Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Internal consistency v consistency across articles

[I have restored this section just after it was archived; it includes argument that is relevant to the current RFC (see just below), which explicitly makes reference to it.–Noetica^Tea? 08:10, 16 September 2012 (UTC)]

Further information: Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_129 § Internal_consistency_v_consistency_across_articles

Noetica removed these words [See correction below.–Noetica ☺] – "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" – from this lead sentence:

An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within a Wikipedia article, though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole.

As the lead already mentions internal consistency, this sentence is arguably repetitive without the juxtaposition. More importantly, we don't require consistency across articles, and it's important to stress that. The lead currently implies that we do, or at least does not make clear that we don't:

• "The MoS presents Wikipedia's house style, to help editors produce articles with consistent, clear, and precise language, layout, and formatting."

• Consistency in language, style, and formatting promotes clarity and cohesion; this is especially important within an article.

Therefore, the addition of "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" (or similar) is needed. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:38, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

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The first sentence of this section inadvertently misrepresents what happened. The sequence of events (all on 12 August 2012):

• SlimVirgin restored some wording that had been long absent from MOS (diff)
• Curb Chain reverted that restoration (diff)
• Noetica restored what SlimVirgin had added, except for what Curb Chain objected to (diff)

Slim, would you please amend that first sentence? Best to keep the account accurate. ♥
Noetica^Tea? 07:51, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

[Note: I have exhausted my reserves of time for dealing with this issue. I see that Slim did not make the factual correction I requested (see immediately above). For the RFC on this page (#RfC: Internal consistency versus consistency across articles), please refer to the detail in all of my submissions in this earlier section. I explain my temporary absence in that RFC. ☺Noetica^Tea? 03:43, 7 September 2012 (UTC)]

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Not needed. As these sentences in the lede show, consistency across articles is indeed important. Including your proposal is contradictory and will be a contention of confusion for editors.Curb Chain (talk) 05:10, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

You are mistaken there. Articles do not have a single standard style. When there are two or more acceptable styles, an article can use either of them: English/British spelling, BC/BCE, date formatting, citation style, etc. (this has been said by arbcom, for example here or here) There is no requirement to make all those articles consistent with each other.

The extra phrase is to prevent people from going in style-fixing sprees when they get the mistaken idea that articles need to be consistent among them. This is a real problem that caused many headaches and arbitration cases. For example Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/jguk_2#Findings_of_fact, where someone tried to ensure BC/BCE consistency across articles. A more recent case is Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Date_delinking where people used scripts to adapt hundreds of articles to their preferred style. --Enric Naval (talk) 06:59, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

No Enric, Curb is not mistaken. As things stand, there is nothing in the Manual to support such a spree. If MOS supported campaigns to impose one style choice uniformly across Wikipedia, from among options, it would say so. It would not single out consistency within articles, as it does now. Indeed, it would not present options at all!

Consider three propositions:

P1: There is a hard requirement for consistency within articles, where MOS presents options.

P2: There is no hard requirement for consistency between articles, where MOS presents options.

P3: In groups of articles on similar topics, similar styling is better than an unprincipled or random selection of styles.

Who disagrees with any of those, and why? (Not a rhetorical question.)

We might regard P3 as a motive for our glittering array of subsidiary MOS pages, naming conventions, informal conventions out there in the projects, and so on. It starts as an unspoken presumption; and then, many specialists make it explicit for their own fields.

I think we should not send a message against efforts to unite groups of articles in that established way. I am yet to see an argument that such groups of articles (often cross-linked, often cited together) are improved by a perceived licence for each to take its own independent direction, subject only to the whim of editors narrowly focused on a single article rather than a thematically united group of articles.

Noetica^Tea? 07:51, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Noetica's general principles here, but would formulate the propositions to take account of the following.

• for P1 and P2, "where MOS presents options or is silent".
• for P3 I think we should make it clear that consistency is expected for closely-related articles (and try to establish that if anyone is inclined to disagree).

Of course, how closely articles are related can be a matter for discussion. Authors should be relatively free to agree the appropriate scope for any consistency.

Apart from being general common sense, an appropriate degree of consistency both enhances the user experience and makes it easier for editors to make corresponding changes everywhere where they are needed.

Nobody should be able to say "MOS says that articles do not have to be consistent with each other" as a pro forma excuse to block changes among such closely-related articles. At the same time we should emphasise that editors should establish consensus before making extensive changes. --Mirokado (talk) 09:51, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

I disagree. The MoS does not require articles, even articles in the same Wikiproject, to match each other, so it is perfectly okay to say so. "Let's make this article match a related one" is not, by itself, sufficient reason for a change in style. However, "I feel like it, I raised it on the talk page, and no one objected within a reasonable time frame," is sufficient reason. To use the language of the thread, we should not put P3 in the MoS. 1. We shouldn't add rules to the MoS unless there is a real reason to do so, like a) said rule is part of the English language or b) adding said rule would solve a non-hypothetical problem and 2. Enric Naval has provided evidence that attempts to enforce cross-article consistency have caused non-hypothetical problems on Wikipedia. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:42, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but adding such a rule will allow editors to WP:WIKILAWYER.Curb Chain (talk) 01:17, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

With what do you disagree exactly, Darkfrog? I don't read Mirokado as saying that any version of P3 should be actually included in MOS. P3 is just a proposition that we are invited to consider. On the other hand, if you disagree with P3 itself, will you please tell us why?

I would in effect reverse your judgement on the two reasons you mention, like this:

• "Let's make this article match a related one" presents an excellent reason for a change in style.
• "I feel like it, I raised it on the talk page, and no one objected within a reasonable time frame" is never a sufficient reason for making a change in the style of an article.

To use the reason that you favour (the second reason cited here) is contrary to current provisions in MOS, at MOS:RETAIN:

When an English variety's consistent usage has been established in an article, it is maintained in the absence of consensus to the contrary.

That wording makes good sense. Some talkpages are sparsely attended; but the article in question might have a style that fits well with related articles, for example. A positively expressed consensus should be required, to overturn such valuable consistency.

Noetica^Tea? 01:33, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

I disagree with Mirokado's statement, "Nobody should be able to say "MOS says that articles do not have to be consistent with each other" as a pro forma excuse to block changes among such closely-related articles." Yes, they should be able to state that the MoS does not require inter-article consistency and use that to block changes among closely related articles. People should need a reason to make such changes. That reason need not be big. It can be "I feel like it, I raised it on the talk page, and no one objected." However, "We have to make these articles match because they're closely related in subject!" is false. No we don't have to.

I do not believe that we should add P3 to the MoS for the reasons that I stated yesterday. 1) We shouldn't add more rules without a good, non-hypothetical reason. 2) We don't have a good reason to add this rule; E. Naval even showed that we have a good reason not to. If pushing cross-article consistency causes trouble, then we shouldn't require people to push it, even if some people would prefer articles to be written that way.

As for the "I feel like it, I raised it, no one objected" rationale, if only one person has an opinion on the matter, than that person's opinion is the consensus. In that situation, 100% of the people involved would agree. Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:04, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

The MOS is also a guide and set of pages to indicate to readers/editors which style to use when there are differing styles. We don't make rules to limit peoples' choices for the sake of limiting peoples' choices; we make rules, and the MOS's purpose, to make it easier for viewers to read our articles so there is some sort of consistency and so that readers can expect a sort of userfriendlyness versus a chaotic page-after-page styled encyclopedia. There is a way to block changes where people quote WP:IAR but that requires the use of WP:COMMON.Curb Chain (talk) 19:54, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Maybe that's how it should work, CC, but it's not how it does work. 1. We should assume that anything written down in the MoS will be cited as gospel on article talk pages. 2. Because Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia, giving people their freedom wherever reasonably possible, as in such proven policies as ENGVAR, allows disparate editors to contribute. Some inconsistency is worth it if it means we don't grossly insult Brits or Canadians or non-native-English-speaking contributors. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:48, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

ENGVAR already is sanctioned at MOS:RETAIN. We don't need this extra statement as it will be used by editors to disrupt pages per their own style.Curb Chain (talk) 13:17, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

It is about other things as well as WP:ENGVAR such as WP:CITE and WP:APPENDIX (and others such as date formats, table formats, quotation styles and any other style of format issue that an editor thinks should be "consistent"), so there is a need for the extra statement over and above the specific ENGVAR. -- PBS (talk)

I disagree with "In groups of articles on similar topics, similar styling is better than an unprincipled or random selection of styles." this has never been a requirement. The problem is what is a group? For example it could be argued that all articles about any subject within the countries of the EU should use British English/Irish English because the EU does. Or all articles on NATO (except those specifically about Britain and Canada) should use American English because the US is by far the largest contributor to NATO and therefore most articles about NATO are about American topics, and As NATO is deployed in Kosovo and Kosovo is not a member of th EU all articles about Kosova should be in American English. This type of argument has never been accepted.

One can see the fun one can have with arguments such as if its in a category its grouped in that category therefore it has to be consistent with all the other articles that appear in that category (An editor at the moment is using that as a justification for using his preferred spellings and ignoring usage in reliable sources). When an article appears in two categories then in which "group" does it belong?

This is why the MOS has only ever agreed that consistency should within an article, not across "groups" of articles.

I am with SV, EN and Darkfrog24 on this one. If as has been said "SlimVirgin restored some wording that had been long absent from MOS" then as it is a sentence that sums up a lot of Arbcom decisions, when was it deleted who deleted it and what was the justification given on this talk page for the deletion? -- PBS (talk) 10:15, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

That's a task for the history search where I pick half way between the latest and earliest version and see if the sentence was present or not and continue this process until I find the version where it was taken out. It doesn't always work, because there could be reverts in between or it could have been added and removed multiple times, but usually it does work. What instances where there that people were changing spelling styles according to like articles and not according to reliable sources?Curb Chain (talk) 20:45, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

But you miss the point, PBS. Please read the exchanges above with more care. The core suggestion is not they we insert P3 in MOS: "In groups of articles on similar topics, similar styling is better than an unprincipled or random selection of styles." I must say, I would be amazed if anyone disagreed with it as a statement considered in isolation. Do you disagree with it? In other words, do you prefer "an unprincipled or random selection of styles" in a group of articles (however defined)? For example, would you prefer that within a group of obviously related literary articles, these two forms be randomly selected: Dickens' novels; Dickens's novels?

With respect, PBS: perhaps you have neatly demonstrated the kind of confusion MOS should avoid inadvertently promoting, in the matter of consistency. Do not conflate "this has never been a requirement" [in MOS] and "this is a bad thing". Those problems you discuss with defining "group" are not weighty. Any competing systematic groupings among articles can be resolved by the appropriate projects, and agreements can be reached. Only if we actively seek difficulties, or manufacture them, can we expect possessive apostrophes to emerge as a casus belli in thematic groups of articles. Editors will generally prefer a consistent look and feel – and take pride not just in a single article but in the appealingly uniform style that greets the reader who follows links to similar ones.

That said, I have always favoured more singularity and less optional variability in MOS guidelines. Apart from British versus American, en dash versus em dash, and some other inevitable diversity, most variability in fundamental style is avoidable and detrimental. The community really does appreciate a well-considered standard that will settle disputes at the 4,000,000 articles. Look, I always prefer the spaced en dash for sentence punctuation, and always will. But I cheerfully use the em dash instead: and that includes across related articles, not just within them. If I got militant about it and sought to promote en dash regardless of such broad coherence, I would be doing a disservice to the readers. Let's all avoid such militancy; and let's not carelessly promote it by including unnecessary text that people will misread, and will use to justify disruption. And the fewer kinds of variability we have at the most basic level of style, the fewer opportunities we give to militants.

Noetica^Tea? 21:00, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

"within a group of obviously related" Obviously related went out when it was agreed that article space would not support subpages ("/"). -- PBS (talk) 21:25, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

How about this: "Making this a requirement would be a bad thing." And Wikipedia has a long history of "guidelines" and other unofficial rules being treated like requirements. No, there should be no requirement or any unofficial resolution or declaration that could later be mistaken for one.

The more freedom/variability we have, the better. That way we don't insult people by claiming that their way of doing things is inferior. This is a crowdsourced project. The rule requiring intra- but not inter-article consistency is a good way to strike a balance between neatness and diversity.

Noetica, you state that making this into a rule would settle disputes in many articles. Can you offer evidence, as EN has offered evidence to the contrary? Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:58, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Darkfrog, I cannot follow some of those points. Making what a requirement "would be a bad thing"? What does that answer, precisely? My point was general; but you seem to have something specific in mind. I do understand this though: "The more freedom/variability we have, the better." I appreciate your being consistent on that point. Unfortunately, maximising variability is not the business of MOS. Quite the opposite. A core function of any manual of style is to restrain variability in a principled and measured way, which improves the reader's experience. And freedom? A robust, clear, and consensual MOS has freed editors from many a wilderness, such as these archived disputes over Mexican–American War, which were only settled by the sharpening of WP:DASH that we achieved here in 2011. Remember those disputes? Wade through all of that archive! Or search for this: "consistent with itself", especially at the exchange following Enric Naval's "Oppose". Read all of that exchange. You will find him insisting on the same line as he does here. I had hoped that the lessons of Mex~Am War were well learned; but no. In that exchange see reference to this provision at WP:TITLE (it stood then and it stands now):

* Consistency – Titles follow the same pattern as those of similar articles. Many of these patterns are documented in the naming guidelines listed in the Specific-topic naming conventions box above, and ideally indicate titles that are in accordance with the principles behind the above questions.

That's the last of five points so salient that they bear this link: WP:CRITERIA. Why should we weaken its force with the "not necessarily" wording at MOS? My example, to answer Enric's evidence: Mexican–American War.

WP:TITLE and MOS have to be in harmony. This is achieved by WT:TITLE settling the choice of title (the wording, as the title would be spoken); and then almost all of the styling is delegated to MOS. As with any publisher. No other arrangement works. If the title were styled without consideration of MOS, we could not even achieve consistency within an article. The title would drift with the inconsistent and untrackable usage of "sources", but the text would follow recommendations at MOS. Or what?

Noetica^Tea? 21:55, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

As I've said earlier in this discussion, I mean that making P3 into a requirement or having some sort of resolution stating "It is better for closely related articles to use the same styles" would be a bad thing.

Wikipedia is not a publisher the way other entities are. There's no chain of command. There's no understanding that things are one entity's opinion. The current rule requiring intra- but not inter-article consistency strikes a good balance between the benefits that you cite above and the insult that we would be doing our editors by requiring them to kowtow to other people's whims for no practical reason.

And in case this wasn't clear, let me explicitly state that I don't think that cross-article consistency should be banned, only that it should not be required. If someone writing an article wants to use the same style as any other article in Wikipedia, then he or she should go right ahead. If someone proposes this or any style change on a talk page and a consensus forms that the change would be beneficial, then they should have that option. However, what people should not be able to do is say "We must make these articles match each other because the MoS requires it of us." Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:18, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia is very like a publisher in the relevant respects: it assembles and edits material, and disseminates it in text and related forms to the public. Very early in its history, people decided that it needed a manual of style, in the manner of a publisher. MOS has existed continuously since then. Its role has been tested and certified again and again, as for example in this ArbCom finding of fact:

The English Wikipedia Manual of Style has been built from a number of pre-existing Manuals from numerous fields. The best practices from these have been combined to create a single, unique MOS that applies to articles on the English Wikipedia.(from Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation)

I have repeatedly challenged people here to find a manual of style for collaborative web writing, editing, and publication that is more thoroughly considered, or more comprehensive, or more detailed than Wikipedia's MOS. Like it or not, WP:MOS and its subpages are in their own right a major style guide of our time.

If you object to that, or want to alter the role of MOS, make a proposal to do so. Good luck!

You speak of "kowtowing". No one is asked to do that. MOS is as consensual as we can make it, and a good deal more consensual than WP:TITLE (look at the troubles there at the moment, and over the last ten months), and even than WP:CONSENSUS itself (currently a hotbed of troubles, and recently placed under a month-long protection). If you object to following consensual guidelines, with the occasional application of WP:IAR where they fail to cover a particular set of circumstances, then make a case against guidelines at the village pump. Not here! Here we continue orderly development of a premier style guide for a very special purpose, unprecedented in history.

Finally, you write: "... what people should not be able to do is say 'We must make these articles match each other because the MoS requires it of us.' " That's right; and MOS does not require that. It is policy at WP:TITLE that comes closest to requiring that. Nor should MOS provide an argument for those who would twist its words in support of inconsistency between thematically related articles.

♪

Noetica^Tea? 04:20, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The current discussion is about which rules Wikipedia MoS should endorse. Wikipedia's difference from other entities that disseminate information—its crowdsourced nature—is relevant. People aren't getting paid. People are for the most part nonprofessionals and volunteers. "Do it because I'm the boss and I think A looks better than B" doesn't hold much water here. We have to treat people with respect, and that means not making them adhere to our whims. If we endorse something as a rule, and people are punished for not following it, that is "requiring people to kowtow," as I put it.

For the most part, the rules that are in the MoS weren't made up from scratch here. They were sourced from other, professionally compiled style guides. The majority of those style guides say "using a lowercase s in 'summer' is right and using a capital S is wrong." There's a difference between copying what can be said to be a rule of the English language and making stuff up on our own just to shove down other people's throats.

Do you know of any case in which someone claimed "The MoS requires that we use different styles in these articles"? Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Darkfrog, of course I don't know of any such cases. No one is claiming that there are any, right?

Wikipedia is not simple anarchistic "crowd-sourcing"; it has policies and guidelines to ensure that a high-quality encyclopedia results. So what, if people are not paid? People have always engaged in voluntary work and subjected themselves to local restrictions and rules – for a better outcome. As I have said many times, the work of this talkpage is to make the best set of guidelines to help Wikipedia be the best possible encyclopedia. If that work is done well, MOS will earn respect. The community will decide on the value and status of MOS within the project that it serves. We cannot decide that here. But ArbCom has decided; and the quiet majority of editors seems to appreciate the consensually derived recommendations and standards that MOS encodes. When they are asked, which is rare enough. No one is "making them adhere to our whims". No one here compels anyone to do anything, in editing articles; and anyway, the guidelines should certainly not be "whims". If any one of them is, let it be challenged. I have challenged in that way from time to time, and I will again. WP:MOS itself ("MOS central") is in pretty good consensual shape, but there are problems at several other MOS pages.

Noetica^Tea? 22:29, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

You said, "Nor should MOS provide an argument for those who would twist its words in support of inconsistency between thematically related articles." This caused me to wonder if perhaps you had seen a discussion in which someone thought that the MoS required different styles, "word twisting," as you put it.

By "people are not paid," I mean that at a regular publishing company, it is okay for one or a few people to hand down arbitrary decisions that could just as easily go the other way. This is because 1. the lower-ranking people are paid to put up with it and 2. the lower-ranking people can assume (sometimes with a great deal of benefit of the doubt) that higher rank was bestowed based on merit or seniority or something else that makes their supervisors worth heeding. Because Wikipedia doesn't have any of that, we should be extra careful that there is a good reason for every rule that we ram down people's gullets. "Y looks neater to me" invites the response, "Well X looks better to me." This is why I think we should be very cautious about adding new rules to the MoS. There are too many whims in it already. Maybe there shouldn't be whims in the MoS, but there are.Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:20, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

And if people can be brought up on AN/I for violating the MoS, then yes, that counts as "compelled." Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:27, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Read more carefully the answers you have already been given, Darkfrog. I have responded patiently and at length; and at considerable cost in time and patience. No one here is making "rules that we ram down people's gullets"; MOS has guideline status, and is consensually developed. As I have said (see above):

"No one here compels anyone to do anything, in editing articles; and anyway, the guidelines should certainly not be 'whims'. If any one of them is, let it be challenged. I have challenged in that way from time to time, and I will again."

(I will run out of time for this, you know. ☺)

Noetica^Tea? 03:44, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

What exactly is it that you want me to discern from your previous posts, Noetica? My last post, the one to which you're responding, consists entirely of my clarifying things that I had said to you. Did you mean to respond to my question about the M-A war article?

By "compelled" and "ram down people's gullets" I refer to anything that people can be punished or censured for disobeying, as in AN/I. The MoS may be only a guideline in theory, but in practice, it's a set of hard rules. That means that we should treat any new additions to the MoS as if they will be cited as gospel on talk pages.

By "whim," I mean any rule that offers no real benefit to Wikipedia. WP:LQ, for example, has been challenged repeatedly and it's still there, even though it directly contradicts the preponderance of reputable sources and discussions have failed to show that the ban of American punctuation gives Wikipedia any benefit. It is a lot easier to keep whims out of the MoS in the first place than to get them removed once they're there.

Bringing this back to the issue at hand, this is why I don't think that the MoS should endorse P3 either officially or unofficially unless someone can offer evidence that doing so would solve a problem that has actually happened. We'd be forcing people to follow rules that we made up solely because we felt like it, and that's a slap in the face. Darkfrog24 (talk) 05:33, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

There has never been style consistency across articles on WP, and the MoS makes that clear at various points (e.g. ENGVAR), as do other guidelines (e.g. CITEVAR). So the issue here is only that the lead should properly reflect that. I'd therefore like to go ahead and restore the words in question, because they do make the lead clearer on that point. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Of course there has been "style consistency across articles on WP"! How could that be a bad thing? MOS assists that; and so do WP:TITLE, the many naming conventions, and other "regularising" instruments across wikispace. But MOS is already very clear: in some areas there are choices. Where that applies, stick to one option within an article, and don't switch to another option without good reason and consensual discussion. No more needs to be said; stressing a lack of consistency between articles only encourages a lack of consistency between thematically related articles, through misreading for "political" purposes. I have given a potent example of such politics: Mexican–American War.

Noetica^Tea? 22:29, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

There has never been consensus to introduce style consistency across articles; on the contrary, there has always been opposition to it. I don't know what you mean by thematically related articles, or "political" purposes, and the example hasn't enlightened me, sorry. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Sure there has been such a consensus! Style consistency across articles is what MOS is all about. But there has never been a requirement in MOS to implement a particular style option uniformly across articles, where MOS provides for such options. I for one am not proposing any such requirement. Let's be strictly accurate, otherwise we will be misread. It's bad enough when we do express ourselves with precision, apparently. ☺

As for Mexican–American War, it is an infamous example of a battleground. Disregard for reader-friendly consistency of style where MOS did not provide for such options; and it caused protracted conflict. I gave the example at least to show how hotly disputed the matter of conformity to MOS has been, generally. But more specifically, MOS was cited inaccurately: against any consideration of titles that in the relevant respect were precisely the same (based on the pattern "X–Y War", using an en dash). Cited, in fact, against the policy provision at WP:TITLE that I have quoted above (from WP:CRITERIA).

Noetica^Tea? 23:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I finally had time to click your link and it's just the article on the Mexican-American War. How exactly does this serve as evidence that having some sort of resolution in favor of cross-article consistency on closely related topics would prevent problems on Wikipedia? I'm not being sarcastic; I'd like to know.

As things stand, I support returning "but not necessarily across Wikipedia as a whole" to the MoS. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:25, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

The link for you to click is clearly marked as "archived disputes" (see above). I then wrote (see above): "Remember those disputes? Wade through all of that archive!" You contributed there, Darkfrog. Read how you made points that are almost identical to those you make now, and read how I referred you to policy at WP:TITLE, then too. Try again.

Noetica^Tea? 03:44, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I mean the link you posted a few days ago, the one that just leads to the war article. (Checks) And today's link just leads to the article too. Yes, there was a big fight about whether M-A War should be hyphenated/dashed the same way in every article, but I am asking you what you think. Wading through the archive would at best facilitate a guess at what your reasoning is. What I want to know is what part of which M-A war dispute you feel is a specific problem that would be solved if the MoS were to endorse P3.Darkfrog24 (talk) 05:38, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Sorry Darkfrog: I have no time to limn yet again the stance that I have already made quite clear. Just note my response to your last sentence: I have linked you the general archived mess at Talk:Mexican–American War; and I have drawn attention to your own points there, and Enric Naval's. Let us ask: How much progress has been made? Who has worked for that progress, and who has worked against it? Finally (as I hope!), I stress once again: I am not proposing P3 or anything like it as an addition to WP:MOS.
Noetica^Tea? 00:29, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

There seems to be agreement to restore "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole." Enric Naval, Darkfrog, PBS and I are in favour; Noetica and Curb Chain are opposed; Mirokado wants consistency between closely related articles, but not necessarily across WP. I think the more people we ask, the greater the consensus will be against requiring cross-WP consistency, so I'll go ahead and restore those words. I think the lead could use some general tweaking too, but I'll address that separately. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:13, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

I would like to add that this is not a discussion about whether we should change the policy. The policy is that cross-article consistency is permitted but not required. The issue is whether the MoS should have the words "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" in it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:09, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Break

The problem is that the second and third paragraphs contradict each other. The second says we have a house style; the third says we do not. Both have redirects (WP:CLARITY redirects to the second, and WP:Stability and WP:STYLEVAR to the third), so anyone reading those in isolation would be misled.

Second paragraph: "The MoS presents Wikipedia's house style, to help editors produce articles with consistent, clear and precise language, layout, and formatting. The goal is to make the encyclopedia easier and more intuitive to use. Consistency in language, style, and formatting promotes clarity and cohesion; this is especially important within an article. Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording."

Third paragraph: "An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article, though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole. Where more than one style is acceptable, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a substantial reason. Revert-warring over optional styles is unacceptable. (These matters have been addressed in rulings of the Arbitration Committee: see Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Jguk#Optional styles and Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Sortan#Preferred styles.) If discussion cannot determine which style to use in an article, defer to the style used by the first major contributor."

SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:30, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

I see the third paragraph as a clarification of the second. It does not contradict anything in the second. The second says, "Consistency is good." The third says, "By that we mean intra-article consistency." Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:09, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

The second paragraph says there is a house style, but the third paragraph says there isn't, so there's a contradiction right there. It matters less if the two paragraphs are read together, but the separate anchors mean they might not be. The question is: to what extent does Wikipedia have a house style, or to what extent does it allow contributors to choose a style so long as there is internal consistency? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:48, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Additional discussion

I just want to note that I agree that User:Noetica was correct in removing the discussion that User:SlimVirgin started by pulling the archive instead of linking it, but some comments had been added when she restarted the discussion:[1]Curb Chain (talk) 03:05, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Never mind, Curb. SlimVirgin acted completely in good faith. I only objected because the way she did it left things unclear. I think it would often be fine to restore something had very recently been archived, and to put a clear explanation at the top. I do think that one is generally then expected to join in the discussion that one has wanted restored. I don't see that happening.
☺ Noetica^Tea? 20:03, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

I think Curb's point is that, when you removed the discussion from this page, you removed six new posts that had not been archived. So they disappeared. But they're now in the archive along with the others. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:29, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

O yes, of course. Well, that's what can happen when material is retrieved from the archives without clear signalling. I have checked, and it turns out that anyone who made a post in that discussion has joined the new discussion, and can see what has happened. If anyone had been left out, I would have notified them now. Turns out not to be needed.

Noetica^Tea? 22:02, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Reversion of non-consensual edits concerning inter-article consistency

I have reverted (see diff) two edits by SlimVirgin. The change in question clearly has no consensus. Editing and discussion for this page are subject to ArbCom discretionary sanctions (see the note at the top of this talkpage); so a high standard of conduct and respect for due process applies. Please discuss more, and if necessary initiate a neutral RFC. If any RFC is not set up in neutral terms, according to the provisions of WP:RFC, I will call for its immediate closure and refer the matter to WP:AE. Please note especially: This is not intended as inimical to any good-faith development of the page; but experience has shown how these things can escalate, and how they can wear away people's time and patience. ♥
Noetica^Tea? 00:18, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

When changing subtle things, it's a lot easier on the rest of us if you use "Show changes" a bit, and try to minimize the distracting diff variants. I had to compare sentence-by-sentence, just to figure out that the only thing you changed in that edit was a single sentence, and a number of linebreaks.

This is why plain-reverting is bloody annoying. (The same thing is happening elsewhere at the moment). If you have a partial dispute with an edit, then just revert the part you disagree with (or even better, offer an alternative/compromise edit), not the entire damned thing.

Thanks. -- Quiddity (talk) 00:48, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

The words in question were in the MoS for quite some time, and were removed without discussion. I have restored them because this is an important issue, and one that has caused quite a bit of grief on WP. If you want to remove them, please gain consensus here, or open an RfC to attract more eyes.

I didn't restore your other reverts, but I can't see the point of having six short paragraphs in the lead, so I'd be grateful if you would let them be condensed. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:43, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Noetica, what was the point of this revert? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:51, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

As Noetica continues to object, I've opened an RfC below. Apologies if it ends up being largely repetitive, but it might attract fresh eyes and we can request a formal closure to avoid arguments. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 01:17, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

I reverted Noetica there in a moment of irritation, but I shouldn't have, so I'm going to revert myself and abide by whatever the RfC decides. SlimVirgin ^(talk)

• Comment: It's obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a few seconds that this entire "intra- vs. inter-article consistency" thing is a false dichotomy. There is absolutely no conflict between the two ideas, except that which is purposefully manufactured by people who refuse to write in a way that is consistent between articles, just to satisfy their own personal stylistic preferences at everyone else's expense. The "versus" that is latent in this discussion is entirely artificial. It's what the British call a load of bollocks, and Americans refer to as total bullshit. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 23:38, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

RfC: Internal consistency versus consistency across articles

This sentence had been in the MoS for some time: "An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article, though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole." The whole sentence was removed 12 months ago, [2] then restored, [3] then it was changed so that it read: "An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article." [4] [5]

Should the words "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" be removed from that sentence? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 01:00, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

[Correction by Noetica: The sentence in question had been absent from MOS for over 12 months, till Slim Virgin reinstated it a few days ago. It was then removed by an editor, and then restored in part by Noetica.]

Replies

[no threaded discussion here, please]

• Oppose removal. There has always been an understanding that internal consistency is required when it comes to style issues, but not consistency across articles. There are formatting issues that are applied across the board (the general layout, for example). But when it comes to language variations, punctuation, and a host of other issues, we allow the editors on the page to decide, sometimes governed by personal preference, sometimes by whether a particular English-language variant ought to be dominant. The words "not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" signal that cross-article consistency is sometimes expected, but not always, and I feel it's important to retain that point. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 01:14, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
• I am opposing the removal because style consistency across articles has always been discouraged since the "date delinking" edit wars years ago. It's clear and concise. The removal leaves room for other interpretations. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:12, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal. per SlimVirgin and Enric. (Maybe we can get "Description not prescription" added back to wherever it was, too, eventually...) Time is not especially relevant, the detail/context that the sentence contains, is. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:40, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal. I think it's important to include a phrase that underscores the point that we have options for styles. Otherwise MOS would require, say, American English and SI units and common date formats across all articles. The MOS is not a prescription to be applied slavishly to all articles. A short phrase serves as a useful reminder of that fact, and its removal, as Enric Naval pointed out, leaves room for other interpretations, contributing to wasted time in needless debates about inter-article consistency. ~Amatulić (talk) 04:00, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal. The sentiment expressed by the phrase in question is essential to preventing disputes over English spelling style, comma style, referencing style, etc. "The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." <grin> We should emphasize that we are not here to make everybody toe the same line. If somebody's formatting can be traced to a practice that is accepted in a particular venue, then that formatting should be allowed. Binksternet (talk) 04:35, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal. It must be understood that an absolute consistency across articles is not possible with the diverse population we have and hope to have. This lack of rigid consistency must be explicitly permitted, along with the wish expressed that styles be referenced and adhered to when possible. But when the permissiveness disappears silently quietly without much notice to the common editor, the appearances are chilling.

Which brings up two issues on my own mind. Noetica, do you really think that 12 months is a long time, for pages which nominally are to be used to guide the entire 'pedia? You've been here since 2005, seven years. The lapse of one year before even active editors discover a misjudged edit is not unreasonable. It would seem from your strong surprise that a year could possibly be called 'recent' that you must be far too familiar with these environs to tell on that particular.

These pages are not welcoming, quite dense, often confounding, and I am not surprised that editors would not often make themselves available to review proposed changes. Saying that "see talk" is sufficient for changes to MOS would seem to me to be entirely insufficient for the average non-MOS-wonk editor.

Removing the explicit allowance for editors to not be required to conform to the tittle of MOS, through a change by the MOS-most editors, is troubling on multiple levels. Shenme (talk) 06:27, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

• Support the removal of text that was done twelve months ago. The stress on intra-article consistency is fine, of course. So is motherhood. But why labour to include what many editors have unfortunately misread as a licence for chaos? Groups of articles on similar themes benefit enormously from similar styling (where MOS allows for a choice). Why bend over backwards against such efforts? They are clearly in readers' interests. MOS was, till a few days ago, silent on such laudable efforts. What benefit is there in it making a statement that is bound to be misused by those who favour complete independence of styling, at each of 4,000,000 articles? No one is suggesting that a contrary statement be made; just that it is not the business of MOS inadvertently to counter worthwhile efforts to improve the readability of closely associated articles.

Noetica^Tea? 08:51, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

• [NOTE: As I explain below in "Threaded discussion", I am tied up with matters in real life. I have said all I need to say for this RFC, in the discussion earlier on this page: #Internal consistency v consistency across articles. The question facing us is important, and I advise people not to conflate consistency of style for Wikipedia in general (the very essence of MOS) and consistency of style where choices are allowed in MOS (and there are very few such choices, at least in WP:MOS itself). Misreadings we observe in this RFC illustrate the very problem that such carelessly added wording introduces: people do not read accurately, nor discriminate as we expect they will. ♥ Noetica^Tea? 03:52, 7 September 2012 (UTC)]

• Oppose removal by which I really mean "support re-insertion." Wikipedia is not like other encyclopedias. It requires on the unpaid service of editors from many disparate backgrounds and it has no chain of command. There's no one who can legitimately say, "Do it this way because I'm the boss and I've earned my authority." Inter- but not intra-article consistency strikes a balance between neatness and the diversity of opinion among our editors. If it is "bound to be misused," then show at least one case in which that has happened. Has an editor ever claimed "We are not allowed to make these articles match each other; the MoS says so"? Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:31, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal/retain - This would also seem to fall afoul of WP:ENGVAR, among other things... - jc37 20:04, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
• I think the sentence should be re-inserted. It's good for readers of the MOS to see a reminder that it is meant to include only a minimal amount of standardization, and that there are many reasons why different articles will have different styles. Where some see chaos in numerous styles, I see a field of wildflowers. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:25, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
• Comment. In my opinion, style and formatting inconsistencies across articles within English Wikipedia should be viewed as unavoidable exceptions to a general ambition that Wikipedia should be as consistent as possible throughout. Inconsistency should not be tacitly encouraged or presented as part of a "principle". 86.160.221.242 (talk) 16:40, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support re-removal per Noetica, and per the fact that the removal has been stable for a long time, and the fact that we do not need to repeat everything ever said in every guideline and policy on the system. It's already implicit in MoS's mandate as a guideline that it operates in juxtaposition and compromise with other forms of guidance here. Reiterating that a guideline can have exceptions, or that any particular guideline is not an ironclad policy, is not what we do here. Also, it really has been misinterpreted as a license for chaos. It was removed for a reason.

  Furthermore, there's an underlying assumption (one that is often advanced by the sort of editorial misprioritization addressed by WP:SSF, and WP:NOTHERE before it) that inter-article consistency is not desirable, and is immediately trumped by narrow, even personal preferences. Yet, obviously it is desirable to the extent that it can happen without raising intractable problems (like those addressed by WP:ENGVAR). If it were not desirable MOS would be very short, as the bulk of it and its subpages is style advice for dealing with English-language prose across all articles here. Material is not being broken out of MoS into small, topic-specific WikiProject "guidelines"; rather, the exact opposite is happening: Good advice from projects is making its way steadily into MoS so that it is applied consistently in articles on other topics.
  — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 08:24, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

• Support re-removal When one says 'consistent within an article' and is mute on what happens outside, lack of consistency between articles is unambiguous as implied in the guideline. There is no ambiguity in its absence, and I find the deleted half superfluous and repetitive. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 08:49, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support removal. The main purpose of the MoS , like other guidelines, is to achieve a level of consistency above the level of the individual article. Even in the case of the exceptions which prove the rule, like WP:ENGVAR we strive for consistency with things like WP:COMMONALITY. It is not required, but within the context of the Manual of Style we should not stress that it is unnecessary, thus giving the impression that it not desired. I think we achieve a reasonable balance by not mentioning it at all in this sentence.--Boson (talk) 09:04, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
• Remove to reduce chaos – "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" sounds like the opposite of what MOS is about, which is to encourage some consistency of style across WP. Dicklyon (talk) 05:02, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support removal.—It's unnecessary to confuse editors on this point, when the whole of MoS concerns stylistic consistency on en.WP. The absence of this text in no way suggests that articles have to be consistent with each other where a choice is allowed (engvar, em vs en dashes as interruptors, etc). Tony (talk) 06:57, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal (of "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole.") This is another case where discussion of wording changes gets confused with discussion of policy changes. "An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article" of itself implies that between articles consistency of such choices is not of "overriding" importance, so if we were only discussing wording, I don't see the need for "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole." That there is no overriding requirement for consistency throughout Wikipedia as a whole is clear from many other places (ENGVAR, choice of citation styles, etc.). If on the other hand those who don't want to include "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" seek thereby to change policy (as some comments above imply), so that consistency between articles becomes an "overriding principle", then these words should certainly be present, otherwise the implication is that consistency overrides ENGVAR, etc. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:23, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
• Retain/oppose removal' - The key words being "not necessarily". On those formatting issues about which broad community-wide discussion arrives at a consensus, consistency can and should be enforced, but about those the community maintains a more laissez-faire attitude, editors should have the leeway to improve articles as they see fit, given the specific needs of the specific article, without having to answer to those who try to enforce a non-existing consensus. The very most important thing, which it is best that we put our energies to, is to give our readers good, accurate information, well presented, rather than that every article have every tiny formatting aspect be exactly the same. Such "fooliosh consistency" is, in Emerson's words "the hobgoblin of little minds", in Shaw's words "the enemy of enterprise", and in Wilde's words "the last refuge of the unimaginative." Surely our editors are just the opposite: enterprising, imaginative and open to the world. Beyond My Ken (talk) 01:37, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose Though they certainly are superfluous these few words can serve as a reminder to people of how we do things here. It would be much easier to point a misguided editor to this phrase than to the absence of words to the contrary. There may not be a lot of benefit but the cost is nanofarthings. JIMp _talk·cont 09:25, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support removal. Of course the Manual of Style applies to the whole of Wikipedia. That's what it's for. Are we now to have local consensus for commas? Em-dash wars breaking out in Birds? Apostrophe wars in Composers? WP:BEANS Neotarf (talk) 06:49, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support removal. The extra words seem to be encouraging inconsistency far too strongly. , indeed one responder says "consistency across articles has always been discouraged" which seems a good example of a rule which should always be ignored: should I look for ways of making every article I edit inconsistent with every other article? The wording chosen should not give anybody an excuse to be uncooperative, whether they wish to apply something too widely or ignore interrelationships between articles. Although readers must accept that Wikipedia's articles follow no single strict house style, they are not well served if, for example, individual articles covering the six books of a series have corresponding content distributed differently across sections, perhaps in a different order or with different names. The work of adding related information to several such articles could be doubled or trebled depending on how they were inconsistent and such barriers to editing cannot contribute to content improvement. Not even in a single article do we revert constructive additions merely because a wrong sort of dash has been used, so I do not see consistency within an appropriate scope, maintained tactfully, as stifling new content. Neither would any expectation of consistency remove the necessity for having consensus to maintain it: I would expect the ease of finding consensus to correspond to the closeness of the relationship in a self-limiting way. --Mirokado (talk) 14:00, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal. It is kind of silly for a project that uses four different flavours of English and can't decide what it thinks about the usage of diacritics to try and pretend that internal consistency is really all that important. When you get right down to it, Wikipedia is the informational equivalent of a quilt. It is a patchwork design that comes together into a single pattern despite the differences found on each tile. I see no reason to replace that with a unitarian attitude. Resolute 01:18, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
• Meh. Should talking about the other part; there is far too much different-as-hell but internally-consistent going on. Consistency across the project is needful, with any variations being on a level vastly larger than individual articles. And no, don't talk to me about WikiProjects taking any lead, here. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 04:32, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal and reinstate the words per Slim, Resolute and Peter Coxhead. It's how we do things, and policies and guidance describe how we do things. Hiding T 11:00, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal Editors should be allowed to edit, to create articles. No one wants to see WP become an homogeneous blob. Part of its charm is that the best articles do bear the stamp of their creator. The phrase should be retained. It's not tautological. It makes explicit an import aspect of WP's ethos. 87.112.91.134 (talk) 14:39, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal/Support retaining the bit that says that we don't need to be consistant across all of Wikipedia. --Jayron32 00:44, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
• Meh, seems to make little difference either way. I would prefer to argue over something juicier like diacritics or nested quotation marks ;) Kaldari (talk) 04:43, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support Removal per the smart people above. 128.127.107.10 (talk) 05:26, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support removal, per Special:Contributions/86.160.221.242: In my opinion, style and formatting inconsistencies across articles within English Wikipedia should be viewed as unavoidable exceptions to a general ambition that Wikipedia should be as consistent as possible throughout. Inconsistency should not be tacitly encouraged or presented as part of a "principle". -- Strongest point made in this discussion, bar none. We strive to present a consistent and consistently formatted encyclopedia to the public. A reminder to watch consistency first on the level of the individual article is perfectly fine, but the words "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" explicitly defy the purpose of having a Manual of Style in the first place. --87.79.226.106 (talk) 00:32, 17 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support removal. Overall consistency in formatting and style across the entire English Wikipedia is an important goal also. Certainly exceptions can exist, but that language implies that broader consistency is of little importance. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:41, 17 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose removal/support replacing that phrase, unless I'm the person who gets to decide what that applies-to-all-articles style is going to be. We need more live and let live where style is concerned, and less time wasted in discussions about whose style of spelling, citing, image formatting, etc. is the one true way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Threaded discussion

Some questions

• Question - How does this apply to an issue like "The" v. "the Beatles"? Could/should we have our article about the Beatles use "The" while those about John, Paul, George and Ringo use "the"? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 03:56, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

In my opinion, no. Wikipedia should have a global view on that (unless the different camps become so entrenched and intractable that people just give up trying). 86.128.4.124 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 11:36, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

And if that happens, go with MoS's default position, which is inter- as well as intra-article consistency. Those who would make weird exceptions have the burden on them to demonstrate a need for it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 23:19, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

The MoS does not have a default position for inter-article consistency. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:12, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Come on guys, don't descend into slipshod language again and again. See my admonishments to distinguish what are quite distinct issues, above. Sheesh! If we at this talkpage don't read with care, how do we expect readers of MOS to get the message? That is the core problem in this discussion.

SMcCandlish refers to "MoS's default position, which is inter- as well as intra-article consistency". Of course. That's the purpose of a manual of style!

If anyone (Enric Naval? Darkfrog?) thinks Wikipedia should not have a genuine, effective MOS, let them go to the village pump and argue their case. Or mount a self-contained RFC. Here, however, the business is to develop a manual of style that functions as one. It now qualifies as a major manual of style in its own right, and there is nothing remotely approaching it on the web – or for the web – in quality and coverage. You doubt that? Show us a better one! If anyone thinks MOS includes whims or foibles, let them argue here for particular improvements. That's the core purpose here.

So finally, for now: Do not spread confusion. Do not conflate these two issues:

1. Consistency of style generally
   (the purpose of MOS)
2. Consistent application of styles where MOS provides for a choice
   (a much smaller concern, the details of which are the present topic; it can only apply to groups of related articles, otherwise MOS would not provide for choices at all)

It is grossly irresponsible to hijack an RFC concerned with 2 to further one's agenda with 1.

♫♪

Noetica^Tea? 23:51, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Take your own advice, Noetica. No one said that Wikipedia should not have an effective MoS. The MoS does (or used to and should again) state that intra-article consistency is its purpose. It does not state that inter-article consistency is. One can imagine a default position, but no true one is given. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:53, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Obdurate obfuscation. I have no time for this, as I have said. You write: "It does not state that inter-article consistency is [its purpose]." What? Inter-article consistency is the blindingly obvious plain supposition behind every manual of style. You wonder why I go on at length, repeating what I have already plainly stated in a few words? Think afresh; actually read what I write, and you might get it. You utterly, repeatedly, and apparently wilfully fail to see the crucial distinction that I have marked out several times already. Do better.

♥

Noetica^Tea? 03:27, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

In other words, you looked at what the MoS said, and you drew your own inference about what it meant. Don't complain when other people do the same thing. I might read Hamlet and think that it's "blindingly obvious" that Hamlet's insane, but someone else might think that he's faking. I'm not "willfully failing" to listen to you. I just don't agree with you.

What we know for certain is that the MoS does explicitly state that intra-article consistency is a goal and does not explicitly state that inter-article consistency is. Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:41, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

A recklessly inept response, and unworthy. To mimic your analogy, missing the fact that MOS is about general consistency between all articles would be like reading Hamlet and missing the fact that it is a play. Hamlet is very evidently a play, even though there is no declaration like "this is a play, and is to be acted by actors in front of an audience". Its proper title: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. You have to know: in those days especially, a tragedy is a play. It has a list of dramatis personae, it is divided into acts and scenes, it is set up in standard dialogue format, and has stage directions. Now, the proper title for MOS: Wikipedia:Manual of Style. Kind of gives the game away, doesn't it? And what is a manual of style, that applies to 6,871,991 articles? It is necessarily a guide to elements of consistency, for and across all those articles. You continue to confuse the issue. Yes, MOS provides for some variation. But yes, MOS rightly stresses especially consistency within any given article. What is here under dispute, though you steadily refuse to acknowledge it, is the extent to which those few variable elements might vary across related articles. The issue could not rationally be anything else. You just don't read that; it seems to suit your agenda (and Enric Naval's, and sockpuppeting campaigner PMAnderson's) to insist instead on making MOS ineffectual. You would prefer that it have less influence, and that it not work toward general uniformity of style, across four million articles. But that is not what this RFC is about. Nor is it what the contested wording is about. Stop pretending that it is. Yet again: people will misread the wording that SlimVirgin inserted in MOS, which she now wants restored. You misread that wording, and you are a regular here. So it is even more likely that those less familiar with MOS will misread it. Where has this been a problem, you ask? I have answered: the best example I know is the life-wasting wrangling over Mexican–American War, in which you, Enric Naval, and PMAnderson pushed the same anti-MOS agenda, with the same perverse appeal to Slim's ill-advised and misleading words in MOS. Get it.

☺

Noetica^Tea? 01:08, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

What this means, Noetica, is that you and I looked at the same document and came to different conclusions about it. That does not make me unworthy in any way or designate you as fit to give anyone orders. You have an agenda yourself: You don't want people to be allowed to do things in ways that you don't like, regardless of whether they can be proven to be correct or incorrect English.

Just because I don't think that pushing inter-article consistency or whims like WP:LQ is a good idea doesn't mean I don't want the MoS to be followed. Removing stupid and arbitrary rules from the MoS makes people less likely to disregard the sensible ones.

This conversation is in response to SmC's assertion that inter-article consistency is the MoS's default setting. I responded "The MoS does not have a default setting for inter-article consistency." The RfC is about whether the MoS should have a statement stating that its purpose is interra-article consistency, so that comment is relevant.

So, because I disagree with you, I must have misread the wording? Actually, my understanding is that you think that the fact that the MoS exists is proof that it must exist for the purpose of inter-article consistency, and that is what I don't accept.

Your comments seem to have a recurring theme of "The fact that you disagree with me is proof that you don't understand the issue." That's not a very logical argument. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:59, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Palpable misrepresentations, Darkfrog.

• I did not say you were unworthy. I said: "A recklessly inept response, and unworthy." It was unworthy of you, as a committed contributor at this talkpage.
• You have no ground for the claim that I "don't want people to be allowed to do things in ways that [I] don't like". That is an irresponsible accusation. I am not forcing anyone to do anything; nor is MOS. MOS includes many provisions that I think are absurd; but I choose to respect MOS, and I hope other editors will do the same (as WP:POLICY says they should).
• What you prejudicially characterise as "pushing inter-article consistency" is the very purpose of MOS. Again and again you fail to make the elementary distinction that I have again and again invited you to grasp.
• WP:LQ is not "a whim". If it were, it could easily be exposed as one; and it could be removed. Your failure to achieve that removal does not prove that it is a whim. Quite the contrary.
• You write: "The RfC is about whether the MoS should have a statement stating that its purpose is inter-article consistency, ...". Inaccurate to the point of being straight-out false.
• You write: "Removing stupid and arbitrary rules from the MoS makes people less likely to disregard the sensible ones." So what? I want to remove those also! We all want to. Keep working on it, by all means. But don't weaken the standing of MOS in the meantime.
• Your "understanding" shows that you do indeed miss the points that I have made. Because of your missing them, I repeat them; and still you miss them. If you have an alternative account of what a manual of style is, please share it. I have spelt out my account (which is the almost universal account, note). Let's see yours.
• You wrongly apprehend the recurring theme of my posts. It is not your disagreeing with me that I find unacceptable; it is that you do not address the evidence and the arguments that I present.
• It is a cheap and transparent tactic to ignore the arguments as actually given, present a straw man in their place, and then finish with the judgement "That's not a very logical argument."

Noetica^Tea? 05:47, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

That "inter" was a typo for "intra." I meant to say "This is about whether the MoS should state that intra-article consistency is its purpose."

So if I said "These posts are full of drama queen histrionics," you wouldn't think that I was calling you a drama queen? You wouldn't be insulted or consider it a personal attack? Because I think you would.

The difference seems to be that you think that just because the MoS says something doesn't mean people have to do it, so it doesn't matter if it contains unnecessary rules (and those rules might as well match your own preferences). However, people can be censured and punished for disobeying the MoS, so we must be more careful.

WP:LQ is a whim in that people like it but it offers Wikipedia no real benefit. It is not my failure to have it removed that proves that it's a whim. It's the fact that it contradicts established sources and that no one has been able to point to even one incident of American English punctuation causing any problems that proves this. It takes more than logic and the sources to get a popular problem out of the MoS. It would be great if it didn't work that way, but it does.

There is a difference between most manuals of style and the Wikipedia manual of style. That difference is that the WP:MoS is meant for Wikipedia, which is 1. crowdsourced and 2. dependent on the donated service of editors from around the world. The difference in skill, training and range of expertise is immense. Because they are not being compensated, we shouldn't expect them to take orders the same way we could expect paid employees to and we shouldn't expect every article to be exactly the same the way we could expect articles in Britannica to be. If we want to keep our contributors, we need to make compromises, and accepting that consistency has its limits is one of them.

My idea of a strong MoS is one that is obeyed. Not requiring inter-article consistency or a serial comma or any given point does not make people less likely to do what the MoS does tell them to do. Think of two teachers in a grammar school: One of them has a million rules about how the kids' legs should be positioned when they sit and exactly how far apart their coats should be on the rack. The other teacher has fewer rules but they're more about safety and schoolwork. Which one are the students less likely to disregard as a control freak or jerk? Which one is likely to have students who think that rules in general are made to be broken?

Noetica, you haven't presented any evidence in this thread ("Questions"). You've only repeated your opinions. You sound like you think I should take your word as proof. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:53, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Concur with anon. Where something is clearly incorrect English and can be shown through sources to be incorrect English, like capitalizing "the" mid-sentence, then the MoS should not allow people to use it. This is a separate issue, dealing with optional matters, like whether or not to use the serial comma. As for "The Beatles," its my understanding that their fans kept shouting until the opposition was too tired to object any more. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:05, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Break 1

• An RFC should not be advertised misleadingly to the community. I have therefore added a factual correction that will appear on the relevant RFC listings. If Slim Virgin would like to amend her text to incorporate that correction, fine. Otherwise, please let it stand. ♥ Noetica^Tea? 11:55, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

If you want to write underneath my posts to correct or add an interpretation, that's fine of course, but please don't post inside them (this is the second time it has happened). In any event, none of these details – when it was restored, who partially restored it – matter. The question is simply whether we (now) want these words or not. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 17:15, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Slim, I am the last person to want irregular procedure at this talkpage. But you posted misleadingly so that the RFC is not advertised honestly to the community; and your rewording is still misleading. An RFC is, as I clearly reminded people here recently, required to be presented neutrally (see WP:RFC). Please now reword accurately. I'm sure you will understand: if you do not fix the advertised portion of your text, my proper but reluctant next move might be to seek a remedy from ArbCom. Noetica^Tea? 23:09, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

I assume you are asking SlimVirgin to alter the text at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia policies and guidelines, presumably to include the text you added above in the "Correction from Noetica" section? (Your request is unclear, and bringing up arbcom is .... [insert eyeroll insinuating-word here].)

I suggest a simple addition, there and above (SlimVirgin only, please): just add the list of relevant diffs, and let people come to their own conclusions based on the evidence.

[6], [7], [8], [9]

It's not complicated, don't make it more so. -- Quiddity (talk) 02:52, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the diffs, Quiddity. I've added them. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:27, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Indeed: it may not be complicated at all, Quiddity. Ask SlimVirgin who inserted the contested words in the first place, and with what consensus, and with what signalling in an edit summary. That might be relevant here, don't we all think?

When the extra words were removed, a year ago, there was reference to an ongoing discussion on the talkpage, where everything was out in the open. The edit summary (see Quiddity's links just above here): "Rationalise unruly bunch of mini-sections ('principles'). Reduce negative angle. Rm repetition and redundancy. See talk page." Now, let SlimVirgin show how the original insertion of the text she favours was managed. And by whom. I'm all for transparency. ☺!

As for referrals to ArbCom, of course I mean through WP:AE (ArbCom enforcement). My purpose is not to impugn SlimVirgin's motives or good faith; but recent cases have left this page under ArbCom discretionary sanctions, and as a regular here I am very concerned to avoid deficiencies in process that have wasted months of editors' time, and reserves of goodwill. We have to be especially careful. False advertising at an RFC notification, editing unilaterally without establishing consensus, chaotic discussion – none of that helps. Let's work collegially to maintain an excellent manual of style for Wikipedia.

Noetica^Tea? 08:42, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Mentioning AE has a chilling effect, and comes across (in this low-stress situation) as tactical. I'm not going to belabor the point, because it's plausibly deniable, and hence not worth debating. But everyone reading is aware, and most are rolling eyes.

Don't just insinuate, show the fracking evidence. Why are you asking others to do the legwork? ("Ask SlimVirgin who ...") Here's some relevant diffs, that led from its initial to final form: [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19] (And yes, SlimVirgin added it). It's not hard; Open the history, search for "consistency". With the time spent on crafting your polite wikilawyeresque statement, you could have been researching that, or doing something else useful. Grumblegrumble. [Addendum: Having trawled years of the history, I've seen how much work you do, and I do appreciate that. I'm just trying to point out that some of your sentences here are coming across quite badly.] -- Quiddity (talk) 21:31, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Posted with difficulty, away from my usual place, from an iPad, immersed in real-world concerns involving the care of an 89-year-old woman 18,000 km from where I am: References to WP:AE may be "chilling", but the mechanism is there for a reason, and MOS has a role and a history that mean we must exercise special care. It is not my fault if people edit it disrupively, or discuss without observing the protocols, or without revealing their involvements. If my objections when people do that are seen as unpleasant, consider dispassionately what chaos we must guard against repeating.

Look above on the page, Quiddity, and see how much effort I have already put into this discussion. Thank you for coming in now and doing some more of the necessary work, and for revealing what SlimVirgin really ought to hve made plain from the start. I genuinely have no time to do any more on this for a while. My opinions, and my rather closely articulated reasons for them, are all laid out clearly above this RFC.

Best wishes to all!

Noetica^Tea? 22:19, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't want to take part in a meta discussion, but I'd like to add that I didn't know before starting this discussion who had first added that sentence and who had first removed it, because there was a lot of history to look through and it didn't really matter. All I knew was that it had been there for a while, and had been removed relatively recently, so that's what I wrote. I don't like the implication that I knew I was the original author and for some reason wanted to hide that (why would I?). I also wonder what the point is of not saying directly: "Slim, did you realize you first added that sentence a few years ago?".

Anyway, enough said. I hope we can now focus on the substance. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:37, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

I am not sure if Noetica is still amazed, (21:00, 25 August 2012). But there is a possibility of arguing that while a consistent style may not be desirable across all articles, a consistent style in groups of articles may be desirable. This argument has been advanced in the past for the articles Orange (colour) and Grey because they are both articles about colour. It has also been advanced for the articles in featured topics.

My problem with arguing for consistence in "groups" of articles is what is obvious a group to one person is not necessarily obviously a group to another (and what to do with articles that are obviously in two groups with differing styles). I suspect that while the argument about obvious groups is superficially attractive, due to the problems lack of clarity in defining a group, it will eventual lead inexorably towards harmonisation of style over large parts of Wikipedia. -- PBS (talk) 08:52, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

And then you have overlapping. There are many articles that belong to more that one group. What will happen when those groups have conflicting styles? --Enric Naval (talk) 16:12, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Break 2

[Note: Some of the threaded responses in this section were moved out of the Replies section above, and the initial posts copied to preserve context. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:26, 17 September 2012 (UTC)]

*Oppose removal. per SlimVirgin and Enric. (Maybe we can get "Description not prescription" added back to wherever it was, too, eventually...) Time is not especially relevant, the detail/context that the sentence contains, is. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:40, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Not taking sides in the RfC (haven't thought it through yet); but I want to point out now that all manuals of style are both prescriptive and descriptive. Tony (talk) 06:21, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't remember exactly where it was, but I think it was originally in WP:NOT or WP:PG or similar (not a MOS page). Pointers appreciated though. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:27, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

[Noetica's vote, quoted from above:] Support the removal of text that was done twelve months ago. The stress on intra-article consistency is fine, of course. So is motherhood. But why labour to include what many editors have unfortunately misread as a licence for chaos? Groups of articles on similar themes benefit enormously from similar styling (where MOS allows for a choice). Why bend over backwards against such efforts? They are clearly in readers' interests. MOS was, till a few days ago, silent on such laudable efforts. What benefit is there in it making a statement that is bound to be misused by those who favour complete independence of styling, at each of 4,000,000 articles? No one is suggesting that a contrary statement be made; just that it is not the business of MOS inadvertently to counter worthwhile efforts to improve the readability of closely associated articles.

Noetica^Tea? 08:51, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
[NOTE: As I explain below in "Threaded discussion", I am tied up with matters in real life. I have said all I need to say for this RFC, in the discussion earlier on this page: #Internal consistency v consistency across articles. The question facing us is important, and I advise people not to conflate consistency of style for Wikipedia in general (the very essence of MOS) and consistency of style where choices are allowed in MOS (and there are very few such choices, at least in WP:MOS itself). Misreadings we observe in this RFC illustrate the very problem that such carefleesly added wording introduces: people do not read accurately, nor discriminate as we expect they will. ♥ Noetica^Tea? 03:52, 7 September 2012 (UTC)]

By "what many editors have misread as a license for chaos," what do you mean? What happened, specifically, and when? Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:55, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

*Oppose removal by which I really mean "support re-insertion." Wikipedia is not like other encyclopedias. It requires on the unpaid service of editors from many disparate backgrounds and it has no chain of command. There's no one who can legitimately say, "Do it this way because I'm the boss and I've earned my authority." Inter- but not intra-article consistency strikes a balance between neatness and the diversity of opinion among our editors. If it is "bound to be misused," then show at least one case in which that has happened. Has an editor ever claimed "We are not allowed to make these articles match each other; the MoS says so"? Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:31, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

I've already addressed this fallacious "we're volunteers so we should be able to do whatever we want for personal reasons, and consistency can go screw itself" meme at WP:SSF. Lack of payment has nothing to do with anything; there's no logical connection. It's like saying "I have blonde hair, so I should be allowed to eat small children", or "my dog is old, so I shouldn't have to pay the water bill". — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 22:36, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm not saying that volunteers get to do whatever they want, and you know that perfectly well, but anyone who's worked in a volunteer organization can tell you that it's not the same type of dynamic as a workplace. On Wikipedia, no one volunteer outranks another. "Do X because I'm your boss" holds no weight here. "Do X because the majority of sources say that X is right and Y is wrong" does. People don't pull rank; sources do. When the sources cannot show that one way is better than another, no one person or small group of people should get to order the others around. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:18, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

[SMcCandlish's vote, quoted from above:] *Support re-removal per Noetica, and per the fact that the removal has been stable for a long time, and the fact that we do not need to repeat everything ever said in every guideline and policy on the system. It's already implicit in MoS's mandate as a guideline that it operates in juxtaposition and compromise with other forms of guidance here. Reiterating that a guideline can have exceptions, or that any particular guideline is not an ironclad policy, is not what we do here. Also, it really has been misinterpreted as a license for chaos. It was removed for a reason.

Furthermore, there's an underlying assumption (one that is often advanced by the sort of editorial misprioritization addressed by WP:SSF, and WP:NOTHERE before it) that inter-article consistency is not desirable, and is immediately trumped by narrow, even personal preferences. Yet, obviously it is desirable to the extent that it can happen without raising intractable problems (like those addressed by WP:ENGVAR). If it were not desirable MOS would be very short, as the bulk of it and its subpages is style advice for dealing with English-language prose across all articles here. Material is not being broken out of MoS into small, topic-specific WikiProject "guidelines"; rather, the exact opposite is happening: Good advice from projects is making its way steadily into MoS so that it is applied consistently in articles on other topics.
— SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 08:24, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

• You said "It was removed for a reason.", but what? The only clues I can find are the original edit summary, and the archived thread Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 124#Extraneous clutter at the top - neither of which discuss the sentence/section in question at all. Is there anything else to look at, that makes you (and Noetica) consider it a license for chaos? (I'm assuming this is related to some sub-battle about date or titles or dashes or engvar or etc, but I'm not familiar with what/when/where/who :/ If I/we have more information, we can give better input. It is an RFC, after all; lots of non-regulars who need context...). Here's the talkpage history from 4/5 Aug 2011, in case that helps. -- Quiddity (talk) 20:55, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

I second Quiddity's request. You are the second person to say that this rule has been "misinterpreted as a license for chaos." What happened, specifically, and when? Was it only once or many times? We've seen some evidence that this text prevents problems, but if we can prove that this text causes more problems than it prevents, then it should stay out. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:43, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Please do not fixate on the idea that only a specific, major event is important; there was no Great Wiki Disaster of 2011. What there has been in response to this "rule" and various other kowtowing to intractable special interests who refuse to write consistent, encyclopedic prose for a general audience, is such editors taking license to do the exact opposite, and write articles on "their" topic as if intended for and published by professionals in their field instead of, well, everyone else in the entire world, which is what Wikipedia is actually here for, not regurgitating precious nitpicks from academia. It leads to wikiprojects acting as if they are sovereign states that own entire ranges of topics, and has led to enormous amounts of entrenched editwarring over the last 8+ years, threats of editorial boycotts, wikidiva resignations by editors, and other childish nonsense of massive proportions, all because some people are not here to write an encyclopedia but rather to spread their sub-sub-sub-field's particular stylistic peccadilloes and force everyone else to use them. Enough of that idiocy. It's been nothing but destructive. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 22:36, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Actually, problems attributable to this phrase would be more relevant to the MoS if they happened more than once. If it was a lot of little incidents rather than one big incident, then point to a good example or two. However, it's not immediately obvious what "not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" has to do with the issue of writing for a general vs. a specialized audience.

Encyclopedic tone seems to be a separate issue from intra- vs. inter-article consistency, and it is covered elsewhere in the MoS. All of Wikipedia should be written for a general audience. Can you show or tell us how the phrase "but not necessarily across Wikipedia as a whole" has caused these problems? Can you point to one or more talk page discussions in which someone cited that phrase as a reason to write articles in a Wikiproject in an inappropriate manner? Did it happen in WP:BIRDS? Those guys are pretty big on writing articles for a specialized audience. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:26, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

*Retain/oppose removal' - The key words being "not necessarily". On those formatting issues about which broad community-wide discussion arrives at a consensus, consistency can and should be enforced, but about those the community maintains a more laissez-faire attitude, editors should have the leeway to improve articles as they see fit, given the specific needs of the specific article, without having to answer to those who try to enforce a non-existing consensus. The very most important thing, which it is best that we put our energies to, is to give our readers good, accurate information, well presented, rather than that every article have every tiny formatting aspect be exactly the same. Such "fooliosh consistency" is, in Emerson's words "the hobgoblin of little minds", in Shaw's words "the enemy of enterprise", and in Wilde's words "the last refuge of the unimaginative." Surely our editors are just the opposite: enterprising, imaginative and open to the world. Beyond My Ken (talk) 01:37, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Misquotation, and skewed quotation out of context that misconstrues the intent of the original, is the hobgoblin of people whose arguments are too weak to stand on their own. Emerson actually said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers...", which is very, very different, and his message was about radical philosophy and the advancement of novel ideas, which Wikipedia absolutely does not do. Just one example. By way of contrast, see the old aphorism "Consistency, thou art a jewel." Its origin is lost, but uses the virtue-as-jewel metaphor of the Elizabethan era, so it's at least as old as Shakespeare (cursorily searching, I've found it in print in the 1800s, but Bartlett suggests it's much older).

What you're missing is that Emerson, Shaw and Wilde were all writing about the negative effects of conformity on new, creative output such as literature, fashion and other forms of artistic expression, as well as the propounding of new theories. That is not what Wikipedia is. We are not permitted to engage in original research or even novel synthesis. And WP is not creative writing. It is necessarily dry, strictly informative prose that serves a purpose. It is formal, technical communication, not art. It serves this function best when it does not confuse the readership or make them mentally work hard to figure out what we are trying to convey. Emerson is worth quoting in more detail here: "To be great is to be misunderstood." Emerson argues for being confusing and self-contradictory! That's fine if you are a philosopher refining your outlook over time. It's a disaster in an encyclopedia. Inconsistency between articles here, for no reason other than to suit the in-house preferences of (mostly) academics, government people and fandom obsessives (the three most common sources of WP:SSF problems around here), is directly inimical to Wikipedia's actual goals, which are in service to readers, not editors. Consistency between articles, where it does not create novel problems like conflict between English dialects, is a sensible and necessary consistency in our context, not a foolish one. More recently, Tim Robbins (again writing of creative not technical/formal educational output) said "only logicians and cretins are consistent", and that's important: Consistency in art is certainly cretinous and yawn-inducing. But encyclopedia writing is by definition the work of logicians.

In closing, see the other quotations at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Consistency, and notice that all of them that are in opposition to consistency are about either a) art and other creative output, or b) are about individuals changing their mind (i.e., a completely different meaning of the world "consistency" that isn't relevant to this discussion at all, and Cicero even suggests it's a misuse of the concept). I dare you to find a single exception. Even Larry Wall's quip that "the essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent" is directly applicable here, as it suggests that exceptions to consistency in human relation to reality (which is what WP is a tool for) should be rare; an insistent lack of consistency in such a context – what he calls "consistent inconsistency" – is, he suggests, a working definition of insane.
— SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 23:19, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

*Support removal. The extra words seem to be encouraging inconsistency far too strongly. , indeed one responder says "consistency across articles has always been discouraged" which seems a good example of a rule which should always be ignored: should I look for ways of making every article I edit inconsistent with every other article? The wording chosen should not give anybody an excuse to be uncooperative, whether they wish to apply something too widely or ignore interrelationships between articles. Although readers must accept that Wikipedia's articles follow no single strict house style, they are not well served if, for example, individual articles covering the six books of a series have corresponding content distributed differently across sections, perhaps in a different order or with different names. The work of adding related information to several such articles could be doubled or trebled depending on how they were inconsistent and such barriers to editing cannot contribute to content improvement. Not even in a single article do we revert constructive additions merely because a wrong sort of dash has been used, so I do not see consistency within an appropriate scope, maintained tactfully, as stifling new content. Neither would any expectation of consistency remove the necessity for having consensus to maintain it: I would expect the ease of finding consensus to correspond to the closeness of the relationship in a self-limiting way. --Mirokado (talk) 14:00, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

• Hum, my bad. A better wording: "enforcing consistency across articles has always been discouraged". As in "changing articles from one MOS-approved to another MOS-approved style, just because you would like all articles in an arbitrary group to have the same style." People won't complain if you are actually working in a group of articles and you need to do changes in order to work better, and you only change articles that you are working in, or at most the odd article that is closely related. Now, if one was to land in a group of articles for the first time, then change the style to one's personal preference, then edit war when people complain that specific articles have a different style for a reason, etc, ..... --Enric Naval (talk) 18:49, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

  Thanks, Enric. Striking some of my response. I do agree with what you say just above, but not every editor is as sensible as we are and I'm still concerned that the proposed wording will encourage uncooperative behaviour, so I will stick with supporting removal. --Mirokado (talk) 21:15, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

  Ideally nothing would depend on such a fine balance of words, but experience of Wikipedia editing suggests to me that either wording will be used by those who cherry-pick the MOS to support a prior position. "Sensible" editors already understand that intra-article consistency is a priority, and that inter-article consistency is highly desirable, and that both kinds of consistency are subject to consensus, not ownership. Unfortunately many editors are not "sensible". I guess that preference here may depend on which kind of uncooperative behaviour you've mostly encountered. I'm concerned that removing the wording will encourage uncooperative behaviour, namely editors trying to change styles which have consensus in one area of Wikipedia to those which have consensus in another, because this is the kind of edit-warring I've mostly encountered. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:31, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Look at that post. When I keep asking about evidence, this is what I mean. What kinds of edit wars have you seen, what fights on talk pages, what poorly worded articles, what bad reader experiences have you seen and how do you think changing/keeping this wording would fix it? Peter, can you drop us a link to any of these edit wars? Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:47, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Well since the proposed addition has been absent for a year or so I can't point to any recent problems it has caused. I can however point to responsible and constructive activities that this wording appears to target and wonder why anyone would expend so much effort to try to prevent them:

• the List of horror films extends over 70 other pages. My attention was drawn to these lists by an obviously incorrect entry while I was checking links from a stub I had created (Amy B. Harris) for general quality issues (which does not mean that I expected all those links to be consistent). These lists were in an appalling state with lots of redlinks and lots of incorrect entries. I noticed that because I naturally checked the other lists as well as the original one, something which would be pointless if consistency between related articles is to be discouraged. Although the lists generally had the same number of columns and the same column headings, in detail there were random differences between them as well as formatting inconsistencies within some articles. The only practicable way to fix these problems was to apply a uniform structure to all the articles and then check progressively for problems and correct them. The more subtle the problems, the more the growing consistency helped to reveal them. The end result is that (with content improvements mainly due to contributions from other editors) the lists are much more correct and better sourced. Citations needed on more than one list can be copied and pasted without alteration as can the occasional entry allocated to the wrong year. The fatuous entries from drive-by editors have almost disappeared. All the changes were discussed on talk pages, often with an announcement and progress report accompanying each set of changes.
  If the MOS allows an editor to insist that some of these lists can have a different table structure, or be a bulleted list instead of tables, or have a different citation format, or whatever, because "consistency between articles is not necessarily required", then I presume I would either have to let some articles rot, ignore the problems completely or start an RFC. I certainly would not do the work twice over to accommodate what I would regard as obstruction.
• cooperation on the works of Anne McCaffrey is relatively easy because, generally, the articles on her books have a common format. We can refine changes to one article including discussions on the talk page knowing that the corresponding updates can be made with reasonable effort and reliably to the other articles. There have been disagreements which have been resolved on talk pages. New ideas are not stifled, very much the reverse, we are currently discussing a new set of improvements. As far as I know, nobody has been made to feel unable to make changes to the pages. I don't think anybody is saying "therefore every article about a book by a particular author must have the same format", simply that the MOS should not set out to prevent such cooperation.
• it seems in practice unlikely that editors will often challenge these sorts of scenario, but that indicates that this proposed addition is in fact pointless. If anybody were to make use of it, the result would be more discussion not less, resulting in RFCs if necessary.
• in cases like date linking which has been mentioned, nobody is going to prevent such an activity by saying "articles do not have to be consistent", that is far to vague to counter someone's conviction that the world can only be saved by linking (or delinking) every date. The lines of defence are already quite adequate, with a requirement for consensus in advance for extensive systematic changes, blocks for editors who do not accept that (we can all think of cases where that has happened) and specific criteria determining when a particular disposition is appropriate. Nobody prepared to be blocked rather than achieve consensus is going to take the slightest notice of this text even if it is adopted. --Mirokado (talk) 23:04, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

To summarize, Mirokado seems to be saying the following 1. Inter-article consistency can make some improvements easier to make. 2. Mirokado describes one set of articles that happens to be written consistently and is working out well. To these two points, I respond that just because inter-article consistency is not required doesn't mean it's not permitted. Consistency alone isn't reason enough to change format, but my opinion is that effecting repairs is. 3. Mirokado thinks that the wording is extra/unnecessary. 4. Mirokado provides an argument against the date delinking example, which was previously offered as evidence by Enric N. Mirokado has not listed any edit wars or other nonhypothetical events attributable to the inclusion of the phrase "not necessarily across Wikipedia as a whole" in the MoS. Let me know if I've misinterpreted any of that. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:34, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

That is a pretty fair summary. It seems clear from your response that your concerns are not intended to impact the sorts of activity I have mentioned. As far as "consistency alone" is concerned, there will pretty well always be other benefits. I have already given examples from the editor's perspective. Readers benefit if they can easily understand where to find information in article Y if they have just been looking at the corresponding information in article X. Readers' expectations will be stronger the more closely they perceive the articles to be related.

Responding to "just because inter-article consistency is not required doesn't mean it's not permitted": if the MOS says anything at all about this it should acknowledge, as well, that although not required across the whole project substantial consistency is essential among many sets of articles in order to provide a satisfactory user experience and highly desirable, again among relevant articles, to support effective collaboration between editors. If it does not then it is encouraging a substandard user experience and article ownership in various forms, both of which are totally unacceptable. --Mirokado (talk) 20:49, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi Mirokado, no one is saying consistency across articles, or groups of articles, must be opposed. The point is simply that just because an editor punctuates in a certain way in Holocaust in Poland doesn't mean editors must punctuate the same way in Holocaust in Romania. The sentence at issue is: "An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article, though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole." The word "necessarily" is important here. It signals that consistency across articles may sometimes, or regularly, be appropriate, but not invariably, and that some style issues are left to the editors on the page to decide. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:27, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

I believe that the MoS should not state that any sort of cross-article consistency is desirable because that statement will be taken as law. 1. We should give our editors freedom where correct English allows. 2. Some articles may logically belong to more than one group. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:13, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Some things are the same across pages (e.g. the general appearance), and there have been style practices that were so odd that I was glad to see cross-article consistency applied (e.g. overlinking). But generally I agree that internal consistency is the aim, and agree too about the groups. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:49, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Break 3

This isn't a race or about numbers alone, so I'm closing the running tally. SlimVirgin (talk) 18:44, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Tally against removal of "not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" vs. for As of now, responses are 2:1 in opposition of removal (AKA support of reinsertion). Would anyone like to offer or summarize evidence or change his or her position? Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:18, 11 September 2012 (UTC) I make it 12:7, Darkfrog. [Now updated: see new subsection below.–Noetica] Is this Request for Comments now being closed by a nonadmin after only 10 days? Neotarf (talk) 07:00, 11 September 2012 (UTC) [After refactoring to make the new tally subsection, below:] And as we all know, an RFC should not be decided on the numbers, but on the arguments advanced. I submit that refusals to answer questions, and misrepresentations of issues, ought to be taken into account also. I have notified three editors whom I contacted earlier (because they had earlier commented on the issue, with varying opinions), to let them know that you are counting votes here. The matter is important, and there is no rush for it to be concluded. I suggest that we do indeed start a subsection for summarising the issues. Let it be one in which each side collaborates to produce a summary of its own case in 500 words – so there would be just two clear statements to read, side by side. Care to start? NoeticaTea? 05:47, 11 September 2012 (UTC) (I'm one of those Noetica contacted, thanks for that as I had been following the discussion and intending to respond but also "rather busy" the last few days. --Mirokado (talk) 14:00, 11 September 2012 (UTC)) This poll is not meant to close the discussion, only to facilitate bringing it to resolution. As for the theory, I'd love it if RfCs could be decided based on issues rather than on numbers, but how often does that happen around here? Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:01, 11 September 2012 (UTC) Tally of votes continually updated Oppose removal SlimVirgin Enric Naval Quiddity Amatulić Binksternet Shenme Darkfrog24 jc37 Beyond My Ken Jimp Peter coxhead CBM [derived from a reading of the contribution] Resolute Hiding Support removal Noetica SMcCandlish Ohconfucius Boson Dicklyon Tony 86.160.221.242 [derived from a reading of the contribution] Neotarf Mirokado Br'er Rabbit [derived from a reading of the contribution] [Updated by NoeticaTea? 12:17, 14 September 2012 (UTC)]

Counting votes

• I have reinstated the tally (see subsection below). No one should think that numbers alone count; but the voting has become diffused or replicated by quotation in various subsections. Quite confusing for newcomers, I might add! These lists serve an index of contributions so people can find them and evaluate their arguments. Noetica^Tea? 22:11, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

• And I have closed it again. If you want to open your own RfC later you're welcome to do that, but keeping a running tally of numbers is pointless at best, so please allow this RfC to run its course without it. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:33, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

• I have no view one way or the other on the above discussion about including or not including the sentence about Wikipedia as a whole other than to comment that you might as well reverse the two words not and necessarily if it is included - just a comment... Apteva (talk) 09:27, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Infoboxes

Manual of Style/Infoboxes says that infoboxes are optional ("neither required nor prohibited"). I would like to extend this on that subpage and the main MoS page to read: "The addition of an infobox is an optional style issue that is left to the editors on the page. Where no consensus can be reached, defer to the style used by the first major contributor, per WP:STYLEVAR." SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:39, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Survey (Infoboxes)

[No threaded replies in this section, please.]

• Support. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:39, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose - I don;t agree with the part about defer to the style.. first contibutor - it just doesn't match policies - I think on the other hand that some deference to consistency should exist - eg most species articles have a species box., ditto habited places - in potential cases of conflict I would suggest defaulting 'to the norm'..Oranjblud (talk) 22:47, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose. Deference to first major contributor is baldfaced ownership. Infoboxes are a de facto standard; there are millions of them, and good faith editors add hundreds per day. It is disruptive for a dis-info band to staunchly oppose these good and appropriate improvements. It retards the project and is toxic to the community. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 23:26, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support ...Modernist (talk) 23:56, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Why is this section once again placed above the one below? And why has the section bellow been headed "discussion" as though the comments there are not replies to the proposal in hand? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:59, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Because some people think RfCs are essentially a form of voting? — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 15:47, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

• Strong Support. If the project has a MOS subset, such as WP:MOSLAW or WP:MILMOS then it should take precedence over projects that do not have an MOS subset. Other than that, I'm fine with the first major contributor approach for any conflicts. I am opposed to them becoming optional in all cases. GregJackP Boomer! 01:28, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support primarily to halt the battleground mentality that is otherwise brought to the table by the aggressively-pro-infobox-everywhere editors. I'm pro-infobox-everywhere (because metadata is useful, and I personally learn well via bulletpoints and lists and reductionist synopsese, and can extrapolate oversimplifications/archetypes with ease), but not via the tactics currently used (grind down opposition, 'outvote' the person who wrote the article, etc etc), and not without acknowledging the very legitimate problems that infoboxes often run into. It's the rude/siege mentality that is killing us, and causing stress and retirements. I'll add more, in the discussion below, later. —Quiddity (talk) 03:40, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support, but Oppose a likely interpretation. If people follow what this actually says, and follow consensus when there is one, then any damage this causes is likely to be minimal, and it could possibly help. But I'm pretty sure that some people will read this as an analogy to ENGVAR, and say that the first contributor trumps everyone else ... and that would be a huge mistake, as long as this is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In military history articles for instance, if certain types of articles tend to have an infobox, our readers notice things that like, and will add a similar infobox to similar articles. If we invent some rule that an infobox is "not allowed" because someone back in 2006 didn't add one, that's only going to generate a long series of frustrated editors who feel slapped down because we reverted what seemed like an obvious omission to them. My main concern here is creating an editing enviroment that's hostile to people who don't "know the rules". - Dank (push to talk) 12:55, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
  • Switching to Oppose: Sorry, I just noticed the last two words ... it's okay to tilt the playing field slightly towards the first major contributor, but ... seeing this issue through the eyes of the wikiprojects I'm familiar with, my point won't work for everyone ... we see infoboxes as primarily a matter of content selection rather than style, and treating it as just another optional style issue is part of the problem. - Dank (push to talk) 15:52, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose as the defer portion seems like it could be used to keep infoboxes off pages just because the first major contributor didn't put one on. Also, I like the boxen. --Nouniquenames (talk) 16:00, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose who is the first "major" contributor? Support that User:A writes a 1000 byte stub, User:B then enlarges that to 10,000 bytes and User:C adds another 20,000 bytes, who is the "first major contributor"? Suppose now that User:B's work was riddled with errors and did not include any citations, then User:C corrected the work and added many citations - who would be the major contributor? Unlike ENGVAR, where an article can start off life without using specifically UK or US English, all articles start off without an infobox, so trying to draw inferences from ENGVAR is not appropriate. Martinvl (talk) 16:10, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
  • Hi Martin, I've replied below. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:24, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose - Martinvl's reasoning above is compelling. Opposing change to an article based on an individual's preference is a recipe for fossilising our content and preventing improvement. The issue of whether an infobox improves an article is not so clear-cut that a rule will work 100% of the time, but I can see sufficient benefit in general that the presence of an infobox may be assumed to be the default. --RexxS (talk) 19:34, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
• I think there is a general consensus on Wikipedia that infoboxes are useful - this can be seen in the large proportion of articles that include them. I feel infoboxes are part of our "house style" that makes Wikipedia articles distinctive. The question here is different than CITEVAR, where the citation information is included regardless of the form of the citations. With infoboxes, there should be a presumption in favor of them (just as there is a presumption in favor of references). The exact kind of infobox is a separate issue - if there is no consensus on that for a specific article, I agree that the first infobox to be added should be used. But in general we should expect that adding infoboxes is an improvement to the article. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:24, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose When I create an article I hardly ever add one of these boxes, I leave that to people who enjoy creating them (so I do not see the argument that because I have created an article without them some other editor can come along later and interpret my lack of adding a box as my opposition to them). The argument about CITEVAR is not a good one because that is strongly opposed by some editors such as myself in the way that some editors interpret what style means. Instead the argument if used should refer to the main MOS footnote 1 where there is general greement. In this case arguing that one should defer to the first non stub contributor is like arguing that if the first major contributor did not use section heading, then section heading can be removed at will and not added without consensus. First major contributor is useful for National Verities of English, but not much else, as it impedes the development of the project as people come up with better ways to present and order information. -- PBS (talk) 15:24, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose 2nd sentence; support and suggest reinforcing the 1st, to make it clear it is telling wikiprojects they don't own articles they feel are within their scope and cannot force them to have or not have infoboxes or any particular form of infobox. I cannot at all support the notion that "style of first major editor" is a good idea here, though. We only ever go that route when there is no other choice (e.g. American vs. British English in a topic with no strong national ties - the choice is 100% arbitrary and no functional/utility argument or other rational preference can be offered, only an entirely personal, subjective "I like it" feeling). This is not one of those cases; there are rational arguments for and against infoboxes, even particular infoboxes, that can be made and discussed and consensus thereby arrived at normally, on a per-article basis, just like 99.9% of everything else about that article. We do not need Yet Another Rule (cf. WP:CREEP) that impedes the ability of editors to arrive at consensus by reason instead of doing something arbitrarily by fiat like "I was here first, so you can go get bent." WP generally never works that way except in the handful of cases where it is an unavoidable lesser evil. Infoboxes aren't one, they're just something that a few people obsess about and won't stop arguing about. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 15:44, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
• Strong oppose What if the editor is a newbie and doesn't know how to make an infobox? So because he or she didn't include on when starting g an article that that article can never have one? Dumb. And a terribly foolish enshrinement of ownership issues. Goes against the idea of improvement by current consensus..oknazevad (talk) 18:51, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

  Comment: That's an invalid argument (it's a straw man); no one has proposed that newbies, or any particular editor, be forced to add an infobox themselves. Rather this is about whether any editor or group of editors can force an article to have or not have an infobox at all. Obviously, per WP:CONSENSUS and everything else about how WP works, the answer to that is "no". You may be right (or not) to oppose this proposal, but what you wrote addresses a different, imaginary one. :-)

• Oppose (sorry) I appreciate the sentiment in trying to resolve a dispute, but enshrining what is essentially first mover advantage in lieu of discussion is not a good idea. Casliber (talk · contribs) 20:16, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
• Strong oppose. Infoboxes are useful. It's not just a style issue as with “12 September” vs “September 12” where the difference between the two is completely immaterial 99% of the time. Just because I didn't bother to add an infobox straight away when I created an article doesn't mean there should never be one. — A. di M.  19:03, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose The problem with using first-major-contributor to resolve a deadlock here is that it is impossible to decide from the edit history who if anyone has decided not to add an infobox, as opposed to lots of editors who have not added one. (I for example mostly don't bother to add infoboxen but have not so far objected if someone else does so). I guess if someone adds a comment saying "<!-- please do not add an infobox to this article -->" that could determine the current-consensus state for subsequent revisions (my addition of a similar comment to an article where an editor had refused to accept {{authority control}} was welcomed). A talk section added at the time explaining why it is not considered appropriate for a particular article would also be helpful. --Mirokado (talk) 12:13, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

  Comment: Huh? Adding a "please do not an an infobox" HTML comment would tell no one anything about consensus, only about the controlling urges of whoever added that comment. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 22:55, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose As pointed out a number of times above, this would amount to a ban on adding infoboxes to anything but stubs. Let's extend this to tables. Tables are optional. If tablelessnesss is a style and the first major contributor didn't add one, then thou shalt never add a table. Pictures are optional ... JIMp _talk·cont 15:04, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose Agree that in the absence of policy on whether or not articles should globally have infoboxes, the decision should always be made at the individual article level, but consensus should rule the day. This wording just needlessly strengthens trenches and little empires on WP. Applying the 'first major contributor rule' is rarely the way article styles evolve where there is a healthy consensual editing environment. I see this rule invoked almost always a first line of defence of entrenched ownership; it then becomes a substitute for rational discussion and consensus-building. In any case, the absence of an infobox at the hands of the FMC does not mean she/he didn't want one. The FMCs' intentions or proclivities are often impossible to establish, and thus ought never to be used as grounds for turf wars. Even if same was possible to devine, it's no more justified for individual editors to overrule consensus because (s)he got to an article first. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 03:10, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose. Infoboxes should be banned entirely :) Kaldari (talk) 23:43, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose. Articles evolve over time. Most articles do not start off their life with an infobox, and the first major contributor often does not add an infobox. They generally get added at a later time. Besides all the problems trying to determine who was the "first major contributor", you would likely be deferring to someone who probably didn't leave the infobox out intentionally. The "first major contributor" could have wanted an infobox in the article, but didn't feel like putting the effort into making one. Or maybe he just didn't know how to add one. Or maybe he was planning on coming back later to add one. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:32, 17 September 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose per "first major contributor". Out of the question. --78.35.248.247 (talk) 14:10, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Discussion (Infoboxes)

Does anyone mind if I add a sentence about infoboxes being optional, with the usual reminder to respect the preference of the first major contributor if no consensus can be reached, per WP:STYLEVAR? I am seeing infobox wars breaking out in several places and pages needing to be protected as a result. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:16, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

I would think infobox requirements would be set at the wikiproject level, and when there are conflicts due to multiple projects, the first-editor approach to decide which to use should take precedent. --MASEM (t) 19:27, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Neither Wikiprojects nor "first major contributors" (by whatever metric that might be argued) own articles. This is a core Wikipedia principle. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:33, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but in nearly any case where there are two or more options for the MOS (say: us vs uk spelling, ref style, etc. etc.) our MOS defaults to the first editor's preference with consensus discussion to change later unless it is totally and obviously wrong (eg using US spelling in an article about Buckingham Palace). It's a standard resolution that works well in the other parts of MOS, and should be fine here. --MASEM (t) 14:53, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

I concur with Masem with a proviso - if the project has a MOS subset, such as WP:MOSLAW or WP:MILMOS then it should take precedence over projects that do not have an MOS subset. Other than that, I'm fine with the first editor approach for any conflicts. I am opposed to them becoming optional in all cases. I disagree with Andy in part, in that I do not see that setting MOS standards cause ownership of an article. GregJackP Boomer! 19:41, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Where did I say that "setting MOS standards cause ownership of an article"? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:52, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

You did not say that, I said that. You said that "neither "Wikiprojects nor first major contributors ... own articles." I replied that having MOS standards, such as the one proposed by Masem and endorsed by me, would not cause ownership of articles. GregJackP Boomer! 20:11, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

The current guideline is at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Infoboxes#Using infoboxes in articles. DrKiernan (talk) 19:48, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, DrKiernan. So it would just be a question of adding the usual wording, per STYLEVAR/ENGVAR/CITEVAR, about deferring to the first major contributor where consensus cannot be reached. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:30, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

And is perfectly adequate (even if it doesn't give as much weight in favour of infoboxes as I would like it to). The problem is with people not respecting that, and not respecting consensus. The proposal above doesn't address that. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:55, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Object; infoboxes are good and useful, and all the deference to first major contributor is thinly masked OWNership by vested contributors. And Wikiproject's don't own anything, either. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 19:50, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't know that I agree - it is only if there is no consensus that it defaults to the original language. That doesn't imply ownership, it merely means that if there is not consensus to change something, it is left as is. GregJackP Boomer! 20:11, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

(You know me, Greg; Jack Merridew;)

There's years of evidence that first major contributor is used as ownership. We have WP:BOLD, we don't need consensus to change things, we're supposed to. Too many people focus on the R in WP:BRD; they love tripping the bold up. The net effect of their approach is that major topics that were begun years ago, are often stuck in the norms of years ago. They retard articles. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 23:35, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

I oppose WikiProject control here. The official guideline on WikiProject advice pages has given infobox wars as an example of what WikiProjects may not demand for articles within their scope for several years now. It is not good for a group of editors to descend on an article and tell the people who did all the work that they must/mustn't have an infobox, because we're a group of editors who called ourselves a WikiProject, and you're just a group of editors who wrote the article. (WikiProject, by official definition, means "group of editors who want to work together".)

The problem of conflicting advice is not trivial: not only do groups of editors differ in their preferences, they differ in which infoboxes they use. WP Chemistry and WP Pharmacology don't use the same infoboxes, but they do support many of the same articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:09, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Look at what you wrote: "tell the people who did all the work that they must/mustn't have an infobox". This is classic evocation of ownership. However much work a group of editors did, they don't own the article any more than a WikiProject does. However, a well-supported WikiProject has the advantage that it can set cross-article standards, whereas a group of editors who worked on an article are less likely to. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:04, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Well said and exactly right. It isn't "control" - it is setting standards. GregJackP Boomer! 14:19, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Any well-supported group of editors can set cross-article standards. The way you do that is by making a WP:PROPOSAL to the community, and either we adopt your standards or we don't.

What you don't do is get a little group of friends together, name yourself "WikiProject Something", write down your advice, and then pretend that the advice of your little group has to be followed, or even respected, by anyone at all. The community, not little self-appointed fragments of it, is in charge of actual cross-article standards. Any group or individual can put their ideas or preferences forward, but no small group or individual can demand that their preferences be followed.

The actual cross-article standard for infoboxes is articulated at MOS:INFOBOX, and it says that you can do whatever you want. They're never required (even if some group of editors says they are required for some type of article) and they are never prohibited (even if some group of editors says they are prohibited for some type of article). WP:Advice pages specifically says that groups of editors who have decided to call themselves a "WikiProject" get no special say in the matter. Both of these are official, community-adopted guidelines, not just essays made up by a small group of editors.

There are solid practical reasons behind this. Many articles are tagged by multiple groups. We do not want to be in the untenable position of simultaneously requiring and prohibiting an infobox on the same articles. We commonly add infoboxes to articles about chemists. We commonly do not add any infoboxes to articles about classical music composers. And guess what? Alexander Borodin is both, in equal parts. Hildegard of Bingen was a prolific medieval composer—so no infobox, if all that matters is the opinion of the composer's WikiProject—but she was also an abbess and author, so other WikiProjects say the opposite. Albert Schweitzer was both musician and physician, among other things, and the WikiProjects make opposite recommendations. Boris Vian was author, performer, musician, and engineer. You cannot simultaneously allow all of the relevant WikiProjects have their way. It's not actually possible. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:04, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Are there advantages or disadvantages to infobox? I started two different BLPs. The first article, someone came and put an infobox on, but it doesn't show anywhere on the page. I added a question about it to the infobox, but no answer. I don't know what it does or if I should delete it. The second article, I found an infobox I liked on another biography and copy/pasted it to the new one. How do I know if that was the right infobox, or if the article would be better without one? There is little guidance anywhere about these infoboxes. Neotarf (talk) 21:11, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

There are two main advantages to Infoboxes; first, they give a handy summary, in a semi-standardised format, of the key points and data in an article, for the benefit of our readers. Secondly, they emit that data as machine-readable metadata, understandable by scripts and computers, to allow it to more easily be reused elsewhere. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:57, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

The main disadvantage is that a decent implementation may be impossible. They often contain no more information than you would get from the first paragraph. They can reduce complex, nuanced issues down to a thoroughly misleading word or two. They provoke disputes between the "completists" (if the field exists, then we should fill it in) and "selectivists" (let's only put the most important information in the infobox). When they aren't completely redundant, they're often inadequately sourced. WP:DISINFOBOX has more information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:11, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

No; WP:DISINFOBOX has mostly FUD. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:25, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

No, WP:DISINFOBOX is absolutely right. Recently I found three fields in an infobox to be absolutely wrong. No one questioned them because they were in an infobox, and they didn't require a source because they were in an infobox and when I take the page off my watchlist anyone can change them. But that's all irrelevant to what SV has proposed here. This page is a mess now and it's hard to find where to support or oppose her proposal. Truthkeeper (talk) 22:30, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

I did set up a separate section for "support/oppose," with comments from this section copied above, but Andy kept reverting me. I will set up a new, empty one. Otherwise it will be impossible for the closer to read the consensus. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:37, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

You assert that "No one questioned them because they were in an infobox"; you offer no evidence to support that assertion. Your claim that "they didn't require a source because they were in an infobox" is bogus. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:54, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

"Disinfobox", heh. "...for their apparent professional visual appeal". Yes, yes. Useful when you don't have that much information on a subject, and don't want the article to look so much like a stub. :) I have seen infoboxes both footnoted and not, but no indication in policy if the material in the box needs to be sourced, especially if it is presumably sourced in the article. And what do you do if someone who has no interest in the subject whatsoever drops an infobox onto the article, and none of the info is available. Neotarf (talk) 10:12, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Do you have an expame of an infobox used where none of the information is available? I'll wager not. They may indeed be useful to hypothetically niaive editor in your contrived scenario, but that's not why they exist, nor one of their several and significant benefits. Do you have any other straw men you'd like to invoke? (How we might - telepathically? - determine that an editor has "has no interest in the subject whatsoever" of an article they've just edited is left as an exercise for the reader.) Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:07, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

It's very rude of you to assume that I am lying. Neotarf (talk) 22:28, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Its extremely rude, not to say unacceptable, of you to falsely assert that I assume that you are lying. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:41, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

If you are going to continue to make accusations about my conduct and good faith, i.e. "contrived scenario" and so forth, this is not the place for it. Take it to my talk page. Neotarf (talk) 00:01, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Note: I have again undone SlimVirgin's duplication of parts of this section (she reverted me the first time I did so). I object to my comments, and others', some of which I had replied to, being shown out-of-context; especially (but not only) when done above the original discussion. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:47, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

The RfC tag goes at the top of the discussion, not at the end of it. Please don't move it again, Andy. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:05, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

First major contributor

Martin, regarding who counts as the first major contributor, the idea is to model this on WP:CITEVAR, which resolves disputes about which citation style to use. What happens there is that, when editors can't agree or reach a compromise, people look through the contribs to find the first major contributor who used a consistent style (the first person to make substantive edits who decided to use one style over another, and who did so consistently). Determining who this is may sound tricky in theory, but in reality I've never known a case where it wasn't obvious. And remember that this is only used where editors are falling out over citations. It's just a way to end disputes.

In the case of a dispute about an infobox (where no compromise can be reached, such as choosing a different infobox, or adding or removing certain parameters), you would look to see which one editor, or series of editors, had done most to advance the article to the state it was in when the dispute began, and you would abide by whatever decision they had made about an infobox. Yes, you're right that this tends toward conservatism, in that the status quo ante is the position that's given priority. But that has worked well with CITEVAR and other style issues, in that it discourages prolonged disputes about style issues which – if not discouraged – can end up being pursued from article to article. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:24, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Slim, articles are improved by editors making changes and the use of CITEVAR is merely a mechanism to stultify improvements. It ends disputes by appealing to ownership of articles and that is bad for the encyclopedia. No editor should be given a weapon to override reasoned consensus on an article's talkpage about any optional part of our content. ENGVAR has a series of priorities for deciding on the style of English used and deferring to the first major contributor is merely the tie-breaker in the event that the more rational factors do not apply. CITEVAR on the other hand makes no consideration of the advantages or disadvantages of having a given citation format. Hand-written citations are not a "style". Harvard is a style; Vancouver is a style; APA and Chicago are styles; and yet many articles are prevented from adopting the ease of maintenance, consistency of presentation, and improved reusability that templates can afford. Only the largest of articles display the downside of templates, yet vast numbers of small articles are left with broken references and non-working links because of the dead-hand of the "first major contributor". This proposal is a further attempt to impose a technophobic fossilisation on articles - particularly as all articles start off without an infobox, which gives a kind of 'first-mover' advantage to those who want to remove all infoboxes but can't articulate a reasonable argument to support their prejudice. --RexxS (talk) 19:56, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

RexxS, you left out MLA style, and it really makes not a bit of difference whether the style is achieved via a template (we don't happen to have any that adhere to MLA) or by handwriting. The viewers see the output. Templates are useful for data mining. Truthkeeper (talk) 20:05, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Rexxs, people aren't going around removing infoboxes so far as I know. In all the cases I've seen, people are arriving to impose them on articles they haven't edited before, and then start reverting when challenged. I like infoboxes, and I also add them to articles I haven't edited before. In several years of doing this, I've only been challenged three times, and in each case I backed off, not because I was acknowledging someone else's OWNership, but because I respected that someone else had written the article, and they had formed an educated view about the content problems an infobox might cause (e.g. because of complicated biographical issues), or had formed a view about the aesthetics that I was willing to respect.

Three times in several years indicates that this is not a major issue. It's just that, when it does become an issue, we currently have no way of resolving it (except by people turning up to vote for their overall preferred position, which turns it into a numbers game). This proposal – that this is a style issue that should be handled like any other – would offer a resolution in the small number of cases where no compromise can be reached. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:58, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

You're mistaken. Editors allied to the classical music/ opera projects systematically remove - and presume to issue bogus instructions against re-adding - infoboxes. This is in direct contravention of the outcome of an RfC which they instigated. Recently, another editor has taken it upon herself to purge infoboxes for a significant number of articles, usually obfuscating with two-or-three letter edit summaries such as "rm" and "org". Your suggestion that Wikipedia does not have a method of resolving content disputes is a curious one; though there is an issue that some small but vocal groups of editors reuse to use that process or abide by its outcomes. It is naive in the extreme for you to assume that your proposed remedy would not be abused by such people in an attempt to enforce the removal of infoboxes from significant sections of Wikipedia. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:23, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Andy, I'm not familiar with the classical music wikiproject issues; if you have a link that would be helpful. We could add an explicit caveat to this proposal that people should not go around adding or removing infoboxes across the board, per WP:STYLEVAR and per the ArbCom (see the footnote in the STYLEVAR link for reference to the cases that formed the principle): "Where more than one style is acceptable, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a substantial reason. Revert-warring over optional styles is unacceptable." SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:34, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Composers/Infoboxes RfC. Infobox use is not merely a matter of style. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:41, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

This proposal would prevent WikiProjects from ruling that articles within their scope must or must not have infoboxes. That is, if someone were to create an article about a composer and were to add an infobox, no one could remove it on the grounds that one of the projects interested in that article had decided against infoboxes. The decision about an infobox would always be made at the individual article/editor level. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:11, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Your second sentence does not guarantee your first. The current situation is already that the decision about an infobox is made at the individual article level; your proposal is thus, at best, redundant. Giving article creators control of the future development of articles would be contrary to core Wikipedia policy; and would be a monumentally stupid thing to do. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:37, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Everyone can't be in control here, not the people who want to remove the boxes, or the people who want to add them, or a WikiProject that has placed the article within its scope. It's an either/or thing at the moment: we either have a box or we don't. Perhaps in future someone will create an option whereby readers can choose to see or hide infoboxes, or perhaps we should create a template for a completely collapsed infobox. But for now, we need a mechanism to decide in those rare cases where no compromise can be found by refining a box's parameters.

The most obvious mechanism is to prioritize the status quo ante. That will sometimes mean the box is retained and sometimes removed. As more people who like boxes create articles, they will become the first major contributors and the status quo ante will increasingly mean the box stays. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:09, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Collapsed has already been tried, and widely detested: see the disaster that was Ponte Vecchio for 3 years, because everyone got completely burnt out discussing it (80% of that talkpage is about the infobox), until some IP finally came along and fixed it per the very relevant MOS:COLLAPSE. It's an wp:accessibility problem at the least, and a hindrance/overcomplication at best. —Quiddity (talk) 00:37, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Truthkeeper, I missed out Bluebook as well, but it was never intended to be an exhaustive list. To the point: it actually makes the world of difference whether a citation is achieved by hand or by template. The latter guarantee a consistent style; can be checked and updated much more easily by bot or script; and can emit metadata, which (although you can't see it) can be used by re-users like Google to pick up important facts. It is a mistake to assume that just because two options look the same, they are identical.

Slim, I think you'll find that infoboxes are being removed sometimes without even the courtesy of an explanation in the edit summary. I am very disappointed at such behaviour from colleagues who really could do much better and engage in a proper discussion. I hope I'm not an unreasonable editor and I'm willing to accept that some articles are not best served by infoboxes, but I'm unhappy that the issues are not being explored. You are quite right, of course, to defend the principle of decisions being made at article level. Given goodwill between the editors discussing, I believe this still represents the fundamental 'wiki-way' of finding a consensus. I honestly don't think that STYLEVAR actually helps that process, as any mechanism that uses a rather arbitrary factor to favour one side or another denies the very principle of looking for common ground when seeking a consensus. --RexxS (talk) 00:29, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I agree that it's always better to find common ground. I also think that just about every objection to infoboxes can be addressed by refining the parameters, and by finding ways to express key points succinctly. Editors who oppose infoboxes may not realize that you can use the generic {{Infobox}}, and create your own headers and parameters. Having said that, I still wouldn't want to see editors who had put a lot of work into an article forced to accept them by sheer weight of numbers. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:50, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Classical music

Terry Riley (before)
Birth name	Terrence Mitchell Riley
Born	(1935-06-24) June 24, 1935
Origin	Colfax, California, U.S.
Genres	Minimalist
Occupation(s)	Composer
Instruments	Piano keyboards
Labels	CBS Records New Albion Records
Website	terryriley.net

Terry Riley (after)
Born	Terrence Mitchell Riley (1935-06-24) June 24, 1935 Colfax, California, USA
Era	Contemporary

@Andy: The classical composers project DOES have and use an infobox, called {{Infobox classical composer}}. The RfC you link to is where it came from. You've tried to delete it 4 times, including once by replacing [20],[21] remaining uses with {{infobox person}} and then claiming it was "unused" at both of the TFDs, plus reverting editors that try to use it. Plus two 1-month older removals, in the same way. How many times have you replaced it before?

Instead of complaining about it "losing valuable data" abstractly, and ignoring legitimate objective objections, I strongly suggest you read the section Template:Infobox classical composer#Fields that are specifically excluded, and try to understand the perspective of the many editors that agree with those summaries. Then start a clear and non-confrontational discussion on the talkpage, suggesting additions/changes that you believe would be both widely-applicable, and unlikely to result in misinformation being added to unwatchlisted-articles.

We're trying to inch the discussion forward, over time, solving each of the objections slowly and carefully. It'd be really great if you'd stop shooting us in the foot. —Quiddity (talk) 00:37, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Again, though, if someone were to create an article about a composer, and were to add a non-minimalist box, that would take priority. This is why I feel the "first major contributor" rule is the only one that's going to work, because it's an entirely "blind" process. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:50, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Indeed it is a blind process - although not a neutral one because of the starting point. I would not object to the idea of "FMC" if it were to be to be used to reach a decision when all other options have failed to reach consensus, but I fear that in reality the side that FMC favours would simply use it as their starting point in discussion, ignoring reasoned argument from the opposite viewpoint. In that case it becomes the antithesis of a tool for finding consensus; without some means of ensuring that it is to be treated as a tie-breaker, not a trump card, I remain convinced that including it here is not helpful in improving the encyclopedia. --RexxS (talk) 10:41, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I have to side with Whatamidoing, RexxS and others raising concerns about the "first major contributor" clause, but also about wikiproject dictatorialism, which the first half of this proposal does appropriately address. We (meaning the WP community in general, but also MoS gnomes more specifically) have let WikiProjects run roughshod over the principles of Wikipedia for far too long, and to a terrible extent. The level of WP:OWN nonsense out of these things is worsening by the day. And I say that as someone who has started wikiprojects myself and finds them useful when they are not operated like little dictatorial fiefdoms. That said, I'm entirely sure that "whatever I did first is the rule, and I was the first major article, so everyone else can just go jump off a bridge" is not a good model for how to go about this. We don't normally form consensus this way, so I can't support this proposal. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 15:52, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

The only time members of that project use "their" infobox (which was recreated out-of-process after being properly deleted) is to replace a better one, in order to deny editors the ability to use the latter's parameters (and we've already discussed this, recently; I pointed out that you were duped into creating it for them). I can provide evidence of this if you doubt that; can you provide evidence of the infobox being used by the project's active members, in other circumstances? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:25, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

The fact that they're using an infobox at all, is good.

As stated, there are rational reasons to exclude certain parameters that continually get misused (#Fields that are specifically excluded). You always just skip over those parts, in discussions.

I was not "duped" into helping them come to a solution, as you keep saying, and it's rude to assume or state that I was. I'm fully aware that it is "incomplete" or "imperfect" from your perspective.

There are a mixture of humans here, and as WhatamIdoing explained very clearly above, the disagreement between "the 'completists' (if the field exists, then we should fill it in) and 'selectivists' (let's only put the most important information in the infobox)" is not simple.

Yes, I have seen that most of the current uses were added by Mishae and Magnus; and Yes, I'd be very happy to see diffs where the project-members are actively implementing the template. Most of us think it is a good thing, if they're willingly using an infobox. It certainly displays more adaptability and open-mindedness than your own actions I value their adaptable and open-minded attitude. —Quiddity (talk) 21:26, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

It's all very well and good to have some recommendations that standardize the use of boxes for specific topics, especially if there are enough experienced editors on a topic to reach a consensus, but my understanding is that most content is created by new users. Can't some guidance be provided for us? Maybe not on the level of MoS, but more of a recommendation or tutorial thing. Really, there are other users with even fewer edits than I have who go around templating stuff that I have no idea what it is. Wouldn't it be best for the person who wants to use the box to source the information to put in it? And is there a minimum amount of information needed on the box? For instance, I have found very little about Abdullah al-Hamid, other than his full name and his age on a particular date, still, I like the box, especially since there's no photo yet. And what about sourcing? I have seen boxes with ref markers; it looks cluttered, but is it a good practice for other reasons?

Also, there is something called a persondata; not sure if it is covered by this part of MoS.

Neotarf (talk) 23:44, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

• Infoboxes are only useful if uniform, and uniformly used. Projects may need special features, but as much as possible should be standardized. ENVAR is not a parallel case--in that matter, there were several equally good standards and choosing one or the other is necessary. This is a case where we either have a standard, or total inconsistency. As Wikipedia matures we need a way to provide formally formatted data. Personally I wish we had never chosen this particular obtrusive and unsightly way of doing it, but if we use it at all, it should be used systematically. Perhaps The Wikidata project will find a better technique. DGG ( talk ) 23:52, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

This might also be a good place to remind participants of the template at the top of the page, and that the MoS pages are subject to Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions. See this remedy which includes the reminder " All parties are reminded to avoid personalizing disputes concerning the Manual of Style, the article titles policy ('WP:TITLE'), and similar policy and guideline pages, and to work collegially towards a workable consensus."

Neotarf (talk) 23:53, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

To clarify why my vote above - editors should have a choice concerning the use of infoboxes. I oppose mandatory use and I also oppose giving the decision to first users as in WP:ENGVAR. However respect and deference should be accorded editors who create hundreds of edits to an article and who render an opinion - weight should be given to those opinions...Modernist (talk) 00:24, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Quidity: You claim that "that they're using an infobox at all, is good"; event though they are not using an infobox, other than as a tool to remove better infoboxes. That is far from good. I invited you to provide an example of them using it in a positive manner; you have failed to do so. I addressed your "Fields that are specifically excluded" point ("in order to deny editors the ability to use the [better infobox's] parameters"), but, for clarity, those edge cases are being used to prevent the inclusion of valid, cited and relevant information, such as that Terry Riley (you cite me reverting its replacement, above), whose lede says he was "intrinsically associated with the minimalist school", wrote minimalist music; that the man we say is "currently performing... as a solo pianist" plays piano; hides his own website (readers are invited to compare the infobox before and after its emasculation; above) and removes the fact that he is a composer. That's a disservice to our readers, and harmful to the project. That and similar examples are evidence enough that your naive good faith in creating the template was abused. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:09, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Time to close

There's much opposition, well-reasoned at that, to this proposal. Tome to close it? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:31, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but see below. This proposal has obviously failed, yet the underlying issue remains unresolved. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 22:55, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Resolving the underlying infobox "ownership" issue

The fact that "first major contributor gets to arbitrarily decided" idea proposed above isn't workable is only half the problem here, and not the root one. The other, which this proposal also tried to address, is that wikiprojects by and large do appear to believe that they have the authority to tell the entire editorship "thou must" or "thou shalt not" put an infobox on any article We the Project consider within our Holy Scope. They need to be rapidly and unmistakably disabused of this notion before this situation gets any worse. So, the underlying issue this proposal tried to address is a real problem and remains unaddressed with this proposal's failure (because it reached too far in the opposite direction).

I propose that we add a statement to the effect that no editor or group of editors can force this issue, and that it's up to a consensus of the editors at the article, on a per-article basis, just like almost all other editorial decisions on Wikipedia.

(PS: I rather wish we'd scrap the entire WikiProject system and replace it with something that forbids any kind of "club"-like model - no "members" or "participants", no "projects", just pages of recommendations arrived at by a consensus of editors who care, on how to address particular topics. But that's another issue for another time and place.)

— SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 22:55, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Can you provide links to places where this has happened? (I'm not doubting you, I'm just interested in reading what the debate looked like in those instances.) Tdslk (talk) 00:54, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

See Classical music, and preceding comments in First major contributor, above. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:17, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

We already have WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. A link to that should suffice; though the problem is not that we don't have a policy, but that some editors are allowed to ignore it, for the sake of a quiet life. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:22, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

The rule you want already exists, or nearly does: "If discussion cannot determine which style to use in an article, defer to the style used by the first major contributor." The first choice is a consensus of editors at the individual article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:21, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

I was asked to comment again. That is not the consensus. The consensus that is followed in practice in WP is that once it is decided to use infoboxes on a particular type of article then the decision stands until consensus changes, and affects every article in scope. It does not go article by article. In particular, there is general consensus throughout WP to use infoboxes for people in as standardized and generalized a way as possible across all the relevant wikiprojects; that nobody is compelled to make such an infobox when writing an article, but that if they do not, someone will add it. (I understood the original proposal here to be challenging that, and I understand that challenge to be rejected. If the wording of the MOS needs to be changed to make it clear that they are not optional, I make such a proposal.) DGG ( talk ) 15:44, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Thats way off - I hope others dont see things this way as conflict will only issue - Wiki projects don't own articles in anyway and it does go article by article as seen at Using infoboxes in articles. We have tried to fix this ownership problem many times over the years, but still have statements like "should not be used without first obtaining consensus on the article's talk page" that is a clear violation of our Editing policy and Be bold. To think our editor will see some odd WP advice page before they edit is just crazy and has lead to many many conflicts.Moxy (talk) 17:52, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Not to mention in-article comments instructing people not to use infoboxes, which are a blatant defiance of the outcome of the RfC called by members of that project in a vain attempt to enforce their preference. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:08, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Quote - "Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article". There seems to be a drive here that all articles must have infoboxes, and that the editors of an article or members of wikiprojects have no say whatsoever about what the content or format of infoboxes, which people here appear to want to be set centrally as part of MOS and be immune from all challenge. Why should MOS (effectively a Wikiproject itself) have supremacy and be allowed to dictate things if no-one else is? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nigel Ish (talk • contribs) 18:32, 22 September 2012‎

Quote =Nigel Ish "a drive here that all articles must have infoboxes" and "the editors of an article or members of wikiprojects have no say whatsoever about what the content or format of infoboxes" - All that would be the opposite of what the policy says that you have just quoted. All content and format disputes should be discussed at the individual article level first - then proceed to outside the article if not resolvable at the article level. No blanket rules by a group of editors should prevail over talking about what is best for each article at each article!Moxy (talk) 19:45, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

The quote is what the guidance currently says - the following comments are my take on what the regulars here appear to be doing in trying to force a Wikipedia wide standard for infoboxes onto all articles, with the appearance of trying to override any objections either at the article and ignore any issues that wikiprojects raise, whether based on valid subject related reasons or not.Nigel Ish (talk) 20:18, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Oh sorry that was not clear to me.... but yes you are correct that the majority think infoboxes are beneficial thus an asset to our readers.Moxy (talk) 20:29, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Embedding foreign terms and names (like names with diacritics) in English Wikipedia

Not many editors seem to be aware of the Wikipedia guidelines for embedding foreign words and names in English Wikipedia; these guidelines are for web accessibility reasons. For an explanation, please see my essay here. I propose that a caution, and a link to these guidelines, be added to Wikipedia:MOS#Foreign terms or to a more appropriate section of MoS. LittleBen (talk) 11:46, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

And as has been pointed out to you in the past, its not that people are unaware, its that people don't agree with you that names with diacritics are Non-English. -DJSasso (talk) 12:00, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

A bit of both perhaps. They are some articles with large chunks of none English text without use of {{lang}} or similar. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 12:17, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

For example:

• "successful actor and director, Noël Coward has had a significant impact" from the article Cultural impact of Noël Coward is English, but,
• "Deux enfants royaux dans véritable amour ont été séparés largement et profondément" from De Wilhelmus, is not English. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 12:57, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

• Sun Creator: Many thanks! I'm doing an impartial study of the effects of diacritics in article titles and would greatly appreciate knowing of any popular pages that use diacritics in the article title and body.
• There's a parallel discussion about language templates here. LittleBen (talk) 13:12, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

If you want to find articles with foreign language text try searching with quotes for the following "et a", "para a", "volta a", "an der" "an die", "an den", "es a". Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 16:30, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that the quote should be wrapped in the template. Its the names that I don't believe should be and that is what he is really trying to argue here. -DJSasso (talk) 13:37, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

One should perhaps distinguish between "foreign text" and "foreign terms". Foreign terms (as opposed to names of foreign entities and words of foreign origin) are usually written in italics. --Boson (talk) 13:57, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Standard English words like resume (think job applications) and naive are both properly written with characters not common in English. The presence of accent marks or umlauts does not, by itself, make the word non-English. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:03, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Please also remember that "foreign" and "non-English" are distinct concepts. The former has no real place on Wikipedia, which is wp:WORLDWIDE both in content scope and in readership. That said, many diacritic-using article titles are of course related to specific countries with major languages that use such diacritics. To find examples of "popular" pages, consider looking at national categories such as Category:Top-importance Finland articles, Category:Top-importance Serbia articles, Category:Top-importance France articles, etc. Of course the equivalent "High-importance" article categories are much more populus. LeadSongDog come howl! 22:04, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

• Very helpful, much appreciated. LittleBen (talk) 02:12, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Non-English words and phrases are entirely appropriate to the English encyclopedia. Consider Post hoc ergo propter hoc or Ad hominem: they are not English, and they are important articles. Similarly, the English Wikipedia properly contains thousands of lines of poetry, lyrics, and quotations that aren't in English. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:25, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

• As discussed here, no major book publisher would use complex diacritics or foreign languages in book titles—except for widely-known words or names. The same argument surely applies to article titles. LittleBen (talk) 05:17, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

The parallel discussion just got closed here]. How often do we have to go over the same arguments? Agathoclea (talk) 13:15, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

• The trend everywhere is towards simplicity and usability—particularly in book titles, film titles, and article titles. In Mainland China "simplified Chinese" was created to make the language more accessible to the majority.
• Britannica apparently uses macrons in romanized Japanese names like Tokyo and Osaka—no respectable publisher does that nowadays, but it would probably cost Britannica too much money to bring their style into this century. Local English newspapers and websites represent current majority usage; limited-edition vanity academic publishers cannot afford to keep reference materials up to date with the real world. LittleBen (talk) 15:17, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

You again conflate non-latin scripts with diacritics. These are two totally seperate issues. Also you are saying that tabloid sources are more relevant than accademic? That throws our quest for knowledge out of the window and replaces with trash. Agathoclea (talk) 17:29, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

RFC:Largest cities or city population templates

There is a Request for comment about the utility/redundancy of Largest cities/city population templates. This is an open invitation for participating in the request for comment on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/City population templates. Should you wish to respond to the invitation, your contribution to this discussion will be very much appreciated! If in doubt, please see suggestions for responding. Mrt3366^{(Talk?) (New thread?)} 08:04, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Number signs

The section currently reads

Instead use the word "number", or the abbreviation "No."

While the examples is only No.. I would like to suggest two things. It seems that on most music articles that No. is the preferred method. Can we please get rid of "number" or at least suggest it's not preferred? Secondly, there have been a few editors who have been adding a non-breaking space between the "No." and the following number.

Also, could we clarify that if, when using "number", and the digit is less than 10, that the number should be spelled-out? --Walter Görlitz (talk) 05:23, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Request for scrutiny and feedback

I've brought a new writing and editing tutorial to the stage where it could do with some feedback. I wonder whether editors would mind taking a look and either directly editing or commenting on the talk page: Spot the ambiguity.

Apart from identifying glitches, I'd like to know whether the tone and structure of the exercises are optimal. Are the explanations too wordy? And is this a useful angle to take in helping writers to improve their article editing skills? There are many more examples I could add, but perhaps already the 19 exercises need to sectionalised into groups of six or seven to encourage users to work through the page in a number of visits. I chose to mix up the types of ambiguity rather than to systematically concentrate on one at a time (e.g., lexical, punctuation, unclear referents, word order). Thank you. Tony (talk) 12:31, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

My main criticism is that there is a limit to how much verbiage should be devoted to clarifying every possible ambiguity, which is relevant because some of these ambiguities are far-fetched. Churchill said "We shall never surrender." He didn't say "'We' means all of you, not just me and my dog. And 'all of you' means all Britons, not just all of you here. Well, not all Britons; we do have some traitors. I mean we won't surrender as a group. Oops, make that the British Empire, not just Britons. And 'never' doesn't really mean never; in a thousand years it may be honorable to surrender to an overwhelming alien invasion. It means we won't surrender to Hitler. Um, or Mussolini, or Hirohito. Um, or their successors. In the near future anyway (I'm not anticipating 21st-century neo-Nazis). And it doesn't mean there won't be surrenders like the Battle of Singapore. And it doesn't mean we won't surrender to a seductress ..."

I wouldn't segregate the examples by ambiguity type. No specialized training is required to determine why any of the examples might be considered ambiguous; the reasoning is plain enough after clicking the answer. So I think the examples should be like real life, where you don't know what type of ambiguity is likely to occur next.

More detailed criticism is on the talk page. Art LaPella (talk) 21:40, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Verbiage ... ok, I guess it's crap. Tony (talk) 08:00, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. I think Tony deserves our thanks and our encouragement for his sustained efforts. Those tutorials are a largely untold success story. They have been very well received in the past, and deserve wider promotion. Quite an innovation, contrasting with some of the nay-saying and nihilism we observe on the topic of Wikipedia style.
Congratulations Tony! Please continue, and please don't hesitate to ask for input at this talkpage, even if the appreciation is not always made explicit.
Noetica^Tea? 08:22, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

O, I meant to add that Art's work on WP:SMOS is surely appreciated also. We should not let that initiative fall away. I want to return to the problem of multiple links to the same large MOS page, in many instances. I've been developing an idea about transclusion, but I have been busy and not felt on top of the technical issues yet. All in good time.
Noetica^Tea? 09:16, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Diaspora capitalisation

I started a discussion on the page talk:Jewish diaspora because I think that the word "Diaspora" should always be capitalised when referring to the Jewish Diaspora. If you use "the Diaspora" it is understood to be in reference to the Jewish Diaspora, so in that case "the Diaspora" is a proper noun referring to the Jewish Diaspora. In all other cases, such as with "African diaspora," "diaspora" is simply a regular noun. I've looked through style manuals and can't find anyone saying that it should be capitalised in this case, but it seems to be common practice if you search for "Jewish Diaspora." Wondering if we could make a clear call on this. It would be helpful for sticklers like me. Anyone care to weigh in? —Zujine|talk 01:43, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Google Ngrams doesn't show much preference either way in recent times. Art LaPella (talk) 03:32, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Art, it is almost always preferable to reduce contamination by title case in ngram investigations. Yours on "Jewish Diaspora,Jewish diaspora" does not achieve that. This one does better: "Jewish Diaspora is,Jewish diaspora is". There would still be headings with that "is" in them, so we can assume that the predominance of lower case is a little higher than indicated by these ngrams.

I will not join in that discussion, as a matter of personal preference these days. But I make two observations, apart from the above:

• People need to be far more careful with talk of proper nouns and proper names. (Editors might learn from the greatly reformed article Proper noun, which needs just a little more work and a move to Proper name.)
• The strong representation, indeed the majority presence, of lower case "Jewish diaspora" in sources is decisive under WP:MOSCAPS for denial of any requested move to Jewish Diaspora, if it comes to that.

♫♪

Noetica^Tea? 05:26, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

I concur with Noetica, and go further and suggest that Wikipedia, per WP:NOT#SOAPBOX, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, etc., must consistently resist attempts by special interest groups of any kind to capitalize everything relating to them as if somehow magically special. It's irrational, elitist and not helpful to our readers. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 02:25, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Right, like "The Beatles" in running prose. Too much reliance on the magic of capitalization. Binksternet (talk) 03:28, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Exactly! ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 03:35, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Just thought I'd bring it up. I noticed that "diaspora" was improperly capitalised in many articles, which led me to look up the rules regarding the unique case of Jewish Diaspora (ahem, diaspora, excuse me). Thanks for weighing in. —Zujine|talk 06:34, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Beatles RfC

You are invited to participate in an RfC at Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/The Beatles on the issue of capitalising the definite article when mentioning that band's name in running prose. This long-standing dispute is the subject of an open mediation case and we are requesting your help with determining the current community consensus. Thank you for your time. For the mediators. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 03:42, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Relaunching that discussion again is blatant WP:FORUMSHOPping. The debate has nothing to do with [T|t]he Beatles in particular, and is a general MoS issue about whether to change the official names of things that begin "The" to lower-case "the" in mid-sentence just to make the grammar seem better to some people. The discussion should be had here, if it needs to be had yet again at all, which is doubtful. WP:NOT#SOAPBOX and WP:NOR effectively forbid falsification of facts to satisfy pseudo-grammatical whims. This is distinct from WP:TRADEMARK problems, like trying to replicate the all-lower-case font and star-in-place-of-apostrophe styling of the official "Macy's" logo. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 02:43, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

The involved editors wish to get the widest possible word out so that the most people can respond and the issue laid to rest with finality. Thus the spamming of notices that brings you to complain. Of course, pointing the reader back to a central discussion page cannot be forum shopping since the forum is not being changed.

Your stance does not conform to the majority of published style guidelines such as Chicago Manual of Style which recommends lower case "the" Beatles in running prose, and also recommends lower case non-italics "the" New York Times in running prose, even though the trademarked name of that newspaper is The New York Times, with the "the" in italics and capitalized.

There is nothing here about "pseudo-grammatical whims"; there is simply a serious and far-reaching style matter to solve.

Making the "grammar seem better to some people" is not the point; the point is to streamline Wikipedia practices to conform to the majority of published style guides. Binksternet (talk) 03:18, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Actually, the point is to make Wikipedia correct. Capitalizing "the" mid-sentence is an aggrandizing move. Wikipedia doesn't need to do other people's advertising for them. They're "the Beatles," even if whoever designed their official website was either ignorant about correct capitalization or just feeling pretentious. Almost every reputable style guide uses a lowercase T. We should do the same, not make up our own rules. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:17, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

I agree, and FTR, their official website has a mixed usage, not caps throughout. In fact, of their 12 album summaries at least 6 of them use lower-case. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 04:37, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Trans women once again

Please don't confuse this with anything similar but different.

WP:MOS says that trans women should be referred to with she/her throughout (except in direct quotes, of course.)

However, it looks like (in my experience of studying edits) that many Wikipedians support the rule that they should be referred to with no pronouns at all before their operation, but then we can use she/her after the operation, despite not being consistent with the above statement. Any questions about which rule is right?? Georgia guy (talk) 13:07, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Avoiding pre-op pronouns seems to be the obvious way to avoid conflict. I would support making this the MoS rule. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 02:20, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

So is it your position SMcCandlish that the MoS has got it all wrong when it comes to a definite article in band names but in most other cases we should follow the MoS? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 02:27, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

No, trans women should be referred to as "she" regardless of what part of their lives is under discussion. Avoiding pronouns during discussions of their lives before the operations should be permitted but not encouraged. This way, we won't get people putting the "no-pronouns rule" before good, cohesive writing. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:14, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Not using pronouns at all is a good compromise for people with very short last names, but for people with longer names it can be cumbersome. — A. di M.  15:25, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

What A.M. said. Talking around the pronouns should be allowed where it does not interfere with good writing, but it should not be our go-to answer to this issue. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:41, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Section hatnote templates

I think section hatnote templates such as {{see also}} should be changed to section endnotes, since the information they offer is of little relevance before the reader has read the section. Please take a look at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Layout#Placement of section hatnotes, thank you. --Paul_012 (talk) 18:09, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

That's not a categorically true assumption; it varies depending on what the hatnote is and the context in question. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 02:45, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Spaced endash in dates with spaces but un-spaced in compound nouns with spaces

At WP:ENDASH, section 1 says to use an un-spaced endash for date ranges except when the dates themselves contain spaces, in which case a spaced endash is used (e.g. "1 January 1970 – 23 June 1993").

Section 2, discussing compound nouns, does not make this exception for components that contain spaces, using an un-spaced endash regardless (e.g. New York–Los Angeles).

Isn't this inconsistent? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 04:58, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

This was a long-argued compromise; not perfectly consistent, but not too at odds with styles used and recommended in various guides. The use of spaces in things like New York–Los Angeles is quite rare, in my impression, whereas it is less rare in dates, and there was very little push to change how we do dates. Dicklyon (talk) 05:59, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

But I don't think AlanM1 wants to change spacing; he wants to clarify the rule. Perhaps add "excluding dates" to "The en dash in all of the compounds above is unspaced." However, "above" could be interpreted to mean section 2 only, which has no dates. Art LaPella (talk) 06:30, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

No, actually I do want to add spacing in the "New York – Los Angeles" case :) This is consistent with the date usage, and looks more symmetrical to me, just like with dates. I did a quick analysis of a google search of "New York – Los Angeles" (and verified it was, as they state, the same result set as with any other separator (i.e. it ignores punctuation chars)). I copied the 561 results that were shown, trimmed the parts before and after the phrase, then removed everything that wasn't "New York" and "Los Angeles" separated by some number of spaces and dash-like characters and sorted the results. This left (unfortunately only) 115 results:

• 90 were "New York - Los Angeles"
• 22 were "New York-Los Angeles"
• 3 were other combinations/typos

There are admittedly problems with the methodology, and a more complete study might be necessary, but 90/20 does seem somewhat compelling, doesn't it?

If we use less-familiar names, I think it gets more compelling:

• "I took the Alpe d'Huez–Angoulême flight"
• "I took the Belle Île–Alpe d'Huez flight"
• "The Villefranche-de-Rouergue–Les Sables-d'Olonne–La Montagne Noire segments were completely full" (Quick – how many segments is that?!)

N'est-ce pas? :) —[AlanM1(talk)]— 05:43, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

En-dash usage

FYI

 – Pointer to a relevant discussion elsewhere.

At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Airports#New RfC, someone's launched another "hyphens vs. en dashes" RfC with regard to airports, after one RfC and various requested moves have already declined to override MoS on this. Someone seems not to have noticed WP:LOCALCONSENSUS and WP:OWN. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 02:34, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

I would suggest that hyphens seem to be correct for airports. I can not find anyone using en dashes. In our list of US airports all use hyphens except for Rock Springs – Sweetwater County Airport, for which the actual name is "Rock Springs Sweetwater County Airport". There are 53 U.S. hyphenated airport names. Some use en dashes, some hyphens. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania uses a hyphen, correctly I would say. Am I missing something? Apteva (talk) 04:32, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Or are hyphens always correct for airports and Wilkes-Barre because of this advice: "Wrong: Franco–British rivalry; "Franco" is a combining form, not independent; use a hyphen: Franco-British rivalry"? Apteva (talk) 04:39, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

The following nine U.S. airports use en dash:

• Aspen–Pitkin County Airport
• Charles M. Schulz – Sonoma County Airport
• Fort Lauderdale – Hollywood International Airport
• Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport
• Lewiston – Nez Perce County Airport
• Minneapolis−Saint Paul International Airport - actually uses a minus sign, not an en dash
• Reno–Tahoe International Airport - this was moved recently and the RM was probably closed incorrectly, with one support vote and insufficient information.
• Seattle–Tacoma International Airport
• Wiley Post–Will Rogers Memorial Airport

Some of the hyphens in the airport list are for old or alternate names. The remaining 28 U.S airports use hyphen. Apteva (talk) 07:00, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I do not express currently any reasoning about airport names in general, but the comparison of "Wilkes-Barre" to "Franco-British" is completely wrong because of John Wilkes and Isaac Barré. Also, Apteva's use of space-stroke-space instead of an en dash directly in this posting (which is exactly about the hyphen–dash rivalry) looks as a provoking illiteracy, which does not contribute to establishing of the consensus. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 11:02, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Apteva, I don't doubt that you have good intentions; but your zeal in many forums at the same time and on a couple of style issues is getting disruptive. Please don't edit this MOS page to further your present push. I have just reverted that, and I invite others to monitor things also. This page is to serve the needs of editors maintaining 4,000,000 articles. Its provisions have generally been weighed very carefully, by editors with linguistic knowledge and a great deal of style experience.

If you have questions about hyphens and dashes – and certainly about proper nouns and proper names, on which I see you have picked up some strange folk ideas – feel free to drop in at my talkpage and we can talk it over.

☺

Noetica^Tea? 11:36, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Isn't the relevant section this bit, at MOS:ENDASH?: "By default, follow the dominant convention that a hyphen is used in compounded proper names of single entities, not an en dash. Guinea-Bissau; Bissau is the capital, and this distinguishes the country from neighboring Guinea. McGraw-Hill, a publishing house". That seems to me to suggest we should follow the use of a hyphen where that's the official, formal name, maybe even in every case. The airport is a single entity, even if the bits that gave it the name aren't. Also, a quick scan suggests that several of the pages above that are using the endash now were moved from the hyphenated version at the end of last year, so it seems that was the stable principle in practice as well until a while ago. N-HH talk/edits 11:49, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

ps: and, as ever, this merely reinforces my view that we could save ourselves all a lot of trouble by doing what most online and many print publishers do and forgetting about the specialist use of, and distinction between, hyphens and endashes. But that's another story, and I know its use makes many people strangely happy. N-HH talk/edits 11:49, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

No, N-HH. Airports are not typical entities of that sort. The default is here overruled; and indeed practice "out there" is variable even for the same airport name. Unlike "Guinea-Bissau", say. Airport names are usually functional artificial constructions with semantic weight, more like definite descriptions than fully autonomous proper names. Contrast "McGraw-Hill", which is in a way fossilised. No one thinks of "McGraw" and "Hill" as meaningfully linked in that name. Not any more.

Your view about saving a lot of trouble by obliterating the best-practice distinction that MOS preserves is well and truly noted. Thank you for not going on about it! The community spoke on these issues last year, loud and clear. There was strong endorsement of the distinctions MOS makes, which are far from unusual or freakish. They contribute to a high-quality encyclopedia, with enhanced readability. But I don't want to go on about it!

Noetica^Tea? 12:47, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Well I can only counter that it seems to me at least that they very much are entities of exactly that sort, and that no clear justification has been offered for any decision to simply "overrule" that default. I don't quite get the idea that an airport name derived from a combination of the names of two people or after the two places it serves is any less a "fully autonomous proper name" - whatever that might mean exactly, especially the first half - than the name of a publishing house originally founded by two different people. And at what point might "fossilisation" occur? Some airport names are very old. Some even have their names specifically referred to, in multiple sources such as this syndicated AP report - even if, I know, those sources are not academic guides to grammar and punctuation - as being "hyphenated". N-HH talk/edits 14:31, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

The hyphenation in that article will not be based on the "correct" name, but since it is an AP story, it will be based on the AP house style. Neotarf (talk) 15:04, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm not talking about the hyphenation itself or AP style, I'm talking about their use of the actual word hyphenation to describe the name. Something which is very common in other sources and reports too, including when quoting those involved in determining the name change. N-HH talk/edits 15:09, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I also noticed this, and I made a list of sources explicitly saying that these names are hyphenated. And I can't find any source saying that they are dashed.... This is exactly what you would expect to find if airport names were hyphenated proper names. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:25, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I assume the response to that is, or would be, two-fold though: first, that it's merely loose language from people who are not punctuation experts, and secondly that even if it "is" a hyphen, our style-guide not only requires an endash but mandates us to force the change when rendering it here. Whether any or all of that has any real weight, I'm not sure .... N-HH talk/edits 16:33, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

The second argument would be quite misleading? Both WP:HYPHEN and WP:DASH happens to recommend a hyphen for proper names of single entities. We can all agree that an airport is a single entity. Maybe someone will want to argue that airports don't have proper names? --Enric Naval (talk) 14:44, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

They already have of course, not least previously in this very thread ... N-HH talk/edits 14:50, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Enric Naval:

• I have answered your point about "sources explicitly saying that these names are hyphenated" at the RFC itself. As I write, you have not responded there. Why not? You are instead continuing to argue here as if I had not responded! That is unhelpful and uncooperative. If you would prefer that I ignore your points in future, just tell me, all right? ♫♪
• The answer I gave at that RFC is one that N-HH predicts, above. My text at the RFC:

"That's all misleading, Enric. For example, people commonly use 'hyphenated' to mean 'with a hyphen or something that looks like one'. Most writers (and many editors ☺) are not style experts, and most are unaware that there are such things as en dashes. See my answer to you earlier, timestamped today at 23:33, (UTC)"

Answer there, please. It's an RFC affecting naming on Wikipedia, and needs to be taken seriously. It is not a political forum for diminishing the effectiveness of MOS.

• You write: "Both WP:HYPHEN and WP:DASH [happen] to recommend a hyphen for proper names of single entities." That is inaccurate and misleading. Both those MOS guidelines are more nuanced. Read them again. In particular, note that the examples you appeal to are not of the form we are discussing here: "X~Y Z". They are of the simpler form "X~Y". There are several examples (like "the Roman–Syrian War") where the pattern relevant to these airport discussions is realised with an en dash.

  Roman–Syrian War might not be the best example to use, as I can not confirm that using an en dash is supported by "common usage".[22] (an article that makes liberal use of en dash in other places, but not for Roman-Syrian War) Anything that has attained "proper name status" by definition has an established proper name. Anything that has not can clearly use any preferred style convention, such as using an en dash in certain situations and some other punctuation in other situations. Does the spelling of a proper name include the punctuation internal to itself? I say it does. While we tend to eschew stylistic spellings such as WAL★MART, we do include hyphens, spaces and /, but is there really any proper name that is constructed using an en dash? Apteva (talk) 02:39, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

N-HH:

• Enric wrote: "Maybe someone will want to argue that airports don't have proper names?" You responded: "They already have of course, not least previously in this very thread." Really? Where? I had written:

"Airport names are usually functional artificial constructions with semantic weight, more like definite descriptions than fully autonomous proper names."

If your assertion referred to that statement, please amend and discuss what has been said rather than some distortion of it.

• You earlier asked for clarification. That was healthier! Now let me explain. Many proper names are fully autonomous. Many are free of any descriptive meaning. Perhaps the names "Amanda", "Rhode Island", "New South Wales" are good examples. I think few people analyse "Amanda" as describing its bearer as lovable, as the etymological meaning would suggest. Nor "Rhode Island" as if it referred to some island, with modification by "Rhode". I can assure you that for typical Australian users of "New South Wales" that proper name does not call to mind "Wales", nor the quality of being either "south" or "new". These are fully autonomous proper names, freed of any original descriptive content. But not all proper names are like that. "Southern Ocean" remains descriptive for many users, though it functions as a proper name. Same for "Northern Territory" (in Australia), and "North Carolina". And so also for very many airport names. Whichever way you manage its punctuation, "St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport" is descriptive: it is an airport, and an international one. And it is semantically associated with the placenames that are its components. It is not a fully autonomous proper name. It has current descriptive meaning, and is not fossilised like "Rhode Island". If for that reason alone, the semantic distinctions marked by hyphen and en dash are preserved in many sources: in best-practice publishing. And that best practice is what MOS, supported by community affirmations that are endorsed by ArbCom, seeks to emulate.

Noetica^Tea? 00:32, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Burma/Myanmar

WP:CONSISTENCY gives an exception to ENGVAR for proper names. The Burma article is in British English and Burma is preferred by British English. Suppose Myanmar is the common name. Is it okay to primarily refer to it within the article as Myanmar even though it is in British English? Marcus Qwertyus (talk) 09:27, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't really have anything to do with British vs. American English linguistic/style differences. According to Burma#Etymology, it's about which countries recognize the authority of the current military government, who renamed the country to Myanmar. The UN does recognize it as Myanmar, but the UK, US, and Canada do not, and continue to regard it as Burma, according to the article. I don't know whether the UN's recognition (without US and UK) should be sufficient to change enwiki's naming – I just wanted to clarify that it's a political, not a language, issue. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 17:36, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

(Suppose) media and popular usage does not follow the official usage. Then what? Marcus Qwertyus (talk) 09:55, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Looking at Google Ngrams [23][24][25] there don't seem to be substantial differences between English varieties: in all of them Burma dominates (though many of them will be mentioning the country in an historical context and hence shouldn't count – cf this; any idea how to tell them apart in Ngram results?). As for the general principle, I'd say that in article titles at least, if Word A is somewhat common in both Dialect X and Dialect Y whereas Word B is very common in Dialect X but very rare in Dialect Y, we'd better use Word A, as per WP:COMMONALITY. — A. di M.  17:19, 25 September 2012 (UTC)