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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 203.81.70.29 (talk) at 17:35, 17 April 2013 (→Cadastral Map: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Question about usage of present and past tense

One editor is saying that obsolete computers and obsolete software should be written about in the present tense rather than in the past tense—like "Windows 3.0 is an operating system", "OS/360 and VMX are operating systems", "the Apple II and PC/XT are computers", "the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud is", "Coal-fired steam engines are...", "The Beatles are..." and so on. I'd tend to use past tense for things that (virtually) no longer exist, e.g. they may be long obsolete—difficult or virtually impossible to buy, even on the second-hand market. Are there any guidelines on this? LittleBen (talk) 14:13, 4 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure whether there is a guideline, but general usage seems to be that if something does exist, then present tense is used. Obsoletion does not meen that it doesn't exist. For example, a TV show that ran in the 1960s but is no longer in production still exists, so "The Prisoner is a TV series". However, The Beatles don't exist as an entity any more, so "The Beatles were..." (but Abbey Road is still an album). In the case of OS/360, this "is in the public domain and can be downloaded freely", so would suggest that this is a case for a present tense. --Rob Sinden (talk) 14:39, 4 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Saying "The Prisoner is a TV series" sounds odd to me. The implied assumption when using the present tense about a TV show is that the show is still in production. I would use past tense. Blueboar (talk) 15:55, 4 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
So by that same logic, "Abbey Road was a record by The Beatles"? I don't think so. --Rob Sinden (talk) 12:16, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. The logic that such things could be referred to in the present tense is arguable, and even when it can be justified, it is not in all connections helpful. Would you say "the great fire of London is one of the largest disasters to strike the city in the 17th century"? You could of course construct a situation justifying it, but...
Anyway, it doesn't need a rule, only some literacy on the part of the editor. JonRichfield (talk) 20:03, 4 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Er, I don't think we need to insult editors' literacy … "Camelot is a musical" even if at this particular moment it isn't being staged anywhere (doubtful, but you get the point). And what about syndication? I can still turn on my TV at 7 a.m. and see I Love Lucy. Television may seem to complicate the usual conventions of writing about literature or a work of art in the historical present (though last time I looked the article wasn't very good on this point), but categorically a television series exists in the same way that a literary or theatrical work does, not as an historical event that took place at a single moment in time. A television series, like a book or painting, is in effect "present" each time an audience engages with it, and therefore has the constant potential to be present. We don't say "Macbeth was a tragedy by William Shakespeare" because that's still what Macbeth is; it didn't cease to exist as such. You would say "Euripides' Medea was first produced in 431 BC" (referring to an event that occurred at a point in time) but "Euripides' Medea is a Greek tragedy" (because that's what it still is); therefore, "I Love Lucy IS a television series that WAS produced from 1951 to 1957". Cynwolfe (talk) 21:16, 4 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely right. Johnbod (talk) 21:48, 4 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Err...? You "don't think we need to insult editors' literacy"? Well, that is a hard proposition to assail, isn't it? But forgive me, exactly what did I say to elicit your remark? I said: "it doesn't need a rule, only some literacy on the part of the editor", which is exactly what I meant, and mean, and what is more, to judge from your examples, you agree. How many of the cases you cite would you consider to be in conflict with it? Every one is an example of just where the literacy of the editor (in English, and certainly in some other languages as well) could and should be relied on to select the correct tense, and should not need any documented rule to keep him to the straight and narrow. As I have said, and probably shall repeat on my lawful occasions, the fewer imposed and documented regulations we can get by on, in fact, the thinner our rule book, the better for all concerned. And how would you go about formulating such a rule to cover this case anyway - especially for the benefit of an illiterate editor, which is the only kind to need such guidance in practice (slips and finger trouble always excepted)? JonRichfield (talk) 12:08, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. State verbs are always in simple present. Apart from that English Grammar In Use says "We use the simple present to talk about things in general. We are not thinking only about now. We use it to say that something happens all the time or repeatedly, or that something is true in general. It is not important whether the action is happening at the time of speaking."
"Is" in Windows is an operating system" is a state verb. "Windows was an operating system" implies "it no longer is an operating system" and raises the question "why?" The answer cannot be "because it is discontinued" because discontinuation does not turn an operating system into a video game, dish washer or anything else. The correct form is "Windows is a discontinued operating system".
There are certain exceptions in English language though: "Your dad is a good man" and "your dad was a good man" are both correct in context of a "dad" who is now deceased, subject to religious beliefs. However, out of context, "your dad was a good man" is ambiguous because it can also mean the "dad" is now a bad man. However, the same cannot be said for "Albert Einstein is the greatest of all scientists" and "Albert Einstein was the greatest of all scientists". The latter can only mean Albert Einstein is no longer the greatest and beckons the question of "why?" (Note that most scientists earn a lot of posthumous respect.) Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 19:29, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I see this as an interesting question for similar reasons. Is an operating system more like a work of fiction (which is discussed in the historical present), or once it's discontinued, is it more like an event that has unfolded in time, like a war that's been fought and lost? If it stops being what it was, what is it? Cynwolfe (talk) 21:16, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"Your dad is a good man" when one's dad is dead would be forcing one's religious beliefs onto the listener. It sounds weird, and could easily give offence. Tony (talk) 00:04, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. Someone who is easily offended by a misplaced "is" has serious social and psychological issues, so much so that he disregards the fact that respect is being paid to his good father. Normal people also account for the small talk nature of the comment, the fact that 99.99% of people in the world believe in one form of God and afterlife (including but not limited to Christians and Muslims) and that it may simply be a slip of the tongue. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 08:19, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It sounds to me like the consensus is to use past tense for past events and for things that don't exist any more, including deceased people, and to use present tense for things that are merely old and obsolete, usually. Sometimes using past tense for old obsolete things will be OK, too, if they hardly exist in the wild (like Otis King's patent calculator was a helical slide rule). Use common tense. Dicklyon (talk) 05:28, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. The exception that you mentioned is far stricter than it seems, especially for state verbs. E.g. "T-Rex is a theropod dinosaur". I think T-Rex went completely extinct long before Otis King's patent calculator. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 08:19, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I would always say "was". Possibly the sentence in that article - "Tyrannosaurus is a genus..." - is OK, because the genus is a construct of the people who study these things (the genus can be thought of as still existing because the field of study that defines and refers to that genus is still existing). But when talking about the dinosaurs themselves, I would use the past tense. Victor Yus (talk) 08:31, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. Did you notice that I intentionally mentioned "theropod" in my example? It meant to cover your "genus" treatment. Otherwise, yes, you are right that dinosaurs "ate", "weighted", "hunted", etc. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 08:47, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Use either one. Or both. It is an OS that still runs on at least thousands of computers doing real work, even though it's nearly extinct. Dicklyon (talk) 19:12, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Parenthesis coming always before punctuation?

This is my first time here in MoS. I would want to ask if overall text quality wouldn't benefit from a suggestion of every phrase of user-written prose (that is, the content we don't cite but redact) ending in punctuation. This would make consistency much clearer (and people not exposed to logical quotes, such as the overwhelming majority of U.S. Americans, would understand the rule to use it more readily). What I mean is to indicate to use "this (blablabla)." rather than "this. (blablabla.)". I didn't found an already existing name for this (neither in English nor in any other language), so I use terms such as "logical parentheses". I find it also much better aesthetically. Lguipontes (talk) 10:22, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Here are some examples.
  • I saw the dog (a poodle).
  • I saw the dog. (It was sleeping.)
—Wavelength (talk) 15:34, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Couldn't it be "I saw a dog (and it was sleeping)."? Most users don't really know the difference (including us from Romance-speaking countries that AFAIK only use the "this (blablabla)." formula.
Just to prove that changing the style guide would be helpful, here is the current revision of the article on French language, that I am editing: [[en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=French_language&oldid=548852203#Algeria here]. It says "Most urban Algerians have some working knowledge of French, and a high (though unknown) percentage speak it fluently.(about 80 percent) However, [..]". It is horrible and completely unnecessary. This is a common sight in the Wikipedia articles to which people edit the least, or are edited mostly by people from countries outside of the English-speaking world. I believe defining a clearer "end phrases in punctuation" would help a lot. Lguipontes (talk) 17:37, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You probably intended to link here.
—Wavelength (talk) 19:01, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Parentheses are punctuation marks. They are discussed in the article "Bracket", which is categorized in Category:Punctuation.
Os parênteses são sinais de pontuação. São discutidos no artigo "pt:Parêntese", que é categorizado em pt:Categoria:Pontuação.
—Wavelength (talk) 18:48, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I meant so. That was a typo, thanks. I am here in en:wp for three years and by now 2000 edits, so I believe myself as generally knowledgeable in English (at least much more than the average student after 6 months of language course in my country). I am not illiterate and I know what brackets are, but the English usage (you won't see "this. (blablabla.)" in Portuguese or Spanish, never, much less on a formal setting) often leads to errors much like "American" quotes as it is used very confusingly and many editors won't know exactly how.
The rules for "this. (blablabla)." aren't covered by the English article, and the Portuguese for the most doesn't even cite the possibilities of use of punctuation in other languages (Portuguese Wikipedia has a lot of gaps, systemic bias that cover only Lusophone reality, and has poor-written text to a degree that one would feel its work to never end [even though neverending work is a reality in all Wikipedias, I would know better that it wouldn't be an enjoyable task there – it doesn't help that Portuguese prose is harder than, say, Japanese, according to bilingual children, and they are often stressed with the task of trusting new users that in average tend to act way more ignorant to policy than people here {so that IP edits in general, instead of just IP insertion of links, require captcha}, so it is a hell to not cite every piece of information, even common sense for people who understand the topic, and get it all deleted thereafter]).
As I already said, it seems to not have a need (far from me being youknowwhat-centric, but the fact that major Average Standard European global languages can do it well without this indicate it is at least in part just accessory). My knowledge in English, though good for my needs, is often shallow (school English in Brazil is "verb to be" every single year and rarely gets deeper, I learned it from the internet for about 95%). I would like to know from a person knowledgeable in English grammar how much it is really necessary, so as to know how much one couldn't go for this detail like other European languages (I read French as of late 2011 and I also never saw they using it), the point you seem to raise. I would google it (I tried it once months ago), but it seems to be too much of a non-issue for native speakers to have easily findable information, so someone here would explain it way better. Lguipontes (talk) 19:48, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Lguipontes, you say that American quotes lead to errors, and I am guessing that you refer to the U.S. practice of putting periods and commas inside the quotation marks, "like this." A lot of people who don't like American punctuation argue that it causes errors, but none of them have ever given a real-world example. In all my years of writing and editing in U.S. English, I've never once seen someone make a mistake or misunderstand text because of American-style punctuation. Have you witnessed any such errors? What were they? I want to know if errors attributable to U.S. punctuation are Bigfoot (mythical) or the platypus (thought to be mythical but eventually proven to exist). Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:19, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Just noting here that internal punctuation isn't American punctuation. Publishers all over the world use it, and we ought to allow it as an alternative in the MoS, precisely because it avoids errors. I keep meaning to add it, but haven't been able to face the arguing that might ensue. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:43, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
1. Just because not everyone who uses it is American doesn't mean that the style itself isn't American. Some American venues spell their names "theatre," but that doesn't mean the spelling isn't British. 2. Even if you think the name is inaccurate, it's the name that all the major style guides use, so it's perfectly all right to call it American. 3. Yes. Yes we should allow it. However, if someone can prove that it causes non-imaginary, non-hypothetical problems on Wikipedia, then the ban might be justified, kind of like how people argue that we need straight quotes because curly quotes interfere with search functions in some browsers. So far, no one has offered any such proof. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:48, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
LguiP has answered my question here. This user hasn't seen any real mistakes or confusion and was only repeating rumors. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:53, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is a funny thing, but I once was rebuked by a professional editor for putting (as I remember) a fullstop inside (or was it outside?) a closing parenthesis. It is, I was sternly informed, a publishing convention. I immediately baulked, saying that I could just about care less about the convention, but could care a great deal about logic, in particular as embodied in context-dependent syntax. By that time I was a computer pro of long standing, and delimiting punctuation in computer languages is of necessity subject to strict rules, because if not, what you write means, if anything but an outright error, something different from the intention. Now, the same thing should apply in our rules, say I. If the thing within delimiters needs a closing stop, exclamation or the like, then it goes inside the brackets or quotes or whatever they are. If it belongs, not to the enclosed bit but to the whole sentence, paragraph, chapter or whatever might be the case, then it goes outside. If it makes no logical difference, then it doesn't matter, and suit yourself. Could anyone think of a functional exception? I can't! JonRichfield (talk) 19:12, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree entirely. Human languages are not like programming languages. Readers don't process what they see based on logic. A reader with an organic brain does not react to character order the same way a computer does. Anything that is poorly punctuated or "written to suit oneself" will be harder to read and look sloppier than something that is correctly punctuated, even to people who can't name every rule or explain why the sentence seems wrong. That's your functional exception, based on the way readers function. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:35, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I was afraid to have to ask, but... how exactly that works? You can link me something in another site. I see the term "sentence" to be used thoroughly in explanations or manuals of English grammar. We never ever hear of an equivalent in Portuguese. What is bigger than a phrase (that is used 'interchangeably with sentence here) is a paragraph and that's it. At least that is what we learn in school (and I am a good [often the best] student in languages and humanities). Thinking of those "sentences" wouldn't easily come naturally for me, I learned English for real in the past year, as a 17-year-old. I believe I did read English pieces with perfect grammar so it was used accordingly, but I couldn't notice any difference. *facepalm* Now I just don't know what imperfections I am supposed to remove, because using it the right, indifferent or wrong way looks the same to me. Luckily as soon as I started to correct texts favoring English pieces without a bias for American localisms (I believed this parentheses thingy to be, just as I knew the illogical quotes were, before I looked here in MoS and saw it is used even in places where obviously persons from everywhere in the world would have to agree over a common standard), this April, I decided to consult you guys. Lguipontes (talk) 19:48, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Just saying, I've read the article sentence before, and I still don't understand how it works, as it fits the knowledge I learned through Portuguese acquisition. Well, it is nice to know that I am not the only one confused. Lguipontes (talk) 19:56, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's not really that complicated:
Phrase in the summer
Clause when I was a child
Sentence When I was a child, I ate ice cream in the summer.
Whether or not it makes sense to you, there's a "right way" and a "wrong way" to handle parentheses in English, and we need to do it the right way. If you don't can't figure it out, then don't worry: someone who understands this particular rule of English punctuation will eventually fix it for you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:11, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Lguipontes, I've read your post four times and I still can't tell what you're proposing. The things that you're saying seem to contradict the existing rules of standard English. The short version of the rule with parentheses is that the punctuation goes outside the parentheses if the parenthetical is contained within another sentence (even if it could be a full sentence or independent clause by itself) but inside the parentheses if it is not: "I saw a dog (a poodle)." "I saw a dog. (It was sleeping.)" "Why haven't children made milk their favorite snack drink? (Because milk is sold in gallon jugs.)"
As always, I agree with WhatamIdoing that this MoS should reflect correct English as it currently exists, not serve as a vehicle to improve English. Go ahead and try to improve the language if you want, but don't do it here. When you succeed, we can change the MoS to match the new rules. English is crazy and English is counterintuitive, but if we start making up our own rules, we'll just look stupid and it will be harder for the readers to understand the content. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:14, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"English is crazy and English is counterintuitive"... I will add one more: English is often inconsistent. Something the MOS needs to account for a bit more often. Blueboar (talk) 03:04, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) I think that WP:MOS#Brackets and parentheses means to say that sentences containing bracketed content should be punctuated without regard to the bracketed content. Additionally, it seems to mean to say that a bracketed single (It doesn't say "single". However, it probably doesn't mean to include "multiple".) full (implied: declarative) phrase should not be terminated inside the brackets (but how about bracketed nondeclarative phrases?).
I disclaim that I am not a grammarian. Regardless, I opine that the first sentence of the rule in the MOS would be better to say something like, "Sentences containing bracketed content should be punctuated without regard to content enclosed by the brackets.", rather than (as now), "If a sentence contains a bracketed phrase, place the sentence punctuation outside the brackets (as shown here)."
Neither the current wording nor my suggested alternative cover standalone bracketed content which is not part of a containing sentence (e.g. as exampled in [1]). This is probably generally best avoided, I think, but should probably be punctuated inside the brackets if present.
Re questions from Lguipontes about what a sentence is or is not, see the Sentence (linguistics) article. The lead section there is outstanding, IMO. I really like the example. Ungrammatical. Good, though. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 04:08, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the answers.

I think I am remembering now... Clause and sentence, I studied this in school. But it was in the third grade (9-year-old Brazilians, 8-year-old me), only the trollest Vestibulares go deep into this subject (my admission to a federal technical school was harder than most vestibulares, and I proudly entered it without studying much, much less doing a course, as a 13-year-old, and neither of the Portuguese tests included it; since my Math result was just above the necessary needed, I think my dissertation was among the best out of the 800 that passed out of 18000, I was in the 370s...). Wait, I should have put it as "this. (blablabla.)" in the piece I just wrote, isn't it? Anyway goddamnit, I should have remembered what frigging clauses (orações, a term that for the vast majority of us means only orison i.e. prayer) are, if I'm not wrong I had to learn it when I was studying adverbs and adverbial locutions; it was the hardest Portuguese subject I took in all 12 grades, that came back to haunt me (this time in a foreign language).

Anyway we don't need it to a degree similar of yours for consistent and/or formal Portuguese orthography in any way, those terms, as I said, aren't present in colloquial Portuguese and most people don't even remember that they exist, much less what they are. As I also said, we call what is between a capital and the final punctuation, or the thingy of subject+predicate as phrases, and if someone tells your average Brazilian that "in the summer" is a phrase, you can be called illiterate. People don't also regard brackets as punctuation, we know it is sort of, but punctuation for us is just what looks like ". , ? !". Much less we know what would be a declarative (this time I am very certain I didn't study it). This is probably why I don't make sense.

Naturally, if we regard European Portuguese to be the lexifier of what the Brazilian language became after the Marquis of Pombal banned the Jesuits and their Tupi-based creoles so an enormous community of 1-2 million people speaking the same language was forced to shift to Portuguese, my native language turns out to be a post-post-creole called vernacular Brazilian Portuguese (compare African-American vernacular English) as I was raised by people of worker class and rural or first generation urban backgrounds (actually my mother was the 1st or 2nd nerdiest student as me, had austere Portuguese teachers, and she also became a teacher, so she speaks a high strata of colloquial, but I had little contact with her between 5 and 10 so vernacular is really dominant), and what we learn in school, media, etc. that is supposedly more "educated" are just different strata of colloquial Brazilian Portuguese, a post-post-post-creole that is still relatively grammatically simplified in relation to standard European Portuguese... But this question should be avoided altogether as Brazilian Portuguese is still Standard Average European, everyone gets confused learning English grammar including the natives, and Ibero-Americans in general seem to get troubled in this same problem. Lguipontes (talk) 09:17, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Getting to the point now, should I always use parentheses after the period if it got a subject+predicate? This is a relatively easy task, I thought it would be a lot harder, the sentence article doesn't really shout in my face "HEY YOUR LIFE IS A LIE, your phrases are sentences and you don't even have a term for the true phrases!", but usage in Wikipedia isn't this exact, it seems that not all sentences are this simple, and people do it many more times, including pieces that I believe to not be sentences but can't really be certain (why, English, why?).
Also, I'd find much easier in those cases to just don't use parentheses at all except if both commas and dashes can't really be used, what returns back to my initial question, if English would really get poorer without this, but then who would be me, a high school student, trying to re-build the world's lingua franca that isn't even my native language, learned amateurly (in Brazil we can magically make nouns become verbs and adverbs if we don't find an adequate one, actually at least 10% of Portuguese verbs were created this way AFAIK, LOL) in the internet in a meantime of 3 years, so my proposal is moot if it really violates English rules (I thought it didn't, that it was just a matter of style and customizable).
I didn't really get what Wtmitchell said, but it seems to me that he agrees that full sentences inside brackets should take a period as standard in English (I really got it), but it would be best avoided (what I proposed is that if it is choice we could put it orthographically in the former sentence before the period of that one, since it is entirely nonstandard in English and I won't question it, avoiding it to the highest possible level would also work – that is what I do, I use dashes when commas aren't sufficient). Lguipontes (talk) 09:17, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
“You don't even have a term for the true phrases” – well, actually you do. — A. di M.  10:50, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I meant my native, and my education languages (the popular, and the educated – not to be confused with the formal – variants of BP), of course there would be Portuguese-speakers studying this subject somewhere in the world if such knowledge is so pervasively necessary for understanding the grammar of global, closely-related, historically powerful, languages. Thanks a lot. The source is UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in the top 7 of our best Universities). Not exactly surprised that I never heard of such term in my whole life. I am a lot interested in Linguistics, but this grew once I already understood English and so could read generally better and more easily findable sources, and I focus a lot more on phonetics than on other elements. Lguipontes (talk) 18:46, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Good point – in Italian, for example, sintagma does exist but it's way, way less common than phrase in English: in non-technical contexts people would just say something like espressione; is there anything similar in Portuguese? — A. di M.  09:51, 10 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
A common term for our sintagma, to which even Google Translate seems to go a bit WTF? I've never heard of anything like that. Neither did my mother nor some of my online friends when I told them about the information I discovered because of the answers to this section. Expressão translates as... well, look it by yourself http://translate.google.com.br/#pt/en/express%C3%A3o The closest to sintagma in those Portuguese re-translations I'm used to IMO is locução, but it sounds terribly like a bizarre term we Brazilians only ever have to deal with in our Portuguese classes. Particularly, I use expressão most often in the sense of vocábulo and never would thought a synonym of it in another language would translate as locução. Lguipontes (talk) 01:35, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Semicolon misused to bold a line

Template:Formerly

See Help talk:Wiki markup#semicolon issue?. --  Gadget850 (Ed) talk 10:46, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am revising the heading of this section from Do not use a semicolon (;) simply to bold a line without defining a value using a colon (:). This usage renders invalid HTML5. to Semicolon misused to bold a line, in harmony with WP:TPOC, point 13 (Section headings). Please see Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines (Alertbox).
—Wavelength (talk) 14:25, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The line "Do not use a semicolon (;) simply to bold a line without defining a value using a colon (:). This usage renders invalid HTML5." had been inserted into the MOS, after a similar warning was added without discussion to the markup wikihelp at H:DL. If there's a bug in bad HTML generation, someone should work on figuring out what to do about that. And if it it preferred style to not use semicolons for minor bold headings, we should say that without reference to HTML bugs. Has there ever been any style advice about this widely used construct? Apparently, from the discussion, using a colon to indent a line has exactly the same issues, so we should work those out. Dicklyon (talk) 14:39, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I revised the wikicode of "Bone cell" at 15:10, 12 April 2013 (UTC).
—Wavelength (talk) 15:18, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Let's keep this centralized on the help talk page. --  Gadget850 (Ed) talk 15:25, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
There are separate issues here, and the help pages as they say are very thinly attended. Whatever we decide there, we don't need to mention HTML generation bugs in the MOS. Dicklyon (talk) 16:00, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The use of the colon for indent does render with definition list markup. The W3C validation tool does not give an error on this use, so perhaps the tool is in error. I have never understood why the indent markup renders in this manner.
And to clarify: The HTML5 spec added the must. The semicolom markup usage did not fail validation until we switched to HTML5 in Sptember 2012, but it was still semantically incorrect. --  Gadget850 (Ed) talk 16:24, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

On the subject of list definitions, is it okay to use list-definition formatting when followed by a bulleted list, like this:

Three parts of the finger
  • Tip
  • Middle
  • Base

Is this invalid? It doesn't seem like it should be, but that doesn't always stop the standards committees. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:19, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

May I have this in English again, please?

...the suggestions that appear as users insert text ignore straight double quotation marks.... I've re-read this section more than 5 times now, but I just can't get the meaning. Can anyone help? Does it maybe denote "user-inserted text" (inserted text by the user)? Enigmatic ... -andy 217.50.46.182 (talk) 12:00, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Let me parse it for you: as users insert text in the search box, suggestions appear, and these suggestions ignore straight double quotation marks. I agree that the sentence could be written more clearly.—Emil J. 12:15, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
And why is this an argument for using straight rather than curly quotation marks? If anything, it seems to speak the other way (or not to matter at all, given that there would be redirects from one format to the other). Victor Yus (talk) 14:06, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"known mononymously"

Someone has developed a hobby of introducing the obscure word "mononymously" into every lead it can possibly fit into. It's bad style for an encyclopedia; it has the feel of a teenager trying to sound smart. Can we agree that this is silly, and that the word should only be used where it's really needed? —Gendralman (talk) 01:07, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I can agree. JIMp talk·cont 01:22, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Cadastral Map

Can i change google satellite image to GEO Tiff file by global mapper software and can i draw cadastral map to this GEO Tiff image by geomedia software.

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