Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Three corrections

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Please comment if there are any questions. Apteva (talk) 00:30, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

It appears that the example "the Uganda–Tanzania War; the Roman–Syrian War; the east–west runway; the Lincoln–Douglas debates; a carbon–carbon bond" while not commenting that it is a little long (do we really need so many examples?), is in need of two corrections; in the first example, "the Uganda–Tanzania War", war should not be capitalized (see google book search), and it should be "but not the Roman–Syrian War (as Roman-Syrian War is a proper name)". The article at Uganda–Tanzania War should also be moved, to Uganda–Tanzania war, and if it is a proper name, a better example used, and it be moved to Uganda-Tanzania War. (already moved) [and now it needs to be moved, but there is an RM to decide that...] Apteva (talk) 23:08, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Comment. I have reverted Apteva's undiscussed move of Uganda–Tanzania War, which was apparently done to prove a point here and not in the interest of the article itself.
  This section attracted no comment before Apteva elevated it to an RFC, probably because Apteva is pushing on proper names, en dashes, and hyphens at several forums at the same time – including an RM, now closed as not moved, for the long-settled Mexican–American War. I have explicitly said, on this talkpage and elsewhere, that general issues with WP:MOS guidelines should be raised as general issues, right here. Not at several locations, and not as particular sparring points. It seems to me that this RFC is yet another waste of time. I comment on one detail only: yes, obviously many examples are needed in the guideline. Even more than we have now, perhaps. Some editors are still refusing to accept the principle it is based on as consensual; and Apteva, for example, is playing hard by appeal to inconsequential differences among the present examples. If any element of the long and meticulous community consultation on dashes in 2011 needs review, let it be done in an orderly and informed way. Some recommended background reading for those interested: the article Proper noun, most of which is now accurate. (It needs a move to Proper name.)
  Noetica^Tea? 21:48, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

  It was a correct move. Uganda–Tanzania war is not a proper noun and is not capitalized. Nor was it undiscussed. The date and time in the above discussion shows that it was pointed out on September 27 that it should be moved, and that it was not moved until October 5 (and a check of the edit history will show that I noted that it had been moved when I opened the RfC on October 7). Clearly plenty of time and some for anyone to disagree with the proposal. Seeing none, I took it as approval, not an unusual response. Should an RM to move proper noun come to my attention I would object. And I think that would be the consensus. The word phrase "proper noun" did not enter use until about 1890. The dictionary, if it contains "proper name", defines it as proper noun. The two terms are interchangeable. I have called for an RfC because I am not going to get into an edit war over the Revert. In the BRD cycle, after R comes D. There had been no response, so I am asking for a response. I do not believe that a review of a clearly embarrassing discussion needs to be reviewed. Proper names use hyphens and our MOS says so. 10,000 books use a hyphen and maybe a 100 use something else. Case closed. I would like to remind everyone to focus on the issue, not the editor, though. WP is never an authority on anything, proper nouns included. WP articles can never be used as a RS. Apteva (talk) 02:40, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

These topics have already been the focus of much long and pointless argumentation that wasted the time of multiple editors, time that could have been spent elsewhere, like in creating content. I don't understand the point of reopening these discussions so soon after they have finally and painfully been settled by consensus. --Neotarf (talk) 08:03, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Congratulations to Noetica, the proper noun article has just been cited by no less an authority than Mark Liberman at Language Log. [1] --Neotarf (talk) 08:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Hey, that's good for WP's reputation. Tony (talk) 13:26, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

There are still improvements that are needed - fix the misleading and incorrect examples. If someone wants to argue that proper nouns are not capitalized or that sentences do not need periods, not questions of course, then certainly their time is better spent elsewhere, but if someone insists that Roman-Syrian War is spelled with an endash they will have a very hard time supporting that premise. Is War capitalized in "Uganda-Tanzania War"? Possibly, but if it is the punctuation is a hyphen and not an appropriate example of where to use an endash. If war is not capitalized, Uganda–Tanzania war is an example of where an endash is used, and the capitalization needs to be fixed. In both cases the current article needs to be moved - either to Uganda-Tanzania War or to Uganda–Tanzania war. There are always people who misspell things, and use incorrect punctuation, and that is why there is an edit tab and a move option. Apteva (talk) 03:49, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Uganda–Tanzania war

Uganda–Tanzania war has not "achieved proper name status" and should be spelled with a lower case w in war. If it has "achieved proper name status", then it should be spelled with a hyphen. When something has not achieved "proper name status", it is simply a construct of words, using punctuation to convey meaning. Since it is a war between Uganda and Tanzania, an endash is used, instead of a hyphen. While few editors would notice the nuance, it is reasonable to be correct. Whether dashes should be allowed in titles is a discussion which belongs at WP:TITLE, not at WP:MOS. Apteva (talk) 07:24, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Roman-Syrian War

As this has achieved "proper name status" it is be spelled with a hyphen, using common usage. Likewise, Mexican-American War is also spelled with a hyphen, in the vast majority of sources. Apteva (talk) 07:24, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Comet Hale-Bopp

This example: "Comet Hale–Bopp or just Hale–Bopp (discovered by Hale and Bopp)" needs to be removed because used either with or without the word "Comet" this is still a proper noun and therefore uses a hyphen, as supported by the thousands of reliable sources that use this punctuation. According to Google Books there are 31,900 sources, the overwhelming majority of which use a hyphen. It is not even close. Apteva (talk) 22:47, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Nonsense. Many of those reliable sources do use the en dash, which confirms that it is simply a styling choice. The fact that many sources have a style that substitutes hyphens in the traditional role of the en dash, and that the Google books OCR can't tell the difference, does not mean that WP needs to adopt that style. There's nothing special or unique about Hale–Bopp here. Your concept of "proper noun, therefore hyphen" is unsupportable hallucination. Dicklyon (talk) 01:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Not nonsense at all. There are some sources that do use en dash, but if there were many, as in many more than use hyphen, then statistically at least one would have appeared in the first ten. Out of the first 100 how many use hyphen? Out of the first 1,000 how many? Google books has 32,900 to look through. I strongly disagree with the supposition that an OCR can not tell the difference as there are a huge number of occurrences in google books of both endashes where they are appropriate and em dashes where they are appropriate. While it is far easier to do a text search, I am completely confident in my assessment that there are no endashes in the first 10 results that I obtained. As was pointed out before, any suggestion of "many" needs to also include "out of how many", as saying there are 432 examples of using Hale-Bopp with an endash sounds impressive until you find out, say, that that was out of 32,000, with 29,000 using a hyphen and 3,000 using a space, just as a made up example. Proper noun hyphen is not fiction. It is in our MOS and I really have yet to see any example of a proper noun that does not use a hyphen. I am not saying they do not exist. I can certainly imagine that if someone named Hale-Bopp and someone named Lennard-Jones discovered a comet it could be called the "Hale-Bopp–Lennard-Jones Comet, to distinguish between one discovered by Hale and someone named Bopp-Lennard-Jones, or by one person named Hale-Bopp-Lennard and one named Jones. Normally exceptions to rules are pretty easy to find. It is academic to find them, but still interesting, and I really have not seen one. One editor perhaps looked for examples of endashes in WP article titles and came up with two that are not proper nouns and two that are using incorrect punctuation on WP. Since when has WP ever been considered a reliable source? Apteva (talk) 04:27, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Nonsense. Several of them DO in fact appear in the first page of 10 hits on Google Book Search (with previews). You need to actually look at the previews to see how they are styled, as the OCR does not distinguish hyphen from en dash usually (and sometimes it sees en dashes as em dashes—I was going to say like this one, but it turns out that one really did get typeset with an em dash, due to some amateur typographer's blunder). If en dashes do show up sometimes in snippets, in probably from books that they got electronically, as with this one, where you can tell they got it electronically because if you zoom way in the letters aren't blurry or pixelated; they're being rendered from text. The same effect is often seen in Google Scholar, where papers with en dashes often show up as hyphen, but not always; in spite of that, nearly half show up on the first scholar results page with en dash. It's not an usual style like you're making it out to be. Dicklyon (talk) 05:33, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Am I hearing an echo? 5/20 is a long way from "nearly half". It is 3 to 1 in favor of using a hyphen. Which is correct based on that information? Clearly a hyphen. Apteva (talk) 06:35, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

For now I have changed "Comet" to comet, per p. 48 of the New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors, and per our article on the comet, which does not capitalize the word comet - hence an endash is correct as it is not treated as a proper noun. There is an open RM to move the page to Comet Hale-Bopp, treating it as a proper noun. Sources clearly favor proper noun status. Halley's comet, on the other hand, does not favor proper noun status and can also be corrected. Apteva (talk) 16:28, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Please see WP:Policies and guidelines#Not part of the encyclopedia: "The policies, guidelines, and process pages themselves are not part of the encyclopedia proper. Consequently, they do not generally need to conform with the content standards. It is therefore not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's administrative pages, or to phrase Wikipedia procedures or principles in a neutral manner, or to cite an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's editorial practices. Instead, the content of these pages is controlled by community-wide consensus, and the style should emphasize clarity, directness, and usefulness to other editors."

The "New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors" does not have any authority over Wikipedia. The Wikipedia house style for comets is here: WP:Naming conventions (astronomical objects)#Comets.

--Neotarf (talk) 18:22, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Irrelevant. The name we have chosen is "comet" not "Comet". Using "Comet" gives it proper noun status, and it becomes Comet Hale-Bopp, with a hyphen, not an endash. the section referenced says to use the common name, and if none, give it proper noun status (how generous). The example, Comet Hyakutake, is littered with references that use comet and ones that use Comet. Apteva (talk) 18:53, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

IMHO, recalling high school grammar classes might be of help here. Is the word "comet" a part of the name, or it just reiterates what the name is about? In other words, can we leave "comet" out without loss of meaning? Does the (c/C)omet Halley-Bopp resemble the "New York Times" newspaper and a McDonald's restaurant, or, rather, The Wall Street Journal and the White House?

To my feeling, that particular space object is called Halley's Comet, and another one is called Hale-Bopp Comet. Since the names of space objects (planets, stars, comets, galaxies, constellations, etc.) are always capitalised (e.g., Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Aldebaran, Vega, Milky Way, Sun, etc., etc.) , the word "comet" should also be capitalised in all the instances, since it is an inseparable part of that object's name. Rules as to dash/hyphen should apply accordingly. kashmiri 19:52, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Of course Comet Hale-Bopp (however hyphenated) is a proper noun. All names are proper nouns. Some sources may choose not to capitalize it; that's a style decision (a poor one in my view, but style rather than grammar). But even in those sources, it's still a proper noun — that's a grammatical rather than stylistic category. --Trovatore (talk) 20:29, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

That may be obvious to any number of people, but it is not obvious to the people who write articles about the comet, or Articles as in scientific articles published elsewhere.[2] In both cases the spelling of the dictionary is used. Why would we write a style guide that no one was using? Style guides should follow what we are doing, not make up rules that no one uses. I suggest that Comet should be changed to comet in Celestial bodies to agree with common use. We use sun and moon when 99.9+% (probably a lot more 9s for sun than moon) of the time we actually mean Sun and Moon, and it is ridiculous to capitalize it, and not done in common practice. Our style guides need to follow common practice, not introduce peculiarities. Apteva (talk) 21:04, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Your reference to "common use" seems misguided: Sun and Moon are always capitalised when used as names of celestial bodies (i.e., not in sun lotion, sunbathing, moonlight, etc.); so are Earth, Mercury, etc. As to your removal of capitalisation in "Comet", I would thus suggest you refrain from making edits that deliberately violate WP:MoS. Any such changes should be reverted. kashmiri 21:44, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Speaking only for myself, I am not making any edits that violate the MOS. The MOS says that proper names use hyphens, so I am moving articles that are proper nouns and use an endash, like, for example, Mexican-American War and Spanish-American War. Doing that brings them into compliance with the MOS. I am removing the examples in the MOS that are not in compliance with the MOS. The MOS says that proper nouns use hyphens, and has three examples that are proper nouns yet use an endash. One of them, comet Hale–Bopp, is not capitalized in our article, is not capitalized in a respected dictionary, and yet is capitalized as an example in our MOS. What's up with that? What I do need to do, though, is politely ask editors to read the section of the MOS on hyphens and note that there actually are places they are used - like in proper nouns. We all need to get on the same page here though, and if someone can show me 10,000 books that use an endash in Mexican-American War, and that there are less than use a hyphen, by all means that is what we also should use. But no matter how some editors came to the conclusion that Mexican-American War should have been spelled with an endash so they are going to use one, if in fact that is not a reasonable decision, it needs to be re-opened. In case no one has noticed, out of 4 million articles, there are some that have errors, and that is where I would prefer to spend my time. Fixing errors - like the spelling of Mexican-American War. Apteva (talk) 02:27, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

A Google Books search shows about 50% capitalize "Comet". Art LaPella (talk) 23:57, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

True. But how many dictionaries capitalize Halley's comet or comet Hale–Bopp? Apteva (talk) 02:27, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Most online dictionaries on the OneLook list capitalize the "C". Some capitalize it inconsistently. None on my list uncapitalize it consistently, although Dictionary.com's Halley's comet definition comes closest. Art LaPella (talk) 04:51, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

But now I found two uncapitalizers elsewhere. Art LaPella (talk) 05:07, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

The dictionary link for Comet Hale-Bopp is amusing - links to WP with a hyphen, even though the article uses an endash, as of 2011 - "05:05, 26 January 2011‎ CWenger (talk | contribs)‎ . . (31 bytes) (+31)‎ . . (moved Comet Hale-Bopp to Comet Hale–Bopp: MOS:ENDASH #1, comet discovered by Hale and Bopp)".

We found 3 dictionaries with English definitions that include the word comet Hale-Bopp: Click on the first link on a line below to go directly to a page where "comet Hale-Bopp" is defined.

General dictionaries General (1 matching dictionary)

Comet Hale-Bopp: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia [home, info]

Computing dictionaries Computing (1 matching dictionary)

Comet Hale-Bopp, Hale-Bopp, Comet: Encyclopedia [home, info]

Slang dictionaries Slang (1 matching dictionary)

Comet Hale-Bopp: Urban Dictionary [home, info]

I checked to see if it was just copying the punctuation used in the search entry, and replaced the hyphen with an endash and got:

Sorry, no dictionaries indexed in the selected category contain the exact phrase comet Hale–Bopp. Apteva (talk) 15:59, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

• You might want to check s.t. other than a dict, such as Cometary Science after Hale–Bopp (Böhnhardt, Combi, Kidger, & Schulz, eds, Springer 2003), which uses the en dash in numerous papers and research notes, such as The 1995–2002 Long-Term Monitoring of Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale–Bopp) at Radio Wavelength; Large-Scale Structures in Comet Hale–Bopp; Modelling of Shape Changes of the Nuclei of Comets C/1995 O1 Hale–Bopp and 46P/Wirtanen Caused by Water Ice Sublimation; Observations of Rotating Jets of Carbon Monoxide in Comet Hale–Bopp with the IRAM Interferometer; From Hale–Bopp's Activity to Properties of its Nucleus; The Shadow of Comet Hale–Bopp in Lyman–Alpha, 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann 3 – One Orbit after Break-Up; Nitrogen Sulfide in Comets Hyakutake (C/1996 B2) and Hale–Bopp (C/1995 O1), etc. These are proceedings of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Colloquium No. 186 "Cometary Science after Hale–Bopp" (Tenerife, Jan. 2002), which followed the First International Conference on Comet Hale–Bopp in Jan. 1998. There are other, similar uses, such as 4015/Wilson–Harrington, 55P/Tempel–Tuttle, the Kuiper–Edgeworth (K–E) belt, the Hertz–Knudsen relationship, and the Stefan–Boltzmann constant. They even use the dash for Hale–Bopp in their references, though I suspect that if we followed up, we'd find that many were published with a hyphen. That is, they punctuate according to their in-house MOS, which is s.t. people here have been arguing we're not allowed to do (esp. in article titles, claiming it violates COMMONNAME). — kwami (talk) 18:19, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) Comment. Hale-Bopp carries a hyphen because the IAU says that it's spelled with a hyphen. Hyphenated surnames have the hyphen replaced with a space, like Singer Brewster, discovered by Singer-Brewster, or cut in half, like Bally-Clayton (1968d C/1968 Q1), discovered by Bally-Urban and Clayton. Some people had already moved a couple of featured comet articles via RM. Kwami (who is posting right above me by pure chance) then moved dozens of comet articles to dashed articles, then proposed "Hale-Bopp" for the MOS draft as an example of a dash names. He didn't mention that all comet articles were hyphenated only a few weeks ago, or that he had moved dozens of himself a couple of days ago without discussion. Months later I realized the problem and I tried to correct it, but the usual suspects stonewalled the change. Now Kwami has been desyosped for making massive moves against consensus. Maybe it would be time to discuss comet hyphens again..... Or should I wait until Noetica is topic banned for stonewalling and edit warring? --Enric Naval (talk) 18:45, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

And Enric Naval posts pictures of cats he's killed on his user page. If you can provide a source for the IAU rule, great, but that would simply be their in-house style. We don't copy the in-house styles of our sources any more than they do, as the result would be chaotic. Punctuation varies from source to source, and is even adapted in references and quotations.

The IAU convention, BTW, is similar to typewriter hyphenation. It's because astronomers send the IAU telegrams of their discoveries, and telegrams can't handle dashes. — kwami (talk) 19:14, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

The IAU has a comet naming guideline, not a style guideline. It's the only body that can name comets, and its naming decisions are internationally accepted. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:29, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Valuable link. Although I can't help an impression that the document deals more with naming than with typography. I wouldn't be surprised if its authors did not understand a difference between a hyphen and a dash. Astronomers hardly ever are typesetters... kashmiri 12:06, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

What it says is that spaces or hyphens are used: "each individual name is to be separated by a hyphen", and it is recommended that no more than two names be included. If someone has a hyphenated name that hyphen is replaced with a space or one of the two names only used. So that eliminates the ambiguity of Hale-Lennard-Jones - it would be either Hale-Lennard Jones or Hale-Lennard or Hale-Jones. Apteva (talk) 14:54, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

And the comet names were always announced in circulars, printed in paper, with diacritics, umlauts, scientific symbols, minus and plus signs, superscripts, and French letters like ç. The telegrams were coded and illegible, and they never contained any comet name. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:41, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't know whether this has to be a joke or what. This is a printout of a French-language news release from 1920 regarding the position of an observed new planet. Nothing about comets, naming, etc. See, basic knowledge of French prevents being misled by comments like yours. kashmiri 12:02, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

The IAU circulars communicate the discovery of all types of astronomical bodies: stars, asteroids, minor planets, comets, etc. as well as observations of interest, corrections, etc. Here you have the printed IAU circulars announcing 1919 g (Skjellerup) and Reid 1921a and Väisälä 1944b. More recent version are available by subscription. As you can see, the official names have always been announced in printed circulars, which don't have any restriction for diacritics, umlauts, dashes, scientific symbols, etc. Decades before the circulars started, they were announced in printed journal Astronomische Nachrichten, which also didn't have any restriction in characters. Telegrams didn't play any role in name announcements, they were just for quick announcements of discoveries. At discovery time comets only had a provisional designation like 1944b (second comet discovered in 1944). --Enric Naval (talk) 16:27, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I am not sure about the coded and illegible part. The IAU recently, though, asserted[3] using capital letters for planets, etc., but it is not clear if that extends to comets. Hale-Bopp for example could simply be certified as being "the comet Hale-Bopp", which provides no insight into capitalization of comet. The examples given were Solar System and Earth's equator.

It was noted that the naming of all planets so far has long predated the existence of the IAU. I think that rather than naming things they standardize names and certify them, and are an arbitor, but they do not make up the names, or sell names.

The IAU frequently receives requests from individuals who want to buy stars or name stars after other persons. Some commercial enterprises purport to offer such services for a fee. However, such "names" have no formal or official validity whatever.

Based on the survey of google book results below it is clear that the endash conclusion in 2011 took an extreme minority viewpoint and put the MOS in conflict with WP:TITLE. I suggest that it be reversed in light of new information, and that the examples of wars and comets with endash be removed from the MOS and replaced with hyphens. Whether the use of hyphens will remain dominant or, like Kiev could be replaced with a new spelling remains to be seen. WP is not a crystal ball and does not try to reflect what people should be doing or what they might be doing but simply what they are doing. Just as Kiev remains the overwhelming spelling in common usage, Comet Hale-Bopp (with a hyphen) is the dominant spelling for the comet Hale-Bopp (correctly not capitalized when preceded by the), along with airports and wars which have achieved proper name status and if there are any other names with endash or hyphen they, like Comet Hale-Bopp can be tested to see if they use an endash or a hyphen in common usage, but the MOS does not need to pretend that endash rules apply inside names, because that is not the interpretation of the vast majority of book editors. Should that change, clearly WP would eventually reflect that change as well, but certainly can not be expected to precede that change. To do so would be original research. Apteva (talk) 13:49, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

The IAU decides who were the original discoverers and in which order they made the discovery, and the spelling of the comet name (the thing with modifying the hyphenated surnames). The IAU also fixates the transliterations of foreign names so they are spelled in only one way by everyone, although I can only give a example for a Moon crater(1). The IAU can ignore suggestions, see what happened to Hugh Percy Wilkins. If you disagree with a naming decision you can only appeal to the IAU itself. Most importantly, you can't assign arbitrary names to comes that you discovered yourself, the IAU will decide the name for you whether you like or not.

(1) The Far Side of the Moon: A Photographic Guide. 5.1 Identification of Named Features. Spelling of Feature Names. The IAU has fixated the transliteration of "Tsiolkovskiy (crater)", which is named after a Russian rocket scientist. You could drop the last "i" and still have a valid transliteration of the guy's name from the Russian language, but then it wouldn't be the crater's correct name. The IAU standardized all Moon crater names in 1975, and it only accepts names of dead people, except for Apollo astronauts; some old names were retained, others were changed [4]. In 2008 the MESSENGER probe mapped Mercury, and the IAU made rules for the names of it surface features: the biggest basin received a unique name, cliffs were named after famous ships, and craters were named after "'deceased artists, musicians, painters, and authors who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field and have been recognized as art historically significant figures for more than 50 years.". The IAU approved names for each feature and then published official maps.[5][6]. The IAU can pull this stuff because it's the naming authority in astronomy matters.

Q: Who is legally responsible for naming objects in the sky?

A: The IAU is the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and surface features on them. And names are not sold, but assigned according to internationally accepted rules. "Buying Star Names", IAU's FAQ

(...) rules established by the IAU, which emerged as the arbiter of planetary names and coordinate systems during the early years of space exploration. Back then, standardization helped to prevent the Solar System from being plastered with conflicting sets of names used by Soviet and US scientists. These days, the tensions are less nationalistic and more interdisciplinary: a dust-up between the geologists who tend to lead planetary missions and the astronomers who comprise much of the IAU. “Why should I let astronomers name things just because they’re on another planet?” asks Mike Malin, a geologist and principal investigator for the mast camera on NASA’s Curiosity rover mission, which has generated its own conflict with the IAU over the naming of a feature at its Martian landing site. "Space missions trigger map wars. Planetary explorers rebel against nomenclature protocols". Nature 22 August 2012

To avoid further disputes as proud pioneers sought to thank benefactors, curry favour or merely indulge themselves, the IAU went on to establish working groups to set rules and conventions for nomenclature.

, Procedures now make sure that mountains on Mercury are named with words for 'hot' in various languages, canyons on Venus christened after goddesses and small craters on Mars twinned with villages on Earth. Just last month, a 39-kilometre-wide Martian crater was named Moanda, after a town in Gabon. "The Name Game". Nature 22 August 2012

By that time, tiny P4 should have a real name. "We're tossing around some ideas," says Showalter, "but the name has to come out of Greek mythology associated with Hades and the underworld." That's according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which formally approves the names of heavenly objects — and which has strict and sometimes arcane guidelines for what's permitted. Underworld myths are the rule for moons of Pluto; for moons of Uranus, it must be characters from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope — specifically Pope's poem "The Rape of the Lock." That required Showalter to learn the verses well. "I'm the discoverer of two moons of Uranus," he says. "We named them Cupid and Mab."

The IAU is also responsible for the decision in 2006 to demote tiny Pluto, just one-half the size of Earth's moon, to the status of dwarf planet. "Pass Out the Cigars! Pluto Is a Papa" Time, Science section, 25 July 2011

So who's in charge of naming solar system objects that are discovered now? Since its organization in 1919, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has been in charge of naming all celestial objects. When an astronomer discovers an object, or wants to name a surface feature, they can submit a suggestion to the IAU, and the IAU either approves it or suggests a different name. Since we don't think there are any undiscovered planets, the IAU focuses on the naming of moons, surface features, asteroids, and comets and has websites about naming conventions for each. "Curious About Astronomy? Ask An Astronomer: Who named the planets and who decides what to name them?" Astronomy department of Cornell university.

The only official body which can give names to astronomical objects is the International Astronomical Union (IAU). (...) All official names have to be adopted by the IAU. There are certain rules which have to be followed in the official names allocated to different types of object; some of these are outlined below. (...) Comets. Comets are named after their discoverers. (...) In 1994, the International Astronomical Union updated their mechanism for naming comets (...) For more information on comet designations, please visit the International Astronomy Union website (...) "The naming of stars" Royal Observatory, Greenwich

So, is it clear now that the IAU's naming guidelines are not an "in-house style"? And that the IAU is the only body with the power of naming astronomical stuff and defining the exact spelling of each name? --Enric Naval (talk) 22:59, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

The words "The MoS presents Wikipedia's house style" need to be nixed too. WP is not a publishing house and does not have a house style. WP is not a monolithic organization under the command of one person, even though some editors would prefer that. There are many styles that are appropriate, and the MOS explains what some of them are. It is not either inclusive nor exclusive. Editors refer to it for suggestions, but use their own common sense in applying what it says. Britannica, on the other hand, is a publishing house, and does have a house style. The words "house style" are not common language and have no reason for being used, even if we were a monolithic organization, and even if we did have a "house style", which we do not. Apteva (talk) 17:08, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Let's not expand the scope of this section so much, or we will get nothing done. We were talking about comet names: the capital "c" in "Comet", the hyphens, and the proper name status. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:02, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Above, Enric Naval ignores the difference between naming and styling, and between official names and common names. The IAU has a brief style guide in which they "recommend" capitalization of names of individual astronomical objects (just as many other organizations have style guides that recommend capitalizing the important items in their respective fields). "The IAU formally recommends that the initial letters of the names of individual astronomical objects should be printed as capitals" as their web page says, referencing their style guide which clarifies that this is "in IAU publications". If they have a recommendation for how the general public should choose to style the names, I'm not sure where it is. And if they have info that says "comet" should come before or after the name, I'm not seeing that, either; it's clear that in common names, Halley's comet is more common the comet Halley, but others go the other way. Does IAU control this? I don't think so. Do they have an opinion on en dashes? Like many style guides, theirs doesn't say anything about that. Dicklyon (talk) 17:45, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

(I'll comment on hyphens. I won't comment on comet/Comet.) The IAU's comet naming guideline, not styling and not an in-house style, says that discoverer names are separated by hyphens. And says to remove hyphens from hyphenated surnames to avoid confusions with said hyphens, like Singer Brewster, discovered by Singer-Brewster, or drop part of the name hyphenated surname, like Bally-Clayton, discovered by Bally-Urban and Clayton. Thus, these compounded names are not built with standard English rules, they are built with IAU's naming rules, which give explicit instructions for using hyphens and spaces to separate the name in a manner that doesn't cause any confusion about how many discoverers the comet has. (Thus, it's not necessary to use dashes to separate surnames, because there is no possible confusion with any hyphenated surname in any comet name, past or future.) --Enric Naval (talk) 18:02, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

First a clarification. The IAU is not referring to an internal guideline about how they should internally recommend capitalizing or recommend using spaces and hyphens - they are the final arbitrator as to what the "official" name of a comet or planet is. They use those guidelines in helping them make those decisions, and they publish their answers. Bally-Urban was certainly asked would you like to use Bally or Urban because you can not use both. Singer-Brewster could have been asked, but the guideline permits using up to two names. Some names go on much longer. Secondly while there is a difference between the official name and the common name of many things, in neither case do comets use a hyphen. Common usage is tested, as it was here, by checking as many sources as possible and determining the most common usage. Scholarly sources could tend to prefer the official name, but not necessarily. Common names could tend to prefer comet Halley or Halley's comet, or Halley's Comet. It is not clear whether the IAU is even specifying whether comet goes before or after the name and is simply addressing the variable portion of the name - the word planet is not a part of the name planet Earth, why would comet be part of the name comet Hale-Bopp? It is completely acceptable, in context, to use Hale-Bopp. The dominant convention though, is clear, for most comets, it comes first. But the MOS is not the place for establishing title rules. That domain is at WP:TITLE, which has, like the MOS, 70 subpages for assistance. Apteva (talk) 19:29, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

WP doesn't care what IAU wants to do stylistically. WP is not an astronomy journal. IAU allegedly asserting that its stylistic decision to favor hyphens over dashes (I would bet good money they did not in fact draw any such distinction, and are only drawing a distinction between using a space and using a dash that they have misnamed a hyphen, because they're astronomers, not grammarians; Apteva's own post of 14:54, 16 October 2012 (UTC) supports my view here) is actually a naming matter not a style matter is simply an alleged assertion and not one that WP is magically bound to recognize when it defies common sense and conflicts with our business as usual of creating an encyclopedia. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 22:15, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Did you read all the quotes I posted above? The IAU has a naming guideline, not styling. It decides the names and how they are written, and how foreign names are transliterated from other languages. I have seen several sources explaining that comet names use hyphens, and how hyphenated surnames need to have the hyphens removed so they don't conflict with the other hyphens. I have never seen any source saying that the IAU really meant to use dashes and not hyphens. --Enric Naval (talk) 13:28, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

It would be possible to name a comet in a way that would use a hyphen; Hale–Bopp is named in a way in which Wikipedia's current consensus style guidelines would use endash. Is there a source that says the IAU was distinguishing between hyphens and endashes? Or do they not mention endashes, and perhaps were they just using "hyphen" the way many non-Wikipedia sources do, as a catch-all for hyphen/minus/endash/half-an-emdash? -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:10, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I still don't see any argument beyond "IAU only sets the styling", which is patently incorrect according to multiple reliable sources, and "IAU meant a dash", which is not supported by any reliable source and directly contradicts a few of them that make explicit mention of this rule. So, are we going to remove Hale-Bopp as an example of a compounded name in English. Maybe we should rename all counterexamples lik the airport names:

• Singer Brewster → Singer-Brewster

--Enric Naval (talk) 13:20, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

The fact that Hale–Bopp is so often found with en dash in sources, including astronomy journals, is strong evidence that the IAU naming guidelines are not being interpreted as styling guidelines in either astronomical or general publications. Dicklyon (talk) 18:07, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

I looked at the first 50 results in google books, and only 3 use a dash[7]. Even if you discard books that use wikipedia material, self-published books, uncheckable books, and books from suspicious publishers, there is only a tiny minority of books that choose to use a dash, 3 versus 40. Google news also show a supermajority of hyphens[8]. I think that this is much stronger evidence that astronomical and general publications actually look at the IAU when they make style decisions. And, yes, you can find as many isolated examples as you want, but they are still a tiny minority when you look at the whole of publications. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:52, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

I thought that y'all might be interested in [9]. AgnosticAphid talk 00:13, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

This [10] second requested move is much more relevant to this particular discussion.AgnosticAphid talk 18:30, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Apteva has claimed that this discussion has resulted in a clear agreement for using the hyphen instead of the en-dash for the comet article. I do not read any such clear consensus; participants other than Apteva, please correct me if there is a new consensus. -- JHunterJ (talk) 01:59, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I think he's saying that since nobody bothered to argue with Enric Naval's last point, we must have all accepted it. That's wrong. I didn't bother to reply since he had ignored where I pointed out "including astronomy journals". You can see what I was getting at here, where a healthy percentage of scholarly papers, largely in scientific and astronomy journals, style this one with the en dash. It would not be appropriate to declare them all "wrong" for not following the IAU's style on this. Dicklyon (talk) 03:17, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

That is how I read it as well: that no new consensus had been reached, but that the participants did not restate the responses above the last point again below the last point. Thanks. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:00, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I would not characterize one out of ten a healthy percentage. I have looked at the first 500, though, and out of them slightly less than 1/4 use an endash, with the vast majority, over 3/4, using a hyphen. It would behoove Wikipedia to not intentionally create a conflict between one guideline and another. Would anyone be willing to allow comets to defer to the dominant spelling of using a hyphen, as stipulated by the IAU? My preference is to have an encyclopedia provide accurate and correct information, although that may be a strange concept to propose. As to capitalization, there is more variation, but it appears that the IAU treats comets like planets, the word comet is not a part of the name, so it is comet Hale-Bopp, just as it is planet Mars, and planet Earth. Hale-Bopp is interchangeable everywhere with comet Hale-Bopp, much less so Halley's and Halley's comet. Common usage may indicate Halley's Comet - dictionaries are split, with Oxford English having the entry say Halley's comet, and Oxford American saying Halley's Comet. In books, Halley's comet has been dominant up until the most recent siting, although each time it comes around there has been the same spike in ill-informed spellings, which I would not recommend Wikipedia emulate.[11] Apteva (talk) 18:23, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

So, most astronomy journals (~75%) use hyphens. Percentages in books and news articles are even higher. I don't know where Dicklyon is seeing any "healthy" percentage of dashes. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:11, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Survey

Wikipedia:Polling is not a substitute for discussion

Survey-hyphen/endash Prefer hyphens for comets Prefer endash for hyphenated comets Prefer endash or hyphen as appropriate, for comets or for anything else, per the Wikipedia style guidelines It would be possible to name a comet in a way that would use a hyphen; Hale–Bopp is named in a way in which Wikipedia's current consensus style guidelines would use endash. -- JHunterJ (talk) 19:01, 20 November 2012 (UTC) No preference Survey-upper/lowercase Prefer lower case comet Prefer upper case Comet No preference

Post-survey break

Please address the arguments I presented. The last I fell into the trap of making a "survey", aka a poll, and one person presented a series of flawed and vague arguments, and the usual suspects piled up in support and stonewalled the change --Enric Naval (talk) 22:04, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

It would be possible to name a comet in a way that would use a hyphen; Hale–Bopp is named in a way in which Wikipedia's current consensus style guidelines would use endash. -- JHunterJ (talk) 19:01, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Following that logic, we should blindly use "Comet Singer-Brewster" despite all the sources explaining the lack of a hyphen? Why aren't we doing that? Oh, right, because that's clearly preposterous. You don't "style" a name when reliable sources say explicitly that it's spelled in a specific way because of specific orthographic reasons (to avoid confusions with hyphenated surnames). --Enric Naval (talk) 13:48, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Invoking words like "blindly" don't help the discussion. We do not style spaces as either hyphens or endashes; I agree that would be clearly preposterous. So I might stand corrected; it appears the IAU will only use one type of punctuation in its names, to connect two names and not to modify one name with an adjective or adjectival noun, so we should continue to use endashes for all comets (or at least all comets with a common name that follows IAU naming). -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:02, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

"to modify one name with an adjective or adjectival noun", sorry, I'm lost, how is this related to "Comet Hale-Bopp"? We are not talking about "Hale—Bopp's comet", which is a different constructions and not the actual name of the comet. --Enric Naval (talk) 10:20, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Who brought up Hale—Bopp's comet? I'm lost as well. My point was that the IAU apparently isn't going to assign names with dashes that that WP style would use hyphens instead of endashes for (although there's always the hypothetical possibility that common usage might vary from IAU for some comet(s)). My earlier point is that the IAU apparently does not distinguish between hyphens and endashes, or address endashes at all, while WP does. -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:54, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

The IAU seems to distinguish hyphens pretty well: "each individual name is to be separated by a hyphen (but family surnames with two or more words separated by either spaces or hyphens are to be distinguished in comet names by single spaces only between each surname word -- although, for simplicity, the discoverer shall in such cases also be given the option to choose one main word from his or her name to represent the surname on the comet, with such choosing strongly encouraged)" IAU Comet Naming Guideline

The hyphen rule is repeated and explained by several RS, none of them ever mentions about any confusion with dashes. --Enric Naval (talk) 15:34, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I hope you understand what I'm saying and are just deflecting it because it doesn't suit your conclusion. In order to distinguish between two things, one must mention those two things. If the IAU doesn't mention any dashes other than hyphens, it hasn't distinguished hyphens from endashes. -- JHunterJ (talk) 15:53, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

They are talking about hyphens in relationship with hyphenated surnames. According to the International Comet Quarterly discoverer names were already separated by hyphens back in 1886![12]. You can check that they use a hyphen (not a dash) in contemporary astronomy journals, in English, in Italian, in German and in French. All in print journals that are capable of printing dashes, superscripts, scientific symbols, etc. Back when they wrote the naming guidelines, hyphens in comet names had been a tradition for at least 117 years. Maybe it didn't cross their mind that someone could think that they were Eonglish-impaired enough confuse a hyphen when a dash?

I have compiled a long list of sources over the last months. Sorry for the awful formatting. Newspaper articles, astronomy books and journals, popular astronomy books, all sort of stuff. All sources mention hyphens, hyphenation, linking with hyphens, etc. In a span of more than 120 years, there is not a single source mentioning or implying that the IAU confused a hyphen with a dash or viceversa. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:08, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

The use of en dash in Barnard–Hartwig also dates from 1886, as here. Just depends on the editor's style preference. In German, a spaced hyphen is also found, as here, indicating not the usual hyphen. Dicklyon (talk) 23:54, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Right: there is not a single source mentioning or implying that the IAU has distinguished between hyphen and dash. Where many, many sources conflate hyphens and dashes or ignore one or the other of them, Wikipedia styles some as explicit hyphens and some as en-dashes. -- JHunterJ (talk) 20:57, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I think I have met my burden of proof by presenting dozens of sources that unambiguously support that comet names have been hyphenated for more than a century. I couldn't find any reports of confusion with dashes or with any other punctuation mark. Above I provided sources saying that the IAU is the ultimate decider for all astronomical names in the universe. And here you are claiming that the IAU can't tell a hyphen from a dash and that nobody has noticed for over a century, except you. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:22, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I didn't say they can't tell a hyphen from an endash, I said they haven't distinguished them. They may have no pressing need; the hyphen may serve them adequately, whereas WP has for some reason opted to distinguish hyphens from endashes. Simple. -- JHunterJ (talk) 03:31, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

My preference is to prohibit dashes from titles, but there is a huge difference between distinguishing between endashes and hyphens and misusing endashes for hyphens. Give someone a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Give someone a hammer and a screwdriver and it is absurd to try to use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail or a hammer to drive in a screw (though that does sometimes work). State that half of the population has an IQ of 100, and if someone disagrees you can immediately put them into the lower half. So if we did prohibit dashes from titles this problem would be a lot less of a problem, because it would be only a matter of editing instead of moving articles. The MOS does not determine article titles though, or content, only how to portray that content. It does not and can not tell editors to misspell words, such as telling them that Hale-Bopp is spelled with an endash, because it is not spelled with an endash. I consider myself to be one of the roughly less than 1% of editors who can distinguish between an endash and a hyphen, which is why there has been very little participation in this discussion. Apteva (talk) 06:52, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Comet names explicitly use a hyphen, which is a specific punctuation mark. They have used hyphens for over a century and it's explicitly indicated in dozens of sources. A dash is a different mark and it's not mentioned anywhere in said sources. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

That it's not mentioned anywhere is my point. Styles that lump dashes and hyphens together would have no need to mention dashes if they specify when to use hyphens. -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:47, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

You keep claiming that the IAU conflates dashes and hyphens together, with not a single iota of evidence. And again, it's naming, not styling, they specify the punctuation mark that has to appear between the components of the words. They don't say "you should write it like this", they say "it is written like this". --Enric Naval (talk) 13:51, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I claim that the IAU has not explicitly distinguished the two, and they haven't. If Wikipedia styles their hyphens as endashes, that's a style choice, not a misspelling. You keep claiming that it is incorrect naming and not styling, with not a single iota of evidence. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:02, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

• If 25% of sources out there use dashes, that is healthy. We should follow our style guide. Tony (talk) 10:33, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

• 75% of scholar sources sounds a lot healthier. And over 90% in books and newpapers sounds even healthier! Don't you agree? --Enric Naval (talk) 15:34, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

• Our style guide did not address airports, bridges, or comets, and made a fallacious suggestion for Mexican-American War, that someone would think it was a war of Mexican-Americans, instead of between Mexicans and Americans (neglecting the obvious that Mexicans are Americans), something that would never happen no matter what punctuation was used. That fallacy led to the even worse travesty of using endashes in bridges, airports and now comets, where there is not a shred of commonsense to use an endash. It just keeps getting worse and worse and more and more bizarre. Fix the original problem. Spell Mexican American War the way everyone else does (98%), and this whole malarkey goes away. The MOS should be reflecting the things that most people do, and not making its own rules about things, and should be staying away from making rules on issues where there are more than one way to do things (this is not one of them - this is an issue where a rule that does not apply has been applied to spell something incorrectly). Apteva (talk) 17:45, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

• News sources seldom use a style that includes en dashes for anything, so have no bearing here. Books are 20% en dash for Hale–Bopp. See below. Dicklyon (talk) 20:21, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

• Refuting Apteva and Enric Naval –

Apteva has been pushing the theories that en dashes are not used in proper names; that they are not used in airport names; and that they are not used in comet names; and other variations. Enric Naval has joined in supporting him in the case of comets; not sure about the others. The claim seems to be that reliable sources use en dashes in two-name attributive compounds in comet names so infrequently that there must be an underlying rule, habit, convention, law, or decision to avoid en dashes in such cases, and that WP must respect that prohibition.

But where is their evidence that reliable sources interpret the IAU's hyphen-based comet naming as a prohibition to style those names with en dashes? Perhaps they could show that the frequency of use of en dash in comet names, or airport names, or proper names in general, is signfiicantly less than the frequency of en dashes in non-proper attributive compounds of name pairs (such as in Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease), or significantly less than the occurence in other parallel pairs (love–hate relationship). Or they could find specific publications that would use en dash in Creutzfeldt–Jakob (or whatever), but hyphen in Hale-Bopp. So far, I don't believe they have presented evidence of either sort. If they do find such evidence of lower frequency of en dash usage in certain situations, then we can entertain a motion to amend the MOS to say to use hyphen instead of en dash in certain types of name compounds.

Lacking such a proposal based on evidence, all we have is an annoying level of continuing disruption based on opinions and imagined rules. In many cases, their imagination seems to be exacerbated by their inability to find or recognize en dashes in books, as I've pointed out to both of them several times. For example, Enric claims only 3 of 50 books in Google book search use en dash in Hale–Bopp. But in this book search I find these 10 that use en dash in the first 50: [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22].

This 20% is a not an unusual rate of use of a style with en dashes in parallel attributive compounds, proper name, comet, or otherwise. If it's a bit lower than some, it's likely because some astronomers do take the IAU literally and style with a hyphen where they might have used an en dash otherwise. It's hard to say without more evidence. But still, 20% use of en dash in this comet name is a "healthy" percentage. Certainly it would be ridiculous to declare these many books "wrong" in styling the coment name as they do, especially in light of the many scholarly articles and journals (including Icarus; Nature; Earth, Moon and Planets; Planetary and Space Science; Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) that style it that way, too.

To declare the WP:MOS style to be "wrong" here, based on no evidence, is baseless. Dicklyon (talk) 20:21, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Kindly remove any reference to any specific editor. Doing so is completely inappropriate. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and has a responsibility to its readers to provide correct and accurate information. No one can argue that comets are not correctly spelled as they are spelled by the IAU - with spaces and hyphens. No one can argue that it would improve the encyclopedia to misspell them with any other form of punctuation. It is easy, though, to find out why some editors want to spell them with an endash. It all goes back to the fallacious argument that spelling Mexican-American War with a hyphen would indicate that it was a war of Mexican-Americans, instead of a war between Mexicans and Americans, which is wrong for two reasons, one English does not make any sense - idioms often have meanings that simply need to be memorized, and secondly because most sources do use a hyphen instead of an endash, and if the MOS did decide that an endash should be used it would introduce a conflict between this guideline and WP:TITLE. I did over 7,000 edits, with none to the MOS or it's talk page. But when someone starts misspelling things and using a misinterpretation of the MOS to do it, I get real interested in the MOS. Apteva (talk) 06:52, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

As far as I know, the only one pushing a theory of "misspelling" is you. Nobody is saying that sources that use hyphen in such compounds are "wrong"; they simply have a different style, where the role of the "long hyphen" as the Cambridge guide to English usage calls it, is served by the hyphen. In WP, the MOS says we prefer the en dash to serve that role. So when you say "No one can argue that comets are not correctly spelled as they are spelled by the IAU", I agree, there's nothing there that anyone would argue about. If there's a "fallacious argument" you want people to consider, a link to it would be useful. Dicklyon (talk) 19:02, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

([23], [24], [25] are the same book from different editors.)

>80% is still far more healthy that <20%..... And, of course, the typical name-throwing by Dicklyon: all those journals use sometimes hyphen and sometimes dash, with most journals using hyphen almost always, like Earth, Moon and Planets [26]. Planetary and Space Science is about 50-50 [27] Nature has 50-50. Only Icarus uses dashes more often than hyphens, and only by a small margin (32 out of 60). Of course, a proportion of >80 means that most journals use mostly hyphen. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Enric, what you've demonstrated is that the styling choice of en dash versus hyphen in many journals is probably not controlled by the journal's editorial staff, but by the authors. With 25% of all articles using the en dash, and possibly some journals enforcing the IAU hyphen style, the proportion of authors choosing to use en dash is probably higher. Certainly none of them are falling into it by default, or because they can't find their preferred choice on their keyboard, as many of those using hyphen probably are. The point is, the IAU has not imposed a style on the field, either in general publications, or in specialist journals, where the prevalance of styling with en dash for Hale–Bopp is not so different from other things that one might style that way. The hyphen remains the most common, the default, and the least common denominator styling for those who don't know or care about the difference, and for some who do. But that is not a reason to say that the en dash is "wrong". Dicklyon (talk) 21:41, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Less than 20% of articles. And more original research and opinion about styling, when I showed with reliable sources that it's a naming problem, and that the name uses a specific punctuation mark. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:56, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

It's not forbidding me from turning left! The sign doesn't "distinguish" between left and right!

Unclear who this is addressed to:

I don't think you realize how preposterous your argument is. According to you, the IAU should have said: "and by a hyphen we actually mean a hyphen, like we have been doing for over a century in all compounded comet names, as explicitly indicated many times before in astronomy articles and books; not a dash, which is a different punctuation mark with different usages, and which has never been used in any comet name, and which, unlike the hyphen, has never been mentioned as part of a comet name in any source". --Enric Naval (talk) 14:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm unclear on who you're saying has proposed something about what the IAU should do or should have done. I've only argued that what they've done has had little effect on styling usage, as far as I tell. Your "over a century" also ignores the fact that I pointed out above that en dash usage in comet names dates from the same year (search up for 1886). Dicklyon (talk) 21:50, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

By the way, your sign example may be lost on most Americans. We don't use signs like that, where a positive (the right arrow) is taken as a prohibition of alternatives; we'd have a "NO LEFT TURN" sign instead, or a left arrow with a red circle/slash; or "ONLY" on a black&white right-arrow sign. Styles vary. Dicklyon (talk) 21:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

The link above to an 1886 publication using an endash also uses a hyphen for the same comet. Click next to see the second reference.[28] No one is suggesting that no one has ever used an endash for a comet, but what is being suggested is that it is less correct than to use a hyphen. I do not see any possible argument against that supposition, and not correcting the MOS is ludicrous. The advice to capitalize the word comet is also not correct, as it appears that the word comet in the name is the same as the word planet in the name of a planet - not a part of the name. On the other hand, system, is a part of the name Solar System, as indicated in the example provided by the IAU.[29] "An initial capital letter is not required when the name of a person (or object) is used as an adjective or as the name of unit, unless it forms part of the name of an individual object (Isaac Newton Telescope)." Since comet is the name of the unit, it is not capitalized. Thus it is planet Mars, planet Earth, planet Saturn, Halley's comet, and comet Hale-Bopp. There is not consensus to follow this practice on Wikipedia for Halley's comet, even though it is correct, as Halley's is not commonly used separately from Halley's comet. Apteva (talk) 23:53, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Yeah. You can see a full copy of the 1886 publication with the hyphen in p. 208 [30]. And, of course, you are again cherrypicking one example that fits your position, and tiptoeing around the dozens and dozens that don't. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:21, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Conclusion

"To declare the WP:MOS style to be 'wrong' here" is not baseless. What was done was to answer the simple question, which should never have been asked - "which should be used, a hyphen or a dash?" The reason it should never have been asked, is that it is not the providence for the MOS to teach grammar, spelling, or punctuation. Those arguments belong only with the articles where they occur, and at the reference or help desk, or at the wikiproject level. What was methodically done was ask, what is correct punctuation to use between dates and nouns, like in the date range 1846-48? Or in the Michelson-Morley experiment? The correct, pedantic punctuation to use is in both of those cases, an endash, as in 1846–48 and Michelson–Morley experiment, but the problem is that logic does not even necessarily apply to the Michelson–Morley experiment, if no one actually calls it that, and instead uses a hyphen all the time. That is why Wikipedia refers to reliable sources and uses no original research and everything must be verifiable. The next logical step taken was, well how about other things that have two nouns or two words joined with a hyphen, should they maybe also use an endash, like a Red-winged Blackbird, or someone named Hatfield-McCoy? This was a Spock like logic approach, but humans do not use logic, and it led to an absurd result, like naming the Mexican War the Mexican–American War, a name only used by about 0.2% of reliable sources - about 2 out of every 1,000 books use Mexican–American War (with an endash), while 90% use Mexican War, a simple fact that was brought up but not checked, at a time when the article had the name correct (in Mexico it is unsurprisingly called La Invasión Estadounidense, "the United States invasion").[31] Ngrams does not find even one instance of using Mexican-/–American War[32]. In naming things, we are constrained to the names that other people use, not rules of logic, which can lead us to use bizarre names for airports and comets, as can be seen by calling the comet Hale-Bopp, Comet Hale–Bopp. What we need to do is end this foolishness and simply use the test used by WP:TITLE, and in the case of both proper nouns and common names such as the Michelson–Morley experiment, what is the most common name used, and what is the official name used, and pick one, but it is not the providence of MOS to do the picking, it is the providence of the article in question talk page, which is where such discussions belong, not here. We can not, and should not try to choose names, to teach spelling, grammar, punctuation, or how to tie shoe laces. Sometimes we lose sight of the forest for the trees, and this is a case where we have clearly done exactly that, to the huge detriment to Wikipedia. We really need to trust that someone is going to have a dictionary, or a copy of Strunk & White, and fix sloppy grammar, punctuation, and spelling - without defining them in the MOS and by doing so, introducing bizarre anomalies, like spelling airports and comets with endashes. Apteva (talk) 19:59, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

"To declare the WP:MOS style to be 'wrong' here" is baseless. It's a style guide. It may be inappropriate, (although I don't think it is), but it cannot be 'wrong'. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:26, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

It provides incorrect advice, and is in conflict with longstanding policy, but is easily corrected. Apteva (talk) 06:37, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

While it is perfectly acceptable for a publishing house to use any punctuation they think looks pretty, and any newspaper to dash off copy calling comet Hale-Bopp anything they think it is called, it is not acceptable for a reference that is either used or laughed at by all of them to not take the trouble to find out what the correct spelling of comet Hale-Bopp is, and use that in the article, so that when it comes around again sometime around 4385, anyone reading the article will see the correct spelling and punctuation. Hopefully sometime shortly before then this discussion will have come to a conclusion. [And sometime in the next day or two would be even better.] Apteva (talk) 20:18, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

The conclusion is that most people would rather ignore what reliable sources explicitly say about how a certain name is spelled. They prefer their original research about what is the "right" spelling. Reliable sources of the highest quality are rejected on the basis of personal appreciations of what they really wanted to say (p.ex. when they say "hyphen" they actually mean "hyphen or dash" unless they explicitly say that they didn't mean a dash[33][34]). --Enric Naval (talk) 09:59, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I trust that was intended as sarcasm. I would hope that most people would agree that the standard of putting what most people use to be the most logical conclusion, instead of personal appreciations. Apteva (talk) 00:46, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

What multiple reliable sources explicitly say

Rather than accept what all reliable sources say, some editors prefer to claim that all sources meant "an horizontal line that could be a dash or a hyphen", rather than simply what they wrote, a hyphen. This includes people who have co-discovered several comets, among them a co-discoverer of Hale-Bopp:

• International Comet Quarterly when explaining how comets are designated: "Rare cases of multiple discoveries were denoted with hyphens, e.g., '1886 IX (Barnard-Hartwig)'"[35]
• Rose Center for Earth and Space / American Museum of Natural History "Their discovery [Hale's and Bopp's] gave the comet its catchy hyphenated name."[36]
• a professor of astrophysics: "Comet Hale-Bopp was discovered by two astronomers on the same night, which explains the hyphenated name.[37]
• The Australian Astronomy Journal "This soon produced the first hyphenated comet name, to indicate more than one independent discoverer,"[38]
• British Interplanetary Society "Comet nomenclature. (...) If there are two or more independent discoverers, each name is ascribed, but separated by a hyphen, e.g. Harrington-Abell."[39]
• Chicago National Museum: "When more than one person reports a new comet at the same time it gets a hyphenated, and sometimes sort of funny-sounding name: Comet Mitchell-Jones-Gerber, Comet Ikeya-Seki, and Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann, for example."[40]
• The Review of Popular Astronomy "[Winnecke] discovered a comet which Encke found to be identical with that of Pons' 1819 discovery, hence the hyphenated title ."[41]
• United States Naval Observatory "In some cases the names of more than one discoverer are given, separated by a hyphen."[42]
• Alan Hale (astronomer) (discoverer of Hale-Bopp: "In such cases, it has been customary to name the comet after each of the discoverers (with the individual names separated by hyphens), (...)"[43]
• Fred Schaaf (astronomer, has several astronomy books and articles in Astronomy and Sky & Telescope) "Independent discoveries of the same comet sometimes resulted in several names linked by hyphens, as in Swift-Tuttle."[44]
• Fred Schaaf (when writing for newspaper The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) "Although their names [Shoemaker Levy] are now forever linked as the hyphenated co-discoverers of one of the 20th century's largest comets,"[45]
• a Doubleday book Astronomy Made Simple: "Therefore, many of the discovered comets bear such amateurs' names as West, Austin, Levy, and Ikeya-Seki (hyphenated names mean that there was more than one discoverer)." [46]
• a Simon & Schuster book Comet Fever: "If a new comet is discovered simultaneously by two or more observers, it receives a multiple, hyphenated name, like the tongue-twisting Whipple-Fedtke-Tevzadze, the staccato Tago-Sato-Kosaka, or the more melifluous Swassmann-Wachmann. [47]
• astronomer Patrick Moore: "(...) in a discovery, their names are hyphenated; this explains Schwassmann-Wachmann, Grigg-Mellish, Giacobini- Zinner, Arend-Roland, Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, and many others. (...)"[48]
• astronomer Gerald Hawkins: "(...) if two or more people discover the same comet, then hyphenated names are used in (...)"[49]
• astronomer James Sayre Pickering "A hyphenated name given to a comet may mean that the comet was discovered by a partnership of observers, as in the case of the Arend-Roland Comet of 1957. The hyphen may also mean that the original discoverer and the observer who first saw the comet on its first return have both been given credit."[50]
• astronomer James Sayre Pickering (in a different book) "How are comets named? A comet is usually given the name of the individual who discovered it. Sometimes a comet is given two names, separated by a hyphen, as the Pons-Winnecke comet. This indicates that one of the men discovered it. (...) could also mean that the two men, working as a team, discovered the comet, as in the case of the Arend-Roland comet."[51]
• Popular Astronomy "Now there are six Metcalf comets (one hyphenated with the European)" (probably a reference to 23P/Brorsen–Metcalf). [52]
• astronomer Brian A. Skiff, co-discoverer of several comets: "Then there are the hyphenated ones where I'm given top billing or where I'm the junior partner, (...) There are in addition several 'LONEOS' comets (some of them hyphenated as well) (...) Some (but not all) of these hyphenated comets with the survey name given rather than the observer (...)" [53]
• comet hunter Donald Machholz: "If several observers discover the comet at about the same time, then the names of the first three discoverers are given to the comet, each separated by a hyphen (-)."
• Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (U.S.) "Otherwise, up to three names can be applied to a comet, each separated by a hyphen (-)"[54]

In the last two items an actual hyphen is shown between parenthesis. Isn't that enough distinction to appease any possible doubts that they meant an actual hyphen and not something else? --Enric Naval (talk) 11:57, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The standard response usually given here by those opposed to changing the MOS is that reliable sources of the kind you give above are reliable only as to content but not as to style; only style guides are reliable sources for style.

Now there are non-style-guide sources that are treated as reliable as to style, namely codes of nomenclature produced by internationally recognized bodies. For example, double quote (") is used in Wikipedia as the top level quote mark; single quotes (') are reserved for nested quotations. However, the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants legislates that single quotes must be used for cultivar names, and this has been accepted.

So it seems to me that what is relevant here is (a) whether there is an authority that determines the official names of comets (b) if so, whether that authority explicitly specifies the use of hyphens. If the answer to both is "yes" then the MOS should certainly recommend the use of hyphens in the names of comets. A body which could be the required authority is the International Astronomical Union. Its website shows that it does prescribe the format of certain kinds of designations used for stars (see e.g. [55]) but I can't find anything about comets. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:04, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Or we could decide not to follow such authorities on matters of style for various reasons. One reason might be that the style is at odds with the rest of Wikipedia's style. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 18:27, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

We could indeed. But there is a difference between deciding not to follow a style explicitly set out in a widely accepted international code and deciding not the follow the style used by a particular set of publications. The former decision would be far less likely to gain consensus, particularly among editors who were specialists in the field covered by the code. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:32, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

(a) The IAU is the authoritative naming authority for all celestial bodies (galaxies, nebulae, quasars, stars, planets, asteroids, comets, etc.), see several reliable sources. Around 1970-1973, the United Nations considered taking over that responsibility, but they decided the IAU was already doing OK, see UN Resolution "Standardization of names of extraterrestrial topographic features" The IAU also decides who gets credited for the discovery, and the order in which the discoverers appear in the name. Its decisions can only be appealed to the IAU itself.

(b) IAU comet-naming guidelines "When there are two (or more) independent discoveries of a comet (...) each individual name is to be separated by a hyphen (but family surnames with two or more words separated by either spaces or hyphens are to be distinguished in comet names by single spaces only between each surname word (...)"

--Enric Naval (talk) 16:11, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Nobody disputes the authority of the IAU for naming comets, asteroids, etc. But here the question is how to style the names. The IAU has a system that works on plain ASCII, and they clearly merge hyphen and dash into one concept, as evidenced on at least one of their pages [56]. And they don't allow diacriticals for the same reason; but WP's astronomy editors do still style those names in WP with diacriticals, as in 3628 Božněmcová. If you wanted to make a case that the IAU's hyphen statements are actually interpreted by editors as you say, that they should influence typographic styling in print and online media, you'd need to show publications that use en dash between names but then switch to hyphen when the names are in an IAU-defined comet name. And show that such things are more common than sources that style both types of name pairs with en dash. Without such evidence, you don't even have anything to start to make your case with. Dicklyon (talk) 18:03, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

As this is an encyclopedia, there are only two things that need to be shown - what is the correct, official name, and second, what name is most commonly used. It is easy to find publications that correctly use endash and use a hyphen for Hale-Bopp (the first one checked in google scholar), but definitely not necessary to show that they also use an endash between names, for example in the same article. Using a hyphen is far more common than an endash for Michelson–Morley experiment in scholarly articles anyway. This one did,[57] but they also used an endash for the name of the university, for right–hand, light–cones, mass–term, Yukawa–like, etc., none of which normally would be spelled with an endash, so their use of it in Michelson–Morley experiment is not instructive. Apteva (talk) 20:04, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, the only thing that paper shows is that one can abuse dashes by not following the normal punctuation rules. Dicklyon (talk) 05:41, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The IAU uses more than ASCII characters, and it uses diacritics marks:

• "When more than one spelling of a name is extant, the spelling preferred by the person, or used in an authoritative reference, should be used. Diacritical marks are a necessary part of a name and will be used." Planetary Names: IAU Rules and Conventions
• "(such as names found later to be spelled incorrectly or be missing diacritical marks, etc.)" Comet Naming Guidelines
• "Božněmcová" is listed with all its diacritics in IAU's official webpage, where you can find hundreds of other minor planets with diadritics: Danaë (1860), Chryseïs (1879), Jérôme (1937), Izsák (1941), Lemaître (1948), Růžena (1969), 1861 Komenský (1970), etc. Numbered Minor Planets

The IAU is conscious of the importance of proper and precise punctuation, and the punctuation of names is debated when making new naming guidelines and assigning new names (these are the rules for minor planets, not for comets):

• Back in 2006, when the IAU decided that Pluto was not a planet and will no longer be called a "planet": "Otherwise, the debate has degenerated to the level of hyphens and commas. When the Resolution committee removed the hyphen from the “dwarf-planet” category of version 3, settling on “dwarf planets”, they created some ambiguity about whether this second category, which includes Pluto, were really planets or not. One solution put forward this morning (see post IAU:invasion!) was to say “planetinos” instead of dwarf anything. (...) The option tabled instead was the introduction of inverted commas around the dwarf, to give ‘dwarf’ planets. (...) Update: the quotes, I have since learnt, are intended to go around both dwarf and planet to give ‘dwarf planet’, which makes slightly more sense"[58]
• "Names shall be limited to a maximum length of sixteen characters, including spaces and hyphens. (...) Names should be pronounceable, preferably expressible as a single word, and no more than sixteen characters long."Minor Planet Naming
• "How have the nomenclature rules changed and how they should be changed in the face of database-oriented astronomy (e.g. case-sensivity; special character handling; dealing with spaces in names (...) 'Special' characters include Greek letter, hyphens and spaces." Proceedings of the Twenty Seventh General Assembly Rio de Janeiro 2009
• When discussing the name of Makemake (dwarf planet). "The Lowell Observatory's Bowell said Makemake was nearly unanimous among the committees, and the only discussion came over whether to hyphenate, combine or separate the two "make" parts."[59]
• "There has always been a preference for names consisting of a single word. This rule could not be maintained, however, since the names of some of the people to be honored consist of two or even three words. Thus names combined of more than one word had to be tolerated. Some designations contain a hyphen, and some an apostrophe." Dictionary of Minor Planet Names. 6º edition "A total of 82 designations contain a hyphen, and 46 an apostrophe."5º edition

--Enric Naval (talk) 10:22, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I have no personal interest one way or the other in the names of comets, but on the basis of this evidence it does seem to me that (a) the IAU is the authority to be followed (b) they have prescribed hyphens. The clincher, though, would be to show that they distinguish between hyphens and dashes and have explicitly chosen the former in the way that the ICNCP explicitly distinguishes between single and double quotation marks, insisting on the former for cultivar names. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:25, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

When they explicitly use the word "hyphen" it is clear that "hyphen" was meant, and not "tilda", "emdash", or any other short horizontal character roughly midway vertically located. Distinguishing between single and double quotation marks is obviously necessary in that case. Distinguishing between a hyphen and a dash is obviously not necessary. The issue is clear, the official name uses a hyphen, the most common usage uses a hyphen, and for wikipedia to use anything else would be strange, and counterproductive to the purposes of an encyclopedia - to inform and educate. Apteva (talk) 01:21, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

@Coxhead. Well, a quotation mark can be single or double, but a hyphen can only be a hyphen..... Anyways, I can see your point. I have sent an email to cbatiau AT eps.harvard.edu:

Good day:

I am having a dispute in Wikipedia about the punctuation in comet names when there is more than one discoverer.

Your "Comet Naming Guideline" says that "each individual name is to be separated by a hyphen". But some editors say that you didn't distinguish between hyphens and dashes. This would mean that the IAU allows comet names to be written with a hyphen or with a dash.

So, according to the IAU, is it correct to write Comet Hale-Bopp with a dash?

Sincerely, Enric Naval.

I'll wait for their reply. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:58, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Good job sending a biased question to drag someone official into your squabble. If they reply that it is not correct to use a dash, and that you must say "Hale-Bopp", they are likely referring to their own requirements for reporting and naming; it would be less likely that they're declaring that Nature and Icarus and other journals are violating their rules, doing something they don't "allow", in publishing papers with Hale–Bopp styled as WP does with en dash. So what are you thinking you might find out from this inquiry? Maybe they'll say "Yes, we've sent multiple cease-and-desist letters to Nature and Icarus, and our lawyers are working on the next steps, about which we are not allowed to comment at this time..." That would be cool. Dicklyon (talk) 19:54, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

(Dicklyon, please feel free to send a "non-biased" question and see if you get a different reply.) --Enric Naval (talk) 11:30, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

I got this reply from the vice-president of IAU's Commission 6 [60] (they are responsible for comet naming):

Dashes are marks like semi-colons, commas, and periods, used

grammatically in sentence structure. Hyphens link words together,

not dashes. It is strictly not correct to write "Comet Hale-Bopp",

but rather "Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp)". Many comets carry

the same name, so designations are paramount, not names;

names are secondary. It's better to just put "Comet C/1995 O1"

than "Comet Hale-Bopp".

Regards, Dan Green

Well, it looks to me like the IAU has consciously distinguished hyphens from dashes, and it has chosen hyphens. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:30, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

¿Qué? "The IAU has consciously distinguished hyphens from dashes, and it has chosen hyphens." No way! They have done no such thing, any more than they have "consciously" distinguished hyphens from commas.

A brilliant demonstration of what the genuine experts on style have been trying to tell you again and again, Enric: content experts are often clueless about style. Just look at this gem from the reply you elicited:

"Dashes are marks like semi-colons, commas, and periods, used grammatically in sentence structure. Hyphens link words together, not dashes."

So much for CMOS, New Hart's Rules, and every other respectable authority on style that makes provision for en dash as a nuanced and semantically justified occupier of the broad "hyphen" role.

Suggestion to editors opposing the current consensual and best-practice MOS provisions for hyphens and dashes: read CGEL's chapter on punctuation, written by the academic linguist who has addressed the topic at greater depth than anyone else alive. Then come back when you actually know something about the topic. Till then, you're wasting your time and everyone else's. ♥

Noetica^Tea? 13:12, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Green's ignorant response is less surprising within the context of styles that don't use an en dash. The "dash" he refers to is only in the role of em dash, and all connections are made with hyphens. This is all one could do with typewriters, ASCII, and Microsoft Word without a user manual. But for typographers, people with Mac keyboards, people who read publishers' style guides, etc., the statement is pretty funny. At least what he said was "strictly not correct" doesn't discriminate! Dicklyon (talk) 16:03, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

What RFC?

This stale section from September was recently tagged as an RFC, but is only attracting repetitive argumentation, in the form of "conclusions", from the same people who it went stale on earlier. There is still not much support for the ideas presented. Can we move on? Dicklyon (talk) 03:50, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Having read the arguments above I do not see why article titles should not follow common usage. When I last looked this project has "4,120,583" articles and it is silly to try to argue that one style fits all. It may well be that some disciplines mandate the use of hyphens in their naming conventions. It may be that another discipline mandate the use of dashes. If most reliable sources about those topics follow the official bodies recommendation, then the common usage in reliable sources will use the official names. If not and the common usage follows other names then we should use those names. This may mean that the construction of titles will vary over 4m+ articles but that does not matter if we follow the usage in reliable sources. What we should not be doing is recommending one style for the titles of articles if it contradicts the usage in reliable sources. This argument about ignoring sources makes about as much scene for hypes and dashes as it would for a preference for "southeast" rather than use "south east".

Also this is a question for the WP:AT policy talk page and not the MOS talk pages. I think to make this clear the paragraph that starts "MoS applies to all parts of an article, including the title..." should be removed because as far a I know that was never agreed as part of the WP:AT policy (if it was then please show me where in the archives of Wikipedia talk:Article titles where such a consensus was reached). -- PBS (talk) 21:19, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

That's not the topic here. The topic is Apteva's idiosyncratic thesis that when an en-dash-connected term gains proper name status, its en dash changes to a hyphen; a pure MOS question, which would of course affect titles to the extent that the MOS styling applies there, too. Dicklyon (talk) 22:15, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, but PBS nailed it perfectly. Apteva (talk) 00:51, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, but Dicklyon nailed it perfectly. -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:56, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Adding the talk page guidelines has certainly reduced the bickering here, but not eliminated it - yet. This page is solely and only for the improvement of WP:MOS. Any comments about someone are legitimately moved on sight to their talk page. But as an admin that should be clear.

This section is about fixing the MOS so that it is in line with the rest of the encyclopedia, by deferring to common use in spelling comet Hale-Bopp, in spelling Roman-Syrian War, and in spelling Uganda–Tanzania war - in other words, in improving the MOS. I have no idiosyncratic thesis. I have a suggestion that the MOS get its act together and quit being goofy. People turn to encyclopedias for knowledge, and it would be nice if that information they found was factual, like comets are treated the same as planets, the word comet is not a part of the name, and is not capitalized. Just as it is planet Mars, it is comet Hale-Bopp. And that comets and airports use slashes, spaces, and hyphens, but never dashes in their names. Seriously, this is not rocket science. And yes, we do also have articles about that too. Do we want experts in a subject to roll their eyes, or be proud that what they read is accurate? Apteva (talk) 14:40, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Some have expressed rebellion against dash rules in general. But although I found some comments like this agreeing that "when an en-dash-connected term gains proper name status, its en dash changes to a hyphen" based on ENDASH, you have abandoned that argument. If we can't find any supporters, that makes it idiosyncratic, and you shouldn't need us to tell you that. Art LaPella (talk) 20:04, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

It goes back to the same old problem: what is common usage. All publishers have house styles. WP is no exception. Tony (talk) 10:22, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Common usage is normally not difficult to determine. It is a question we answer thousands of times a year at WP:RM. The diversity of wikipedia, and the diversity of uses of wikipedia, as well as the diversity of the editors result in the idea of an enforced house style being meaningless. If we were a publisher, we could review each article and approve them for publication for that purpose and for that edition with a particular style, but we are more like the putty that is used by anyone for any purpose, and wikipedia is constructed by multiple thousands of editors, covering multiple thousands of subjects, many of which have particular requirements, making it meaningless for us to attempt to enforce a house style. If fact I would recommend that all of our advice on spelling, punctuation, grammar, and good writing be relegated to essays and not be a part of the MOS. Apteva (talk) 01:37, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Ending the endash/hyphen warring

This has been a divisive issue for too long. Proposal:

• Within articles hyphens are a valid substitute for an endash if used consistently.
• For proper nouns hyphens or endashes defer to common usage. See WP:TITLE. As of 2024, there are no known proper nouns which use endashes. For example, Mexican-American War is spelled with a hyphen more commonly than with an endash or a space.

Adopting this will eliminate all of the endash/hyphen warring. Apteva (talk) 05:41, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Can you clarify what warring you are referring to? Dicklyon (talk) 05:46, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Ah, apparently the kind of edit war that you are trying to start here, while ignoring the discussion that you had been involved in here. Dicklyon (talk) 04:18, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

More specifically, I think you are referring only to the controversial compound (or union, etc.) proper names, right? You're not talking about any changes to the rules for numbers, dates, etc., right? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 13:29, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Both. Dashes are used correctly in numbers, dates, and to separate sentence clauses. They are used correctly to denote meaning in phrases such as the Michelson–Morley experiment (two people, not one with a hyphenated name), but using them there is controversial. They are not used correctly in comets and airports. They are not used correctly in wikipedia in any place where common use prefers not using them - and not using dashes at all is perfectly acceptable - and unless the article is FA or FAC, fixing them takes a far lower priority than other improvements, other than to make the article consistent, such as removing a dash if the rest of the article uses hyphens, or vice versa. While there are rules for using dashes, wikipedia does not have rules, and it is really outside of the charter of the MOS to try to teach spelling, grammar, punctuation, or good writing - although all of that can and should be available in essays. What is in the charter of the MOS is to explain what an encyclopedic style is, and how we structure articles. The rest can be deep sixed converted to a group of essays. Apteva (talk) 15:03, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. Hyphens are ugly when used to replace en dashes. I'm not in favor of uglification. Binksternet (talk) 05:48, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
  • Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The ugliest thing in Wikipedia right now is extending the length of a hyphen in a comet name so that it looks more like it is suspiciously an endash instead. One must be careful with the pen in making hyphens, and not make them so long. Hyphens are used in some places, is every hyphen, ugly to someone? Endashes are correctly used in some places, but it is not incorrect to substitute a hyphen for an endash. In an article that only does that, it is not correct for someone to change the whole article from using hyphens to endashes. What is correct, is if it uses mostly one or the other to change the one or two that are out of place. If there is only one hyphen on the page, for a date range, for example, it is not correct to change it to an endash, because substituting a hyphen for an endash is an acceptable style and our MOS says so - after this proposal is adopted. It is the content of the article that is important, not the style of the content. Proper nouns are referred to WP:TITLE because most of them are notable enough to have their own article, or are person's names (not personal names as our MOS called them - a personal name is calling the Moon Minney, or Mickey), where hyphens, like in comets and bird, are exclusively used. Apteva (talk) 18:56, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

• Comment: "Warring", of course, means megabytes of debate, much of which was supplied by the same editor who proposes to rescue us from that same "divisiveness" by doing things his way (to be fair, Dicklyon also debates en dashes.) We can be pretty sure that victory for the hyphens wouldn't end the warring; the en dash empire would strike back. Maybe it's just as well that en dash wars continue; otherwise, the same people might war over something that matters. Art LaPella (talk) 06:36, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Probably you're right that he's referring to these disruptive debates that he keeps starting. If there's any place were I've posted even half as much as he has, let me know and I'll throttle myself. Dicklyon (talk) 15:31, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose promotion of the consistent errors. Note that WP:TITLE is about article titles, not proper nouns, and the only thing it says about dashes is "Sometimes the most appropriate title contains diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other letters and characters not found on most English-language keyboards. This can make it difficult to navigate to the article directly. In such cases, provide redirects from versions of the title that use only standard keyboard characters. (Similarly, in cases where it is determined that the most appropriate title is one that omits diacritics, dashes and other letters not found on most English-language keyboards, provide redirects from versions of the title that contain them.)" It doesn't mention hyphens at all, except for the allusion in that statement. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:04, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose—We've been over this, I don't see anything new here that would change the outcome. Within articles hyphens are a valid substitute for an endash if used consistently.—sure, if that is your house style or if you're confined to ASCII or something then using hyphens as a substitute would be reasonable. We don't have these limitations. Anyone can go ahead and write with hyphens, of course—nobody should be giving anyone a hard time for using hyphens. Others with the desire and know-how can go through and use the correct mark. Before I figured out how to type them in with my keyboard I was grateful to others for fixing what I wrote, eg. for page ranges. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 06:07, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  It is inappropriate to pretend that wikipedia is a publishing house and has a "house style" when it comes to things like hyphens. It makes absolutely no difference to write 1-4 or 1–4, and it does not need to be fixed. Sure, it can be fixed, but it is better left alone if that is the only place on the page that a number range is used, and nothing else is being changed. Sure in a featured article things like that can be "prettied up", but even in a good article there are far more important things to fix than to change hyphens to endashes. And hyphens should never be changed to endashes within proper nouns - because that violates common usage. If someone wants to publish a section or all of wikipedia they are welcome to use whatever "house style" they wish, and change all the punctuation to whatever they wish, but wikipedia has an obligation to use whatever is the most correct, and the most common usage. And no it is not most correct to use an endash in Mexican-American War. Using endashes in proper names creates edit wars, using hyphens in proper names eliminates those edit wars. Doubt me? Look at the ten times that Mexican-American War has been moved. Apteva (talk) 07:45, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

  • Au contraire, mon ami. Wikipedia is a huge and widely consulted publisher with over 4 million articles. Our current house style is already quirkily schizophrenic in that no style governs all articles, and I certainly don't subscribe to the view that we should be tolerant to what goes on elsewhere beyond the considerations that went into building our current MOS. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 07:56, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

  So quit pretending that it is a house style, when it clearly is not one. The purpose of the MOS is to help us, not hurt us, and it has long overstepped its boundaries. Time to fix that. Apteva (talk) 08:10, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose, on both issue-based grounds (people who will not accept that en dashes are proper punctuation and demand replacing them with hyphens are simply grammatically wrong, and we've proven this again and again), and procedural ones (re-re-re-f'ing-re-proposing this is not going to magically force consensus to change, and is a blatant example of gaming the system by "asking the other parent", i.e. regurgitating the same proposal/demand again and again in different forums here in hopes of coincidentally finding a sympathetic audience, after it's already been rejected by consensus multiple times). Enough is enough. This is not even a dead horse any longer, it's just a jelly stain in the dirt you keep flogging. Cf. WP:NOT#SOAPBOX, WP:NOT#BATTLEGROUND, WP:TE, WP:GREATWRONGS, etc. PS: Of course WP:MOS is our house style. That's its entire raison d'etre. The only thing "hurting us" when it comes to this topic is your endless, angry "my way or the highway" attitude, for so long it feels like an eternity. WP:JUSTDROPIT. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 12:10, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
  • The words "raison d'etre", according to wiktionary, mean "The claimed reason for the existence of something or someone; the sole or ultimate purpose of something or someone." Yes it is the reason that the MOS exists to tell us to use sentence case in headings and how to lay out articles, but it is not appropriate for the MOS to tell us how to spell words or use punctuation. That comes from dictionaries and knowing how to write well. By doing that, the MOS has overstepped its charter and introduced very bad advice. And just why do we use sentence case in subject headings anyway? That makes no sense at all. Sentence case in titles makes a little sense, but not in headings. Apteva (talk) 20:41, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
• Support. Show me a single commercially made standard QWERTY keyboard which provides hardwired endashes - and emdashes for that matter. I wonder how many thousands of tons of coal have been burned to provide the electricity to support the extra keystrokes for use of endashes and emdashes in the course of the history of Wikipedia? My stance is not that of a luddite, but rather that of one opposed to endless accumulation of baroque ruffles and flourishes. Trilobitealive (talk) 13:29, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Alternate proposal

This has been churning for too long, agreed. Alternate proposal:

• Within articles, hyphens or endashes or both may be used consistently per MOS:HYPHEN and MOS:DASH.
• For proper nouns, hyphens or endashes or both may be used consistently per MOS:HYPHEN and MOS:DASH.

Ending the endash/hyphen warring will eliminate all of the endash/hyphen warring. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:04, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't think this solves the problem; it supports the current guidelines, sort of, but the "within articles...consistently" might tend to confuse some editors about what the guidelines say. The "warring" that you and Apteva refer to is I think just his consistent pushing to change the rules, via repeated disruptive RMs and MRVs and proposals to change the MOS, none of which have found any significant support (certainly nothing that can come close to the support for the current dash dashlines, which found wide consensus in a big and non-disruptive process over a year ago). Dicklyon (talk) 15:29, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. This is not a serious proposal and does nothing. The problem of edit warring - people moving Mexican American War to an endash and back to a hyphen ten times, only goes away when people who edit the MOS agree not to impose absurd standards on the encyclopedia. In date ranges, numbers, we do not have rules, the world has rules. We have guidelines and policies. Our Manual of Style can either help us develop the encyclopedia or it can hurt us. When it introduces bad advice, it hurts us, and it is absurd advice to misspell the comet Hale-Bopp on the MOS, and even worse to argue against it being fixed. The hyphen is on every keyboard, not so the endash. If someone wants to read the MOS and learn how to enter an endash for the years 1914–1918, they are welcome to do so, but they are also not prohibited from substituting a hyphen, and writing 1914-1918. If that is the only place a hyphen is incorrectly used as an endash in that article, it is better to just leave it as a hyphen. If someone who is making another edit wants to fix it they can, but it is not a valid edit to simply perform the edit just to change that hyphen to an endash. Edits are costly. Using hyphens for endashes are not worth correcting. Using endashes for hyphens will trigger an edit war if the MOS is not corrected, because they will always be corrected. Apteva (talk) 18:56, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
• No thanks: who wants sub-professional standards at en.WP by going against standard typographical conventions? Tony (talk) 00:31, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  You're in favor of not using style guidelines, because that will be more professional? -- JHunterJ (talk) 01:27, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  More likely he replied at the end of Apteva's section, not realizing there was an intervening subsection. I get caught by that kind of problem a lot myself. Maybe he'll fix... Dicklyon (talk) 06:23, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Ah, thanks. If that turns out to be the case, and it does end up being indented, any editor is free to delete my comment of 01:27, 27 November 2012 as well as this one. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:00, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Or maybe he objects to "consistently", which might be read to mean that an article has all hyphens or all en dashes, which would be nonsense. That's why I said it might tend to confuse. Dicklyon (talk) 16:20, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Ok, that is what I thought the proposal was. I'm confused. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:06, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose—I don't think there's any need to adopt a hodgepodge style. We hashed it out, examined relevant style guides etc, the support for the current style was/is quite overwhelming. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 06:07, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  I may not have phrased it clearly enough then. My alternate proposal was supposed to offer support for the current style (or "do nothing", as Apteva put it). -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:59, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Yeah, pardon, I may not be understanding you here, sorry. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:06, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Indeed, it seems that everyone except Apteva is against changing the guidelines, so we can let it go at that. Dicklyon (talk) 17:20, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Keeping the current guidelines is a vote to a) use inaccurate entries and b) create edit wars. I am certain that no one is in favor of either. Therefore the only option is the above proposal (allow hyphens as a valid alternative and use hyphens in proper nouns). Apteva (talk) 07:27, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

While it may not be your intention, "b" reads as sort of a threat. Just because some users might edit war over something isn't a reason to force policy in one direction or another. Personally I think this is a stylistic issue and while I don't care which way has been chosen or will be chosen we should follow the house style what ever has been/is/will be decided it is. Having an enforced style guide is a tool against editwars. For example consider ENGVAR, instead of someone changing colour⇔color in a article and then having a huge back and worth about which is right, it can be reverted to the version called for by WP:ENGVAR and much of the discussion and edit warring avoided. If a style guideline was given a large consensus to use apostrophes for possessive ( Sally's car ), right single quotes for the rare plural cases ( dot the i’s ) and a superscript i for abbreviating is ( itⁱs true ). I might argue against it here, but wouldn't edit war about it in articles. PaleAqua (talk) 17:57, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Apteva, we had a lot of edit/move warring, then we hashed it out and came up with the current guidelines. This has done a remarkably good job dealing with edit warring, as far as I can tell. In other words, the status quo appears to me to be the way to stop edit wars. Are there edit wars going on now that you have noticed that would be solved by your proposal? ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 18:55, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

No one would have had any edit warring if the MOS made the correct choice of using hyphens in proper nouns. Mexican American War would have been moved once and only once - to using a hyphen. Yes there are still edit wars going on now, and there will be forever until the MOS is corrected. The status quo is to use hyphens, not endashes. Apteva (talk) 04:35, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Now that's definitely a threat of continued disruption, since you're the only one fighting en dashes in titles as recommended by the MOS. You are the only person who has complained about, or tried to move, Mexican–American War since the new dash guidelines were worked out. And the only one trying to remove en dashes from titles of articles on airports, bridges, etc., too. To end the edit warring, just cut it out. Done. Fini. And look up status quo. Dicklyon (talk) 04:43, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

No, it is not a threat, it is a statement of fact, and not by me but by the hundreds of millions of readers who expect wikipedia to be correct, and will inevitably attempt to correct errors, like spelling Mexican American War with a hyphen if they see it spelled with an endash. Here is what status quo means - "the existing state or condition". The existing state or condition is that every proper noun is spelled with a hyphen (of those that use a hyphen or endash). Some of them on wikipedia are misspelled with an endash, and need to be fixed. English can change. Come back in 50 years and find out what the most common spelling for Mexican American War is and act accordingly. Right now it is spelled with a hyphen by a 50:1 margin. The MOS needs to be fixed to say that hyphens are a valid substitute for an endash and that proper nouns defer to primary use as stipulated in WP:TITLE. Until it is fixed there will always be edit warring over hyphens and endashes. Apteva (talk) 07:55, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Not a threat? "Until it is fixed there will always be edit warring over hyphens and endashes" sounds very much like one unless it's accompanied with a personal undertaking from you not to pursue the issue or war over it. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 08:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Not a threat. Am I the only one who read the clarifying words "not by me"? Apteva is predicting that "hundreds of millions" will flock to his cause, which is absurd but not a threat, because that unimaginable event would be outside his control, and thus not "An expression of intent to injure or punish another" (Wiktionary:threat) and certainly not punishable. I'm more open to the complaint that Apteva is much too repetitive about en dashes. Art LaPella (talk) 07:02, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose for reasons I've already given above. This is a non-issue. MOS is not in a position to be held hostage by tendentious editors with pet peeves they refuse to drop, and re-re-re-introduce as if they magically are immune to the fact that the idea has already been repeatedly shot down. MOS's mission is providing a consistent set of rules for WP editing, period. By definition, doing so will necessarily mean WP arrives at rules that not everyone is entirely happy about, because it only has rules for things that are contentious (note that we do not have a rule that "p" is spelled "p" and not "7", because no one fights to spell "p" as "7"). MOS's purpose is not to declare what is "proper" or "right" or "correct", only set a standard for what is most useful for WP as the encyclopedia with the broadest readership in the entire history of the world (this fact automatically militates against exceptionalist geeky bullshit). All other style concerns are entirely secondary. Just get over it and move on. PS: To put it more plainly, the answer to "Ending the endash/hyphen warring", to quote the section title, is "stop engaging in 'sport argument' about it and go do something productive or stop wasting everyone's time". PPS: I do not mean to imply that JHunterJ's attempt at appeasement is tendentious; rather, Apteva's tendention on this and various other nitpicks is so mind-numbingly, endlessly browbeating, that it has become disruptive and is arm-twisting people into suggesting compromises that do not serve Wikipedia's interests, just to get Aptvea to shut up. Giving the Apteva what it wants is not the only solution to the problem that Apteva's tendentiousness presents. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 12:22, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

  The preceding personal attack is neither warranted nor appreciated. The MOS is wrong and needs to be fixed. Apteva (talk) 01:26, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

  Apteva, to me it looks like only you believe the MOS should be fixed, that it is wrong. Binksternet (talk) 05:43, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

  And see also WP:Call a spade a spade: "[B]eing civil should not be confused with being friendly or courteous, let alone charitable or credulous." Apteva, criticizing your blatantly disruptive pattern at WT:MOS and elsewhere is not a "personal attack", it's a reality check. I'm happy to discuss this in user talk, since you've started a discussion at User talk:SMcCandlish#MOS (I have replied there at more length). But the short version is, you need to read and meditate upon the very short page at WP:Nobody cares, which precisely describes what is going on, then also internalize WP:Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass and finish off with a mixture of WP:Get over it, WP:Don't be a fanatic (especially points 3 and 4), and WP:Just drop it, especially the section "Forum shopping". See also the first law of holes. You'll be much happier if you apply those principles. As Tony1 and some others can attest, my first foray into MOS was oppositional and demanding, and resulted in me being angry and everyone else here being angry with me. I later figured out that it was more important for MOS to exist and provide a reasoned but often necessarily arbitrary baseline of "standard operating procedure" for style and grammar here, than for me to get my way about what I preferred MOS to say about this nitpick or that. There are many things in MOS that aren't the way I would write them, but I don't keep dredging them up and browbeating everyone about them month after month. MOS is explicitly prescriptive, and has to be, and it is not tied to what any particular external "authority" on style and usage says, but determined by consensus here, or as close to consensus as we can get, based on WP's own particular needs and nature. It is also an undeniable fact that various people will be unhappy about every single rule in MOS; we would not need to make rules about things unless they were things people disagreed about and editwarred over. The fact that you disagree to the point of outrage over one such point is simply evidence that we do in fact need a rule about it, and that such a rule will be arbitrary. So it goes. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 09:22, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Apteva, please be more collegial. I find the fact that you're going for adminship right this moment very odd. Admins need to be skilled at defusing tension, not causing it. Tony (talk) 13:09, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

WP:NCCAPS → "shorter than five letters" rule

With regards to this and this, and in general, isn't this whole "shorter than five letters" notion leading to inconsistent, illogical results? And where does it come from? (like, what's the reference work for [English-language and otherwise] title capitalization out there?)

I mean, as is, when in mid-title, it produces things like this:

"than", "from", "till", "Until" – ... from ... Until... looks weird, does it not?

To conform to this, From Dusk Till Dawn had [rightly] just been changed to From Dusk till Dawn – problem is, it seems to be spelled From Dusk Till Dawn virtually everywhere else (a similar case would be Stranger than Fiction vs. IMDb's Stranger Than Fiction);

also, it's still Wait Until Dark, although "until" is just a one-letter-longer variant form of "till".

But if "till" were changed to "Till", we'd still have the lowercase "from", making for constructions like ... from ... Until... and ... from ... Till....

Changing "Until" to lowercase in turn would then be at variance with a whole host of other five-letters-or-longer prepositions and conjunctions.

Seriously, what the heck? I'm confused out of my mind...

As a followup, more contradictory examples:

My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean

vs.

Someone to Watch Over Me

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Frost Over the World

Please, someone knowledgeable (What's the basis for the"shorter than five letters" rule? Where does it come from? Sources?) comment. While I do have a preference

– Honestly, don't the lowercased variations look downright weird to you, too? Like, did you ever see "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" given as "... over ..."? –,

I'm ready to put that aside if presented with logical and consistent guidelines. As is, it's confusing (I didn't change My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean to ... Over ... out of spite, but simply because I had its spelling elsewhere and entries like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in mind) and handled inconsistently. – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 19:46, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

The correct approach is to defer to common usage, and spell things the way the rest of the world spells them. Anything else is original research and is prohibited in wikipedia. Apteva (talk) 20:03, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

We've always imposed local capitalization rules, regardless of how they are capitalized in the original or other sources. That's what MOS:CT is about. I tend to agree wth this editor (whose name I can't type) that this particular rule is on shaky ground.—Kww(talk) 20:10, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm in favor of styling the caps consistently, but yeah, I think the 5-letter rule needs to be improved. Either an explicit list of words (and usages, for words that might be prepositions sometimes and other parts of speech others), or an explicit list of exceptions to the 5-letter rule, if the first list is unwieldy. -- JHunterJ (talk) 20:50, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

House style guidelines are not original research. -- JHunterJ (talk) 20:51, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I for one will not wilfully go directly against the MoS in its current form (though, I might again by mistake). However, if the powers that be are insisting on sticking to that rule, I think the uninformed readers and editors deserve an explanation as to why the Encyclopædia Britannica, IMDb, AllRovi, Rotten Tomatoes, blu-ray.com, IGN, NNDB, Amazon, cduniverse.com, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, Time magazine, the marketing divisions of film studios and countless others supposedly have got it so wrong. – ὁ οἶστρος (or, romanized, "ho oistros") (talk) 21:05, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

It's possibly a British/American English thing. All those sources are American, but the British Film Institute opts for lower capitalisation: BFI. Betty Logan (talk) 21:15, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Variations in style need not be explained as errors. Dicklyon (talk) 21:25, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Styles vary. Among guides that resemble ours on this four-letter rule are this and this and this. Dicklyon (talk) 21:13, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the links. However, two weren't searchable and within the excerpts of the third that were accessible I couldn't find any pertaining sections. There certainly must be a stronger case for that choice, right? How [and when] was it arrived at in the first place? Was it ever properly hashed out with broad participation?

The first gives the rule

Capitalize the main words in a title and the first and last word, but do not capitalize a, the, to, or prepositions and conjunctions of fewer than five letters when they occur in the middle of the title.

It goes on to say that "The Moon is Down" is wrong because is, though a short word is an important word, and that "Travels With Charley" is wrong. I would hasten to add that the advice, though, is to Hemingway or Steinbeck and to the publisher - were they to have chosen a capital letter, we would be constrained to report that error, in my opinion, although we would not be constrained to use all capitals, as many books do for their titles.

The second uses the rule to "Capitalize significant words in titles", and here the advice given is to people like wikipedia editors, where the advise is not on how to construct a title, but how to report a title, although the advice on "importance" I would say is more easily determined by the creator of the work. It says

The classic system is to capitalize the initial letters of the first and last words of a title or subtitle, as well as all major (or "significant") words. Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, but, if) or short prepositions (at, in, on, of) unless they begin the title.

The third gives the sage advice that

The use of capital, or uppercase, letters is determined by custom. They are used to call attention to certain words, such as proper nouns and the first word of a sentence.

and goes on to say

Capitalize the initial letters of the first and last words of the title of a book, an article, a play, or a film, as well as all major words in the title. Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the) or coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, or, nor, yet, so), unless they bigin or end the title (The Lives of a Cell). Capitalize propositions within titles only when they contain more than four letters (Between, Within, Until, After), unless you are following a style that recommends otherwise.

This advice appears to apply both to originators and reports of works. Apteva (talk) 23:10, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Betty Logan, the BFI is an interesting find. On the other hand, a quick [and doubtlessly superficial] perusing of other British organs – such as The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, The Guardian and The Independent – showed no support for the "shorter than five letters" rule. – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 22:00, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Where the MOS can become OR is if no one writes "Somewhere over the Rainbow", and only Wikipedia writes it that way, that clearly is OR. Ditto if no one changes all caps in RUBBER SOUL to Rubber Soul, that is also OR. WP reports what the world does, and is, without making things up, which is what OR is. Apteva (talk) 22:38, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

It would be best not to keep confusing the content policy WP:NOR with styling guidelines; and this song is an odd case, since its actual title is Over the Rainbow. And it does appear in some sources with lower case "over", not rarely. And you're not seriously proposing that we use all caps in Rubber Soul, are you? Dicklyon (talk) 23:26, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

The thing to do when you find such inconsistencies is just to work on them. It is not surprising that WP still has lots of style inconsistencies. The MOS provides the guidance for which way to go to make things better. For example, Gerschwin's Someone to Watch over Me can be moved to lower-case over, which is not rare in reliable sources. See the first sentence of MOS:CAPS, which is what distinguishes our style from some others. Dicklyon (talk) 23:34, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

There are two problems with that though - first does it appear to accurately represent the actual title, and second while some books use "over" instead of "Over", "Over" is the preferred choice. But that is misleading because Someone to Watch Over Me is a popular book title, used by perhaps dozens of authors. Click on the Ngram links at the bottom, and try to even find references to Gershwin in any of the more recent citations. Apteva (talk) 01:00, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Since Google Ngram Viewer is all about quantity (not quality), I don't see how this would be a suitable tool for establishing guidelines. Like, there are also significant instances of

"Neandertal" (treacherous, as the eponymous German valley [today] actually is spelled "Neandertal")

vs.

"Neanderthal" or

"miniscule"

vs.

"minuscule".

The BFI, the lonely major source brought up that seems to use lowercasing for prepositions such as "over", also is not consistent with Wikipedia's MoS; e.g.,

Wait until Dark

vs.

Wait Until Dark. – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 12:57, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

What I find interesting about all these style guides is that the question isn't really what to do with four character prepositions, it's what to do with five-and-longer ones. I think all of them would have "over" be in lower case, but some of them simply say that prepositions should be in lower case, and give no different rule for longer ones.—Kww(talk) 15:13, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

The more important rule is to capitalize "significant words" in a title. As to NGRAMs, that is a title issue, not a MOS issue. Apteva (talk) 05:22, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

While I personally think we should just go the IMDb way (as ungainly as some of the titles there look) and style everything according to the guidelines used there, to take JHunterJ up on his proposal, how about modifying WP:NCCAPS to accommodate for these spelling versions?:

[proposed by ὁ οἶστρος:]

• From Dusk till Dawn (covered by current policy)
• Wait until Dark (not covered by current policy)
• Stranger than Fiction (covered by current policy)
• My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean / One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (not covered by current policy)
• 20000 Leagues Under the Sea (covered by current policy)
• Once Upon a Time in America (not covered by current policy)
• Girl Walks into a Bar (covered by current policy) – not sure it shouldn't be "Into", though (even if it looks as ugly as "Is")
• The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (not covered by current policy)
• It Came from Outer Space (covered by current policy)
• From Russia with Love (covered by current policy)

[proposed by JHunterJ:]

• Blue Like Jazz (not covered by current policy)
• Bridge Over Troubled Water (not covered by current policy)
• Alternate From Dusk Till Dawn (not covered by current policy)
• 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee (not covered by current policy)
• Star Trek Into Darkness (not covered by current policy)
• [add your own examples]

Would be a compromise / hybrid of "both worlds": even more lowercasing but at the same time allowing for some exceptions to avoid counter-intuitive "butt-ugliness". – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 12:49, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Added an alternate result for From Dusk Till Dawn, and added Bridge Over Troubled Water, Blue Like Jazz, and 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee. We can sort the List of English prepositions into "capitalized (when used as a preposition, as long as it's not the first or last word in a title or subtitle)" and "uncapitalized (unless it's either not used as a preposition or the first or last word in a title or subtitle)" -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:40, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Seems to me you're advocating the IMDb model. I'd be all for that, the only constructions looking rather weird there that I can think of off the top of my head would be

... from ... Until... and

... from ... Till....

(as already mentioned in my very first post). Also, there's the question of "into" vs. "Into". Case for the former: it's just "in" and "to" put together; case for the latter: "Upon" and the like (but then, at IMDb, it's "Up" vs. "in"). Good idea about using that list. – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 14:29, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't mean to advocate for deferring all of our titles to the IMDb's choice of caps. If we coincidentally land there, that's fine though. I don't think we should worry about which tiny words were assembled into which short words; the short words are now different enough and can't be simply replaced with their bits. Added one more: "Into Darkness" appears to be a subtitle in the new Star Trek film, even if they've made the weird call to omit a colon or hyphen or anything else. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:58, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I would not prefer IMDb's capitalization because it's IMDb, but because that seems to be the standard used, well, almost everywhere (if someone has the answer, I'd still like to know where they have borrowed it from).

Under Getting Started > Submission Guides > Title Formats (section Capitalization and character sets), they merely state:

"English language words which must begin with a lower-case letter are: an and as at by for from in of on or the to with".

It doesn't get simpler than that. Granted, it's a bit nonchalantly / loosely worded, omitting clarifications such as "unless they begin or end a title" (although that's implicitly taken into account), but I'm sure there are some Wikipedians who could elegantly and comprehensively incorporate the principles behind it into the existing MoS, while keeping it clear and readily accessible for everybody.

I suggest either adopting that approach in whole (which would cover everything JHunterJ would like to see) or amending it by adding

till,

until,

into,

onto and

than (but not Then)

to their list and be done with it (good-bye, "shorter than five letters" rule).

(By the way, browsing the database, you will find that IMDb is not always applying their own compass consistently, either, but in virtually every case that's just a matter of erroneous submissions that are open for correction – in the few cases where it's deliberate, then that's because they also do respect how the creators want their work spelled.) – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 19:31, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I see; I had misunderstood the IMDb suggestion, sorry! Yes, I'd be fine adopting their list, or adopting a similar list (such as your additions). I think I'd capitalize Till and Until and Than, but I've got no heartburn if WP decides to lowercase them. -- JHunterJ (talk) 19:33, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

That's the way I saw it, too. Actually, that's the reason all this started, as I – unwitting of the "shorter than five letters" rule – wanted to move From Noon till Three to From Noon Till Three. Meanwhile (primarily because of the unsightliness of "... from ... Till/Until ...", as in Lora from Morning Till Evening), I'd lowercase those few words. But crossing a Bridge over Troubled Water? I don't see that. – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 20:09, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Commment. This discussion seems to be quite film-centric, and maybe isn't taking fully into account the requirements of other projects that have prominent usage of composition titles, but surely we should be discussing any changes in terms of published style guides, and which we should take our lead from, rather than in terms of what other websites do. --Rob Sinden (talk) 13:49, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

But surely we are not restricted to published styles guides as the only input to this discussion. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:52, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure. Isn't there an element of making up our own rules for the English language if we just copy what others do (or seem to do), rather than following established guidelines for usage? I guess it could be seen as WP:SYNTHESIS. --Rob Sinden (talk) 13:58, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Establish guidelines contradict each other, so we'll have to "make up our rules" (or make up our minds) regardless, no one's suggesting we "just" copy what others seem to do, and style guidelines are not encyclopedia articles, so it can't be seen as WP:OR. Also, the problems above also include musical compositions/ -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:50, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but we should be debating this in terms of the contradictions between the style guides and which established style we should adopt, not look to other websites to see what they do, without knowing their reasoning behind it (unless of course they have a published style guide). We don't know why the BFI or IMDB make the decisions they do. For all we know they could use a completely arbitrary system, so we shouldn't be following them. --Rob Sinden (talk) 15:29, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

I disagree. We should be debating this in terms of what makes the most sense (or best improvement) for Wikipedia. If a hypothetically arbitrary system makes the most sense for WP or results in the most improvement, we should use it. -- JHunterJ (talk) 15:49, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

That's just anarchy!  :) Should we start using arbitrary systems of punctuation and spelling too? We need to ensure our style guide has some basis in established usage. Whether that proves to be slavishly following one manual, or cherrypicking between different manuals, that's fine by me, but we shouldn't be inventing our own rules without seeking a precedent. --Rob Sinden (talk) 15:58, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

I doubt any system (capitalization, spelling, or punctuation) that makes sense for WP will be arbitrary, and none of the systems under discussion are arbitrary or without precedent. -- JHunterJ (talk) 16:18, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, there is a suggestion above to copy what IMDB do, but also to add a few four letter prepositions, but not all of them, and there is no mention of phrasal verbs (which is what brought me to this discussion!). This seems pretty arbitrary and doesn't seem to follow any of the accepted precedents for title capitalisation. I wasn't party to earlier discussions regarding the current style guideline, but they seem to have been well considered, and to me, the proposed changes seem whimsical. Any changes should be considered more widely, and we should seek broad input from other projects, particularly literature and language projects, rather than base the changes on what an internet movie database (that we don't even trust as a reliable source) use for their criteria of titling films, then adding a few arbitrarily chosen prepositions of our own. --Rob Sinden (talk) 16:40, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

No one's suggesting any change to the way we handle phrasal verbs (we continue to capitalize them in all cases). This discussion is just around prepositions, but without any arbitrariness (no one's suggesting we cast lots to see which prepositions are capitalized). -- JHunterJ (talk) 17:21, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Formula One

Further input is welcome at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Formula One#Flagicons.

Although this is specifically about flagicons, it also goes to the more general issue of some WikiProjects just opting to completely ignore aspects of the Manual of Style, or in some cases even core content policies, sometimes (as in this case) without even attempting to present a rationale that would outweight the considerations behind the respective part of the MOS. --213.196.218.39 (talk) 13:48, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

It might be a pain to look through, but there have been extensive discussions on this in the past. Bretonbanquet (talk) 13:52, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

A rationale has to be included at the WikiProject page, maybe in a dedicated section or at a guideline subpage for the project. Failing that, the WikiProject's style recommendations have to be brought in line with the Manual of Style. --213.196.218.39 (talk) 14:00, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Really? Where does it say that? Bretonbanquet (talk) 14:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

In the upcoming RfC. Seriously, please don't play dumb. I'm not going to waste my time with you if you're playing dumb like that. --213.196.218.39 (talk) 14:05, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Right now, you're the only one wasting time. Either explain things clearly, rather than talk about RfCs which don't even exist yet, or go and do something else. Calling people dumb is only going to afford the contempt which it deserves. What other IPs have you edited under recently? Bretonbanquet (talk) 14:09, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Not only am I not calling you dumb, I'm explictly calling you an intelligent person feigning a lack of intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong. Let's continue serious discussion at the WikiProject talk page. --213.196.218.39 (talk) 14:13, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I strongly suggest you refrain from doing either or making any further snide comments. I'll probably leave others to go into detail with you at the WP page because the dozen times I've discussed it before are probably enough for me. Bretonbanquet (talk) 14:18, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Let's ignore the incomprehensible row above, the terms of which have been, apparently deliberately, kept cryptic. I've replied in the discussion, but basically MOSFLAG requires that flags either reflect a representational entity, or that nationality is pertinent to the purpose of a table. What is pertinent can be judged by what reliable secondary sources generally do. Kevin McE (talk) 20:08, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

FYI: RM from dash

Talk:79360_Sila–Nunam#Requested_move

— kwami (talk) 15:31, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Historic

Is it preferable to say "a historic fort" or "an historic fort"? The style of the article is American usage. Thanks for any information. --MelanieN (talk) 06:34, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

My personal take, without researching it: either, and it seems not to matter whether US/UK variety. The "n" was originally found in certain varieties within England in which the initial "h" was dropped. Tony (talk) 11:14, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

To these English/British ears/eyes, "an historic", while technically a correct alternative, is rarer and sounds a little dated and even pretentious. I'd be surprised if US English was more in favour of it. I'd certainly say you can't go wrong – and would surprise fewer people overall, whether US or UK – with "a historic". N-HH talk/edits 12:07, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

N-HH sounds right to me. Tony (talk) 12:14, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

We should stop agreeing .. anyway, here's some evidence in graphs to back up what we've both suggested. N-HH talk/edits 12:27, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Wow! (re: the graphs) I will fix it. Thanks for your help. --MelanieN (talk) 15:06, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

• There have been several discussions of this over at the reference desk, this one being the most recent. I also agree that "a historic" is the better way to go. --BDD (talk) 17:57, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Scope

If we look back to the early MOS[61] the first sentence is "A Manual of Style has the simple purpose of making things look alike." I would amend that to say that the MOS has the purpose of making articles look sort of alike, but I am not sure the best way to word that. The current MOS uses "The Manual of Style (often abbreviated MoS or MOS) is a style guide for all Wikipedia articles." I am going to ignore the fact that the current MOS is clearly not what anyone could call brilliantly written, and not point out the obvious problems with that sentence (two points though for anyone who can point out the errors - on my talk page). What I do want to call attention to is the focus of the MOS - to make articles look sort of like every other article. Obviously a list does not look like a non-list article, and obviously an article about pokemon does not look like an article about a cricket match. But all of them if they have one have a summary lead paragraph at the beginning followed by the first section which is normally history or overview, and references come before external links and after see also. Where we stray, though, is in trying to teach spelling, grammar, punctuation, and good writing, and I would recommend stripping all of that out of the MOS and putting all of that into essays instead. The result will be a manageable 32kb MOS with no subpages and no arguments. Apteva (talk) 07:16, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

• "no arguments"... — Crisco 1492 (talk) 07:22, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Apteva, please stop. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 07:38, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

• I suggest that you try that in you own userspace, perhaps write your own essay to let off some steam, and spare us this tedium here. Thanks for listening! -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 07:44, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
  • I was thinking of doing that, but brilliant writing is not my forte. It is better to get agreement that that would help, before wasting any time doing a mock up. Apteva (talk) 07:46, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
    • I have more than an inkling that that is not going to happen here at MOS... ;-) -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 07:49, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
      • If it did though, it would be a huge improvement. Apteva (talk) 07:59, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
        • Sez you. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 02:21, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

What multiple reliable sources explicitly say - continuing

Continuing from Wikipedia_talk:MOS#What_multiple_reliable_sources_explicitly_say, with permission from closing admin (User_talk:Nathan_Johnson#closure_of_rfc).

As I was saying, the IAU is the authority to be followed in comet names, it has prescribed hyphens, and a personal email has confirmed that they don't want dashes used as a replacement for hyphens. Waiting for a comment from Peter Coxhead. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:49, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

It seems to me that all of these punctuation/capitalization arguments for named things (comets, airports, works of art, trademarks) boil down to a choice among three possibilities:

A. Authoritative – As published by the naming authority, inventor, etc.

• What if the authority is typographically unreliable, routinely using all-caps, inconsistent style, or doesn't seem to know that there's a difference between a dash and a hyphen?

B. WP:COMMONNAME – The way it is usually seen by the general public in print.

• How do we filter out the sources that don't know the difference between a dash and a hyphen, or have inconsistent editing/styles (creeping into even the most well respected of pubs)?

C. Wikipedia style – According to WP:MOS, using "proper English grammar and punctuation", ignoring that it is a given name.

I'm pretty sure I don't like C, but the other two are problematic in their own ways, and I'm not sure there can be a one-fits-all rule for when they disagree or do not yield clear majorities after filtering (not that it even seems reasonable to do that much work in each case). I'm leaning towards B in the hope that reasonably typographically and editorially reliable sources still predominate. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 20:11, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

For years A and B were the only options. When C was introduced last year it wrecked havoc, causing things to be very oddly named. Choosing between A and B is a constant theme at WP:RM, and there will never be any option of not doing so (William Jefferson Clinton vs. Bill Clinton). Apteva (talk) 21:01, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

No havoc was wreaked. Editors who disagree with the consensus disagree, and a small subset portray that disagreement in apocalyptic terms. -- JHunterJ (talk) 21:27, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

That is obviously disputed. Creating names that do not exist for hundreds of items is in my view clearly havoc. Apteva (talk) 01:50, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

It's not clear what you mean by "creating names that do not exist". Personally, when choosing styling for article titles, I follow the advice in MOS:TM, and choose from among styles used in reliable sources. I'm pretty sure that of all of the articles with en dashes that you have complained about and challenged, all are found with the same en dash styling in reliable sources. I'm not saying the MOS requires this (except for trademarks), just that I restrict my moves to such cases, to avoid controversy. I can't recall the last time anyone challenged such titles with sensible en dashes backed up by sources (besides you and now Enric who has joined you). I agree that "Creating names that do not exist for hundreds of items" might be a bad idea, but it's nothing like what's happening that you're bitching about. Your claim "This is obviously disputed" is just more whining. Cut it out. Dicklyon (talk) 07:38, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Also, this idea that styling of titles like text per the MOS is something that started last year is wrong. We've been doing that for all the years I've been at WP, at least since 2005 (like these hundreds on Sept. 30 2005), and I've seen some en dash titles go back to even earlier. Most do not provoke any controversy. Dicklyon (talk) 07:54, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

As far as I could tell, without checking them closely, all of those are pedantically correct, but annoying to anyone who does not like dashes in titles. But prior to 2008 there were technical restrictions on using dashes in titles anyway. None of those were proper nouns as far as I could tell. While it is annoying to me to see dashes used for something like the Michelson-Morley experiment - something that is rarely spelled with a dash, it is the proper nouns that are of more concern. But strictly speaking all should be named following common usage and not try to be pedantically correct. It is pretty easy to form an analogy between learning a little bit about something and then going out and applying that knowledge in areas that it no longer applies, which is exactly what was done. Show me one style guide that has an example of a bridge, war, airport, comet, or any other proper noun spelled with a dash. I can not find any in New Hart's Rules. I think we just made that up, and it just is not justifiable. Apteva (talk) 08:32, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

@ Alan: COMMONNAME governs names, the MOS the formatting of those names. Trying to follow COMMONNAME for stylistic choices and punctuation results in all sorts of inconsistencies, which is why print publishers drew up MOS's in the first place. — kwami (talk) 21:51, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

And we are not a print publisher. Apteva (talk) 08:32, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

B is often the worst of all possible choices, it seems to me. It will often lead to inconsistency and dispute, especially in an international encyclopaedia, since what is "common" in a topic area in one country is often not in another.

I strongly support following internationally recognized authorities whose remit is nomenclature, where these exist. Where they don't, Wikipedia is entitled to draw up its own guidance, but this must be based on consensus not the dictatorship of the majority.

If the IAU explicitly mandates hyphens rather than dashes in comet names, then this style should, of course, be followed. Peter coxhead (talk) 23:11, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

But they don't mandate anything about, or even recognize the existence of, en dashes. Enric didn't ask about en dashes, and the response didn't say; the guy interpreted the question about "dash" to be about the sentence punctuation dash, not the en dash, as his response makes clear: "Dashes are marks like semi-colons, commas, and periods, used grammatically in sentence structure. Hyphens link words together, not dashes." He thereby declared himself ignorant of the concept of an en dash, which is not so unusual. He did say "It is strictly not correct to write 'Comet Hale-Bopp'", which I assume applies also to the form with an en dash. But that's not so useful here, since Comet Hale–Bopp is what it's commonly called, and we use COMMONNAME (option B) for titles, not official designators (option A) like his suggestion "Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp)". Styling is a different matter. Option C is not an alternative to A or B, but goes along with either or both; perhaps better with B. On whether the IAU mandates, or even recommends, a typographical styling, one could ask them if Nature always gets it wrong; or Icarus; or Earth, Moon, and Planets. They probably won't understand the question, just as they didn't understand Enric's. Dicklyon (talk) 00:44, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

(I mean to respond to AlanM1, not Dicklyon, but couldn't figure out how to do so with the out-dent.) I don't really think it matters what the IAU thinks is the best name. Even leaving aside the possibility of a gramatically-ignorant official source – which seems to possibly be the case here – I nonetheless think that "C" is the best option of these. Are we really going to create a whole list of exceptions to the en-dash formatting rules for particular situations where "official" sources disagree with us? What if there are multiple competing "official" sources with different rules? Or what if common usage is ambiguous? Do we discount sources that appear not to distinguish between hyphens and dashes? Personally I think that the MOS' rules about dash use are confusing enough without a laundry list of particular exceptions for instances where the "official" or common name uses a hyphen rather than a dash. AgnosticAphid talk 01:05, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

• Please focus. The only option under discussion is including C. A and B always exist, and are not the issue. Apteva (talk) 01:50, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

As I was saying, the opponents of the MOS dash guidelines (consensually derived in 2011 by 60 contributing editors, under ArbCom supervision) need to read something systematic and enlightened on the topic under dispute. Then, and only then, can they engage meaningfully in dialogue with editors who do know the theory behind these things, and do understand the difference between content and the styling of content.

I referred earlier to CGEL's chapter on punctuation. Any takers? Any interest? Or should we tightly restrict deliberations, so that off-the-cuff responses from such non-style "authorities" as IAU (to leading questions) will determine style on Wikipedia? Note, of course, that the vice-president of IAU evinces no acquaintance with the en dash at all. Contrast the major guides that inspire the best-practice guidelines consensually presented in MOS. Those major guides discuss naming of comets and the like also, remember.

Please: just let me know. I can help. But if editors prefer to remain beyond help, inform me so I can do something less futile – instead of attempting to engage people who are fanatically committed to ignoring how hyphens and en dashes actually work, in actual high-quality publication.

♥

Noetica^Tea? 03:54, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Please do a careful read of the entire CGEL (Cambridge Grammar of the English Language ISBN 978-0521431460}, and tell me if there is an example of an airport, bridge, war, comet, or any other proper noun spelled with an endash anywhere in the entire book. I am pretty much up to speed on knowing how to correctly use endashes, emdashes, and hyphens in sentences, but see no reason to extend dashes to named items, which, by definition have a specific name. Apteva (talk) 08:06, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

But what difference could that make, Apteva? If I pointed out that nowhere in CGEL is there any support for your wild surmise that proper names never have an en dash, how would that move things along? If I did present such an example from CGEL, what difference would that hard evidence make? To you, I mean. Would it terminate or even shorten your ridiculous campaign?

Very well, let's see. From CGEL, p. 1762:

the Lewis–Jones Company

Nor is CGEL idiosyncratic in this. From The Penguin Dictionary of Proper Names (revised edition, 1991; my usual underlining for emphasis), on p. 230:

Hitler–Stalin Pact ("sometimes called the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact")

And on the very next page:

Hoare–Laval Pact

That dictionary of proper names does not apply distracting title case to its entries; there are plenty in which main words are in lower case, like "Hobson Memorial lectures" and "Odder–Neisse line". Not everyone thinks that every construction functioning as a proper name has its status marked by capitalisation. One more for good measure:

Panhard–Levassor ("French firm of car manufacturers")

So will you stop now, please? Can we all stop, in fact? The RFC has ended, remember. So have most of the other drawn-out diatribes over en dashes, in scattered theatres of conflict where editors' reserves of time and patience are squandered.

The community has spoken, as it did in 2011. Live with it – as we all must live with not getting our way in an imperfect world.

Noetica^Tea? 11:34, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Noetica, welcome back! I'm glad you've got that fat book! Dicklyon (talk) 16:07, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, and it is correct that even if it had a list of all the comets in the world with endashes it would not change the fact that the preferred spelling is with a hyphen. And if it had no proper nouns with an endash that also would not change anything, but it does confirm that one book on grammar, not style, but grammar, does have some examples of using an endash in a proper noun. The acid test still is, is that the most common spelling of Panhard–Levassor, Hoare–Laval Pact, and Hitler–Stalin Pact, and is the official or most common spelling of Lewis–Jones Company (likely a made up example - there are lots of Lewis Jones Companies but they all use a space, and of course Mcgraw-Hill uses a hyphen). I will also note that CGEL does not attempt to be representative, but calls pronouns nouns, and explains the reasoning, though that falls on deaf ears of every teacher teaching grammar, and so should we turn a deaf ear. So no, it does not change anything, and no there is still not any consensus on hyphens and dashes, although it would be trivial to reach consensus if everyone was interested in finding out which areas there is consensus and which there is not. For example, it is pedantically correct to write Michelson–Morley experiment, but that is not the way most people write it, so that is out. No one writes comets or airports with an endash so that is out, and ditto for wars and bridges. And as to the places that dashes are correctly used - in sentences like this one, what is all the fuss about, the sentence does not change its meaning because of three missing pixels. Apteva (talk) 11:04, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

RfC: Should lines be used between a template and text above it?

This is an RfC to establish wider community input on whether this formatting should apply to all articles. This issue was discussed in the past: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 129#Spacing and Using the hidden comment function to create space between a template and text above it.

The Manual of Style states: "Check that your invisible comment does not change the formatting, for example by introducing white space in read mode." (WP:COMMENT)

Does this mean that the above formatting should be used? That is, Should white space be introduced between the last line of text and the top of a footer-(navigational) template?Curb Chain (talk) 07:57, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

I don't think that Hidden Comments should be used to introduce white space because the simple enter-key will suffice. Secondly, using the enter-key to make lines to make white space is arbitrary and is not used.

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout#Headings and sections says "Between sections (and paragraphs), there should be a single blank line; multiple blank lines in the edit window create too much white space in the article." which is saying that hidden comments are not to be used to create white space, and not to create white space.

Specifically, the vast majority of pages do not have the formatting as I presented.Curb Chain (talk) 07:57, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

• Curb Chain has been on about this for quite a while now, to the extent of following me around and reverting my edits. He really needs to chill out and realize that the Manual of Style is not policy, it is not something that has to be followed slavishly, and it is certainly not a straightjacket preventing any of us from improving the encyclopedia. Indeed, it cannot be that, because that would, in itself, emasculate the entire purpose of WP:IAR.

  I've explained to Curb Chain many, many times, the purpose of the edits he objects to, and I'll do so once again for the benefit of othere. Please bear in mind that Curb Chain has brought this to AN/I on several occasions, and has been told by numerous editors there that his complaint is among the lamest thinsg anyone has ever come across. Also, please consider that his compaign of harrassment and annoyance is all about a single blank line.

  OK, here's the explanatuon. If you take a look at any decent-sized article, you'll note that the system, when it renders the page, provides a bit of spacing before every section header. This is to help the header stand out and be separated from the section above it. Unfortunately, the system does not do this at the bottom of the page, where any navboxes follow the External links section. Because of this, it's visually unpleasant that the new section (the navboxes) is so close to the text of the external links section, so I've been inserting a blank line to seperate them, to make it easier on the eye tosee the end of the external links and the beginning of the navboxes.

  That's it, that the sum total of what Curb Chain objects to, that he's started two RfCs to try to eliminate, that's he's brought to AN/I on at least two occasions, and that he's followed me around with no other purpose than to delete ,y edits. (Bear in mind, I don't travel around Wikipedia inserting this single blank line of space, it's part of my normal editing of articles, which is often quite extensive.) That he's fixated on this is, to say the least, rather bizarre. That his campaign is getting rather disruptive is a matter of opinion - but I think he's gone off the rails a bit. In any event, my purpose in making this edits is solely and entirely to make our articles just a little bit easier to use for our readers. Thanks. Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:23, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

While I can't say that I find this a compelling disagreement or one to get worked up over, I am kind of inclined to agree with the person in the other discussion who said it'd make more sense to figure out if the extra space is something the whole site needs rather than to go around making impromptu additions of blank space to single articles on a haphazard and case-by-case basis. AgnosticAphid talk 08:47, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

I would be more than happy if the system could be adjusted to provide the necessary spacing, but no one has ever indicated that this was possible to do. Since that's the case, this is the next best thing. Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:51, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

• I would recommend against making additional space before a template at the end of the article, but it is not something that should be added to the MOS. The correct way to fix that sort of thing is to edit the template. Apteva (talk) 10:23, 21 December 2012 (UTC)