correctly on an out-of-the-box Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows 98 system. In Lynx text-only browser (in a Mac terminal window) it displays correctly when Lynx is in UTF-8 mode, and gets converted to an ASCII dash-carat (-^) when in 8-bit text mode. Does anyone know of a configuration where the up-arrow fails? —Michael Z. 2006-02-23 19:01 Z

All wikipedia pages have <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> at the top. The only problem I've ever heard dealing with browser/unicode compatibility is IE.. but I think you have to screw something up to get it there. Instructions on how to fix that error here. Also, on something way more prevalent: page histories, the → symbol is displayed whenever a specific section is edited. Thus, Unicode browser compatibility is not an issue. I say go ahead. drumguy⁸⁸⁰⁰ - speak? 21:30, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I support using real arrows. I don't know of many systems these days that would not be able to display them correctly. Kaldari 02:01, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

I used ^ originally because that's what the Note template was using, but real arrows of course are a much better idea. I've changed the default in the software, this'll presumably have to be changed manually on enwiki. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:40, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Cool. I see that this is now active. Dv82matt 05:47, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Just a thought. What about using a small supercript 'a' we already use letters if there is more than one backlink. Why not keep it consistent? --Dv82matt 01:27, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

An example of how it would look:

1. ^{a b} Marx, J. L. New disease baffles medical community. Science. 1982;217(4560):618-621.

2. ^a New York Times. January 2010 issue, page 16

3. ^a UNAIDS

Dv82matt 01:37, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't think this is ideal:

• Visually, a list looks like a list because it has a column of labels (numbers or bullets), followed by neatly aligned text. The back-links break the neat alignment of text and they look like secondary labels for the notes, but they are not.
• Functionally, each number is a label helping visually identify the note; the main purpose is to help find the note from its reference in the text. The back-link is a secondary function, subordinate to the text of one note, and it often will not be used by readers who simply click their browser's back button.
• Superscripts are used by typographers to pull note references out of the flow of text, and not for note labels. The usage here seems a bit odd.
• There is no need for numbering (lettering) an item a, when there is no b. For example, in standard Harvard referencing you only see (Smith 2005a) when there is also a 2005b.

Here's an example with back-links after the notes. Since they don't align with each other in a column, they don't present themselves as a major defining element of the list, but each as a separate element subordinate to its note. I've used non-breaking spaces to make each one a bigger mouse target.

1. Great, El Borbah The (2006). New-fangled back-links. Newtown: Innovation. ↑ 
2. Verne, Jules (2006). Citations start with authors name: just like in virtually all publications. City of the Future: Long-named Publisher for Line-Wrapping. ↑ 
3. Who, Joe (2006). Back-links are visually subordinate to the note's content. Newtown: Innovation. ↑a ↑b

—Michael Z. 2006-02-24 16:49 Z

I do like the look. Another reason for the arrow to be at the back of the note rather than the front is to prevent an ugly column of arrows from forming when there are multiple notes.

I still think it's more intuitive to have the backlink at the front but maybe thats just me. Anyway since linking to the number itself is problematic your alternative seems reasonable. I say we go for it. --Dv82matt 17:59, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

There is a case to be made for Dv82's caret-free references with backlinks residing in alphabets (they look good!). However, the problem with it IMO is the use of the alphabets where they aren't actually indicated; ie. alphabets are properly placed next to a reference when there is more than one citation of that reference in the text (Michael is correct to allude to the Harvard style conventions). The more I think about it the more I'm persuaded that Michael's solution is an excellent way to go: it's functional, it's consistent with professional citation conventions, and it's not hard on the eye. ENCEPHALON 12:42, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Backlinks after the note - straw poll

Do you support or oppose formatting backlinks in the style Michael has proposed?

Example (copied from above):

1. Great, El Borbah The (2006). New-fangled back-links. Newtown: Innovation. ↑ 
2. Verne, Jules (2006). Citations start with authors name: just like in virtually all publications. City of the Future: Long-named Publisher for Line-Wrapping. ↑ 
3. Who, Joe (2006). Back-links are visually subordinate to the note's content. Newtown: Innovation. ↑a ↑b

• Support - Dv82matt 05:47, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
• Support - I'm not a huge fan of real arrows (I don't like the fact that they start from below the baseline, that's all), but I do prefer the arrow after the note. PizzaMargherita 06:57, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

  PM, that seems to be the design of a particular font; my arrows sit right on the baseline (using Apple's Lucida Grande font in my user style sheet). —Michael Z. 2006-02-28 18:20 Z

  Ah, of course, thanks for the clarification. (Btw, I use Firefox with no tweaks.) I reiterate my support for this, it's much more natural, is it not? I mean, you go to the footnote, you read it, and at the end of it (which could be many lines further down) you find the "up" link right there where it makes most sense. Oh well. PizzaMargherita 22:45, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

• Oppose - Although I don't feel strongly either way. I like being able to quickly jump up and down in the article between references and notes and doing this takes a longer time when I can't expect all the backlinks to be positioned at the same distance from the left margin.

  Use your browser back button, or its associated keyboard shortcut. —Michael Z. 2006-02-28 18:20 Z

• Oppose - I don't see the point, and prefer the clean look of the current system. In my experience, moving the arrows back would only make them harder to find, as each reference will contain other linked items. Try telling an inexperienced reader to click on the arrow, somewhere in the reference. -- Ec5618 10:28, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

  After clicking a footnote reference, most novice Web users may not even realize they are still on the same page. They would just click the browser back button without thinking. The back-links are just an additional nicety. Personally, I don't think the current system looks very clean at all, especially when a/b notes break up the list's left-alignment. —Michael Z. 2006-02-28 18:20 Z

• Support —Michael Z. 2006-02-28 18:20 Z
• Oppose. Too messy. Mark^{your words} 22:50, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
• Support. Much neater than the current set up. Regardless of the placement of the arrow, however, I think the more important issue is that it is an arrow (and not the non-intuitive caret). Cite.php currently displays an arrow, apparently a change made by someone other than Ævar. Now if only those brackets around the supersripted numbers are removed... ;-) —Encephalon 04:48, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Another Option

What about using a small superscript arrow ^↑? It could look something like this:

References

1.  ^{a b} Marx, J. L. New disease baffles medical community. Science. 1982;217(4560):618-621.

2. ^↑ New York Times. January 2010 issue, page 16

3. ^↑ UNAIDS

Just an idea. Any opinions? Thoughts? --Dv82matt 11:24, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Status

Proposed: No carats for backlinks. Just link from the number, or if there is more than one backlink, link from the letters.

I've implemented this and deployed it, you can see a demo of it at Wikipedia:Sandbox/Ævar. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:34, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Subreferences

I've got a completely different idea. The context of each reference should be centralized in the references section, and the context of each particular fact should be near that fact (this fact is on page 34, etc.) Then, when the references are generated, the "fact references" are a sublist of each list element:

References

I've written it up (with a more detailed example) here: m:Talk:Cite/Cite.php#A_different_idea. Please comment. — Omegatron 17:45, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Maybe I'm missing something, but won't that make the references completely useless when the article is printed, particularly if certain sources are heavily used throughout? Kirill Lokshin 17:53, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh, do you mean because there's no connection between the bullets in the references section and the numbers in the article? Good point. The current references system doesn't handle this, either. Maybe they should be 1.1, 1.2, or 1a, 1b, etc.

I didn't really think through that aspect in detail. The meat of my proposal is to centralize the references in the actual references section, instead of sprinkling them throughout the article, as explained on meta. — Omegatron 22:37, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

It's a clever idea, but I'm not sure if it would be possible to implement it without breaking the simpler one ref tag → one footnote number uses of the current implementation. More problematically, it turns the ref tag from a mere formatting tool to produce a footnote into a more sophisticated piece of metadata, which would cause problems for those uses of footnotes that contain things other than simple citation of sources. Kirill Lokshin 01:42, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

1. It is currently possible to use multiple ref tags to link to the same footnote. The text inside of the first one is used in the references section. Text inside of each subsequent instance is ignored, so I don't know what purpose it is currently being used for, if at all. If this were implemented, the text inside each subsequent ref tag would just show up as subreferences of the first.
2. What uses are there for footnotes besides citation? Why would this break them compared to the current system? — Omegatron 02:40, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Explanatory footnotes also exist ;-)

And I'm not sure whether this approach would break them or not; would it change how ref tags with no "name" attribute are treated, or would those still work as plain numbered footnotes? Kirill Lokshin 02:46, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I thought we weren't supposed to use those.

It would depend how it is implemented, of course.  :-) Going on just the above description, unnamed notes would work the same as they currently do. On the meta page, I expanded it even more to suggest that an unnamed ref tag would be automatically named (first word of the content or whatever) and moved into the references section on save. Same for the first instance of a named tag that doesn't already exist in the references section. Explanatory notes would still work the same way with this, but would no longer be next to their original position in the source, which may be suboptimal. — Omegatron 03:01, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I think auto-moving tags and whatnot should be avoided. It should still be possible to use cite.php to create a proper list of numbered footnotes (see this article, for example) without having them converted to this new format.

On another point, this wouldn't really allow a single footnote that referred to multiple sources; that would still have to be done manually. Kirill Lokshin 03:26, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I think auto-moving tags and whatnot should be avoided.

Hmm... The basic premise here is that the reference details belong in the references section of the source code, and not scattered throughout the article. If this were used, I don't see why there would be any reason to allow some references to be inline. It defeats the whole purpose.

Because editors should be able to make that decision on a per-article basis. Kirill Lokshin 12:52, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

But there's absolutely no reason for it to be different from article to article. — Omegatron 13:50, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

(see this article, for example)

I don't understand. I didn't even have something like that in mind when I thought of this, but it's a better application for this style of notes than anything I could have come up with; a perfect fit. Why wouldn't we want that converted to the proposed format? (There are even comments in the source code trying to explain to the editor what each "ibid" reference is referring to! <ref><!--Norwich, ''History of Venice'', 394.-->Ibid., 394–395.</ref>)

But again, you've now gone from allowing a new (easier to use, in your view) citation style to breaking other commonly accepted styles (Chicago Manual of Style, in this case). We may not require correct footnoting, but it should still be possible to create it; the style you've proposed might be clever, but it isn't accepted by regular style guides. Kirill Lokshin 12:52, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

"Correct" is subjective. Those style guides are for paper, which Wikipedia is not.

Besides, as long as the semantic information is in the article source (and it would be with this proposal), you could have a user preference to render the references section however you want. Heirarchical, ordered list, unorganized dump of ibids, or whatever you like (enough to program into the extension). — Omegatron 13:50, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

this wouldn't really allow a single footnote that referred to multiple sources

I don't understand. Why would you want to create a single citation for two sources? — Omegatron 05:42, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

To reiterate: footnotes (the typographical thing) are different from source metadata (the conceptual thing). According to any formal style guide, having two footnotes in the same place is wrong; the accepted way of doing so is to have a single footnote that includes both sources for the fact you're citing. Kirill Lokshin 12:52, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Why? — Omegatron 13:50, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Because Wikipedia, although not paper, should still follow the proper rules of style for formal English writing. To wit, from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, page 601: "A note that applies to more than one location should be cross-referenced; a note number cannot reappear out of sequence" (16.33) and "Using more than one note reference at a single location (such as ^{5, 6}) should be rigorously avoided" (16.34). Your proposed change would force everyone—even those editors who would ordinarily not do so—to violate these rules. 14:08, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

But why does that rule exist? What purpose does it serve? Style guides exist for a reason; to serve the reader. The reader should not suffer for the sake of prescriptivism. If the purpose behind the rule is good, and it's absolutely necessary for some reason that I can't think of, then I don't know of a good solution for merging multiple citations within this proposal. If the original purpose of the rule is due to a limitation of print, we'll violate the rule to improve the reader experience. (Other style guides don't even use numbers.)

It wouldn't be any worse than the current system; we currently use multiple note references for a single fact and I haven't seen any complaints. I think the drawbacks are negligible compared to the benefits this would bring. — Omegatron 14:53, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

The obvious reason is that, were we to need a number of citations for a single point, we'd wind up with a horrible little list of numbers^{4a 7b 8 19 22} that would be far more intrusive than a single, combined footnote.¹² In addition, we could no longer have a footnote that, say, compares the information given by two conflicting sources, as the new style would force us to split it apart.

(More generally, the better style guides tend to have good reasons for doing things a particular way, even if those reasons are not always immediately obvious.) Kirill Lokshin 14:59, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I know they do. I was asking what the reasoning behind this was.

I agree that avoiding clutter would be good (that is the purpose of this proposal, after all), but I can't think of a way to combine references with this proposed system. Multiple superscripts really don't look that bad to me, are currently in use on the Wikipedia, and aren't very common, anyway.

As for comparing multiple references, which is also rare, they could just have "(compare with...)" and vice versa, with a link to each other?

References

I agree that it's not perfect, but I think the benefits of this system would outweight these disadvantages. — Omegatron 00:48, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't agree. You're trying to deal with a fairly limited problem—people putting overly large templates directly into the footnote call—that can be dealt with by other, non-technical means; your solution destroys the flexibility of the existing footnote tool in favor of a straightjacket solution that, as you admit, doesn't work as well as the current one in a number of cases (and which forces references into a style that nobody actually uses, to boot).

I would have little concern if this were just added as an additional feature to cite.php, and the support for raw footnotes (using unnamed ref tags, for instance) were retained; but I strongly object to breaking the flexibility of the current implementation, particularly via the use of automatic post-edit conversion, to cater to a small minority of people that can't—or won't—learn proper footnote style. Kirill Lokshin 02:17, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

No, I admit that it has one flaw in the context of "proper" footnote style according to one particular style guide, but is otherwise clearly superior to the current system, which has many flaws.

I would object to making this an "add-on" feature, as that would encourage even more inconsistency between articles. — Omegatron 17:54, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Let's recap, then. Your proposed system has a number of flaws, as I see it:

1. It prevents combining footnotes, forcing multiple note numbers at a single point.
2. It prevents the order of the notes in the article from matching the order of the notes in the notes section.
3. It produces a combined notes/references section in a style that is used nowhere else, which is confusing for the reader.
4. It makes changes to the article text that are beyond the control of the editors apparently making them.
5. It makes little allowance for discursive notes, which now wind up in a "References" section for no apparent reason.
6. It will break existing articles that use the cite.php extension.

It's only advantage, meanwhile, is that it forces the bulk of the citation information to the bottom of the article. This is not usually a problem if the footnotes are done properly in the first place; there is no substantial difference between <ref>Doe, ''My Book'', 57.</ref> and <ref name="Doe">p. 57.</ref>. So why exactly is it necessary to force an inflexible, non-standard style on everyone? Kirill Lokshin 20:08, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

No, no, no.

1. It does not prevent combining footnotes. Just enter them like you currently would, but you'll need a unique name tag for each (serving the same function as the inline comments in the example article, so it's not even any more work than doing it that way. Or you could just enter them without a unique name and they would be auto-named for you on save.)
2. No. Another benefit of putting the reference content in the References section is that you can order the references however you want. With the current system, you are limited to the order they appear in the article.
3. Debatable. We think the subreference style would be superior for the reader, but apparently others disagree. Regardless, editors could still use a separate Notes and References section if they wanted to, and do CMS style notes, by giving each reference a unique name.
4. What? This doesn't affect the article text.
5. Yes. But that's where the footnotes visually appear when the page is rendered, so it's confusing to newcomers that they can't be edited by editing the References section. It's also frustrating for regulars as we have to search through the article wikicode trying to find the footnote text so we can edit it instead of just editing the References section where it appears. You claim that moving the reference source code on save would be confusing, but I maintain that using source code in one section to create rendered content in another section is much more confusing, and the current ref tag system is the only place something like this occurs on the Wikipedia. Getting rid of this bizarre functionality is the main reason for this proposal.
6. It will be backwards compatible with the current system. That's why it uses the same ref and references tags (but uses <references></references> instead of <references/>).

I also want it to address the other points in the list of concerns I raised at m:Talk:Cite/Cite.php#A_different_idea. — Omegatron 16:45, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

1. But if each note has its own unique tag, how would the sub-reference functionality work? The tag (similar to the old {{ref}}/{{note}} system) wouldn't necessarily be identical for different citations from the same source.
2. Perhaps I wasn't clear here. If you proposal is limited to moving the content of references to the reference section, this may be true; but if it also includes the sub-references part, then the notes at the bottom will be interleaved with the reference works, causing them to have a different order than the note numbers in the article text.

As far as your other points: as I said at the outset, I have no qualms with this so long as the existing functionality can be replicated. Kirill Lokshin 16:56, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Much too complicated

There is really no need to make this quite so complicated. Having the system actually move text around is not something to which wiki-editors are accustomed. In any case, having the citation next to the text to which it refers is probably a good thing.

The most that is necessary with respect to sub-references is something like an extra attribute on the <ref> tag which will add text identifying a section of the text identified in the main reference. So something like <ref name="foo" section="p. 57"/> or alternatively <refsection name="foo">p. 57</refsection> might result in something like:

1. ↑ whatever text was in the foo reference

   ^a p.57

Whilst the actual syntax is open to argument there is no need for anything more complex than this.

Wuth respect to arguments over whether we follow the Chicago Manual of Style or whatever manifold other styles are available, I suggest that we would be better off synthesising a single consistent citation style of our own rather than succumbing to endless style-wars. Ending the foolish forking of templates to deal with "Harvard referencing" would be a good start.

HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 00:26, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

• My chief proposal here is not the subreferences, but moving the reference source code into the References section where they appear in the rendered page. I just think subreferences would be a logical extension of that.
• The "moving text around" is just supposed to be a shortcut method for entering references, like the [[pipe trick|]] or ~~~~ signatures, which are also modified on save. Then you could enter references while section editing, but still edit them later by editing the References section, where they will appear when the article is rendered. Having source code in one section generate content in another section is not something to which wiki-editors are accustomed, either.
• My proposed tags aren't any more complicated than your example <ref name="foo">p. 57</ref> and make sense in the context of the current style, which ignores such text. Not any more complicated than the style used in the example article, either. The details of functionality and syntax will need to be tweaked and discussed, of course. — Omegatron 16:45, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Superscripts and line spacing

The following in my user monobook.css fixes the problem of extra line space for me, in Safari. —Michael Z. 2006-02-23 15:42 Z

/* keep superscript references from breaking the line-spacing */
#bodyContent sup {
    font-size: smaller;
    vertical-align: baseline;
    position: relative;
    bottom: 0.5em;
}

Thanks Michael Z. -- that works a treat on my Mac! -- Puffball 17:02, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I just updated the selector to #bodyContent sup, which will restrict the effect to the page body. This probably isn't necessary, but it's probably good practice to just mess with the content and not the Wikipedia interface. —Michael Z. 2006-02-23 17:57 Z

Have taken your tip and followed suit. Have no idea what I'm doing; HTML is all Greek to me. Still, nothing seems to have crashed yet. Is there somewhere you could post this tip for other Safari users? Safari is my favoured browser for WP because I like the way it renders text in edit boxes. I find Firefox hard to read in this respect. Thanks again. -- Puffball 22:50, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I outlined the fix at user:Mzajac/monobook.css/Superscript fix, and linked to it from Wikipedia:Browser notes#Mac OS X. —Michael Z. 2006-02-24 00:41 Z

Arguments

It is quite common to have arguments in the text of a page. Examples include parapsychology and solipsism, both of which have extensive debates in their article text. Is there a guideline for how to deal with this kind of "for and against" text, and where the line is between encyclopedic documentation of lack of consensus and message board? I've been pushing (in the articles that I see this happen to) to get each objection or argument properly cited, and "responses" limited to a sentence or two with another citation. Even that's a hard standard to get people to meet, though. If I could point them to a style guideline that clarifies Wikipedia's position, that would really help. -Harmil 21:07, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

• Among others, WP:V. If something's not attributed to a reliable source, feel free to remove it (and preferably paste it into talk for discussion). Christopher Parham (talk) 01:30, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Distinguishing currencies

Though it may be obvious in the context of articles, news articles and other such items could really benefit from a universal way to distinguish between the many currencies that use the $ dollar sign. I'm proposing templates.. {{USD}} would display US   $ before an item and the $ sign links to United States dollar.
Example: US   $8,060,000
Another commonly used unit is the australian dollar.. {{AUD}}
Example: AU   $5,000
There is a list of currencies that use the $ dollar sign in this article.. Canadian dollars are also commonly used. drumguy⁸⁸⁰⁰ - speak? 06:59, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

You know, I don't know why the AU/US and the $ are overlapping.. it works fine in the preview. If this is considered, someone who can mess with the coding can look into it..? drumguy⁸⁸⁰⁰ - speak? 07:05, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to say it, but I think this is a horrible idea. Templates are horrible things, and templates to compensate for bad writing are particularly horrible. Much better to write the article properly in the first place and prevent confusion that way. Mark^{your words} 21:55, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

What's wrong with: If it's ambiguous, specify US$ or use the ISO code (USD). PizzaMargherita 23:18, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Punctuating quoted passages: why British usage exclusively?

When punctuating quoted passages, include the mark of punctuation inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the mark of punctuation is part of the quotation. This is the style used in Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, for example.

I don't get it. With respect to U. S. versus British usage, everywhere else, we say that usage should follows either the nationality of the subject, or whichever convention was established when the article was started.

Why should we prescribe British punctuation style for an article that otherwise follows U. S. usage? Dpbsmith (talk) 19:50, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

...but obviously that maybe must roughly depend usually on the exact approximate order of the rules. PizzaMargherita 21:00, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

It's somewhat misleading to call it "British punctuation" as it's used by everyone but the Americans. There are good reasons to favour what is better referred to as "international punctuation". Firstly, it's logical: punctuation marks go where they belong. Secondly, it's unambiguous: with the American style you might not be able to determine whether the punctuation was part of the quote or not. A third reason specific to Wikipedia is that this topic has been done to death and the general consensus it to stick with logical punctuation. Jimp 00:21, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

The British system is more logical, but aesthetically gross. Quotes look better outside commas and periods, which I guess is why North Americans put them there. Felicity4711 03:22, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

It's gross if you are not used to it. Also I thought that (most) Americans put punctuation inside quotes, for example a question mark even if it's not part of the quotation, but it's part of an interrogative sentence that ends with a quotation. Anyway, I've changed to a more neutral wording, which is widely accepted, as you can see in the archives. I've also neatened up a bit, removing a poor example and removing a reference that is way too much for the scope of the MoS. Hopefully this is the last time we have to discuss this. PizzaMargherita 07:38, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

In AmE commas and periods precede closing quotation marks. Some punctuation examples:

• Did John really say "I quit"?
• Mary saw the flames and shouted, "Fire!"
• Susan sang the song "Tommorow." —Wayward ^Talk 07:58, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and to answer the original question, because we reached a consensus that "logical" quotations are better. Check the archives. PizzaMargherita 07:44, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

As PizzaMargherita indicates grossness is in the eye of the beholder. It all depends on what you're used to. To me the US style looks ugly. The arguement from æsthetics sufferes from the fact that we've all got different taste. Jimp 07:13, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

An aside—is "arguement" misspelt? Or is "argument" a US spelling? Just curious. --TreyHarris 03:33, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Chambers Dictionary, 9th ed., argument. So, apparently, a misspelling. —Wayward ^Talk 03:48, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Getting in here a little late. Quoted passages should have the same punctuation as in the original passage, with quotes outside everything, to indicate what exactly is being quoted. Is this not clear? User talk:Wayward says punctuation precedes quotes, but in his first example it doesn't -- though it's a correct example of how U.S. typography is the same as British.

So:

"Did he really say that?" is the line Harry utters as Barbara enters the scene in "A Very Funny Play" by A. Playwright. (Because there's a question mark in the play's text.)

Is it true that Einstein said "God does not play dice with the universe"?

(Because the quote certainly didn't contain a question mark; why put it inside the quote? Some might include a period too.)

Patrick Henry said "Give me liberty or give me death!" when he faced execution for treason.

(His declaration could have ended with a period, which would be omitted in a fragmentary quote--but when the sentence is hanging, the exclamation point seems apt.)

This would be correct anywhere, I thought. Some U.S. publishing conventions seem incorrect to UK readers. But our practice of putting punctuation inside quotation marks in dialog is not the same as placing punctuation in quoted printed matter. The convention is that quotes go outside everything from the source text. Fragmented conversational quotes are the only time one punctuation mark, the comma, goes before the closing quote mark. Very few Wikipedia articles are going to contain quoted speech that was never printed, I would think.

Quoted text rarely ends in a comma, or no punctuation (a line of poetry, perhaps), so that weird Americanism should come up not at all.

Also, "just adopt the U.K. convention, world, it's more logical" is the one tiresome thing about the style guide. There's 200 million more potential readers that are used to U.S. conventions (or, punnily, "US" conventions). Besides, conventions are arbitary; the most common denominator makes as much sense as anything. It's bullyish, but just as true as "our way is really rather better!" (or, if you prefer, "really rather better"! -- tell me that looks more logical.)

(Really no offense intended. Just can't resist some punctuation banter is all. DavidH 05:29, 13 March 2006 (UTC))

Sorry for the late response. As I said in my reply above, commas and periods precede closing quotation marks in American-style punctuation. Other marks adhere to British style.

Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., 6.8: Periods and commas. Periods and commas precede closing quotation marks, whether double or single. This is a traditional style, in use well before the first edition of this manual (1906). As nicely expressed in William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's Elements of Style, "Typographical usage dictates that the comma be inside the [quotation] marks, though logically it often seems not to belong there." The same goes for the period. (An apostrophe at the end of a word should never be confused with a closing single quotation mark; punctuation always follows the apostrophe.) In the kind of textual studies where retaining the original placement of a comma in relation to closing quotation marks is essential to the author's argument and scholarly integrity, the alternative system described in 6.10 could be used, or rephrasing might avoid the problem.

Ibid., 6.9: Colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points. Unlike periods and commas, these all follow closing quotation marks unless a question mark or an exclamation point belongs within the quoted matter. (This rule applies the logic absent in 6.8.)

Ibid., 6.10: Alternative system. According to what is sometimes called the British style (set forth in The Oxford Guide to Style [the successor to Hart's Rules]), a style also followed in other English-speaking countries, only those punctuation points that appeared in the original material should be included within the quotation marks; all others follow the closing quotation marks. This system, which requires extreme authorial precision and occasional decisions by the editor or typesetter, works best with single quotation marks.

MLA Style Manual. 2nd ed., 3.9.7: Punctuation with Quotations. By convention, commas and periods go inside the closing quotation marks, but a parenthetical reference should intervene between the quotation and the required punctuation . . . All other punctuation marks—such as semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points—go outside a closing quotation mark, except when they are part of the quoted material. —Wayward ^Talk 04:17, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Articles with American subjects should be written in the American style, and articles with non-American subjects should be written in the British style. Problem solved.—thegreentrilby 03:12, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

This is not correct. The new rule says that all articles should follow the logical quotation style. PizzaMargherita 08:47, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

We've been over this a million times already. British usage = world usage. Even American style guides are finally starting to catch on to logical quoting. Wikipedia uses logical quoting. Let's move on. Kaldari 03:18, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I concur with thegreentrilby's summary of the rough consensus that has been arrived at through numerous debates. Actually, Kaldari has slightly misstated the situation; most American style guides prefer the traditional American style. For example, the Bluebook, which is used by nearly all American lawyers, judges, and law professors, states at Rule 5.1(b): "Always place commas and periods inside the quotation marks; place other punctuation marks inside the quotation marks only if they are part of the matter quoted." --Coolcaesar 04:43, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm an American convert to "logical quoting". I've been using the style for over ten years now, except when I've been forced to use the traditional style because I'm writing for publications that have adopted another style. It's sensible and easy to understand, and it has none of the gotchas of the traditional style. It can be stated extremely simply: "put punctuation belonging to the quote inside the quotation marks; any other punctuation goes outside". I think that the rationale for using American spelling in American articles doesn't really apply to quoting, because English spelling is largely empirical; logical quoting, on the other hand, is based on very simple rules. (If there were a widely-understood variant of English orthography that used purely phonetic spelling, I'd be in favor of Wikipedia using that consistently, too. But there isn't, so using phonetic spelling would be a barrier to readability. No such barrier exists here—people used to traditional American quoting rules can easily adapt to logical quoting.) --TreyHarris 08:42, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Aaargh! The biggest benefit of the so-called American style is that it ends bickering about whether a period (or sometimed even a comma) belongs to the quoted passage, which can be no smal blessing.

The biggest drawback of it is that it is, in my experience, probably only used by Americans with a college education. Even then, I've worked with U.S. journalists who were unfamiliar with it. ProhibitOnions 11:40, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I think the Brits prefer the "logical quotes" style because they love arguing—in this case, arguing over whether a mark of punctuation was part of the original quote or not. ::Ducks::—thegreentrilby 04:19, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Speaking as an American who was taught to use the American style, the British style makes much more sense and is used pretty much everywhere else. I see no reason for American bizzarness to apply to wikipedia. JoshuaZ 04:22, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Seconded. --maru (talk) contribs 04:39, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Jr., Sr., and other suffixes

It has recently come to my attention that some articles use a comma between a person's name and suffix and others do not. For example, Martin Luther King, Jr. and William Strunk Jr. I (nor a few other people who have discussed the issue with me) have not found any guideline on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that, while commas historically have often been used, it seems that the pedulum is swinging the other way again.

Logically, they should not be used, since even though, for example, there are three MLKs, they are three people. Therefore, following comma rules, Jr./Sr. is much more restrictive (no commas) than non-restictive (commas) becuase it's determining the person. Additionally, many people forget that, when a comma is used, a comma must follow: [Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote "I Have a Dream."] is incorect, while [Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote "I Have a Dream."] is better, since it correctly uses commas.

Furthermore, both the Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk and White's Elements of Style (and probably others, but I just checked these two becuase of issues of time and access) support not using commas.

Therefore, I would like to propose that a style guideline be created stating not use commas with suffixes based on the support from major/popular manuals of style and on the appeal of logic/comma rules). //MrD9 00:23, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Chicago (FAQ, since I can't find it or Elements on Google Print)

I second your proposal. It's good to have consistancy and the non-use of commas seem more logical. Jimp 01:35, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Aren't Jr, Sr, Dr, Mr, Mrs, St, Sts, and other such personal abbreviations which include the first and last letters of the expanded word supposed to be written without a period (.)? —Michael Z. 2006-03-02 02:05 Z

Ugh, British English... I totally forgot about this (btw, the "ugh" is not due to British English, it's due to my lack of remembering this difference between Britsh/US usage). I do not know what to say, since I havent seen any WP (or other) names ever written without the period in Jr/Sr, but that's because I'm from the US and chance has it I haven't stumbled across any. There are probably others who are better aware of this issue (and the whole Brit/Amer English policies in general) who could better answer, but my logical guess would be that the period could be used in names that tie with Britsh English-speaking countries, while the opposite with the US? Regardless, though, I still think we have to standardize the comma usage (rather, a lack of comma usage), and hoepfulyl someone can comment on the period/nonperiod issue with a good solution. //MrD9 02:15, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I disagree - we have no right or need to alter people's names. Use what they used. For many that will be with a comma. Like "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."[8]. There is no need to impose a false consistency. Rmhermen 03:00, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I seriously doubt that most articles are written by the people they are about. Therefore, the article titles are most likely commaed or not based on the author's preferences, and to people unaware of the style issues regarding them, they will most likely use a comma becuase it is what has been used up until recent years. While still used widely today, like I said, the lack of a comma is growing and becoming more preferable due to the logic behind it. //MrD9 00:01, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc. only lack a period in British punctuation. To North American readers, it looks wrong. Felicity4711 03:26, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Isn't the comma or lack thereof part of the person's name? My birth certificate includes it, and when I use my full birth name, I include it. If someone else doesn't use the comma, then we shouldn't either. Standardizing would seem to me to be like standardizing on hyphenation or spacing within a name. We don't standardize all Vandebergs, Van de Bergs, and VandeBergs, why would we standardize this? --TreyHarris 03:05, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

It's not, though. It's most likely there due to the gramatically illogical use of it by most people in the past. Your last name is still your last name; your first, your first; your middle, your middle; and your suffix, if you have one, your suffix. The last names you mentioned are official (or are used as if they were official, in some cases). They are their last names. But junior/senior are suffixes, and it depends on the writer's style to determine the punctuation with it. For example, the U.S. government varies between use of "Martin Luther King Jr." and "Martin Luther King, Jr." when talking about the national holiday, his national memorials, documents, and various other topics (I googled it before). And in a regular enecylopedia, the usage would be standardized, so why should it not be standardized here (preferably without the comma, as it is becoming more preferred, is logical, and looks better). //MrD9 03:43, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Birth certificates are also issued by many different agencies in many different places, so by their very nature they are going to be (and are) inconsistent, since people in different places, even if there are standardized rules in one office, are going to create different standard styles for their documents (or if there are no standards, then there's even less consistency. //MrD9 03:46, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't believe that without a comma is more logical, nor that suffixes are not part of a legal name. Whatever is on the certificate is the name. Rmhermen 00:25, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Nonsense. In the United States, typopgraphy and orthography and even spelling on some birth certificate has little or nothing to do with it. What you use is what matters, and even then, the presence or absence of a comma has no legal significance and no real bearing on whether or not we include it here. Gene Nygaard 06:42, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Honorary titles

This might be and probably is covered somewhere, but does the MoS say to bold honorary titles like Sir and Dame? Examples: Roger Moore, Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins. One of them is currently bolded, the other two aren't. What's the proper way here? K1Bond007 05:28, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Bolded. (I'm not sure it's written down anywhere, but it's the way it's always done.) Proteus (Talk) 11:14, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

All-caps in articles about publications, etc. that use all caps

Well, what about cases like BYTE magazine? I don't believe there's any dispute over the way in which the magazine presented its own title, which to the best of my recollection was always in all-caps. I don't see anything that addresses this issue specifically. It seems to me that the proper thing to do is to preserve information by presenting the publication title in the way in which the publication presented it, but I'm not a MoS maven. Dpbsmith (talk) 21:07, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (trademarks). Nohat 23:37, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Capital letters (Commonwealth... any suggestions?)

Just a small point about the otherwise accurate section on capital letters: in the article there is a distinction made between American English and Commonwealth English, are we forgetting other anglophone countries who do not form part of the Commonwealth (ie. Ireland, who also use Commonwealth linguistic rules but aren't a member, despite being a former British colony). I would edit this entry but I can't think of a term to replace 'Commonwealth' (the Commonwealth and Ireland, etc.?) Any suggestions?

What about Mozambique? The official language there is Portuguese. I propose "Commonwealth and Ireland, except Mozambique".

(Yes, I am being sarcastic.) PizzaMargherita 12:53, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Just stick a weasel word in there somewhere, that should keep everyone happy. ;-) Martin 12:57, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I like your idea even better actually: "Commonwealth English, or something like that". PizzaMargherita 13:46, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I think the language in Ireland still falls under Commonwealth English, despite its political affiliations. This term should be used carefully, because CE usually includes Canadian English, which has many differences from British English. —Michael Z. 2006-03-12 00:53 Z

Format for school athletic programs?

Florida Gators or Blue Devils (Duke University)? 

I note these are inconsistent. Is there any consensus on this? I'm working on the University of Montana -Missoula and Grizzly athletics. I can't find this in any style manuals, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?

I would personally favor Grizzlies (University of Montana - Missoula), to avoid confusion with the real bears who live in the Montana woods that you might get with Montana Grizzlies. Probably with a reference from Griz. Other ideas? CGMullin 20:30, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

"See also"

It's trivial, but what's the recommended way to say

• But so-and-so is complicated by the influence of foobar. See also foobar.

Should the see also be in italics? In parentheses? Both? Should it have a colon

• See also: foobar

or be written out like a sentence

• See also foobar.

or be part of the sentence it references

• ...complicated by foobar (see complications of foobar).

or what? — Omegatron 07:08, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Why not simply linking foobar:

• But so-and-so is complicated by the influence of foobar.

--Dforest 07:30, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

In some cases, sure. That's not what I'm asking though. It's common to need to say "see also some other article". (Or maybe not?) — Omegatron 03:51, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Well certainly the majority of cross references are simply linked within the text. I guess the question is why do you need to link as a "see also"? One of the reasons why this might be done is for a topic that does not lend itself to being described in the text. I realize your question was about the style of the "see also" links, but the example you gave didn't seem to require one. It's a good question; sorry if that's not much help. Dforest 04:50, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

I think there are cases where it is useful. I don't think those are common enough to warrant a whole lot of instruction creep about it. Consistency within an article, of course—but if you have more than one or two of them, some or all of them should likely be changed to just links, to some "main article" tags under the section headers, or to just a listing in the "See also" section at the bottom of the page.

So I'll just throw out some of my thoughts, because that's really what you seem to be looking for, not necessarily a specific rule to add to the manual. I like italic See also and upright link, no colon. But not using italics is okay with me, and it seems that Wikipedia style is not to use them in some other places where I would use them. No preference on parentheses, or maybe in some situations I'd like one and in other situations the other. Maybe a parenthetical part of a sentence if it really fits in the middle of a paragraph somewhere, but a separate sentence with or without parentheses if it is stuck at the end of a paragraph? But that latter one is more likely to just belong in the "See also" section, isn't it? Gene Nygaard 07:01, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

There's also a problem with subscripts

An earlier comment on this page had a fix for superscripts increasing line spacing. The problem also occurs for subscripts, which are used in pages containing chemical formulae, e.g. Aniline. Alan Pascoe 16:46, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

To whatever extent it is a problem (and I think that whole issue is overblown), the single character option isn't available as it is when you want ² or ³ (and a few other, more difficult to find and use and some less likely to show up in everyone's browser).

Furthermore, unlike the cases such as talking about land area or wing area or volume or whatever gives you a clue as to what the number is, so size is less of a problem, reducing size in subscripts of chemical formulas will be much more likely to cause reading difficulty and misreading of the numbers, since there is a much wider range of possibilities. Gene Nygaard 17:13, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes, there's no universal solution. As you say, some will be happy with the status quo, whereas others will want a fix. Even these will have different browsers, monitors, and standards of eyesight, so the solution has to be tailored to the individual. Alan Pascoe 21:01, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

I've found that the fix referred to earlier also works with subscripts. Just change the selector from sup to sub, and put a negative sign in front of the value for the bottom property. This, like the fix for superscripts, does not decrease the size of the font. Alan Pascoe 17:14, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Dialect Template?

Does it make sense to have a talk page template that would indicate the currently prefered dialect for the article (UK, U.S., Australian, Irish, etc.)? It would go where it is clear by the rules here which should be used. For example, The Beatles talk page would have a template on it that would say something like "contributions to this artcle should follow the conventions of XYZ English" and refer to the appropriate section of this page. John (Jwy) 18:23, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

I have a more radical proposal in mind... PizzaMargherita 23:29, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't see the point in making a new template, when a simple comment at the top would do:

 <!-- this article is written in Canadian English [[en-CA]] -->

However, this has been tried before, and has always been opposed by too many editors, and removed. —Michael Z. 2006-03-11 23:48 Z

I don't know about anyone else, but seeing notices like that splashed all over the place would piss me off more than any variations in spelling do. Gene Nygaard 00:35, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

To put it anyother way, let sleeping dogs lie. Gene Nygaard 00:38, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Gotcha. As I said in my edit reverting to British English on The Beatles page, its not a big deal to revert stuff. It would be useful to have an easy way to refer to the policy (I think its in the middle of a page at the moment) and some examples of the differences (ize/ise, etc.) - so we could put an appropriate edit summary like "using British dialect for spelling as per WP:DIALECT" or something like that to make it easier to spread the word. John (Jwy) 00:44, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

The use of the title "Dr." from unaccredited universities

Wikipedia needs to add in a clear policy for users to reference for those enteries that have doctorates from unaccredited universities or simply have honorary doctorates. Neither in academia are able to use the title and thus, should not be allowed to use it in an encyclopedia. The article for Doctor (title) makes it clear that a honorary doctorate is not applicable to use "Dr." and unaccredited universities are unrecognized academic instiutions and thus, those degrees (which include doctorates) are not recognized by academia, government, or mainstream public.

This issue has come up in a varity of articles such as Peter Ruckman, which parties plead to enter the title because the person is "known as that title." Yet, wikipedia needs to take a stance against unaccredited doctors to prevent quacks from using wikipedia to build a reputation. Arbusto 03:30, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

The issue has nothing to do with whether a university is accredited or not. WP:MOSBIO states: "After the initial mention of any name, the person may be referred to by surname only." Why may is used instead of should I don't know, but accreditation has nothing to do with it. We don't say "Mr. Smith" or "Dr. Smith" on subsequent references, just "Smith". --TreyHarris 04:34, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Okay, but in many articles the first line of the entry introduces the subject as Dr. This title should not be used for unaccredited schools or honoary degrees. Arbusto 04:54, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

It shouldn't be used for accredited schools or non-honarary degrees, either. I don't think anyone disputes that Oliver Sacks is actually a neurologist, but there's no title there. --TreyHarris 07:08, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, which shows that those who attended diploma mills for their doctorates merely want the title and not the position it brings. Thusly, themselves and their followers will push the "Dr." title on the entry. In the case of unaccredited doctorates wiki users should be able to point to a policy that doesn't allow an unaccredited degree to earn the title. Arbusto 07:55, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

I always liked newspaper style -- you ain't a doctor unless you're a licensed medical doctor. Anything else is confusing. References to academic "doctors" should say professor, lecturer, whatever, with Ph.D. or some other degree designation. My 2 cents. DavidH 05:32, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't think there's any such thing as "newspaper style"—The New York Times uses titles ("Dr. Smith"), the Associated Press does not ("Smith"), even when the person is a medical doctor. The Times uses "Dr." for any person who holds a doctorate (linguists have Ph.D.'s, not M.D.'s.):

Blair A. Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who specializes in reconstructing Indian languages, said several Algonquian communities in the East had efforts under way to recover their lost languages and return them to daily use.

"What turns out to be really important is just that they learn some piece of the language because it is reclaiming their heritage," Dr. Rudes said." [9], boldface mine.

I prefer the surname-only style; it sidesteps these arguments entirely. --TreyHarris 07:38, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

People use the title (an example is the redirect page Dr. Martin Luther King) on wikipedia. They are academically allowed/recognized to use the title. Either there is a clear policy for the title or there isn't. I think there should be a policy on wikipedia to exclude those who claim their doctorates from diploma mills from using the title. Arbusto 00:43, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

You seem to be stuck in a groove here. The answer is to eliminate the titles regardless of the individual's doctorate status. The source of the doctorate is completely irrelevant. I don't know what you're proposing here when you say there should be "a policy": "Use last name only on subsequent references, unless the person has a doctorate from a diploma mill, in which case you should still use last name only"? The redirect of Dr. Martin Luther King isn't relevant; redirects should exist for every likely lookup term, including incorrect ones (such as misspellings), so if someone is often called Dr. Phil, that redirect should exist, even if the person has a lesser claim to the title (or even none at all).--TreyHarris 06:47, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Why should a valid title be removed? Why shouldn't there be a policy regarding the validity? For every article that doesn't use the title for a PhD I can post one that does. Arbusto 01:46, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Is this regarding those who have obtained their doctorate from unaccredited, religious institutions? Or are there other sorts of unaccredited institutions that are doing this?

You mentioned above ". . . those who attended diploma mills . . ." Diploma mills don't have campuses. They mail degrees to people who send them money.

I think you'd be surprised if you knew all the people who have honorary doctorates and how people know them as "Dr. such and such." To say that those with honorary doctorates cannot or do not use them with their name is false. Dr. Jerry Falwell comes to mind. Most people have no idea that his doctorate is honorary. --Yuk Yuk Yec 03:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, outside religious media he is almost never refered to as Dr, just reverend. In any event, even if the common media does something stylistically bad/innaccurate doesn't mean Wikipedia should. JoshuaZ 05:15, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

1)Religion has nothing to do with accreditation. There are religious and non-religious schools that lack accreditation. There are religious schools and non-religious schools that have accreditation. 2) Some diploma mills have "campuses." (such as the one 60 minutes exposed Hamilton University) 3) Someone who has an honorary doctorate from an accredited school and lets people call themself a "Dr." is misleading those people. Arbusto 04:25, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

"Why should a valid title be removed?" Because it's not compliant with the style guide to use any title, valid or not. "For every article that doesn't use the title for a PhD I can post one that does." So click edit and remove the titles. --TreyHarris 04:22, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

No, you are completely wrong. [10] The MOSBIO reads "Academic and professional titles may be used in the head paragraph." So can we add a policy on accreditation now? Arbusto 04:35, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

That text got added to WP:MOSBIO after you asked your question. This is absolutely ridiculous. MOSBIO is not a style guide that I have had on my watchlist; so when you asked your question, I looked at what MOSBIO had to say and replied, based on the guide's text at the time. Now you tell me I'm "completely wrong", based on text that didn't exist when I examined it. This sort of situation is exactly why I proposed Wikipedia:Changing policies and guidelines. If there is a dispute currently in progress, it shouldn't be allowed to change policy page guidance to affect the outcome of the dispute. The dispute should be resolved first, and then the policy changed to reflect consensus. This addition was made without any prior discussion I can see. --TreyHarris 05:34, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

It is logical and consistent with common usage to give the title of "Dr." to physicianson their first mention, but to omit the title in subsequent mentions. It would be better to either append "Ph.D" after the name in the first location, or to discuss the academic degrees later in the article. Honorary degrees should be mentioned along with other honors and prizes. Degrees from unaccredited schools deserve special mention, but not special treatment. -Will Beback 06:26, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

• I don't think there should be a policy on this. I respect that Arbusto is trying to uphold quality standards here but I don't think this is the right battleground. It's not Wikipedia's job to decide whether a degree is of an acceptable quality level; we should simply reflect the way that people are standardly described, let consensus do its work, and leave it at that. If that leads to edit wars, so be it (though I think that this is kind of an overreaction to the Gastrich War; until then, we didn't really have that much of a problem--the Ruckman Flap, though annoying, didn't result in some kind of unaccredited doctorate armageddon). I support noting that an institution is unaccredited if that's the case, but I don't think we should carry the "war" against unaccredited schools to every page an alumnus is mentioned on. If Jerry Falwell is commonly called "Dr." Jerry Falwell, then that's a reasonable way to refer to him here; if you want to mention that his doctorate is honorary, that's a judgment call and the collective will of Wikipedia should pronounce on it. (As an aside, I have a Ph.D. from a well-known, highly respected university, and I have nevetheless seen any number of really crap dissertations earn doctorates. Accreditation is, alas, not a guarantee of quality.) · rodii · 16:08, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. While accreditation is not a guarantee of quality, it is a minimal requirement. Wikipedia has no reason to be repeating questionable degrees or aiding what is in some places considered fraud. Furthermore, the Ruckman and Gastrich fiascos point to why we should have this policy so if this sort of matter comes up again we can point to a style guideline rather than get into edit wars over it. JoshuaZ 16:16, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

"While accreditation is not a guarantee of quality, it is a minimal requirement."

Are you saying that without accreditation there can't be any quality? PizzaMargherita 16:50, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Poor wording on my part, accreditation is a minimal requirement for having verifiable quality, and Wikipedia does have heavy emphasis on verifiability. JoshuaZ 16:57, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

The solution is simply never to use courtesy titles. If someone's a medical doctor, then say so, or put M.D. at the end of their name on first reference. Subsequently just surname, or first name and surname if it migt be confusing (in an article where there might be more than one person with the same surname, such as a family), or whatever second-reference name is appropriate if a surname is not usually used ("Sting"; "Björk"; "Saddam"). The use of Dr. always sounds like an honorific and thus NPOV. ProhibitOnions 17:28, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I would not object to such a policy, although it would require a fair bit of refactoring. JoshuaZ 17:40, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

What about Dr. Dre, Doctor Who and Dr. Feelgood? · rodii · 18:48, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Ok, how about the above policy excepting a) fictional characters or b) when a title is part of a stage name. JoshuaZ 19:23, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I was just kidding. I know the policy wouldn't apply to such cases. · rodii · 20:29, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

What about Mr. for a surgeon? Always seems to worry an Americans when in a London casualty ward and the junior doctor say "Mr Smith will take a look, and if he thinks it is necessary, he will be operating on you" ;-). "never to use courtesy titles" what about for people like Lord William Bentinck? Would you recommend that such people are called by their surname "Cavendish-Bentinck" rather than Bentinck even though that is not the common form? --Philip Baird Shearer 17:45, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Fine, excepting peerage. There is no need to refer to people by Mr. anyways. The articles make clear who is a medical doctor. JoshuaZ 17:59, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Most common name policy would seem approprite. For exmple, Lord Lucan, Screaming Lord Such but Shirley Williams, Similarly Doctor Crippen, and Father Christmas. Rich Farmbrough 13:25 19 March 2006 (UTC).

Birth names

The referencing of birth names is inconsistent. See Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Judy Garland for example. I would suggest that birth names should go in the lead paragraph, along with maiden names, e.g.:

Aliced Foo, née Bar (November 23, 1887 – February 2, 1969), ...

Boris Karloff (November 23, 1887 – February 2, 1969), born William Henry Pratt, ...

The three listed have one in the style above, one in bold at the start of the Background section, and one where the "childhood" section starts "At the age of 2, Frances Ethel Gumm made her first appearance on stage ..." leaving the reader to infer that Frances Gumm was her birth name. I would fix that but I won't just yet pending this discussion. Just zis Guy you know? 13:09, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Alternatively I could just read WP:MOSBIO... Just zis Guy you know? 13:45, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Quotation style

The MoS suggests using <blockquote> for longer quotes to indent both sides. However, this cannot be used with the current MediaWiki software where the quotation consists of multiple paragraphs, since the newlines are ignored inside the <blockquote> element. Is there a more wiki-like alternative that indents both sides (say, an officially recommended template putting an appropriately styled div around it)? Or can MediaWiki be changed to take account of wiki markup inside the element? Hairy Dude 04:20, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Of course, it might equally be considered that more than one paragraph is too much for a quotation on Wikipedia. FYI, the one I'm working on right now is on Voiceless palatal-velar fricative. Hairy Dude 04:22, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I think:

It is untrue that wiki markup is ignored within blockquotes—not the italics in this sentence.

But paragraphing using blank lines, it is true, is ignored.

You can use a <p> tag for that.

(Look at the wikitext to see what I did above.) I think in general, multi-paragraph quotes are discouraged. But rules are made to be broken, so if you have an exception, just use the <p> tag. (This also works for lists, which is a useful thing to know when you need to add a paragraph to a numbered list without restarting the numbering.) --TreyHarris 04:28, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Hey, I just discovered this and I really like it. Shall we encourage its use in the MoS?

“ I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired. I am not inspired.

Second paragraph. Second paragraph. Second paragraph. Second paragraph. Second paragraph. Second paragraph. Second paragraph. Second paragraph.

”

PizzaMargherita 00:47, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

You also have <br>. Rich Farmbrough 13:18 19 March 2006 (UTC).

Use of decorative analphabetic characters in article titles, text

Symbols that are not in the alphabet, but in the Unicode character set, are intended for decoration. These should not be used in article text. Articles like I ♥ NY and I ♥ Huckabees should be moved to I Love New York and I Heart Huckabees. I don't understand why people don't see the difference between a logo and a name. A name is something that can be written using standard language. A logo is a stylized representation of the name. Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, should not be what amounts to inlining logos. Everything in the text should follow standard language rules. In fact I helped with guidelines on this a while back at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (trademarks), and it seems people are ignoring them or not applying them to this situation. Perhaps a new guideline reading, "do not use analphabetic characters in an attempt to recreate logos," would be appropriate. (See also: Talk:I ♥ NY) – flamurai (t) 18:45, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Please reply at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (trademarks) – flamurai (t) 18:47, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Use of square brackets

I am confident in my use of them, within a quotation, to add text that the original speaker did not include. This is clearly set out in brackets. However, I cannot find a style ruling on this. Perhaps I am looking in the wrong place -- can anyone advise? I have already been reverted and want a book to throw if necessary! Thanks. BrainyBabe 13:39, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

That's pretty standard English, but if you want to find something to back you up, you might look at any of the references listed here. ^BlankVerse 16:58, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I know my usage is standard. I was wondering if there was a Wikipedia MOS statement to back me up, that's all. If not, and if it becomes more of an issue in the article I'm editing, I'll gladly use the sources you point out. BrainyBabe 17:09, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Here are quotes on the matter from three style manuals, two American and one British:

Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., 11.14: Tenses and pronouns. In quoting verbatim, writers need to integrate tenses and pronouns into the context.

[Original] Mr. Moll took particular pains to say to you, gentlemen, that these eleven people here are guilty of murder; he calls this a cold-blooded, deliberate and premeditated murder.

[As quoted] According to Darrow, Moll had told the jury that the eleven defendents were "guilty of murder" and had described the murder as "cold-blooded, deliberate and premeditated."

Occasional adjustments to the original may be bracketed. This device should be used sparingly, however.

Mr. Graham has resolutely ducked the issue, saying he won't play the game of rumormongering, even though he has "learned from [his] mistakes."

Ibid., 11.19: Brackets to indicate a change in capitalization. In legal writing, textual commentary, and other contexts where silently changing form capital to lowercase or vice versa might mislead readers or make reference to the original text more difficult, any change in capitalization should be indicated by brackets.

According to article 6, section 6, she is given the power "[t]o extend or renew any existing indebtedness."

"[R]eal estates may be conveyed by lease and release, or bargain and sale," according to section 2 of the Northwest Ordinance.

Let us compare Aristotle's contention that "[i]nferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior" (Politics 5.2) with his later observation that "[r]evolutions also break out when opposite parties, e.g., the rich and the people, are equally balanced" (5.4).

Ibid., 11.68: Use of brackets. Insertions may be made in quoted material to clarify an ambiguity, to provide a missing word or letters, or, in a translation, to give the original word or phrase where the English fails to convey the exact sense. Such interpolations, which should be kept to a minimum lest they irritate or distract readers, are enclosed in brackets (not parentheses).

Marcellus, doubtless in anxious suspense, asks Bernardo, "What, has this thing [the ghost of Hamlet's father] appear'd again tonight?"

"Well," said she, "if Mr. L[owell] won't go, then neither will I."

MLA Style Manual, 2nd ed., 3.9.6: Other Alterations of Sources. Occasionally, you may decide that a quotation will be unclear or confusing to your reader unless you provide supplementary information. For example, you may need to insert material missing from the original, to add sic ("thus," "so") to assure readers that the quotation is accurate even though the spelling or logic might make them think otherwise, or to underline words for emphasis. While such contributions to a quotation are permissible, you should keep them to a minimum and make sure to distinguish them from the original, usually by explaining them in parentheses after the quotation or by putting them in square brackets within the quotation . . . A comment or an explanation that goes inside the quotation must appear within the square brackets, not parentheses.

He claimed he could provide "hundreds of examples [of court decisions] to illustrate the historical tension between the church and state."

Milton's Satan speaks of his "study [pursuit] of revenge."

Oxford Style Manual, 2003, 8.1.1: Accuracy and interpolation. All extracts quoted in a work must be in the exact words of the original; treat any deviation as paraphrasing rather than as a direct quotation. Set words interpolated by anyone other than the original author in square brackets ([]) to show that they are not part of the quoted matter. Square brackets can also be used to alter quoted matter to match its placement in text or conventions adopted elsewhere. —Wayward ^Talk 21:29, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for all your trouble! This is very detailed information. So far, I don't need to use it, i.e. my revert of someone changing my square brackets to inappropriate parentheses has not been challenged, but I certainly now have ammunition if that editor chooses to try to change it another time. Thanks again. BrainyBabe 15:06, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

It is unlikely to be a problem, although I had a similar entity changed way back. I should probably "watch" that page... Rich Farmbrough 12:59 19 March 2006 (UTC).

New Proposal

Browsing through articles that are deal with a foreign subject, all names are always translated to the original language. For example: On The Protocols of the Elders of Zion The first sentence is The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion...(Russian: "Протоколы Сионских мудрецов" or "Сионские Протоколы"). Here the article gives a direct translation to Russian which is okay in my opinion. But dealing with an foreign subject many foreign names come up through out the article and are translated every time which in my opinion looks kind of messy.

I suggest that beside all foreign names instead of translating it we place a small box such as

Ru

and when the user puts his mouse over the box a popup text will display the translation. What do you guys think? Tutmosis 00:33, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a mouse. PizzaMargherita 01:07, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Is it possible to operate a computer without a mouse? Or is yours just integrated into the keyboard? Tutmosis 01:33, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Quite possible, so long as everything you want to do is properly tab-stopped. On the other hand, anything that requires mouse-overs won't work, for obvious reasons. Kirill Lokshin 01:42, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

So I guess my proposal failes? haha Tutmosis 01:46, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Columns of content

There was previously a discussion here about Columns in articles

As I mentioned there, I don't think they should be used, but if they are, they should use CSS, not tables, so I've tried to make a new version of the templates to do the visual styling that some people like without modifying the article structure. (Additionally, with the CSS-based layout, people who really don't like the columns can turn them off in their monobook.css.)  ;-) The original table-based templates are at {{col-begin}}, and my new div- and CSS-based ones are at Template talk:Columns. I need feedback and it needs tweaking. Bypass your cache if you don't see the example. — Omegatron 20:51, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Geographical coordinates, de.wikipedia-style

The German wikipedia has standardised on a set of geographical coordinates templates that place the coordinates link above the horizontal rule that runs below the article's title (see de:New York City or de:Kaffee Alt Wien for examples). This is a rather nifty feature, and I think the English Wikipedia should consider whether adopting this as a style standard would be a good idea.

A proof-of-concept template has been created at {{CoorHeader}} that implements this for coordinates in the degree-minute-seconds format that {{coor dms}} uses. The template takes into account the space needed by the Featured Article star in {{featured article}}, as an attempt to address one concern I've heard already.

The other coordinate formats could easily be supported. The code could also easily be rolled into the existing family of coordinate templates so that their inclusion in the body of the text of existing articles would place the coordinates at the top of the page as well.

Is there support for some or all of this as a new standard? Comments? Objections? — Saxifrage ✎ 08:34, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh, yes! See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Coordinates at the top of the article.

--William Allen Simpson 11:24, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Speaking of standarization, I've seen one major problem that might contradict this. I've begun implimenting this feature in some articles (kalasha, Carthage, London) but other areas where I'd like to add it (such as US cities) already have a template for coordinates. Or rather, the "city template" has space set out for it for coordinates whether they are added or not. One example would be Madison, Wisconsin where I attempted to delete the current coordinates in the box and add this new standard...it would not delete the actual coordinate option. :( Sean WI 18:57, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

My suggestion would be to leave the original and just have both. You'll notice that de:New York City uses a coordinates template that both places the coordinates inline in the text and at the top of the article, so there's precedent for this. Even if it's at the top of the page, people will probably like to have it in the city infoboxes for layout reasons and completeness' sake. — Saxifrage ✎ 19:58, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

The title of the document "Manual of Style" confusing?

Is not "Manual of Style" rather a confusing title for this document? Wikipedia:Manual of Style is a style guide for Wikipedia articles, and is also one of Wikipedia guidelines, more specifically a Wikipedia style guideline. However, Wikipedia:Manual of Style is not a comprehensive style guide for Wikipedia articles as there are numerous other documents that specify style for various sorts of Wikipedia articles. For one, Wikipedia:Manual of Style does not cover the layout of document that is covered in any regular style guides such as MLA. In Wikipedia, layout is explained by Wikipedia talk:Guide to layout instead, an independent style guideline document. Nor is Wikipedia:Manual of Style the only style guideline. It's just one of them.

I suppose that in the beginning Wikipedia:Manual of Style was in fact the only document that specified the style of all Wikipedia articles, and only later were those complementary style guideline documents created. If so, should not Wikipedia:Manual of Style be now renamed and rewritten as a kind of meta document that organize various style guideline documents like Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines does? Hermeneus (user/talk) 01:23, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Use of America/American

Firstly, if this is the wrong page to raise this, I apologise and ask you to direct me to the correct one. In many places in Wikipedia the word America or American is used to mean the U.S.A. or citizen of that country. This page is a good example. Leaving aside an endless debate on 'cultural imperialism', should this not be discouraged? It is quite often ambiguous when used in articles about other American countries and presupposes the reader is aware the colloquial usage.Markb 13:51, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

It is not particularly ambiguous in an English language encyclopedia. If this were a Spanish language one, you would have a better argument. Rmhermen 13:58, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

If anything, one should be *more* careful in an English language encyclopedia, given that there are several versions of the English language, and, as a global language, one cannot assume the reader has any knowledge of it's usage in other countries. A Martian reader could very easily understand 'American President' to mean there is a President of the whole America. they may well then become confused to learn that this 'American President' is democratically elected, but only US citizens get to vote. Markb 14:22, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I have to agree, in the interests of preciseness, there is no real reason not to recomend that the full term 'United States of America' be used rather than 'America'. As abreviations, 'United States' and 'U.S.A.' would be prefered to 'America'. --Barberio 15:27, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

We keep getting suggestions to not use American in this form but they never answer one question: what do we replace it with? If people from Brazil are Brazillian, and people from Canada are Canadian, what do we use as an adjective for people from a county that is legally named "The United States of America"? Are they Unitedan? Stateser? United Stateser? United Statesean? United States of American? Are we really going to replace every instance of the adjective American with the prepositional phrase "of the Unted States of America"? Which will also require we repalce all occurrences of Peruvian with "of Peru", and every other use of an adjectival form of a nationality. (Is there a proper noun Peruvian Potato? How about American Cheese? Cheese of the United States of America, perhaps?) RJFJR 16:26, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

How about US Cheese? How about replacing 'American' with U.S. citizens. It's not difficult! It's about trying to use encyclopidiac standards in articles - attempting to use concise and accurate wordings that are clear to the reader. We cannot assume that users of Wikipedia share a common background and usage of EnglishMarkb 19:14, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Do there really exist any dialects of English which don't include the word American as the name of people from the United States in their lexicon? I mean, I don't like the fact of it (I'm Canadian, live in the Americas, and yet somehow they have a monopoly on the term?), but pragmatically I don't think anyone who has linguistic competency in English is going to find it at all ambiguous in practice. — Saxifrage ✎ 21:29, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I concur with Saxifrage and RJFJR. Wikipedia policy is to use commonly used names for things. For example, the commonly used name in the science of linguistics for the dialect of English in the United States is American English. Furthermore, American English speakers are a majority of native-born English speakers. --Coolcaesar 05:30, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

The Majority of English speakers cannot explain Special Relativity, does that mean Wikipedia should not have articles describing it? The majority of people do not speak English as their first language; we should strive to be unambiguous wherever possible. I notice no one can explain why such usage adds to the clarity of entries on here. Markb 08:21, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Let's be honest and recognize that things are called American not just because U.S. residents want to disrespect (or confuse) the rest of the Western hemisphere. The U.S. is the only nation in North or South America that has the word "America" in its name, so it's hardly surprising (or manifestly vague or unfair) for its citizens to be called Americans, its president to be called the American president, or for countless businesses and organizations based in the U.S. to use "American" in their names (American Airlines, American University, American Cancer Society, American Medical Association, American Express, American Bar Association, American Heart Association, American Stock and Options Exchange, American National Standards Institute, American Museum of Natural History, American Astronomical Society, and on and on and on).

Its common and reasonable to use "American" for U.S. references. Continent-wide references need to be explicit to avoid confusion, not the other way around. "The American president" is not going to to be confused with the "president" of North America. "American companies" is not going to be assumed to mean all businesses in the Western hemisphere. Continents don't have presidents; a reference to all companies in North and South America should say "Western Hemisphere businesses," certainly not "American businesses" unless that reference is explicity explained (as in an article on a free-trade zone for North and South America). A mandate in the style guide to not use "American" except in references to continent- or hemisphere-wide topics is not going to fly; it would almost be...anti-American. DavidH 15:06, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Precisely. "American" is usually used to refer to the USA in English; if there's any confusion we can always use U.S. or the likes. I would be slightly more careful with the term "America" to mean the U.S., but even here the context is usually clear. (It's my experience that this use is even more common in Britain than the States.) We should also note that although the United States of America is the only country with "America" in its title, it is not the only one with "United States." ProhibitOnions 16:08, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

"How about US Cheese?" Surely you're joking—or perhaps are unaware of the foodstuff called American cheese. Calling it "US Cheese" would be inventing a neologism used nowhere in the world but on Wikipedia. I have a very simple question: in what native variant of English does the term "American" cause any confusion whatsoever?

I'm aware of other languages (for example, Spanish) where "American" usually refers to the continent, and some other adjective (for example, norteamericano—talk about ambiguous!—or estadounidense ["United Statesean"]) is used to refer to the country's attributes. And surely native speakers of those languages can be tripped up by the differing usage of the term in English. But there are hundreds of cases where English cognates are confusing to speakers of other languages; once we go down the road of avoiding confusing cognates, "stilted" will not even begin to describe the language we'll be forced into using.

Consider shortcake, whose opening sentence begins: "Shortcake is a sweet biscuit (in the American sense: that is, a crumbly, baking soda- or baking powder-leavened bread)...." How would you eliminate "American" there? "Shortcake is a sweet biscuit (in the US sense..."? "Shortcake is a sweet biscuit (as in US English:..."? Those are atrocious. "American" serves a useful purpose. When one is talking about the continents, one can say "of the American continents" or some such. That is such a rare usage it seems completely perverse to assign it the easy-to-use adjective and force the hugely more common usage to use circumlocutions. --TreyHarris 17:04, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

shortcake is a wonderful example, thank you. It's not a question of 'eliminating' Amercia, its about accuaracy. I'm no expert on shortcake, but I think stating 'in the USA, a crumbly, baking soda- or baking powder-leavened bread' describes to me exactly it's usage in the USA. Not in Peru, Brazil, etc; but in the USA.19:00, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

That's ridiculous. If I make shortcake in New Zealand, it's still a crumbly baking soda- or baking powder-leavened bread. Its disposition doesn't change based on national borders. Shortcake is a biscuit in the American sense in the USA, in Ireland, in Zimbabwe. It's not a biscuit in the Commonwealth sense in any of those places, nor in the USA. You're confusing colocation with national affinity, which are two separate topics that sometimes, but not always, go together. Using USA where American is called for can be as incorrect as using Netherlands where Dutch is called for. --TreyHarris 20:59, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Shortcake *is* a good example. The phrase 'is a biscuit in the American sense' means that there is a continent-wide standard for biscuit, and shortbread conforms to it. Nowhere else can I can this American standard for what a biscuit it, probably because there is no such thing. Hence 'is a biscuit in the American sense' is incorrect. Or are you claiming that the word 'America' does not mean America anymore, it now means the USA? Markb 09:54, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

No, it doesn't. This would be a fairly clear reference to the USA. As it has been said before, in English, unqualified references to "America" or "American" refer to the USA. There are rare instances when this might lead to ambiguity, such as discussions of geological features. The instance you cite does not. "American cheese" does not, either; it's a proper name.

Personally, I don't see what the fuss is all about in the above. If you prefer to use "U.S." or the likes instead of "America," go ahead. However, the fact that "America" in other languages refers primarily to the landmass has no bearing on English usage, in which its usual meaning is the USA. ProhibitOnions 11:41, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I concur with ProhibitOnions and TreyHarris. In the English language, "American" generally refers to the United States of America first, and the American continents second. What other languages use is irrelevant to the English Wikipedia. It makes no sense to adopt a usage that would be awkward, confusing, and irritating to the majority of English Wikipedia readers (who are native speakers of English).

Markb has obviously never worked in publishing or journalism. Any professional editor who proposed something that crazy would be fired on the spot. --Coolcaesar 06:33, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

In English, when used without qualification, the word American completely unambiguously refers to the United States of America. Alternative meanings would only be read if it is stated unambiguously in the context that an alternative meaning is meant. I would even go so far as to say that anyone who does not understand this does not really have a command of English idiom. Language is a beatifully illogical and inconsistent thing, and it would be misguided to recommending avoiding use of American to refer to the United States. No clarity would be gained, and much naturalness would be lost. Nohat 06:46, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I propose we also change all occurrences of "hot dog" to "sausage with bread". "Hot dog" should be only used to indicate canines at high temperatures. PizzaMargherita 07:28, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I see no one can explain how using 'America' as opposed to U.S.A. adds clarity to an article. It would be interesting to see what global authority there is for statments like "In English, when used without qualification, the word American completely unambiguously refers to the United States of America". I rather suspect there isn't one.Markb 08:39, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd turn the tables: can you cite any style guide or dictionary where the primary usage of "American" is relating to the continents rather than to the United States? I've looked at several English dictionaries, both American and international, and have not found a single one where the continental definition is the first. I haven't even found a single one with a usage note explaining the possibility of ambiguity! The burden is on you to show us why the status quo should change, not on us to prove why it should remain. --TreyHarris 09:18, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

How about this: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/America. I am not suggesting that the words America or American should be banished, I'm merely suggesting that they should only be used where there is no ambiguity. No one yet has come up with an arguement that their usage should be prefered because they are more accurate than the alternatives. I wonder how much of the reaction so far is purely emotional, rather than rational.Markb 13:01, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

C'mon, Mark, that's not very sporting. If people don't agree with you, that's "emotional, rather than rational"? But if I read you correctly, your most powerful argument in favor of turning this non-issue into a polarized debate is that there (a) might be Martians who are (b) too dim to have noticed the difference between a continental landmass and the geographic extent of the world's most powerful nation when (c) addressing the leader of the latter. Should this ever come to pass, I suspect we will have other things to worry about. Cheers, ProhibitOnions 14:57, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd say, to rejoice about. Ok sorry, I'll shut up now. PizzaMargherita 15:10, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not the place for coining neologisms or novel uses of words—no dialect of English contains the ambiguity you speak of. Furthermore, if there were a dialect that did, you would essentially be advocating that all of Wikipedia adopt this dialect's usage, which precedent has already rejected. (Compare with WP's policy on American and British English spellings.) — Saxifrage ✎ 18:57, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

then I lay down the challenge; show me the article where the use of America or American provides a concise and unambiguous entry where the alternative would ADD to a reader's potential confusion. As to the concept that 'US President', or 'The President of the U.S.A' (for example) over 'American President' is a novel use of words; well, I'll leave it others to judge.Markb 19:40, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

That's easy. American English. Using U.S. English would increase confusion because there is already a prominent (and highly controversial) organization with that name (go look on Google if you're not familiar with it). It would also confuse all Americans, who are generally accustomed to referring to their own dialect as American English.

My suspicion is that your motive is simply anti-Americanism. I see no rational motive underlying your position as all of your alleged motives have been rebutted. The consensus is clearly against you. If you continue to persist in troll-like behavior with regard to the Manual of Style, one of the admins may have to block you from Wikipedia for a while. --Coolcaesar 20:14, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Coolcaesar, you have been asked not to make accusations and ascribe derisive intents like this in the past. Cool your jets. --Barberio 21:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

My Summary of what forms should be used.

• In general, use United States of America or United States, and U.S. or U.S.A. as abreviations. Such as U.S. Politics or History of the United States House of Representatives
• When the particular phrase is a name, such as 'American Football', or 'American cheese', which is commonly and internationaly known as such, then that form should be used.

This is, in fact, the prelevent concensus view on Wikipedia, and the way articles have already been named and written. I see little reason to change this situation. However, let's take a straw poll on the issue to gauge if there's a concensus to change this. --Barberio 21:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with you, it would be an extremely long exercise to make the necessary changes. However, I believe that the style guide should direct people to use United States of America or United States, and U.S. or U.S.A. when referring to that country, as opposed to America/American. I rather suspect the misuse of the later is mainly down the cumbersome title of United States of America, people have lazily abbreviated it to America without thought for the potential for confusion. As to the charge of anti-Americanism, which 'America' am I accused of being against? Once again, an emotional response when a rational one is not available. Markb 10:51, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Straw Poll

Is the current method, of consistantly using the name 'United States' or 'United State of America' (with exception for proper nouns and items such as 'American Football' which are commonly and international known as such) a suitable Wikipedia guideline? Vote with #'''Keep''' to keep the current method or #'''Change''' to change the method, and state your reasoning behind your vote, followed by a --~~~~ --Barberio 21:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

To clarify the current Status Quo, this comes from the current Manual of Style wording on the issue,

"Use specific terminology: People from Ethiopia (a country in Africa) should be described as Ethiopian, not African."[11]

I belive it is pretty clear how this would be applied in reference to the issue at hand. If you want to Keep this guideline, vote Keep, if you wish to Change it to allow 'American' for 'United States', vote Change. --Barberio 18:45, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

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Keep Votes

1. Keep - This is a well established current practice. It is clear and unambiguious. It combats systemic bias. --Barberio 21:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
2. Yes, I think since I made a pronouncement above. No doubt, "U.S." (I trip when reading "US" but that's another discussion) is the best adjective for things of the United States, "America/American" somewhat less so. "American" is more an evocative (and less precise) term. I don't want MoS to discourage evocative writing, and not just in titles. Most uses of American won't be confused with the continents or all countries of the hemishpere. Editing out "American" unless it's the entire "Americas" doesn't seem right. Ooops, I agree with --TreyHarris (below) too. DavidH 22:21, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

(This was moved here after advisement from Markb. He wants to keep the Status Quo, but wants it explicitly stated in the Manual of Style. --Barberio 15:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC))

1. Yes - in new articles, and when amending existing ones, the use of United States of America or United States, and U.S. or U.S.A. is prefered over America, and U.S. citizen should be used rather than American. Where the 'America or American' is part of a proper noun, then it should be used. Markb 10:51, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

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Change Votes

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Other Comments

• Object to straw poll. The above discussion shows a very clear consensus against changing the status quo. Straw polls are useful when there is lack of clarity as to whether a consensus is emerging. It is unnecessary here, and I urge others to agree with me here rather than voting above. Operating by consensus means we need to have a bias against voting. See Wikipedia:Consensus. --TreyHarris 21:57, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

  Please read Wikipedia:Consensus again, it actualy suggests polling surveys to gauge consensus. --Barberio 22:08, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

  Yes: "Surveys and the Request for comment process are designed to assist consensus-building when normal talk page communication fails." But other than Markb continuing to press his point despite a clearly-built consensus, we don't have any failure to reach consensus here. (Consensus does not equal, nor require, perfect unanimity.) --TreyHarris 03:48, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

• Misleading poll The characterization of the status quo is patently incorrect. Nohat 22:16, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

  I agree with Nohat on this point. I think the status quo should remain, but I don't think Barberio's description of it is correct, which is another reason I am not casting a vote. --TreyHarris 03:48, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Although we have had our differences on other issues in the past, I concur with both of you on this one! --Coolcaesar 07:03, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

• Flawed poll. Agree with Nohat. Look at the votes--Markb agrees witht he "keep" votes, but is voting on the other side because he has a different assumption about what the "current method" is. · rodii · 16:29, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

See above. MarkB was not disputing the status quo, but supporting it. He placed his vote in the 'change' section, because he wanted it explicitly stated in the Manual of Style. I've moved this based on this.

This may be required, but it shouldnt be, since it's already made clear that Globalization and Accuracy have primacy. --Barberio 15:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

• Oppose this poll as per TreyHarris: consensus is clear. — Saxifrage ✎ 11:48, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose procedurally this poll as per Nohat and rodii. Currently established consensus is unclear. In the area of category naming, for example, a consensus in favor of "American" has emerged and is regularly upheld on WP:CfD. Gene Nygaard 14:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

These two comments directly contradict each other. This simply confirms that a poll is required to see if concencus supports continuing the status quo, since it's concencus is disputed. My declaration that this is the status quo is based entirly on the majority of edits I have seen reflecting this, and that aplication of globalization and accuracy guidelines leads to it. To apply the use of any diferent method would require special exception to these guidelines, thus a change to the status quo. --Barberio 15:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

So what if they contradict each other? They're two different people, with two different arguments, who just happen to agree on the outcome. · rodii · 18:49, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, there is no contradiction—it just illustrates the procedural nature of our objections. No straw poll should take place when it includes any claims of existing consensus. Start over from scratch. Gene Nygaard 17:15, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Please re-read the poll question. There is no assosiation or claim of existing consensus. Simply a statement of the current Staus Quo, which may or may not be supported by consensus. The status quo as identified is that based on the current Manual of Style guidelines on Identity. Explicitly, 'Use specific terminology: People from Ethiopia (a country in Africa) should be described as Ethiopian, not African.' If you feel there is no consensus to support the current Manual of Style guideline, please say so. There is no procedural issue here. We know what the Status Quo is, and now we're trying to see if there is a consensus in support of it. (It may be that you've assumed that a Status Quo automaticaly equates to Consensus support, it does not.) --Barberio 18:11, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with your interpretation of that MoS statement, and thus that this is the status quo, but I appreciate the clarification of the question. When you say "the status quo is based entirly on the majority of edits I have seen reflecting this," this simply confirms the shaky basis for your presummptions. Your attempt to draw a parallel between Africa" and "America" ignores the fact that, to many people, "America" is also a name for the United States of America. I'm all for discussing whether that should be deprecated, and I think Markb has done a good job of laying out the argument, though you can see from the discussion above that it won't be a popular move. But this poll, based on an attempt to claim your position as the officially-sanctioned "Status Quo," is not a good way to further that discussion. :::::I'm also removing your box as a poor attempt at denying the legitimacy of a position. If you're asking for input, you should listen to the input you get. · rodii · 18:49, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

The style guide provides no special exception for "America" being suitable a substitute for "United States of America", and the quoted text directly implies that it does the oposite. You have not argued any alternative reading. It may well be that to many people 'America' is also the name for the United States. This has no relevence what so ever to what the current Manual of Style has to say on the issue. If you belive that there is a consensus in oposition to this, then it should be demonstrated. The discussion had clearly stalemated, with both sides claiming (and still claiming) to have the consensus in the issue.

If you wish to berate me for 'claiming that the state is a status quo', then you should first demonstrate that it is not. As you should well know, simply saying I have a shaky argument is an Ad hominem against my wording. As I said, my belife it is status quo is the predominance of edits interperating the quoted phrase in the Manual of Style. So far, no person raising a procedural objection has actualy demonstrated why it is not the Status Quo. Till that happens, the poll stands. --Barberio 19:26, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

• Pardon my confusion. I'll try again. The name of the country is America (like other countries, we ignore somewhat the "united" or "federated" or other grouping term in the official name). It is America, its people are Americans, and using American and America are entirely appropriate and should not in any way be restricted to a narrow "north and south america and all its landmasses and people" sense. No way. That's extreme nit-picking, IMHO. I haven't fully deciphered which vote would reflect that in this poll. DavidH 19:11, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

If this is your view, you should vote Change, to alter the MoS to allow a special exception to naming convention for the United States. --Barberio 19:26, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

We aren't taking the bait. When no clear consensus emerges, the result of disputes is status quo ante. By stating the status quo in terms that no one but you and Markb agree is the status quo, and urging those of us who want American to be a useful word for attributes of the US to vote "change", you're trying to game the system, so that, if no clear consensus emerges, you win. We aren't going to do it, which is why we're not voting—the status quo is not as you've laid it out, it is for American to have the broadly useful meaning (which, yes, is sometimes theoretically ambiguous, but is rarely ambiguous in practice) rather than the niche geophysical meaning you want to assign it. --TreyHarris 19:56, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

The name of the county is *not* America! That's the name of the continent - it's just this sort of misunderstanding I'm seeking to avoid by suggesting the style guide explictly states the prefered title for the country is 'United States' or 'United State of America', or even 'U.S.A'. Markb 19:16, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

That's not what English dictionaries say. Merriam-Webster gives "United States of America" as one of the definitions of America [12], as does The American Heritage Dictionary [13], and the Encarta Dictionary [14]. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English agrees: [15]. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't define proper nouns, but sense 2b for American is "Belonging to the United States", and the Compact Oxford English Dictionary gives that meaning as the primary one [16]. Are you suggesting that all these dictionaries do not accurately reflect the language? Nohat 19:38, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Dictionaries do not define Wikipedia policy. It is not specific to use America to mean United States. It is not neutral to use America to mean United States. Wikipedia already suffers from systemic bias, see WP:CSB, this change would be counter productive to the efforts to combat it. --Barberio 19:50, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

That doesn't really answer my question, now does it? Nohat 19:56, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Furthermore, Barberio is just plain wrong. It is specific and neutral to use America to refer to the United States. For example, there are two famous songs both titled "America" which are clearly about the "United States." One is a traditional folk song and the other is a pop song by Neil Diamond (he performed it live on nationwide television at the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986). I also see many British publications referring to "America" to mean the "United States" all the time.--Coolcaesar 20:09, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Markb, you miss the point. Telling us to change "American" to "of the United States" is like saying that all occurrences of "Russian" need to be changed to "of the Russian Federation" and all occurrences of "Mexican" need to be changed to "of the United Mexican States". One is vernacular, and one is pedantry, and you want the pedantry to trump. It's not going to. --TreyHarris 19:56, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

No, dictionaries do not define WP policy. But common usage is a core naming convention. No one has yet given clear evidence that in any dialect of English there is any real confusion regarding the use of the term in context -- as I see, it those raising objections usually base their arguments on some variation of political correctness. But Wikipedia is not here to promote an agenda of "correcting" common usage. My own view, to the extent possible without introducing neologisms ("U.S. cheese") or awkward circumlocutions, we should try to specify "United States" or "U.S." rather than "American", but there I see no reason to write this into the guideline (with the almost inevitable effect of some users running amok making indiscriminant substitutions). older ≠ wiser 20:02, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

See above. Under the Status Quo, 'American Cheese' or 'American Football', would be fine, since it is a very specific term commonly applied. 'American Politics' however, would not, since it has ambiguity in meaning, and 'United States Politics' would be preferable. --Barberio 20:08, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

French Spacing

I moved this here from my talk page so that everybody can discuss. This comment refers to my recent revert. PizzaMargherita 07:23, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi,

I was a little bit confused about your revert of my edit on French Spacing in the Manual of Style. Your edit summary didn't provide much guidance as to why you were reverting, saying only that it was "not what the manual of style was for". I was attempting to make the guideline clearer by making sure that readers understood what the issue in question was. I'd be happy to make a less prominent link, or a link to a different article, but I think that the current section is inadequate to help users who aren't already familiar with the issue of spacing at the end of sentences. Users may have been taught one method or the other as "correct", and not be aware of the stylistic issues involved. Would you feel comfortable with:

There are no guidelines on whether to use one or two spaces after the end of a sentence (French spacing), but it is not important as the difference shows up only in the edit box. 

Thanks, -- Creidieki 23:39, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi. That's a lot better, thanks. Although "French spacing" is ambiguous because it may refer to spaces around punctuation, and anyway I still feel that it's unnecessary background information for a MoS, which is different from a WP article. Anyway sorry I wasn't being rude, just lazy. PizzaMargherita 07:23, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Seems to me we might point out that there's no sense in putting more than one space after a period, because it will be ignored (as it is in HTML in general). Double-spacing after sentences is a pointless holdover from the typewriter days. ProhibitOnions 11:45, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

But it is also harmless (or unhelpful, depending on how you look at it), not changing what we see, and therefore unnecessary instruction creep when it comes to the MoS. Gene Nygaard 17:28, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I will note that I have noticed of late many, many AWB-automated edits that are doing nothing but "fixing" invisible spacing issues, such as "French spacing" and blank lines after headers and between bullet points. This is really starting to annoy me; it pollutes my watchlist, requires my attention to scrutinize the edits to be sure they aren't changing formatting, and diminishes the capacity of the servers for edits that do not affect the visible encyclopedia. Perhaps we should be more explicit about do not "fix" this, à la dialects of English? --TreyHarris 19:30, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I think you're right. If bots are going to go round fixing trivial issues, they should at least do several of them at once. ProhibitOnions 21:05, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Another thing, I noticed the phenomenon you describe had happened to an article I had written, and the bot had left a rather arrogant-sounding edit summary along the lines of (Fixed various formatting errors and other mistakes). It had... removed a single space. ProhibitOnions 21:16, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Maybe we should formalize a "shoot on sight" rule for those people cluttering up our watchlists with those pointless, often invisible AWB changes. Gene Nygaard 17:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

ALL CAPS redux

Please take a peak at the New York Times abstracts I have copied for article: Martin Beck (vaudeville). Does it really look good this way as opposed to the Title Case used by the New York Times when they transcribe an article? These are just raw OCR dumps. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 06:13, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Uh, dude, you can pull PDF files with actual images of those articles as scanned from microfilm out of the ProQuest database at any decent public or academic library. They've scanned in the NYT back to 1850. Once you have the images of the original articles, then it's much easier to see which lines were the actual headline and which were the blurbs below the headline (which usually don't need to be included in the citation). --Coolcaesar 06:36, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

You can skip the "Uh" when your leaving messages for me please. "Blurbs" and "headlines" if they are there, I quote them, and in all caps too. I am asking do they look nice or not nice?

You simply want to know if they look good? I don't think they do. I think they look fairly nasty. --maru (talk) contribs 01:05, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Varieties of English

With regard to the recommendation: "If there's no strong tie, try to find synonyms that can be used in any dialect." — aren't common synonyms the better option even when an article is strongly tied to a certain form of English? After all, we're concerned with communication, not with pandering to chauvinism. If I'm writing an article about the seventh Earl of Ilkeley-bar-Tat, and I refer to his need for a lot of rubbers because he was always making mistakes, I don't see that the fact that he's English justifies insisting on the confusing word "rubbers". Could this recommendation be changed to: "Where varieties of English differ over a certain word or phrase, try to find an alternative that is common to both"? --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 20:56, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you. Using neutral synonims should be preferred at all times, and therefore should be moved up the list of rules—should I say, the two lists of rules.

I think that the "National varieties" section is atrociously ambiguous and ineffective. And given how frequently it is discussed in this talk page, I'm under the impression that I'm not the only one.

I have made a proposal that some people support and some others oppose, although the latter are unwilling to discuss it beyond a drive-by opposition (producing arguments that have already been addressed in the proposal itself) and do not propose an alternative solution. PizzaMargherita 22:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Mel, that is a good point, and the wording could be altered, although in some cases it may be difficult for many people to really determine a neutral word or phrase.

(Pizza, I think there is also a vast majority who doesn't really see a problem requiring a "solution" at all. The concern that dozens or hundreds of occurrences of new markup in an article would needlessly clutter up the wikitext has not been addressed by the proposal at all.) —Michael Z. 2006-03-24 23:13 Z

Plus there's the "let sleeping dogs lie" factor. If you think we have a lot of arguments about this now, just think what is likely to happen if PizzaMargherita's proposal brought this to the forefront in thousands of articles. Gene Nygaard 00:35, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Michael, I replied to your comment. I think your estimate of "dozens or hundreds" occurrences in an article is overstated. And even so, it is in contradiction with your understating the size of the problem—and you say you do trip over "US" (vs "U.S.") when you read it, right?

Gene, could you please share the apocalyptic scenario you have in mind if the proposal passes and is implemented?

(Please let's continue in the appropriate forum. Thanks.) PizzaMargherita 08:23, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

I, for one, will concern myself with how it looks to the thousands of readers who are not logged in, who do not have preferences set--and will argue if someone wakes this sleeping dog up by pointing it out to me by making such an addition of the markup, where I might let it slide otherwise (actually, I often don't notice varieties of English spellings any more). And, I do like a good argument now and then. Gene Nygaard 17:43, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I have replied in the appropriate forum. PizzaMargherita 18:38, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I should have said this earlier; I've changed the wording, and moved the advice slightly further up, so that it's more general. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:57, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

You would think so, right? And yet some would argue that your change had absolutely no effect. This is because of the following weasel-clause

They are roughly in order; guidelines earlier in this list will usually take precedence over guidelines later

and the fact that the order has not changed in either list of rules. Why we have to maintain two lists, I really don't know.

For another discussion on how ambiguous and useless this section is, please read this, or in general stay tuned on this page and watch people fight. PizzaMargherita 10:42, 26 March 2006 (UTC)