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• WT:MOS

Is MoS committed to observing WP:VERIFY?

Please take a look at Talk:The_Beatles/Archive_19#reliable_sources_using_"the_Beatles"_or_"The_Beatles". Thank you, Espoo (talk) 08:54, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

This issue was decided on that talk page on the basis of an opinion poll, not use in reliable sources. Is MoS committed to following most common usage in reliable sources or does WP:VERIFY (WP:RS) only apply to the content of Misplaced Pages articles? It's quite amazing that MoS doesn't say anything about this WP policy or, in fact, anything about how MoS has been or is supposed to be compiled.

Most WP editors consider decisions about capitalisation, spelling, punctuation, etc. to be trivial, and the professional copyeditors trying to make WP articles follow basic standards used in encyclopedias and all professionally edited material are regularly discouraged by being called nitpickers when they try to make Misplaced Pages look at least a bit less amateurish. --Espoo (talk) 17:41, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

The Manual of Style is silent about content standards such as WP:V because it is about, well, style, not content. There are other portions of the site that deal with content issues. At the core of the issue is a content dispute (is the proper name of the group "Beatles" or "The Beatles"?) and not a style dispute (should "the" be capitalized?). If you are unable to reach consensus among the existing participants, may I suggest dispute resolution, perhaps starting with a request for comment, as a more appropriate way to resolve the issue? --Clubjuggle /C 18:31, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually no, this is not a content issue. Nobody is really disputing that the definite article is usually part of the name or that the name sometimes occurs without it. The issue is purely a style issue, namely whether or not to capitalise the article when it is used in the middle of a sentence. (Please take a look at the sources at the link provided.) Thanks for your suggestions about what to do next, but perhaps they aren't the best next steps if this is indeed a style issue?--Espoo (talk) 15:28, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

The use of reliable sources only applies to articles (and to derogatory information about living persons anywhere). Trying to decide style issues on the basis of reliable sources can get tricky, because you have to decide which reliable sources? The ones cited in the article? Sources in the same general field in the article? Sources aimed a at a general readership? Style manuals? Dictionaries? --Gerry Ashton (talk) 18:28, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

In cases where about equal numbers of reliable sources use two or more different possible ways of writing something, Misplaced Pages and its MoS are of course free to choose any of those ways. But if almost all reliable sources use only one of two or more different ways, Misplaced Pages should perhaps start to apply WP:VERIFY to style issues (and update WP:VERIFY to include style issues) to stop unnecessary and senseless bickering and stop wasting huge amounts of time of editors and admins and all the good people in the various dispute resolution and arbitration committees. Additional reasons to start to apply WP:VERIFY to style issues in clearcut cases (large majority of reliable sources) is to make WP look less amateur and to not make especially the most qualified copyeditors so frustrated that they no longer contribute to WP.

The specific issue of trying to decide on the basis of reliable sources whether to write "member of the Beatles" or "member of The Beatles" is very easy and not at all tricky to decide since the overwhelming majority of reliable sources found by all members of the discussion uses "the Beatles" in running text. --Espoo (talk) 15:28, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

There is general agreement that naming conventions are more generally applicable than style guidelines (because if you get the name in the title wrong, people might not even be able to find the page), and that WP:NAME is the granddaddy of the naming conventions. In the first section, that says: "Misplaced Pages determines the recognizability of a name by seeing what verifiable reliable sources in English call the subject." It seems like this makes your case. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 12:44, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

This has come up before (see archives). For some bands (and other organizations) the consensus is that "the" is optional (this can often be determined by finding out what their official incorporated name is, what all their album covers say, or some other primary source) - generally used in referring to them ("the Ramones") because English just works that way, but not part of the actual name. In the case of many bands it is part of the name, and as long as they use it consistently, prefer the capitalization scheme of the band ("Foo Bar and The Baz Quuxes" or "Foo Bar and the Baz Quuxes"), as this is an indication of "official" name. If it isn't consistent, go with most-attested usage, e.g. "The The", even if "the The" can sometimes be found. I have no idea what it is for he] Beatles.— SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 23:19, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Animals, plants, and other organisms

I often contribute to articles that incorporate references to both flora and different animal taxa. Consistent presentation of the species names with respect to capitalisation is a challenge. I therefore propose the following change to be added at the end of this section:

"For articles incorporating a variety of taxa:

• piped links shall be used to create a consistency of appearance using title case per WP:BIRDS for species names.
• lower case shall be used for entries that are either very common (dog, cat) or are not species such as eagle or bilberry."

This has been used in various FA's and GA's (St Kilda, Scotland, Fauna of Scotland, Black Moshannon State Park, Geography of Newfoundland and Labrador, River Torrens, Fauna of Australia) without any complaint. A short essay on the reasoning behind the proposal is available here. Ben MacDui 11:33, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

The place to get consensus on this is WP:TOL, not here. I'm implacably opposed to adding this or anything like it here, unless it has the backing of the TOL people. Hesperian 12:50, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Title case for animal names is just ridiculous in an encyclopedia. If the BIRDS people want to make Bird-opedia, by all means they can then break whatever capitalization rules they want. In a general encyclopedia animals should all be lowercase, all the time (unless the name itself legitimately has a reason for being capitalized, such as a proper noun within the name). DreamGuy (talk) 13:46, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

You'd be right if the birds people had confabulated their capitalisation convention. But in fact they are adhering to a long-established real-world convention within their field. Do you think it is appropriate to prescribe a "rule" that prevents them from writing articles that conform with the conventions of their field? Hesperian 23:05, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Can we assume you are in favour of the principle, but would prefer lower case? Ben MacDui 16:01, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Hesperian.--Curtis Clark (talk) 15:10, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

I am happy to raise the subject at WP:TOL, but history suggests that such support might be difficult to achieve. In any case, I am principally, although not exclusively, interested in geography articles. If birds, mammals and fish are at liberty to have their own solutions, then presumably the same is true of WP:Geography or indeed any of its related projects. Indeed so far as I can see there is no reason why national based projects should not simply agree their own policies creating further confusion. It is a solution I am trying to avoid, hence my posting this here first. My intention is therefore to direct WP:TOL here (as I did already at Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (fauna)), not have the discussion there. The scope is much wider than is covered by that Project. Ben MacDui 16:16, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't doubt that this is an important topic, nor do I doubt that it will be controversial. I'd like to provide some context that some other editors might not have considered: In many groups of organisms, and in many countries, there is no necessary connection between a common name and a species. The American Robin is Turdus migratorius, and no other, but although "brittlebush" can be applied to Encelia farinosa, there are other plants to which it is also applied. Ornithologists (and evidently lepidoperologists) worldwide, and most -ologists in a number of countries, have found value in designating a more-or-less one-to-one correspondence between species and certain names in the local language, but this practice is not universal. For plants in the US, it generally only applies to those species given formal governmental protection.

Thus, of the following statements,

1. The American Robin perched on the Brittlebush.
2. The American robin perched on the brittlebush.
3. The American robin perched on the Brittlebush.
4. The American Robin perched on the brittlebush.

only number 4 would be correct according to the proposal (brittlebush not being precisely a species), but it would require some amount of additional knowledge of the organisms to make this determination. And it seems that one of the purposes of this proposal would be to make the extra work of such careful determinations unnecessary.

A quick look at Black Moshannon State Park suggests that the careful determination may not have always been made; some uncapitalized names may refer in that specific area to only a single species.--Curtis Clark (talk) 18:42, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

As one of the main authors of Black Moshannon State Park, I can say that we went by the available reliable sources specific to the park that we could find (as we also did in Worlds End State Park, another recent FA that uses this convention). I also would appreciate specific examples of errors to fix them (with refs, if they are not in the article already, please). I agree with MacDui wholeheartedly - as another person who mostly writes geography articles, it is hard to know what to do about plant and animal names, and some sort of consistent policy would be greatly appreciated. Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:22, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Are there more than one species of sphagnum, viburnum, cranberry, blueberry, pitcher plant, sundew, opossum, porcupine, and gypsy moth? Some of those are generally understood to refer to only a single species in the US (opossum, porcupine). Others are more generic (literally and figuratively), but may refer to only a single species in the park. I have no argument with the article; I think it certainly deserves its FA status. But I think that the capitalization of organism names doesn't quite work; if it follows the suggestions above, it creates "unreferenced expectations" about the diversity in the park.--Curtis Clark (talk) 04:46, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing these out. I will be the first to point out that I am not an expert on flora or fauna. The sources I use are typically only descriptions or lists of plants and animals present and usually do not say what species of sphagnum, viburnum, cranberry, blueberry, pitcher plant, sundew, opossum, or porcupine are present, nor do they give binomial names in most cases. I will confess that I typically link the name given and look at the Misplaced Pages article - for all of the examples given, the article says it is a genus or a group of animals or plants, so without a reliable source that said otherwise, I treated these names as refering to a genus and not a species. The articles here also generally just give lists of species in the genus and do not always say which species is present in a specific area. So the opossum article lists many opossums, but only the Virginia opossum article says it is the only one found in North America. I also note the article for Gypsy moth lists a binomial name so I assume it is a species. I am not tied to this system being discussed, but I do think that some way of distinguishing between species and genera would be helpful and useful. Ruhrfisch _><>° 17:42, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Ideally, you shouldn't have to be an expert, because the references would give you the information you need. But alas. I think Hesperian's suggestion below could simplify this, but would you consider your article a bird, a plant, or something else? :-) --Curtis Clark (talk) 01:54, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

PS When I look at the article for Brittlebush, it appears to list it as one species. Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:22, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

The name could well apply to the genus as well; other species are called "California brittlebush", "button brittlebush", "sticky brittlebush", and "Virgin River brittlebush". These are constructed names; none are in use except by land managers, writers of checklists and floras, and the occasional scientist who doesn't know the scientific name.

I understand that you think the article has shortcomings (which can easily be fixed) and that the specific system as proposed has flaws (although I am not sure I understand what you think they are). Am I correct in thinking that if we don't know whether a given Park has a porcupine population or only North American Porcupines that use of the former creates an impression of biodiversity where none exists? Possibly, but if they system were introduced and understood it would potentially flag up the need for further research. I understand the issue, although it does not seem to me as big a problem as the current guddle, which simply creates confusion and inconsistency and makes it easy to hide a lack of understanding. However, and perhaps more importantly, it is not clear to me what you are in favour of. Ben MacDui 08:27, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

1. I have seen no shortcomings in the article, and as I said, it is impressive, as warrants a FA. Application of your suggested rules adds a layer of meta-interpretation, which potentially introduces confusion: names that could have been taken at face value, with nothing read into their capitalization, are now to be interpreted as either species or not-species. I assume that is not your intended goal.
2. Your proposed system (and, sadly, any alternative that I can think of), if done correctly, requires a level of research that is not necessarily directly reflected in the article or its references. If not done right, the errors may not be apparent to the casual reader (of course always an issue in any Misplaced Pages article). An ideal system would be of simple application (e.g., title-case everything), but also not jarring to experts (I find "Arctic Cotton Grass" as jarring as an ornithologist might find "great blue heron"). So AFAICT an ideal system is precluded, and we'll have to agree to something less.
3. My preference is perhaps extremist, and not likely to gain broad support: Species of birds, lepidoptera, and possibly mammals, herps, and fishes should be in the standardized common name used most broadly in the region (it is my understanding that all of these are title case by convention); if such name doesn't exist, the scientific name should be used instead. All other species should use the scientific name. Higher taxonomic groups can use either a name established by a code of nomenclature (e.g. Peromyscus, Asteraceae, Phaeophyta) or a lower-case common name equivalent (deer mice, composites, brown algae). This has the advantage of being easy to apply (once the mammal, herp, and fish folks have weighed in with their preferences), and of explicit precision (Didelphis virginiana makes it quite clear which opossum). It has always irritated me that Robert Mohlenbrock's articles in Natural History have only common names of plants; I often don't know which plants he's talking about.--Curtis Clark (talk) 20:16, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

It looks like this is destined to be discussed here. Personally, I support the MoS recommending consistent presentation of taxa within an article; but I think you are overspecifying how such consistency should be achieved. The correct way to achieve consistency depends on the context and should be an editorial decision.

There is also a related issue which has been overlooked: the order of presentation of common and scientific names. In flora articles, names are generally presented as "Eucalyptus diversicolor (Karri)". In fauna articles, they are presented as Quokka (Setonix brachyurus). In articles that make use of both, there should be consistency, but whether this should be achieved as

Eucalyptus diversicolor (Karri), Setonix brachyurus (Quokka)

or

Eucalyptus diversicolor (Karri), Setonix brachyurus (Quokka)

or

Karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), Quokka (Setonix brachyurus)

or

Karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), Quokka (Setonix brachyurus)

should be an editorial decision per article, not a MoS rule.

Therefore I propose the insertion of something like:

The order of presentation of scientific and common names depends on the context: plant articles usually use "Scientific name (Common Name)", whereas animal articles usually use "Common name (Scientific name)".

and then, to get to the nub of the matter:

The format used should be consistent within each article. For example, an article about a bird should apply the bird conventions on capitalisation and presentation order, to any other animals, and any plants, that it refers to.

Hesperian 00:13, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

This is fine as far as it goes, but what about geography articles, which is what evidently started this? They neither quack like a duck or clamber like a kudzu.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:54, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Who cares, as long as it is consistent? If we make a rule that people have to follow the flora convention, someone will (rightly) complain that they want to follow the bird convention for their article on a bird sanctuary. If we make a rule that people have to follow the bird convention, someone will (rightly) complain that they shouldn't have to follow it for their article on a protected seagrass bank.

If you want an explicit statement, maybe add

Articles on geographic areas and other non-organisms are at liberty to adopt any convention, so long as it is applied consistently. Note, however, that the context will sometimes suggest a convention; for example, an article on a bird sanctuary should follow the bird convention.

Hesperian 03:02, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, some of these geography articles may list dozens of plants and animals. I also note that the system of capitalizing species and leaving genus and groups lower case is not explicitly explained in the article itself (it is a comment at top if one edits Black Moshannon State Park). One concern I had not thought of until now is that in some cases a genus or group is linked, where a species should be (Opossum vs Virginia opossum). So my guess is the casual reader may not even notice the capitalization or understand it if they do notice it, but anyone who clicks the link gets the less specific article in some cases. Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:05, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Responses to the above:

• An ideal system is only precluded if members of WP:TOL and its sub-braches put the interests of their specialisations before those of the encyclopaedia as a whole.
• The use of common names in geographical etc. articles is, by convention, always preferred. The issue may need to be addressed explicitly if this is not the case already.
• Geographical and other general articles quack like a duck and clamber like a kudzu. That is the issue at hand.
• In my view it is ludicrous to imagine that a convention can be agreed on an article-by-article basis. There are for example about 200 Scottish island articles about which natural history is an issue of import. There must be tens of thousands across Misplaced Pages. A Project-by-Project basis might work. Far from ideal but at least consistent with the WP:TOL debacle.
• The bird sanctuary issue is an interesting variant. I (reluctantly) agree that articles that fall broadly within the scope of a WP:TOL project should use the relevant convention for that project.

Several questions seem to be emerging:

1) Is it appropriate to have a system for articles that cover two or more taxonomic groups to have a consistent style of capitalisation for species?

2) Should such articles, if they are of a non-specialist nature, use common names (appropriate to the location they describe) in preference to scientific names where possible?

3) Should articles that cover two or more taxonomic groups but that fall broadly within the scope of a WP:TOL project use the relevant convention for that project e.g. bird sanctuaries use WP:BIRDS?

4) Should consistency for general articles that cover two or more taxonomic groups be applied on the basis of:

a) A Misplaced Pages-wide agreement

b) A Project-by-Project basis

c) An article-by-article basis?

It may be too early for formal expressions of support, but at this stage mine would be: Yes, Yes, Yes and (in order of decreasing preference) 4a and 4b. (3) may need a little more definition – River Torrens for example may be a body of mostly fresh water, but that does not make it an article about freshwater fish.

Once these general questions are dealt with, the issue of which system to use and how it should be agreed upon, becomes germane. Ben MacDui 15:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

I am also a yes, yes, yes, and 4a then 4b person. Just to point out a potential problem with the Bird Sanctuary argument though (3, above), I am currently working on Leonard Harrison State Park (LHSP) Pennsylvania (and to give more scale to the issues faced here, in this one of the 50 United States, there are 120 state parks, 20 state forests, and over 60 State Natural Areas, plus various federal areas). Anyway, LHSP is part of a National Natural Landmark, a State Natural Area (technically it is in two of them), the creek that flows through it is protected as a state scenic and wild river, and the good people at the Pennsylvania Audubon Society have included it in an Important Bird Area (IBA). So would the convention for birds apply as an IBA, or that for fish as a wild river, or what? There are also Important Mammal Areas in Pennsylvania, which can overlap too. Ruhrfisch _><>° 15:56, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

An ideal system is only precluded if members of WP:TOL and its sub-braches put the interests of their specialisations before those of the encyclopaedia as a whole. Who gets to be the judge of what is in the best interests of the encyclopedia as a whole? If every ornithologist in the world capitalises their common names, then WP:BIRDS are entitled to argue that following that convention for birds is in the interests of the encyclopedia as a whole, since not following would make us look silly to ornithologists.

And the silliness issue is important: many academics are willing to discount Misplaced Pages even for such simple things as non-standard capitalization. Stupid and short-sighted, perhaps, but there you have it.--Curtis Clark (talk) 03:02, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

The use of common names in geographical etc. articles is, by convention, always preferred. I dispute this. I have written a number of articles on geographic regions, e.g. Houtman Abrolhos, Warren (biogeographic region); and I certainly haven't encountered or followed any such convention. By 2), I hope you're talking about putting common name first, not using common name only. If you are advocating the use of common name only, then I'm afraid my response would be "absolutely no fucking way".

Although I would not have put it as eloquently as Hesperian, I agree.--Curtis Clark (talk) 03:02, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

But more generally, I come back to the view that there is no broadly accepted convention in the real world, so any attempt to impose such a convention here is pointless, artificial, and doomed to fail. I've tried to offer you something something less ambitious, that you might have some hope of getting past the TOL people; why you would persist with something that you have zero chance of getting approved is beyond me.

Hesperian 23:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

P.S. I must say I find it slightly amusing that this proposal would see me put common names first at Houtman Abrolhos#Flora, but scientific names first at Flora of the Houtman Abrolhos. And all in the name of imposing consistency!

I've been thinking about Hesperian's proposal, and it is very similar to WP:ENGVAR, which actually seems to work well in most cases, especially compared to the alternative of specifying a single variety of English.--Curtis Clark (talk) 03:02, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I'll look at the above in more detail when time permits, but my initial reaction is that whilst these additional challenges are interesting and ultimately more detail will be needed in ensuring that unusual situations can be addressed, what is most interesting is your lack of willingness to address the question at hand - namely, how to deal not with the embarrassment of zoologists writing zoological articles, but of geographers faced with the inconsistency of WP:TOL's 'free-for-all' solution. I will re-read some of the above asap- I don't understand the ENGVAR analogy - unless what you are saying is that the answer to question 1 should be 'No' - consistency of approach shall not be required in such articles. "Who gets to be the judge of what is in the best interests of the encyclopedia as a whole?" Apparently, we do, frightening tho' the thought is. Ben MacDui 08:28, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

You're misrepresenting me. I support each individual article being consistent in the way it refers to taxa; in fact, immediately after you showed the way with this discussion, I went of and imposed consistency on my FAs, e.g. . If you want to be consistent across all the articles that you write, I support that; and if the contributors to U.S. state and national park articles want to put their heads together and agree on writing in a consistent way, I support that. What I don't support is the imposition of a set of thou shalts, that forces people to write in a way that they think is silly, that their readers think is silly, and that experts in their field think is silly. Hesperian 23:22, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Would if then be fair to add your name to the below list as being 1) Yes; 4) First choice (b), Second choice (c)? I am honestly surprised you think it is "silly" for a publication to have a consistent and across-the-board approach to style, but if we are moving towards some kind of compromise whereby projects may determine that within their area of remit that may be something. A problem is that unlike the TOL, our projects don't have an hierarchical structure. Is "Fauna of Scotland" primarily an article about zoology, or an article about Scotland - and who is to decide? Geographers are kindly souls not pre-disposed to edit wars and it may be that there would be few problems in practice. Ben MacDui 07:53, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I've had my quota of having my words twisted around to mean something different. See you round. Hesperian 23:44, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Let me be more explicit about the analogies to WP:ENGVAR. I've listed its subheadings below and discussed how a capitalization scheme similar to Hesperian's would equate.

Consistency within articles

It's either "American Robin" and "Brittlebush" or "American robin" and "brittlebush".

Strong national ties to a topic

A "taxonomic tie" could dictate capitalization (the bird sanctuary example given above), as could a national tie (it is my impression that in the UK plants have "official" capitalized common names, something that does not prevail in the US). This would inform the start of an article, and the items above and below would control subsequent edits.

Retaining the existing variety

Once a capitalization scheme is chosen, subsequent editors will adhere to it.

Like WP:ENGVAR, this has the advantage of easy application. Also like WP:ENGVAR, it will result in some readers being surprised by the article, but at least there's a reason. Frankly, I find it an ugly solution, but an effective one.--Curtis Clark (talk) 12:50, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

A few more replies. "any attempt to impose such a convention here is pointless, artificial, and doomed to fail." Why? This seems to me to be a quite ordinary idea that simply requires a little compromise for the sake of a better encyclopedia and to avoid endless quibbling. I am not implacably opposed to the use of scientific names, but there use seems to me to be unnecessary in geography articles as it is both hard to read, especially for general readers, and the suggested use is not consistent either. Currently there is clearly a lack of consensus here at least. I am not unduly concerned - I honestly doubt there are many such articles, but I really don't know. Thirdly, I notice the tendency to continually leap to alternate solutions without discussing the principles. Using the above questions I think we currently have.

1) Is it appropriate to have a system for articles that cover two or more taxonomic groups to have a consistent style of capitalisation for species?

• • • Yes
      • Ben MacDui
      • Ruhrfisch
      • Curtis Clark (qualified yes, depending on larger context)--Curtis Clark (talk) 13:34, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

2) Should such articles, if they are of a non-specialist nature, use common names (appropriate to the location they describe) in preference to scientific names where possible?

• • • Yes
      • Ben MacDui
      • Ruhrfisch
    • No
      • Curtis Clark
      • Hesperian

3) Should articles that cover two or more taxonomic groups but that fall broadly within the scope of a WP:TOL project use the relevant convention for that project e.g. bird sanctuaries use WP:BIRDS?

• • • Yes (with some qualifications)
      • Ben MacDui
      • Ruhrfisch
      • Curtis Clark
      • Hesperian

4) Should consistency for general articles that cover two or more taxonomic groups be applied on the basis of:

a) A Misplaced Pages-wide agreement

• • • First Choice
      • Ben MacDui
      • Ruhrfisch

b) A Project-by-Project basis

• • • Second Choice
      • Ben MacDui
      • Ruhrfisch

c) An article-by-article basis?

My apologies if I am either omitting or misrepresenting anyone's views. Just trying to make a start and see where there is and isn't agreement. It seems pointless discussing the details if we are at odds over the principles.

Finally, I don't grok the ENGVAR analogy or how it fits into these questions. I will have to re-read the above. Ben MacDui 16:32, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Nope - I don't get it. It is quite usual to see species names capitalised in the UK, but lower case is also used extensively. Different publications seem to create their own systems. It sounds like a vote for 4(b) or possibly 4(c) as I know of no obvious external system to draw upon, which is what ENGVAR is based on. Ben MacDui 16:42, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

First, I strongly disagree that scientific names are "hard to read, especially for general readers"—nine-year-old boys don't have much issue with dinosaur names.

Second, my whole point in reframing was to show that there were disagreements over the principles. Ben MacDui and Hesperian have both presented proposals (I discount mine as unworkable), and the evident situation that they are not being directly compared suggests that we are all at some level still trying to solve different issues.

Third, I'll try again with ENGVAR: This was an intractable problem at a global level. No one (save perhaps Jimbo) was ever going to be able to dictate a single variety of English for all of Misplaced Pages. The solution was to let it be decided on an article-by-article basis. Hesperian has suggested much the same for common name capitalization. (Btw, User:MPF might disagree about UK capitalization)--Curtis Clark (talk) 13:34, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I have a few thoughts on scientific names. First, while I agree with it, the dinosaur example is a bit of an exception because there are no common names for most dinosaurs (i.e. no one says "Really Long Long-neck" for Diplodocus). Second, while I know that a Quercus is an oak and Acer is a maple and Tsuga is a hemlock, that is near the limit of my knowledge - if I see Prosopocoilus biplagiatus I have no idea it is a beetle (I looked up a stag beetle up to get a name). My guess is that I am the exception rather than the rule and most readers know fewer Latin / scientific names than I do. Third, since this discussion started about parks and geography articles, many of the sources for such places use only common names. For example, I just finished working on a state park article where the gorge the park is in has "foxes". Which of the nine genera listed at fox do I put in the article, probably Vulpes as it is in Pennsylvania, and perhaps the red fox? In other words, there will be articles for which no scientific name is known or can be found from reliable sources (at least without doing lots of other work that is not needed otherwise). Just trying to show the other point of view, Ruhrfisch _><>° 16:23, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The species Prosopocoilus biplagiatus evidently has no common name (most insect species don't), and I don't think any of us disagree that stag beetle, as a name for a group of species, should be lower case. But if one wanted to refer to Prosopocoilus biplagiatus in an article, that's the only way to do it.

But there is a deeper issue than capitalization, what I think of as the evil underbelly of WP:NOR. Let's say I'm writing an article about a park, and my reference on the animals says that opossums live there. A quick check in a general book on mammals tells me that the only "opossum" in that area is Didelphis virginiana. If I substitute Virginia opossum it would seem extreme to call that original research. But what if it also says "foxes" live there. My mammal reference says that both Vulpes vulpes and Urocyon cinereoargenteus are to be expected. I've seen both in the park, and so I include both in the article. But there is no reference that is more specific than "foxes" for the park. Is it original research?

It seems to me that the bulk of organism names in such an article will be either common names of groups of species ("sedges") or common names of species of birds, mammals, and perhaps herps. There will be an occasional plant or insect species, but most of the plant and insect references will be to larger groups. If you were to capitalize when you know it's a species, and lower-case everything else, you'd end up following the rules of most of the projects most of the time, pretty much by default.

The more I think about this, the more I don't see a need for an MoS rule. I think a guideline of "capitalize when you know it's a species, and lower-case everything else" suffices, and leaves latitude for editors to do it other ways if they have a reason.--Curtis Clark (talk) 17:44, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Yup, and reading "fox" makes it clear the author is unsure of the species, whilst "Fox" suggests they have not done thier research.

I still don't get the ENGVAR analogy. I understand how it applies to the use of common names for species e.g. you can call a Great Skua a "Bonxie" in Scotland, and an "Elk" in the US is Cervus canadensis, Alces alces in Europe and Cervus unicolor in India etc. What I don't understand is how this applies to capitalisation, which individual publishers, rather than national varieties of English, will usually determine. Ben MacDui 18:40, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

I am pretty much in agreement with Curtis Clark's comments above (17:44, 16 August 2008). How about adding the following guidance at the end of the section:

"In articles that cover two or more taxonomic groups a consistent style of capitalisation should be used for species names. This could involve:

• using scientific names throughout - often appropriate for articles of a specialist nature.
• using title case for common names of species throughout (per WP:BIRDS) and lower case for non-specific names such as eagle or bilberry, which may work well for articles with a broad coverage of natural history.
• using lower case for common names, which may work well for non-specialist articles that happen to refer to various different taxonomic groups."

You'll note that it attempts to make suggestions (which I think are broadly in line with chunks of the discussion above), but is not proscriptive. Ben MacDui 19:50, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

• I would support adding this to the MOS. Thanks for everyone's input, Ruhrfisch _><>° 18:40, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

• I can live with that.--Curtis Clark (talk) 15:44, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Done - thanks for your patience folks. Ben MacDui 07:17, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm entering this discussion (or rather this variant of the discussion; this debate has raged for years in more forums that can be counted) late, but have to say that I absolutely and most vehemently as possible oppose this ridiculous proper-nouning and capitalization of things that are not proper nouns and should not be capitalized. It makes WP look like it was written by 8-year-olds (or Germans; their language capitalizes many things that Modern English would not). It does not matter that birdwatchers and ornithologists like to do this in books and even scientific papers about birds. Misplaced Pages is not a birdwatching guide nor a treatise in a journal, it is an encyclopedia for a general audience who cannot be expected to know or understand that birders have collectively chosen, in their own bailiwick, to ignore English grammar rules for whatever reasons. The only rationale other than "we like it that way" that the birder editing crowd has ever offered that I've seen is that is somehow disambiguates. The story goes like this: "If we don't capitalize, no one will know if we mean the species American Robin, or a robin of an indeterminate species that happens to be American." This is of course absurd, since at first occurrence the term would be wikilinked to an article or article section on the species in question or would be followed by genus and species if there was no where to link to yet, and on subsequent occurrences would already be clear from the context. I find it really alarming that a one-topic group of editors are taking a really, really weird terminological micro-convention (not used elsewhere in biological/zoological or other scientific circles, and which looks worse than wrong, even downright ignorant, to everyone else - and it's not even a consistent convention in birding circles, just common!), that they and they alone consider appropriate, for a very particular kind of specialist writing, and have been importing it wholesale into Misplaced Pages, a radically different kind of work. I don't care at all how birders write in their own publications, but WP isn't one of them. The bad part of this is, it is actually spreading to other zoology articles, because editors are getting the mistaken impression that this is the way that Misplaced Pages in general wants the common names of species to be handled! Aiieee!

In the very short term, the second bullet point should more explicitly only permit this for bird articles (herpetologists, etc., do not normally do the capitals thing), and should be made the third, not second point, as it is a weird exception not a norm, and enough editors dispute this capitalization of common names in WP articles that it may not survive anyway. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 23:50, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

PS: To answer a question (to someone else) above: "Do you think it is appropriate to prescribe a 'rule' that prevents them from writing articles that conform with the conventions of their field?" Absolutely yes, when their in-their-field convention causes problems (like reader comprehension difficulty and reader assumptions that WP is written by people who have no idea how to capitalize properly, and I can assure you that will be a common assumption among readers of bird articles here) for this out-of-their-field encyclopedia. Someone else wrote, "An ideal system is only precluded if members of WP:TOL and its sub-braches put the interests of their specialisations before those of the encyclopaedia as a whole." And of course this is precisely what is happening (not necessarily at TOL in partiuclar, but all over the place. The birders just want their way, period. In several attempts in various places here, I have never been able to get across to them why this works very poorly in an encyclopedia and is grossly inappropriate. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 00:00, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, we all have our preferences. I myself like title case (although I am by no means a twitcher) and its my assumption (based on watching numerous such articles) that intelligent readers are capable of understanding simple capitalisation conventions. Title case is used in a wide variety of articles that have already passed GA and FA (see above) and whether or not you would choose to use it yourself, it's here. The aim of the additional wording is to ensure consistency within articles so that we avoid sentences like "The Golden Eagles predate on mountain hares who make their forms in the Calluna vulgaris," not to start proscribing conventions that are already established. The most accomplished project in the field is probably Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Australian biota and they don't seem to be bothered by what you see as "grossly inappropriate". I'd be happy to dialogue about the wider MOS mess and its possible solutions of course, but if you think title case should be banned I suggest you start another thread and invite those affected to join it. Ben MacDui 08:20, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, your rant boils down to:

Premise: Proper nouns should be capitalised; common nouns should not.

Premise: The vernacular names of species are common nouns not proper nouns.

Conclusion: The vernacular names of species should not be capitalised.

Your logic is sound, and your first premise is a trival fact of grammar, but unfortunately your second premise is merely your opinion, and easily disputed. At the risk of oversimplification, proper nouns refer to unique entities whereas common nouns describe a class of entities. When I say "American Robins are birds", I am using "American Robins" as a common noun. But our articles don't say that; they say "The American Robin is a species of bird", in which case American Robin refers to a unique species by its recognised title. In such contexts it is arguably a proper noun. The situation is certainly not so clearcut as you are making it out to be. Hesperian 11:30, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

WP:SG

WP:SG redirects here, so there should be a hatnote to Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Singapore, and the Singaporean notice board. 70.55.86.69 (talk) 08:50, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

SG as in Style Guide? I'm not sure we need that redirect; statistics here indicate that last June it was used 41 times, as opposed to 6750 times for WP:MOS, 3990 times for WP:STYLE, and... 6 times for WP:MS. The numbers are all higher for May, but there is no significant difference except for the case of WP:STYLE, which is already known to be used. Now, although practical reasons dictate that we shouldn't delete any of our shortcuts, even if pretty much useless—coughMScough—we could "donate" a little-used one to a project with which it might have a greater relevance.

So. Would the Singaporeans' noticeboard want the WP:SG redirect, and would the Manual of Style people want to give it? I think the redirect would be more useful there than here. Waltham, The Duke of 15:44, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Hey, there's a hatnote here about WP:MS; we could certainly hand that over to Misplaced Pages:Music samples. Waltham, The Duke of 16:07, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Should I be bold, then? Waltham, The Duke of 22:34, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Yup. Ben MacDui 09:02, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Transactions completed. Waltham, The Duke of 22:58, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

For MS too, I hope. The fewer hatnotes we have, the faster editors get to the gist of the page. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:50, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, for MS too. Although in this case I'm not sure how active the project is, the shortcut will be better-used by them than by us. And we are left with one hatnote, the utility of which I doubt. Is there a recorded precedent of people looking for this arriving here instead? Waltham, The Duke of 11:34, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Possessives

There seems to be some disagreement as to what proportion of possessive take an extra <s> after /s/ or /z/ and how frequently they do so. Swamilive called for reliable references to prove the claim that most forms take the extra <s>. Dominus gives us The Chicago Manual of Style. I'd be interested to see exactly what the CMOS says but as far as I'm aware, being a manual of style, it prescribes not describes. WP:MOS is not based on any external manual of style but on consensus. So what do we want? JIMp _talk·cont 08:36, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't see that statements about proportions are much use – "some" is most neutral and clearly not wrong. My impression is that modern names tend to take the 's; ancient ones tend not to - I don't know if there would be any grounds for a "rule" along those lines.--Kotniski (talk) 08:48, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Partly an ENGVAR question; American English tends as often to be more regular. In my experience, the possessive of Socrates is pronounced with one terminal sibilant, and it is probably most often spelled Socrates'. The present wording is what MOS should be doing more often; we cannot decide this case-by-case; we don't have room. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:07, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Definitely not in my dialect. However spelled, it would be pronounced "Sok-ra-teez-ɘz", because without the extra syllable it suggests the possessive of someone named Socratee. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:52, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

The Chicago Manual of Style's was being cited for description, not for prescription. Section 7.17 is titled "Possessives: Most nouns" and says "The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s, and the possessive of plural nouns (except for a few irregular plurals that do not end in s) by adding an apostrophe only." This is a simple and accurate statement of the facts. I did not think this would be a contentious point, and cited CMOS as only one of a million sources that would have said the same thing. -- Dominus (talk) 18:34, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm planning to put back language to this effect, since there seems to have been confusion about it in the past. -- Dominus (talk) 13:22, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

There was no objection, so I did this. -- Dominus (talk) 20:36, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Posessives with proper nouns ending in s

From WP:MOS#Posessives

Proper nouns that end with s: There is tension in English over whether just an apostrophe, or an apostrophe and the letter s, should be added to such proper nouns (James' house or James's house, but be consistent within an article). Some forms almost always take an extra s (Ross's father); some usually do not (Socrates' wife; Moses' ascent of Sinai; Jesus' last words).

I was always taught in school (and after double-checking with my mother, an English language professor at a university) that with proper names ending in s, an apostrophe and the letter s should not be added if it creates too much of an ess sound, repeats the ess sound more than twice, or results in more than two ses in sucession.

James's is okay because the s in James is a (soft) z sound, and it should be Jesus', not Jesus's and Moses', not Moses's (results in three esses). However, the MoS offer that Ross's is correct – AFAIK it should be Ross' because that creates three sucessive ses and looks ugly to read.

Is this supported by what other people have learned, or am I way off base? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 08:06, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I think everyone has their own theory about this, including professors;) For me it should be apostrophe+s if you would pronounce an additional syllable (so Ross's, assuming you would pronounce "Rosses parents" rather than "Ross parents"), just apostrophe if not (so Jesus' , assuming you would say "Jesus teachings" rather than "Jesuses teachings"). But then not everyone pronounces them the same way either, so that's not much of a rule.--Kotniski (talk) 08:54, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Hehe, I wasn't saying my mum is right, just that she would have a better idea than I do! Since posting this, I read the article Apostrophy#Singular nouns ending with an "s" or "z" sound, which appears to support the "don't make the ess sound overly repetitive" thing. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 09:02, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Having had the pleasure of dealing with this my whole life, I wholeheartedly support as few exceptions to the "put an S on the end" rule as humanly possible (preferably none, allowing for possessive plurals). There was a fairly in-depth discussion of this on talk:Fitts's law a while back. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:03, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I would pronounce two esses in Fitts's law; omission is for cases like Alcibiades' (mostly Greek names) which voices the terminal s into /z/. For such cases, it is customary; we should not attempt to redesign English. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:42, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

You should pronounce two esses in Fitts's law, otherwise you would be implying to any listener that it's the law of Fitt, not Fitts. I think that's what you were saying to begin with, but I'm not sure. Maybe this is a dialect thing, but I don't think I've ever in my life heard someone say something like "Jesus' last words" where this was not prounounced "Jeezussuz last words", despite the spelling. So mom's maxim about how the word is pronounced doesn't seem to really apply, it's just something someone thought of as a possible explanation for the inconsistency. We have weird stuff like "Jesus'" and "Moses'" because a large number of Americans and Britons are big fans of the King James Bible, written in Late Middle English (when was the last time you were "an hungred"?), when ideas of norms of spelling and punctuation were still in flux, and it uses the truncated form, despite the fact that it conflicts with plural possessives. The farther we can get away from obsolete practices like this, the better. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

For what it's worth, here is what the Chicago Manual of Style has to say on the subject: "The general rule covers most proper nouns, including names ending in s, x, or z, in both their singular and plural forms". But there are a few exceptions: "The possessive is formed without an additional s for a name of two or more syllables that ends in an eez sound." (Examples: "Euripedes'", "Ganges'", "Xerxes'") "To avoid an awkward appearance, an apostrophe without an s may be used for the possessive of singular words and names ending in an unpronounced s." (Note "may".) -- Dominus (talk) 17:04, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

So I see. The second rule, which alone includes may, applies to French words, like Descartes and marquis. There is another optional rule: Simply omit the possessive s after s, but I don't propose we adopt it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:16, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. The CMoS is wacky on a lot of things, and heavily US-biased. Other style guides diverge from it, even if they also recommend "'" instead of "'s" for such names, by defining them not in terms of their form, but as being "names from antiquity". I.e., there is no consistency among paper style guides on this topic. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

There is, however, substantial consistency in practice to omit from certain words. The variance is how to best indicate the class where it is idiomatic to do so; we don't have to, but can delegate that to grammars. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:48, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Question about heading levels

This might sound stupid, but do level 2 headers have three "===" or two "=="? D.M.N. (talk) 16:51, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I think I read that the page title is the level one header, so headers (headings? I can never remember which is which either) with two equal signs are level 2.--Kotniski (talk) 16:55, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The confusion somes from a statement in the "Images" section, which states, "Do not place left-aligned images directly below second-level (===) headings, as this disconnects the heading from the text it precedes." This seems to indicate that second-level headings have three equals signs. Is the guideline supposed to say third-level then? GaryColemanFan (talk) 16:58, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Let's kill the ambiguity and say "below subsection-level (=== or greater) headers". Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:10, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

If this is not a technical problem, let's take it out. There are enough prescriptions in the section already. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:11, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

No, it is a problem - I checked and it does look bad. But I support Chris's rewording (though I think it should be headings not headers after all).--Kotniski (talk) 17:14, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

So, does my original question have a clear answer or not? Does a level 2 header have two or three equal signs? D.M.N. (talk) 17:39, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Two. Hence the name. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:08, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

MOS:IMAGES also says "It is often preferable to place images of faces so that the face or eyes look toward the text." So if a picture is at the beginning of a === section, whether or not the eyes are looking into the text is irrelevant, and it should be on the right anyway? For an example see Degrassi: The Next Generation#Concept Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 18:57, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

If the suggestions conflict, decide which is more important under the circumstances and act accordingly - or find a compromise, like moving the image down a sentence; this is one use for editorial judgment. We should say this. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:37, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The original question wasn't dumb at all; I think there's too much risk that "level two heading" will be misunderstood, so I generally resort to something clumsy like "== heading" (with quotation marks) or "two-equal-sign heading" (without). - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 23:56, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

One, the word is heading. Two, the level is defined by the number of equal signs. Three, I don't know how the guideline came to request right-aligned images for level-three headings and below, but I imagine it was done because level-two headings have a page-wide line which helps define the start of a section. Four, I agree that it should be decided on a case-by-case basis whether an image facing right should follow the rule, but I find that good layout generally has precedence over what at least I consider a minor distraction. I don't think it is a tenable solution to move an image a sentence down, however; perhaps Mr Anderson meant to say "paragraph". Waltham, The Duke of 08:11, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Depends on the image and the text. A paragraph would produce overhang in the Degrassi article linked to above, but is generally a good idea. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 12:45, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

I moved the image down by one paragraph. On my monitor size and resolution there is no overhang.. I don't know about others though. Moving an image down a sentence is difficult. Does the image coding go in the middle of the paragraph? Even saying to move it the end of a line is hard.. where does a line end on different resolutions? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:25, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Action upon consensus

The problematic sentence has persisted on the page and continued to cause confusion. I have taken the above discussion as consensus to change the phrasing to Mr Cunningham's version. Waltham, The Duke of 07:06, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Quotation marks and quote formatting

Logical quotation marks and curly quotes

I could not disagree more with the current MOS policy on punctuation inside/outside quote marks and directed/non-directed (curly/straight) quote marks, and would like to vote that the policy be changed.

Commas and periods should always go inside quote marks, regardless of whether they are part of the material being quoted or not. While doing it the other way may seem more “logical,” it is nevertheless typographically incorrect, and looks messy.

Messy/incorrect: Arthur felt that periods outside quote marks were more “logical”.

Neat/correct: Arthur felt that periods outside quote marks were more “logical.”

Also, directed (curly) quotes should at least be allowed, if not recommended. Again, they look neater, and they’re the professional typographical standard. We want Misplaced Pages to look clean and professional. Felicity4711 (talk) 23:50, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Curly quotes are intollerable because they are too hard to edit. They are not present on typical keyboards, nor are they availabie among the special characters in the edit window. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 00:43, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

See WT:COPYEDIT#Logical quotation for more information. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:44, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Felicity, if we were slaves to CMOS, we'd agree with you. But WP has particular requirements, conditions, and readership profile; CMOS and most other guides are primarily intended for hard-copy text. In particular, WP places high value on the sanctity of original quotations; thus, if there is no period or comma at the end of "the original quotation," we should not deceive our readers into thinking there was, or "might have been." The typographical correctness that Felicity refers to was a preference long ago by manual typesetters for the quotation marks rather than a dot or comma to lie at the end of a segment. That this is retained in a modern guide (incidentally, one that often doesn't take its own advice) is a reflection on its utter conservatism in the modern era.

Anderson will take this opportunity to peddle his "do as you please" policy, but that has been argued and rebutted countless times, so spare us please, just once? Tony (talk) 01:45, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Agree with Tony, Dan and Gerry. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:16, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

We've been down this road quite a few times. You can search the Talk:MOS namespace for the previous protracted cycles of discussion. Strad (talk) 06:17, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

• By now, more people have objected than supported; unfortunately, like yourself, they come one at a time, and are shouted down by the usual handful. Ignore this page, if you like; it may well mean that you won't get FA, but FA is a dubious process for this reason among others. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:51, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

"While doing it the other way may seem more “logical,” it is nevertheless typographically incorrect, and looks messy". To you, because that's the style you've always used. There's nothing inherently "correct" about either of them. Ilkali (talk) 20:56, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

The same can be said for personal preferences, induced by education, between AD and CE. Nevertheless, we have agreed to live and let live on these. Except in the rare cases where the terminal punctuation is significant, we should do so here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:00, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

While I won't take sides on where to put the period, I'd like to point out that every usage of quotation marks here has been incorrect. There's no reason to put them around logical or correct at all. Reywas92 21:08, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

WP:KETTLE. There's nothing incorrect about using quotation marks to delimit words-as-words. It's a stylistic preference just like the topic of this thread; some prefer italics, some don't. MOS explicitly allows both, because either usage can be virtually impossible to distinguish from other uses of italics or quotation marks used for other purposes in some articles (e.g. articles with a great number of foreign words and phrases, all in italics; one would want to use quotation marks for English-language words-as-words, to distinguish them from the italicized foreign material). — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 16:36, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

The words-as-words part is correct, but, for example, the usage of quotation marks in the original post do not refer to the word "logical" and are incorrect. I'm not sure how kettle applies as I didn't do anything wrong myself. Reywas92 20:01, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm tempted to slap a {{Resolved}} on this, as perennial rehash. This non-issue has been beaten to death again and again and again. WP uses logical quotation for a reason (namely that it's, well, logical). It is unambiguous, and quotes sources precisely, not questionably. Period. End or story. Please drive through. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 16:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

HTML <q> element_element-Quotation_marks_and_quote_formatting-2008-08-18T14:15:00.000Z">

Does anyone know why <q> tags are filtered by the Wiki software? They're handy because they delegate the decision over what quote type to use to CSS, so every user can choose whatever they prefer. Ilkali (talk) 14:15, 18 August 2008 (UTC)_element"> _element">

Because the quotation marks don't actually exist in the content at all. Misplaced Pages is open content that can be repurposed any way anyone in the world wants to (with credit), including non-HTML uses, HTML uses with other stylesheets, etc., even plain ASCII text; and some browsers don't support stylesheets to begin with. The content has to be 100% complete in the actual rendered HTML, with or without a stylesheet. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 16:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

"Misplaced Pages is open content that can be repurposed any way anyone in the world wants to". We already have embedded HTML and Wiki-specific markup. How would this be any different?

Is there some statement somewhere of what percentage of internet users should be able to view Misplaced Pages properly? How many people are actually using browsers that neither process stylesheets nor provide default rendering for <q> tags? Ilkali (talk) 17:35, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

The difference is that if I copy-paste an entire article or some segment of it into an plain-text e-mail (as many of us regularly do), all that is lost is visual formatting - bold, italics, etc. - none of the content. If we use <q> that would no longer be true. This is the same reason that {{Frac}} exists (as I recently learned). I have no idea if there is any kind of policy or other statement on percentages. As for your last question, the answer is "lots". Not many in North America or the UK, mind you, but there are many very poor places where many people speak English (Jamaica, Liberia, etc.), and the few that have computers mostly have crappy old ones, with old operating systems, old browsers, and dial-up connections that cost by-the-minute (which is why there are guidelines about article size limits, and why the WP/Commons image system makes small versions of images on the fly, and dosen't just inline the full-size version with <img width="X" height="Y"...>, etc., etc.) The en.wikipedia is for those people too. PS: I am hardly the only one to criticize W3C for <q> and various other blatant violations of the separate-content-and-presentation paradigm of the semantic web that linger on in HTML. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 04:05, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

"if I copy-paste an entire article or some segment of it into an plain-text e-mail (as many of us regularly do), all that is lost is visual formatting". There're a number of exceptions to that, including uses of templates (ever wanted to paste a table?) and places where formatting is highly meaningful. Why wouldn't you copy the rendered material rather than the source?

"I am hardly the only one to criticize W3C for <q> and various other blatant violations of the separate-content-and-presentation paradigm of the semantic web". What? <q> embodies that paradigm! "This is a quote" is semantic. "This is surrounded by quotation marks" is presentational. Ilkali (talk) 08:04, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, tables have always been a problem and always will be; no one in the world seems to have a solution to that problem, and it has nothing to do with what WP can, should or will do. As for the second point, let's not be silly; the quotation marks are part of the content, inextricably and indivisibly, no less so than any other form of punctution. "This is surrounded by quotations marks" is semantic, because it is the demarcation boundary of the (also semantic) "this is a quotation". "This is surrounded by this particular style of quotations marks" is presentational. There could have been an HTML + CSS way of allowing flexibility with regard to the presentation that did not muck up the semantics, but W3C dropped the ball on that, back in the 1990s, and now we're stuck with it for the forseeable future. (Another uck fup of this kind is lists - the bullets and numbering are not copy-pasteable, in any browser I'm aware of. Oops.) This will almost certainly have to ultimately be fixed at the browser level (i.e. a preferences/settings switch to auto detect quotation marks (in any of at least 5 different styles) around arbitrary content and render them the way the end-user prefers, just as most modern browsers can do different things to links (underline or not, obey CSS or always use the same colors, etc.), or use a specific minimum font size, or whatever. It's not a WP issue. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 12:06, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

<q> is no more appropriate "separation of presentation from content" than would be forgoing full stops in favor a <sentence> tag. --Random832 (contribs) 14:37, 26 August 2008 (UTC)_element"> _element">

RFC: Formatting of block quotations

Template:RFCstyle

One thing I have noticed is that the manner in which quotes are formatted is sometimes different in the same articles many places here at Misplaced Pages. Example: Quackwatch. In some articles some of the quotes are indented in the simple and normal ":" or "*" manners, while others are indented and formatted using the <blockquote> or {{quote}} template formats.

This is an unfortunate way in which editorial POV can creep into an article. An editor can insert a quote and make it more noticeable than other quotes. Either positive or critical quotes can end up getting highlighted! It may even happen with no greater ulterior motive than personal preference for a certain method of formatting, but the results are still not right. I think all quotes should use the simple wiki markup ":" or "*" methods of indenting, unless there is some special reason not related to editorial POV for doing otherwise. It isn't proper to highlight some quotes in big quote boxes, while others are kept more obscure, sometimes even hidden as part of the inline text, even though the quotes are several lines long. MOS allows both methods, but I find it to be misused at times, and would rather avoid making POV differences.

I have undone such formatting (the last two methods) in several places where I have found it.

Proposal. I would like to see our MOS guidelines modified to ensure that POV-style quoting formats aren't used anymore, at least in controversial articles. In other places it is very appropriate to use nice quote boxes. My main point is that POV-driven use of quote formatting be forbidden.-- Fyslee / talk 04:56, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

• Comment. * is inappropriate; long quotations are supposed to be indented, not bulletted. <blockquote> and {{quote}} both indent the quotation and make the text smaller (they don't put a box around the quotation), and I find them to be most appropriate for long quotations for two reasons: (1) The smaller text size makes it easier to visually differentiate the quotation from the surrounding paragraphs (this is done in printed works as well), and (2) the use of special tags provides metadata for editors and software, and allows uniform changes to quotation formatting across all articles. As far as templates like Template:Quotation, Template:Cquote, and Template:Rquote, I agree that they absolutely should not be used for anything but pull-quotes and similar special-effects quotations (epigraphs; quotations from the subject of an article, if appropriate; etc). This is already made very clear on the Cquote page, but not on very many of the other special quotation templates. Strad (talk) 06:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Comment: I agree with Strad; Cquote and other "quotation special effects" are utterly inappropriate as substitutes for simply block-quoting; I nuke them on sight. Come to think of it, I have never even once seen an article appropriately use Cquote and its ilk; the only time I've ever seen a valid use for it has been in the "Misplaced Pages:" namespace, when it was used for pull-quotes from policy/guideline/essay pages. Someone with a few minutes, please go copy the "don't abuse this" documentation from Cquote to the other templates like it! I would, but I have to run... — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 04:21, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

• Thanks for the information. My main point in the above is that POV-driven use of quote formatting be forbidden. I'll add that to the above. -- Fyslee / talk 06:43, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

• We could have language reminding people that undue emphasis on one quote against another can be unneutral. But attempting to fix this by a standard quotation technique, independent of warranted emphasis, length, and clarity, would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:35, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

• Such wording is just what we need. -- Fyslee / talk 14:24, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Quoting from comics

I asked this at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style (capital letters) but haven't received a reply. I figure this is a more watched place, so I bring it here.

Most text which appears in comics is written upper case. When I've quoted this, I tend to place it in sentence case as appropriate. Sometimes certain parts of the text is in bold, for emphasis. Would we still embolden it, or instead italicise for emphasis? Hiding T 10:47, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Also, what about sound effects. I read a review of a collection the other day which made a good and useful point about sound effects being examples of Onomatopoeia. Would we still reduce those to sentence case? I'm thinking of KRA-KOW and the like. Admittedly it would be nicer to excerpt the actual art containing the lettering to better illustrate any such point, but where that's not possible it would be good to get some guidance. Hiding T 10:51, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I would a) not do it in upper case, as that is simply a font styling matter; b) use bold or italics (some comics do in fact use slanted text for emphasis sometimes) as the original did; and c) for sound effects and other strange forms of emphasis, because they are again just matters of visual font styling, use lower case and either bold or italics as appropriate. An explosion might be ka-boom or even ka-boom depending on how it was done in the original art, and a quiet knife sound effect might be snik (actually a big explosion would probably be an exclamatory onomatopoeic sentence by itself: Ka-boom!) Just my opinion, based on how this sort of thing is handled in pure-text novels sci-fi novels and the like, and how most editors seem to render this sort of material in trascription from film or television. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 04:15, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

You pretty much mirror my own thinking. Thanks for the reply and confirmation. I'll add that to the comics style guide. Hiding T 17:19, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm having difficulty understanding why comic book text would be quoted in the first place. It's not like we're referring to what some expert said on some nonfiction topic. DreamGuy (talk) 22:35, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

With a "BOP!", Fatman said "only a dummy would run into my tummy!" --NE2 22:50, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Block quote clarification

Currently Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style#Quotations reads "Block quotations A long quote (more than four lines, or consisting of more than one paragraph, regardless of number of lines) is formatted as a block quotation, which Wikimedia's software will indent from both margins." The problem as I see it is that "four lines" is really system and browser dependent - I recently switched computers and things that were four lines on my old system are now only two or three lines. Would it make sense to express this as a number of characters (preferred) or to specify a screen resolution? Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>° 04:37, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Good point. About how many characters is "four lines" in a Misplaced Pages article, in 12 pt type at 1024x768 and full-screen browser window? How many "words" does this equate to? (I forget what the average word length is.) — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 12:09, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

The question is: what do we want? more than about 60 words or 300 characters seems about right. We should use both words and characters; it depends on what you're doing which is easier to count. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:03, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I think the standard in legal writing, per the Bluebook, is to indent a quotation if it's at least two sentences or at least 50 words. JamesMLane t c 16:21, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Having to count the words or characters is a bit a hassle. How about giving a guideline in terms of lines of wikicode? The edit box has a standard width (unless someone uses some script to resize it, but then that's their problem). --Itub (talk) 13:31, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. While this would work for unlinked text, any sort of links would throw this off. DYK hooks can't be more than 200 characters long and that does not seem to be a huge problem. PArtof why I brought this up here was because I was not sure how to solve the problem myself, Ruhrfisch _><>° 14:21, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

And the length of a line in editing space is machine-dependent. Estimate it roughly for youself (probably somewhere around 75 characters), and then multiply; this isn't intended to be a hard boundary. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:15, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

All of which brings us back to the original question - what should the minimum length of a block quote be in terms of characters / words? Ruhrfisch _><>° 15:38, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

←Last discussion was Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_101#Block_quotes:_four_lines_or_four_sentences.3F. In the section #Punctuation inside/outside quotation marks below, you see a lot of short sentences that look like blockquotes; that wouldn't look good in an article. On the other hand, 150-character blockquotes are not uncommon in U.S. magazines and journals, if there's a reason to draw special attention to the quote. I don't have any particular talent in layout, but if nothing else is creating whitespace in the vicinity, I don't see the problem with this, and it doesn't seem to me to violate the look-and-feel of mature WP articles. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:22, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Punctuation inside/outside quotation marks

Pardon me for bringing up something you've no doubt covered before. Here's a quote from MoS at present: "Punctuation marks are placed inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation". Up till very recently I took this to mean: "only put the punctuation inside the quotation marks if it would be nonsensical to have it outside, ok?" But now I examine the examples given, I reach the conclusion that the punctuation should be outside the quotation marks only if "a clause or phase is quoted", but "If a whole sentence is quoted then the fullstop should be inside the quotation marks." This means that a perfectly innocuous passage of text could have a visually inconsistent appearance. Firstly, can I double-check that this is what is intended by the rule? (The wording as it is at the moment has confused at least one person!) Secondly, it would be good if someone could reword that sentence to remove the touch of ambiguity. Thank you! almost-instinct 22:33, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

That is confusing, and it didn't use to be worded that way, but much more clearly, saying basically: Include the punctuation inside the quotation marks only if the punctuation was part of the original quotation, otherwise always put the punctuation outside the quotation marks. This is known as "logical quotation" (also called by some "British quotation", though that is a misnomer; some major British newspapers use interior or "typographic" quotation as do most US ones). Logical quotation is favored in technical and other exacting disciplines, because it is more precise and less likely to lead to quotation errors.

Example: I said "It's really hot today" in a neutral tone. Someone can't believe I said that, because they feel cold, and they quote me saying this, with incredulity. In "typographic" quotation, this must be rendered "I can't believe SMcCandlish just said 'it's really hot today!'". This is both a misquotation, strictly speaking, and (for those familiar with this quotation style) a fatal ambiguity - readers who (like most Americans) are used to being uncertain whether terminal punctuation really belongs to the original quotation or not will also be uncertain whether I shouted or whether the quoter of my expression is astounded. WP, like most non-US publications, just avoids this mess entirely. In logical quotation "I can't believe SMcCandlish just said 'it's really hot today'!" and "I can't believe SMcCandlish just said 'it's really hot today!' are very distinct and unambiguous.

Anyway, the text in the guideline on this needs to be improved (e.g. by reverting to what it used to say, or by fixing what it says now to be clearer, like what it used to say). — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 11:15, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the depth of your answer ... unfortunately my confusion exists on a far, far more banal level. Because the opening line says

Punctuation marks are placed inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation

I took this to imply that fullstops shold be always outside the the quotation marks, whether the quote was a phrase or a sentence. So, since reading that, every time I've tidied up a page I changed something that looks thus:

Many people agree that "people who tidy punctuation in[REDACTED] articles need to get out more."

to something like this:

Most people think that "spending hours fiddling around with punctuation—and then getting it wrong—is truly tragic".

If this was wrong, then I've an awful lot of clearing up to do. Yours, crestfallen, almost-instinct 22:58, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

This is fine. Tony (talk) 01:40, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that looks fine to me, too. It's not even problematic to quote a full sentence but put the period outside; the problematic part is insertion of punctuation that does not belong to the quoted passage into the quotation, as this falsifies the quoted material. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 21:13, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Clarifying the passage

D part of WP:BRD: So what are the substantive objections to the edits I made to this section and which were reverted? — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 14:42, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I think I agree with Kotniski's edit summary that that particular sentence was supposed to be about periods (full stops) and not about, for instance, question marks; that is, I don't want someone to read that as permission to quote "Who me?" as "Who me". I also agree with both of you that what we had didn't cover the bases and clarification is welcome. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 23:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Was spacing between ' and " discussed?

I'm not seeing discussion for this, did I miss it? "Use {{" '}} ... Do not use plain or non-breaking space (&nbsp;) characters, as this corrupts the semantic integrity of the article by mixing content and presentation." I've never seen {{" '}} before this. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:44, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Was discussed ages ago, but the guideline recommended using   which is simply semantically wrong. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 03:09, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

The link on semantic integrity leads to Semantic Web, a concept I have never heard of before - and which approaches WP:CRYSTAL. I have just finished writing that MOS is at least not used for POV-pushing; I may have to revise that. Emending to mention the templates, as an editorial choice, may be preferable. It looks like they use a thin space, which we otherwise avoid, because it's not universally supported. (Whatever semantic integrity is supposed to mean, this presumably only violates it a little bit. ;->) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:49, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, so it's a poor article; the concept of the separation of semantic content and presentational display dates all the way back to CSS Level 1 (well, pre-dates that, since CSS 1 was created to address that issue). Who is "they", using thin spaces? If you mean the templates, no they don't; all you have to do is read the template source code. Falsifying or mangling content "a little bit" is still falsifying or mangling content. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 03:09, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

The last sentence should be deleted as meaningless. The use of the templates – recommended in the previous sentence – is as much a break of "semantic integrity" as an HTML non-breaking space. Physchim62 (talk) 17:10, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Um, well, no, it isn't. The template does not alter the rendered content in any way whatsoever, unlike inserting bogus, ungrammatical space characters. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 03:09, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Dan: please provide a searchable phrase that we can use to find this sentence, and please confirm that this is located in the Manual of Syle. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:20, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

The phrase " ' works - so does CSS or semantic integrity; it's under Quotations on this project page. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:23, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I see no indication that separation of content and presentation was ever a goal of the wiki markup language; the main goals seem to have been few keystrokes and marked up text that isn't too hard for a person to read. If this separation were the actual goal, we would have unique markup for such things as titles of books, movies, etc. instead of italics and titles of articles within journals instead of putting them in quotes. We would not have markup for boldface, rather we would be marking things as certain types of information (such as first instance of the subject of an article in a lead paragraph, and they would be shown as boldface. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:32, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

If separation of content and presentation was not a goal of wiki markup language, it would not do what it does with CSS. In fact, it would not validate under the DTD that the delivered page says it uses. But it validates. Of course MediaWiki is designed to produce valid code with separation of content and presentation, or it would be a laughing stock. And {{' "}} is only 7 characters, while ' " is eight, and requires at least basic understanding of HTML character entities codes (e.g. knowledge that the "&" and the ";" are mandatory, etc.), while the template only requires knowing basic template syntax, which far more WP editors know than know HTML character entity encoding. Basically, if something can be done with a template it should be if the template is simpler than the alternative, which is clearly the case here. We could have unique CSS classes (in templates probably) for titles instead of plain italics, and so on; I'm kind of surprised that we don't already. I have noted increased deployment of CSS classes all over WP, so maybe that is already in the pipe. And if you look at the rendered source as delivered to the browser (after translation by MediaWiki from wiki markup), you'll see that the italicization is in fact done with CSS, not with HTML 4's deprecated <i> element, and this is of course as it should be; we seem to be on the path to better semantic handling already, and I've also noticed people implementing more and more microformats, which are seriously semantic, so it's not like no one around here is thinking about this sort of thing. Anyway, the point is that just because WP is not 100% perfect in semantic and non-presentation-clouded content markup doesn't mean that the idea isn't part of WP's goals, nor that we should not seek to improve WP in this direction. If that were the case, WP would be using table-based layouts, the <font> tag, etc. (The font tag works in wikicode, but is actually translated on-the-fly into a span with CSS; MediaWiki does lots of stuff like that, and sends validatable code to the user agent). — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 03:09, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Detailed rationale

I apologize for the assumption that everyone would just automatically "get" this; I sometimes forget that some people are not web development geeks for whom this sort of thing is old hat.

The templates are pretty self-documenting.

Background: Read cascading style sheets and do an advanced Google search on mandatory terms "content", "presentation" and either/or terms "separate", "separation", for in-depth background info on the electronic design and information architecture philosophy surrounding this.

The short version is that the strings "'" and " ' " are not the same. Meanwhile, the strings "'" and {{" ' "}} are in fact the same in rendered content (copy-paste them into a plain-text editor, you'll see); the latter is simply kerned to be more readable on Misplaced Pages, in a way that does not affect the underlying content in any way.

We should not falsify the content (especially not quoted content!) just for a visual typographic/legibility effect, but that is what trying to improve the visual display with   does. We also should not reduce the content to ungrammatical gibberish just for a visual effect, either, but that's what we've been advising that editors do. No style guide on the planet would approve of ending a nested quotation with ...foo.' " We should really, really not do this if there is an alternative that doesn't raise these problems, but provides the same visual improvement sought.

Please note that this is not the same as the recommendation to use non-breaking spaces between unit amounts and their symbols (23 cm) – a space does belong there, meanwhile using a non-breaking one serves our purposes and does nothing nefarious to the content.

There may have been some confusion that the change to recommending the template has something to do with a defect in the display of the   version; this isn't he case (indeed, the templates' goal is that they look identical). So, no one is going to get out a micrometer; this isn't about what it looks like, or what editors will do to figure something out, but about what the content actually says. Misplaced Pages consists of content that is open and may be repurposed in any way anyone wants, in any format, including monospaced formats, or pre-kerned environments, where anything like " ' " will look totally retarded (as well as simply be grammatically incorrect nonsense). The unconstrained reusability of WP content (with credit) is part of the very core of WP's design and purpose (even if more abstraction of content semantics would be a good thing, like the bold subject in leads, and italicized book titles stuff mentioned earlier).

Another way of putting it: It is the very fact that   means what it means that is the problem here (but a non-problem with unit spacing and other uses). It inserts an actual extraneous character into the content in this case, instead of only visually kerning things to be more readable. It doesn't have anything at all to do with whether or not   is displayed properly - I'm unaware of any browser that does not display " ' and " ' (i.e. a normal space-bar space) identically. Not related to the issue addressed by the change. It may help to actually look at the code of the templates; you'll see that there is no space (in the content) between the quotation mark characters; instead there are CSS directives saying to pad this character or that a little to the left or right for display purposes only; if the content is copy pasted, it is copy pasted as "'" (or whatever, depending on the template in question), not " ' ". The   character entity, by contrast, is a real character, just like "Q" or "9" or "₤", in, and altering, the content.

By doing the visual spacing with CSS instead of the insertion of extraneous space characters, we preserve the integrity of the content, and different presentation/rendering environments with no CSS support or different, custom CSS, will do things their way correctly without mangling the content, or being mangled by the incorrect content. We need to do this spacing with CSS instead of extraneous space characters for the same reason that we use CSS positioning for page layout, instead of 1996-style abuse of tables, use CSS to do font effects like sizing and boldfacing instead of deprecated HTML markup for these purposes (<font> tags, etc.), and so on.

By way of comparison, someone who liked the cute little ½, ¼, ¾, etc., Unicode characters (the 9 fraction characters in Unicode, which in many fonts don't even display consistently with each other, but that doesn't really affect the hypothetical here) could cleverly create tiny images for missing ones like "4/5", "9/10", "7/16", etc. that in theory look exactly consistent with the real Unicode characters (for users who have not customized Misplaced Pages's diplay by changing to another font), with the intent that they be used in-line in articles because (to this person) it visually looks better than the output of {{Frac}}. We wouldn't use them, because they falsify the content, not to mention it would be an accessibility problem.

Finally, the Internet, and Misplaced Pages, and computers are not perfect yet, if they ever will be. WP seems to get along just fine with a lot of arcana (non-techie editor complaints at WP:VPT aside). At very least, most editors recognize that {{something}} means "this is a template, and if I go to the template page there almost certainly will be documentation", which is something they can't get for  . Anyway, the problems (the issue these templates solve, and some editors being unhappy with templates in WP) are not really related. One is about doing this proper thing for the encyclopedia's content, and the other is about making things easy for editors put off by markup they are unfamiliar with. It isn't expected that the average editor will make use of these templates, in the first place, just as they do not bother to do 23 cm instead of 23 cm despite what MOSNUM says; rather, others who do bother to pay attention to MOS will fix it later (or their bots will), so it isn't really an editor burden at all (even if ' " were actually easier than the shorter and more symmetrical {{' "}}, which it isn't). There are probably at least 50 nitpicky things like this in MOS and its subpages; one more won't kill anyone. :-)

Hope that 'splains it better.

PS: Elsewhere, Dank55 pointed out that ultimately we should ask the developers to fix this. A dev fix shouldn't be hard, even in PHP, Python, Ruby or ASP (I have no idea what the MediaWiki software is actually written in). You'd just tell it (in pseudo-code, here):

If character string ("'"), then new character string ("<span style="padding-left: 2em; padding-right: 2em;">'</span>")

and move on to the next test, for ("'), or ('") or whatever. Pretty trivial, really. If that were implemented, no one would manually ever have to do anything at all with regard to quotation mark spacing. If there were some weird case where it was desired that these characters butt up against each other, any number of tricks would work, as long as the string in the wikicode was broken in a way that did not rendered visually, e.g. ("<span />')

— SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 05:34, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

This is less than clear. If I understand it correctly, it is only a negative argument: the templates do not, despite appearances, introduce spaces not in the original, and so do not defeat the purpose of logical quotation to represent quotes exactly as in the original.

Would it suffice to mention the templates, without requiring them? That way those who understand and agree with S. McCandlish's argument can use them, and the rest of us can continue using double and single apostrophes as we have always done. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:49, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "less than clear" since you do in fact seem to have apprehended what the templates do. :-) The fact that it is "a negative argument" isn't relevant; MOS regularly gives advice of this sort. What language are you proposing instead? If you just want to use '" I've already explained that this is what we expect the average editor to do anyway, just as we expect that editor to write 23 cm not 23 cm, but we recommend the latter directly in order to forestall reversions by people who don't understand the change to a non-breaking space character in MOS-noncompliant prose they just wrote. I don't see that anything is gained by just mentioning a template instead of recommending its use (we mention {{Sic}} specifically, etc.). That said, my principal issue here is getting rid of the recommendation to insert extraneous   entities. My only concern is that simply mentioning the templates will be wishy-washy. Guidelines should generally offer affirmative guidance, not "maybe do this, maybe do that, whatever". — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 16:21, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

• I'm still not sure I understand the rationale, or that anyone else will, but it is negative argument in the sense that (if valid) it shows only that using the templates isn't wrong, doesn't change the quotation. A positive argument would show why we must use the templates, and can't just type "'", as would be natural.
• If we expect the average editor to use "'", we should make clear that it's his choice. Not everybody will find "'" as unsightly as S McCandlish does. Some will find the appearance of an added space undesirable. We should not simply waltz in, change things, and overrule protests with "MOS says so", we should follow WP:BRD and that includes real discussion.
• If a wide consensus is persuaded by these templates, fine; we can reword But at the moment, whatlinkshere gives no evidence that anybody outside this talkpage even knows about them.
• When facing a choice of disadvantages (in this case, appearance on one hand and the inconvenience of using a template on the other) we should explain it and let editors pick. That's why we have editors. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:40, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

It isn't necessary that one understand a rationale to trust that one exists and is sensible and created in good faith. :-) I cannot think of any way to explain the issue any more clearly: A) "'" and " ' " are not the same content. B) "'" and "<span style="padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px;">'</span>" are the same content. The end. I gave a positive reason for using the templates: It achieves the desired result without violating the integrity of the content. It still says that, just differently, so I'm happy. I don't think it follows that we should "make it clear" that it's the editor's choice. Everything not subject to actual WP Policy is the editor's choice, so we need not state the obvious, and using wishy-washy language in guidelines reduces their ability to effectively guide. We shouldn't do this unless the topic in question is a matter of something close to a 50/50 split between editors' preferences for one option or the other. But the present language seems okay.

We didn't "waltz in"; the observation that "'" is pretty close to illegible when rendered was made quite some time ago, and the desire to visually space them just a hair for readability has gone unchallenged since before I took my months-long wikibreak. There is no dispute that has been raised with regard to it other than right here, but we seem to be discussing the language of the recommendation, not whether the recommendation should never have been made in the first place. If some editors do find the appearance of a little more space undesirable, they have been keeping quiet about it, so we needn't bother with trying to account for them (WP:CREEP, WP:BROKE, WP:BEANS, etc.) Also, I wasn't the one that brought up the issue in the first place; it isn't that I find "'" unsightly, it's that enough editors did to get critical mass to add something about it to MOS, that was well accepted. All I did is fix it to use a solution that isn't grotesque. Whatlinkshere won't be relevant for a while; I created the templates only a few days ago, to provide MOS with a solution to the identified spacing problem that did not cause more harm than it solved. I.e., I am not trying to change consensus, only fix the tech side of the implementation of what consensus said needed to be done.

Current wording already indicates choice, since it now says that "'" "may" cause visual problems and points to where the templates are without demanding that they be used, so I think your final bullet point is satisfied. I'm okay with the passage, too.

Are we any closer to consensus on this one? — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I have tweaked the text; the text I found offered the choice required, but I hope this is clearer. Saying that we want the text, character for character, exactly as in the original covers the ground as well as "semantic integrity" and may be more intelligible. Some may still object that the appearance is what matters, and we should not use kerning which looks like extra space either, but they can avoid the templates. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:51, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Works for me! I don't think anyone will object to the appearance; I tested this in a bunch of browsers on both Mac and Windows and the output is as-desired (i.e. it looks just like the   spacing which wasn't controversial to begin with, just a poor implementation for reasons not considered at the time). — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 18:39, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

For me, there's a commonality between this issue, date autoformatting, and line wrapping/hard spaces: from now on, I'm not going to get involved in anything that I see as a fault of the publisher (which might mean the devs, or someone else...don't know, don't care). Misplaced Pages ought to display single quote/double quote so that it's readable, dates should never have been wikilinked, and lines ought to wrap in some sensible way. Not my problem. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 00:03, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Curly quotes again

I think it’s a sad decision to encourage straight quotes. They are explicitly discouraged by the Unicode standard. Plus, curly quotes are easy to type on a US-international keyboard (with deadkeys): Alt+9 = ‘, Alt+0 = ’, Alt+Shift+ = ”. Let the world move forward. H. (talk) 12:11, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Not everyone who contributes to the English Misplaced Pages uses a US-international keyboard. And from what I gather, curly quotes cannot be searched for. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 16:02, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, that’s why there is MediaWiki:Edittools, look below the edit field in the category ‘Symbols’. (Wiktionary has solved this better, btw, maybe an administrator can have a look there and take it over here: you only need one click for both quotes.) Though of course I urge everyone to use a proper keyboard layout ;-) And then there are tools like gucharmap, Additional characters under Windows accessories and an applet in the Gnome panel. H. (talk) 11:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Of course, editors are not required to enter curly quotes. This is no reason to discourage them.

Searching for any kind of punctuation may be problematic, but I'm not aware of any particular problems in searching for curly quotation marks. Why would you want to do so? —Michael Z. 2008-08-29 17:24 z

What matters is consistency. If there are two characters representing the same grapheme and they're randomly distributed, I have to search at least twice whenever I'm looking for text including that grapheme. Ilkali (talk) 22:37, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

That’s why I am consistently creating a redirect from a page title with curly quotes to the one with straight quotes, whenever I encounter them. This is also (probably unwritten) policy on Wiktionary. H. (talk) 11:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm talking about text searches as well. Redirects won't help me (or Google) find text within an article. Ilkali (talk) 12:34, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Specifically, as often happens, on Mac systems it differs (Option key=Alt key): Alt+9 = ª, Alt+0 = º, Alt+ = ‘, Alt+Shift+ = ’. I posted a marginally related question that hasn't been responded to about a specific instance where not knowing the difference between straight vs. curly can cause problems in wikicoding edits, if anyone reading this can help me out. Sswonk (talk) 16:29, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

FYI, that's on the regular English-language Mac keyboards. —Michael Z. 2008-08-29 17:24 z

Indeed, I explicitly said: US-intl with deadkeys. Although indeed these also differ slightly between Linux and Windows. (Mainly in deadkey behavior, not in the symbols present, I think.) H. (talk) 11:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

"They are explicitly discouraged by the Unicode standard". Can you cite this? Ilkali (talk) 22:37, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) " are explicitly discouraged by the Unicode standard." Oh, really? How about !

(To both above:) http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf contains:

• U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
  • this is the preferred character to use for apostrophe

and http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf contains:

• U+0027 APOSTROPHE
  • neutral (vertical) glyph with mixed usage
  • U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred for apostrophe
  • preferred characters in English for paired quotation marks are U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK & U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

and

• U+0022 QUOTATION MARK
  • neutral (vertical), used as opening or closing quotation mark
  • preferred characters in English for paired quotation marks are U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK & U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK

It says ‘in English’, but this is valid in a lot of languages. H. (talk) 11:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm on a Mac myself, and codes up there didn't even display properly! The first two characters show up as a miniature "a" and a minature "o", both superscripted, not any form of quotation mark.

That’s unfortunate indeed. Seems like you have a configuration problem. I thought since Mac is Unix-based now, it would have switched to UTF-8 as a default as well? H. (talk) 11:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

"Why would you want to ?" Because they are often parts of literal search strings. "Godwin's law" and "Godwin’s law" and Godwin‘s law" are all completely different character strings from the perspective of the search system. There are other reasons to not use curly quotes as well; see many, many previous discussion on this topic. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and if I search the page for “Canada”, then I won't find “Canadian.” So I would search for “Canad” and “Godwin”. There are hundreds of similar examples, and the fact is that readers who use better search strategies will get better search results. Perhaps someday in-browser text search will be as smart as Google search.

We shouldn't be dumbing down and micro-managing orthography to optimize lowest-common-denominator text search. Next we'll be specifying a controlled vocabulary and approved sentence structure. This is long out the window anyway, since I believe there is already an article or two in Misplaced Pages which has a curly apostrophe. —Michael Z. 2008-09-04 15:03 z

See my remark about redirects above. H. (talk) 11:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Curly quotes do cause wikicoding problems, especially since some fonts do not distinguish between the straight vs. curly characters at all for visual display purposes.

— SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, the characters above are displaying correctly as you describe them on your Mac. (I included them in the list to compare with the keystroke examples in the first comment of the section. Sswonk (talk) 18:19, 2 September 2008 (UTC)) See this complete chart from Adobe. Do you have any insight regarding my questions at the text formatting subpage? I understand that possesives of italicized titles are a rare case and that coding them can cause problems, but there is a solution: use a curly apostrophe. It is a matter of style but as far as I can tell it isn't discussed in any style guidelines. Sswonk (talk) 17:09, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

And there you touch on my main argument in favor of using curly quotes: there is not risk they are confused with the apostrophes which are used for markup. Not only in wiki, but also in most all computer languages this is a big advantage (I tell you this as a localizer of several programs: it is a bliss not to have to escape quote signs all over the place.) H. (talk) 11:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't think any human would ever confuse them, and problems with the markup engine are limited to highly specific contexts. Ilkali (talk) 12:34, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

(outdent)I am sending this back to the left margin because there are a few conversations going on and I am attempting to answer two points well indented in separated parts of the thread.

First, yes Mac has been Unix based since the beginning of this century but the issue isn't the OS, it's the keyboard. The history of the Mac system is strongly influenced by the adoption of the Macintonsh GUI based system and the laser printer in the mid-eighties and onward as production machines in the printing an publishing industry. These systems were quickly accepted as replacements for large, tempermental and very expensive phototypesetting systems throughout the industry. Thousands of people who produce printed material, whether they be called typesetters, desktop publishers or pre-press artists, learned to key information using the classic Macintosh system, which used - and uses - special keystrokes to produce a large number of glyphs commonly found in printed pieces. These include the symbols for trademark, copyright, section and bullet. This was learned well in advance of the Windows system of using ALT+0XXX to produce non-standard ASCII characters. The base of production people who use the Mac keyboard and can fly through typesetting complicated documents using QuarkXPress or Adobe software is entrenched, so Apple and Adobe can be excused for leaving these keystrokes as they were for 15 years prior to the switch to FreeBSD OS X variations. I know all this WP:OR because I have been working on Macs doing that sort of work for the last twenty years.

Second, and really related to the first comment, is that "curly quotes" in the publishing industry are actually just "quotes" and "apostrophes". They are the typesetting standard, and the "straight quotes" are used only to denote measurement in inches and feet (28" striped bass, 16' pole vault). Those of us in the industry have been known to refer to those characters as "inch marks", and they are often one of the first things a typesetter must repair when importing text from ASCII or word processing sources. So, although I understand that this is very arcane stuff to a great many, and probably completely inaccessible to a vast number of casual editors, the preference of professional graphic artists is to use what is here being called "curly quotes", which is also born out by the Unicode document provided by H. above. Sswonk (talk) 14:01, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Ampersand vs. "and"

I can't find any MOS page that discusses the use of the ampersand (&) in place of the word "and". Is there no preference? — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 22:27, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Other than for titles of railroad articles, I have no idea. I'd certainly use "and" by default. --NE2 22:53, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

The instances I'm thinking of are not in article titles (nor about railroads!), if that makes a difference. (They're not exactly in prose text either, but in table cells, if that matters too.) — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 23:00, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I would only use & where it is in a quote from a reference, or the real name of something. The only other thing I can think of is TV credits:

Written by: Person A & Person B and Person C & Person D.

Persons A and B worked on the script together, and persons C and D worked on the script together, but they didn't all work together as a team. In this case, "and" and "&" have slightly different meanings. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 00:44, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Botanical author citations always use ampersands; i.e. "Banksia sessilis R.Br. (A.R.Mast & K.R.Thiele)" not "Banksia sessilis R.Br. (A.R.Mast and K.R.Thiele)". In general it should be discouragedforbidden. Hesperian 01:55, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I've added a subsection; see if you like it. Revert or tweak as you see fit. Tony (talk) 02:02, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Looks fine; mild personal preference is that "logogram" is TMI for WP:MOS. With this new section, should we delete "the ampersand (&) is replaced by and, unless it is part of a formal name" as redundant? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:33, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Except in quotes, always use "and" in main text. I don't see any problem with using "&" as a shorthand in tabular data, such as tables, infoboxes, and other places where brevity is an issue (such situations also commonly abbreviate country names, e.g. in tables of sports data, and so forth). Have not looked at the new MOS section yet; will let it simmer a while before getting into it, if I need to at all. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 11:27, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

According to The Elements of Style, the ampersand should only be used be used if its a proper name like the name of a law firm or something like that. Charts and tables as shorthand would be fine, but we should probably say it should not be used in prose. Grk1011/Stephen (talk) 17:19, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

RFC on September 11, 2001 attacks

Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks#RFC on page title and comma - We need outside opinions on what the appropriate grammar is here. Should the page title and the article start out with "September 11, 2001 attacks" (no comma) or "September 11, 2001, attacks"? A third option is to rename the page to something like "September 11 attacks". We would appreciate comments on the article talk page. Thanks. --Aude (talk) 20:13, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

"September 11, 2001 attacks" is the standard WP style (if the year is included); the comma is used to separate the numbers, not to bracket "2001" as some kind of parenthetical. Further comments at the RfC. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 11:22, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Where do we say such a thing? Who supports it? The first comma is present because the year is parenthetical, to those who use this style at all; omitting the second comma (unless some other punctuation supervenes) is a soleicism. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:28, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Saint/St./St?

I couldn't find anywhere that explains this. Does anyone know which version should be used in an article's title? Craigy (talk) 11:02, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

There are some provisions about American spelling versus British spelling. See Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (spelling). Michael Hardy (talk) 12:05, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Err...what? Am I missing something here? I'm fairly sure both versions use the same spelling. What I'm asking is whether or not it should be spelt out in full or abbreviated with, or without a full stop? Craigy (talk)

It's a difference between British and American orthographic conventions. That is broader than only spelling, but I think the same rule applies. Michael Hardy (talk) 12:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't know which policy/guideline applies but my experience of this is that 'saint' is generally not used in the title at all. See for example Category:Italian saints or Category:English saints. Ben MacDui 12:48, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I was aware of that. Sorry I should have been a bit more specific: I meant, say, in the name of churches? Is there a set rule i.e. Saint John's/St John's/St. John's?Craigy (talk) 13:19, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

According to Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (places), "Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize...." I usually follow the convention used by the controlling entity e.g. Saint Paul Public Schools. Churches seem to usually use St. I believe.--Appraiser (talk) 14:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

As a data point, U.S. railroads generally use "St.", for instance Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. --NE2 18:21, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

AP Stylebook says to abbreviate it as St. for "saints, cities, and other places", except for Saint John, New Brunswick (to distinguish from St. John's, Newfoundland). British English uses fewer periods in short abbreviations. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 16:04, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I have to disagree in the case of Saint Paul, Minnesota. In real life it is more frequently spelled out:City's website, Saint Paul Hotel, Saint Paul CVB, Saint Paul College, Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra so I think WP should name it the same way, even if that violates the AP Stylebook. Was that written to consistently save space in newspapers?--Appraiser (talk) 17:03, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

←AP Stylebook does lean a little bit, but not much, in favor of shorter forms, to make newspaper journalists happy. This is more like giving a snappy, all-purpose answer to save writers the trouble of looking up sources as you just did...which is obviously better, for our purposes. I get 1.3M ghits for "St Paul MN" and 5M ghits for "Saint Paul MN". The WT:NCGN people are the go-to guys for place names, but if someone forced me to guess based on your research, I'd say go with Saint Paul, despite AP Stylebook. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 19:52, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

P.S. WP:NCGN says: "The United States Board on Geographic Names determines official Federal nomenclature for the United States. Most often, actual American usage follows it, even in such points as the omission of apostrophes, as in St. Marys River. However, if colloquial usage does differ, we should prefer actual American to the official name." BGN gives "Saint Paul". - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 19:59, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Indenting on talk pages

I have searched but can't find any Misplaced Pages rules for when and how to indent. Is there a standard procedure? I have been indenting whenever I add to a threaded conversation but have been told that there are certain standards that are to be followed. Perhaps, they are just rules of conduct. I'm not sure. What are the basic principles of Indenting Talk Pages and conversations??? Thanks in advance. --Buster7 (talk) 20:14, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like you are doing the right thing to me. What are the particular criticisms you've received? Hard to say w/o knowing what the specifics are. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 21:05, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Maybe it's easiest to give an example. In the following, A-F are independent comments:

• A
  
  • B (reply to A)
    
    • C (reply to B)
    • F (reply to B)
  • D (reply to A)
    
    • E (reply to D)

If you look at the structure of the comments, it's easy to see what each one is a reply to. You just have to look up and to the left. Ilkali (talk) 22:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Looks perfect to me. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 03:37, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Except that it's complicated to get it right, visually; looks a bit untidy, even if there is a system behind it; and goes against the fact that most comments are simple sequences, not related back to specific existing comments. Tony (talk) 03:05, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I have a major preference for alternate indenting based purely on chronology:

• Comment posted at 09:10
  • Reply posted at 09:15
    • Reply posted at 09:35 specifically to the above comment
      • Reply posted at 09:36 specifically on this new thread
• Reply posted at 09:17
  • Reply posted at 09:19
• Reply posted at 09:23
  • Reply posted at 09:25
• Reply posted at 09:27
  • Reply posted at 09:30
• Reply posted at 09:37

The splinter threads are very easy to separate from the mainstream. It is a very easy rule to apply, instead of working out whether it is the fifth or sixth indent that is the end, you simply alternate one indented and one not indented. Furthermore, indents are less accessible to reading Misplaced Pages on small screens - yes, there are increasing numbers of people that do this e.g. PDA and phones. I recommend people at least consider alternating indents. Lightmouse (talk) 16:51, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I changed to alternating indenting when I saw somebody else do it. Has anybody else changed to alternating indenting? Lightmouse (talk) 17:21, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Addition to WP:MSH

Apparently we need to add another line to WP:MSH to promote good writing and to document current standards at FAC:

• Omit needless words from headings. For example, choose Books instead of The books.

It might be possible to roll this in with the "Section names should not explicitly refer to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings" item, but I think it will be simpler to just add it separately. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:25, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestion; however, this is covered already in Misplaced Pages:Manual_of_Style#Article_titles, fifth bullet. Tony (talk) 07:10, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Not so I could tell. That rule explains this change that Sandy made, but not this one. "The" is neither the subject of the article nor present in a higher-level heading. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:01, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

This sounds completely reasonable to me, especially given that (per WP:POLICY the principal purpose of guidelines is to codify extant consensus best practices. I undo quite a lot of "The" cases in headings myself. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 05:55, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Monthly updates

Aug 1 – Aug 24 updates for CAT:GEN are at WT:UPDATES; I did them a week early so people can complain if they see something they don't like, and we can work it out before the Sept 1 monthly updates. I'll probably keep doing these a week early. Everyone is welcome to participate, of course. I err on the side of including anything that anyone might think is important; Tony distills the talk page for WP:UPDATES, and does other pages as well.

Sandy would like for someone to start keeping track of WP:ACCESS. It's not in the style cat now, but I wouldn't mind throwing it into that cat and CAT:GEN too, if someone is willing to say that they're pretty sure that nothing in it contradicts current style and image guidelines.

Most of the pages in Category:Misplaced Pages style guidelines are associated with one or a few wikiprojects, and cover particular article topics, such as math. If someone finds something wrong in one of these "targeted" style guidelines, it would probably work out better to show respect for the relevant wikiprojects by asking their input on the style guideline talk page before making changes. I didn't put any of these pages in CAT:GEN, nor any of the pages in Category: Misplaced Pages image help.

There are 7 4 other pages in the style cat that I didn't put in CAT:GEN, because the discussions on the talk pages involve a lot more than just style guidelines. There's a pretty heavy overlap with discussions at WT:NPOV, WT:V, WT:N, and similar pages. I think the same thing could be said for most pages in Category:Misplaced Pages editing guidelines, so if you guys want to add some cat to distinguish these important style guidelines pages from the wikiproject-specific and article-topic-specific ones, maybe we could add the editing cat to the style cat: WP:Citing sources, WP:External links, WP:Footnotes, and WP:Layout.

- Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:55, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

P.S. I just moved WP:WEASEL and WP:PEACOCK into CAT:GEN; they have an NPOV flavor, but there's a lot more evidence of interest by style people than NPOV people over the years on the talk pages, and they're so close in spirit to WP:Words to avoid that it's hard to justify putting them in a different cat. I think we could justify adding the editing cat to WP:Lists and WP:Manual of Style (writing about fiction), or not. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:20, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

The Duke added some discussion on my talk page at User_talk:Dank55#Style categorisation. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 13:05, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I've decided that I don't have any recommendation on WP:Pro and con lists, WP:Lists and WP:Manual of Style (writing about fiction); they're too targeted to specific types of pages to be appropriate for CAT:GEN, but I can't recommend them as editing guidelines, either. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:06, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Some details on how to disambiguate human names have moved from Misplaced Pages:Disambiguation to Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (people), and changed in the process, to permit things like Joe Schmoe (baseball) instead of Joe Schmoe (baseball player). The exact wording of the passage may still be in dispute/flux. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 13:11, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Update: After editwarring, the issue has turned into a bigger debate about how to specify human name article title disambiguation (or whether to do so in any detail): WT:NCP#GENERAL preference for person-descriptive not field-descriptive disambiguators. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 20:27, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

New page created here. Tony (talk) 07:57, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Left-aligned image displaces heading, ok?

Can I place a left-aligned image in such a way this it displaces a heading or subheading (first, second, third, fourth-level headings...) to the right? This should be indicated in the MoS. --Phenylalanine (talk) 12:04, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Like this, you mean (i.e. with the image before the heading)? I don't see anything wrong with it, or any particular reason to mention it in the MoS.--Kotniski (talk) 12:20, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm not taking a position on the issue, only where to put it. There's some overlap between Category: Misplaced Pages image help and the style cat; look through the image cat, pick the best page from that cat to put it in, and if the page happens to also be a style cat, that's fine. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:23, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Please don't. Aside from looking horrible (have you ever seen this in a print publication?), if it is assumed that the image is meant to be related to the lower section then screen readers will mess up. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 13:07, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Generally concur with Chris. I try to avoid left-side images, except after the heading, and even then only if the image will not interfere with later headings at 1024x768, full-screen browser window, default font sizes (the most common browsing resolution and mode). It's better to use {{Clear}} or <div style="clear:both;" /> and introduce a little whitespace after the image than to allow it to interfere with headings. See Five-pins#Strategy for appropriate use of left-aligned image. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 13:14, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't really care if it's on the left or right, but if Image X is relevant to Section Y, then it should be right under the header, not above it as used here. Reywas92 19:40, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, now I look at it more closely, I agree it looks bad. --Kotniski (talk) 07:51, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Headings

Why never link section titles? I agree that when, as usual, the link can be included in text without loss, it should be. But this can be said without prohibiting the practice, in peerage articles, of linking the date of creation in the section title.

There can hardly be a technical problem; it's done routinely on talk pages.

If there is a reason, it should be given. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:40, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Probably so. There are several reasons. A few that come to mind:

• Many editors are uncertain how to link to such headings, at #links, properly.
• They make it more difficult to read the heading in the source code.
• They make it more likely that the linked-to term will not be mentioned in the following prose, which may confuse readers who do not notice the link in the heading, and are wondering why the term is not used and linked to in the prose there.
• It just looks weird.
• It mingles the purposes of headings (to very, very tightly summarize what is coming) and prose (to explain things for the reader, directly, and indirectly with links).

I'm sure others can think of more. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 20:35, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

PS: If no one it bitching about the rare exceptions in play, then don't worry about it. If they are, then maybe we should consider adding a sentence on exceptions (that might be more productive than enumerating reasons for the rule in the first place). — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 20:37, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

The first couple reasons assume editor incompetence. While all too common, assuming it goes a bit far. (There was a discussion which was effectively bitching about the exceptions, but I'm not sure it had hit article space.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:15, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Assuming that all editors would have these problems, sure, but an assumption that some will is a very safe one. :-) — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:36, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Currently it says "section headings should not normally contain links". Not a complete prohibition; it sounds about right to me, unless someone can formulate some specific exceptions to make things clearer.--Kotniski (talk) 08:48, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

WP:ACCESS explains it: "Avoid putting links in section headings, unless the link text is the only text in the title. Screen readers will stop reading the heading title when they encounter a link, and if the link is the first part of the heading title, they will only read the link text. For example, a heading title of "The Simpsons" will be read as "The", and a heading title of "hackers in popular culture" will be read as "hackers"." We must not link headers for this reason. Misplaced Pages is accessible to everyone (or should be), including those with disabilities. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 08:20, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I should probably say that I am a repeat offender of this on talk pages, but I always make sure to link the entire header, and screen readers will not go crazy if that happens. I would never advocate in in mainspace though. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 08:28, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Do all screen readers do that? Sounds like a bug in some particular screen reader to me - I can't believe it's intended behaviour.--Kotniski (talk) 08:49, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Happens with at least two different ones, AFAIK. I don't know whether it's a bug or not, but if it is, we still shouldn't do it. We can't fix the bug but we can work around it. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 08:58, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Then we should explain it. "causes accessibility problems" would be enough. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:27, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

That works for me. Or "causes accessibility problems for screen readers", just in case people ask why. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 23:45, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 00:08, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Superscript sic?

I see that the MoS is changed to say that sic (in quotes) should be written using Template:Sic. This renders "" in superscript, which is a practice that I'm not familiar with. I can't find any discussion about this and I am tempted to revert. So, what is the reason for using superscript? (Thanks to Dan (Dank55) for the updates, which brought this to my attention.) -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:48, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

It is probably undesirable to use a superscript for this; this is part of our intended text, not a tag. There's nothing wrong with , which is the standard typography; it can even be linked: . Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:05, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

The template seems like a reasonable idea, though the code is a little cumbersome to enter. Bear in mind that the contents of the template can be changed (though currently only by sysops), so the superscripting itself isn't a strong reason not to use it. Ilkali (talk) 22:09, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with the existence of the template, but it should not be required; what matters is what the readers see, not how we get there. This goes double when the template produces something odd and potentially misleading. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:17, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

"what matters is what the readers see". And use of templates grants greater control over that. Ilkali (talk) 23:04, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Nonsense. Using a template limits you to what the template is engineered to do; not using the template leaves you the full resources of markup. Here you don't need complex markup to do any combination of italicizing, linking, and superscripting you may want. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:18, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

We're talking about different kinds of control. I'm talking about centralised control - change one template, update hundreds of instances. There's very little need to have the full flexibility of the markup language for something as boring as a sic notice. Ilkali (talk) 23:25, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

This is a wiki. We don't need (and should not have) centralized control. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:03, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, MOS specifically recommended that the "sic" be italicized and linked, which the template does, so it is actually far less cumbersome. Its superscripting is simply a matter of Misplaced Pages Style. We superscript inline stuff that isn't part of the prose proper, such as reference citations, while many print works do not. Anyway, if people hate the template-recommending change, just revert it; I only made it to make it easier on editors - "just type these 7 characters" instead of the more complicated manual way. Maybe there needs to be a "sic2" template that is identical but not superscripted if people object to the superscripting. I prefer it, myself, as it indicates more clearly to the reader that it is an editorial interpolation. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:41, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Italicizing and linking by hand takes thirteen characters; not linking, which you may want to avoid after the first instance, takes nine; the template is easier in the first case and harder in the second. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:55, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Counting characters is a pretty lousy way of measuring difficulty. But isn't the template reference only seven characters anyway? Ilkali (talk) 23:04, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

In order to turn off the link, you need to invoke an argument. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:15, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Surely the term should not be superscripted, precisely to distinguish it from references. The fact that the MoS recommends that it be wikilinked is an indication that not all readers would understand its significance. And heaven forbid that you have to use it more than once in an article! Physchim62 (talk) 23:46, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Consider an article on Sir Thomas Malory, with quotes, which will have multiple sics. (If we are going to simply italicize real Middle English, make that Thomas Chatterton.) But I agree otherwise; I would not, and will not, superscript, for precisely these reasons. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:03, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Surely those are two excellent examples of where not to use sic! Indeed, neither of the cited articles does use sic, despite the quote from Mallory with (suspiciously little) Middle English spelling. Sic should be reserved for cases where there might be confusion due to an old spelling, or an original misspelling, not simply to convince our modern readers that we haven't made a typing error. Physchim62 (talk) 01:35, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree. sic should not be superscripted. Hesperian 01:54, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

It isn't any more. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 02:05, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed with not superscripting. It's nice to get consensus here and then instantly be able to apply the consensus everywhere the template appears. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 03:46, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

... woah woah woah. Why exactly this this not to be superscripted? Superscript is an excellent way of separating editorial commentary from article content. All other editorial notes are superscripted. This change was far too hasty, and should be reverted until the discussion has had more than, like, four hours' worth of commentary. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 00:02, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

It's a little more complicated than that. I replaced the original hand-coded language here (non-superscripted) with the {{sic}} template for editor convenience (it was then superscripted). Then it gave both versions. Then the template itself was de-superscripted, despite the fact that I recommended that at {{Sic2}} template be created for that (we here don't necessarily know how {{sic}} is being used and where; its de-superscription is probably problematic in some of the places it has been deployed.

The template change should be reverted, since it wasn't discussed at the template, but here.

Whether should or shouldn't be superscripted is still an open debate (both Chris Cunningham and I in favor of superscripting, maybe others; I haven't read all of the above yet), several against. The MOS should still show both options, and one of them superscrpted again at least until the debate resolves itself here. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 00:16, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

We should be doing what people do in the real world. I've never seen superscripted out there. Ever. Hesperian 01:50, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

By that logic, we should not superscript much of anything but exponents and asterisks, since paper sources do not superscript inline reference citations nor any other form of editorial insertion. We do that with almost complete uniformity and regularity here, because we've decided by wide community consensus that it makes reading our articles easier. I.e., we are ahead of the dead trees pack in usability, which makes sense – web development efforts are generally thinking about usability all the time, while paper publishers are usually thinking about paper publishing traditions. WP:NOT#PAPER. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 19:42, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) superscripting '' would not really be correct (though this is a wiki and we might want to do it regardless on stylistic grounds). 'sic' is not a reference; it's an in-text comment notifying the reader that what might look like a spelling error actually isn't. really it's an abbreviated parenthetical - "Goorge Boosh " is just shorthand for "Goorge Boosh (as the author wrote it)". I'm not sure I like the link in the template, though - it ends up highlighting something that ought to be passed over by the eye. would it be better to scrap the link and put a short definition in as a tooltip? or would that be more distracting? --Ludwigs2 01:55, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Prescriptive grammar isn't very useful here. Misplaced Pages decides what is "correct" for Misplaced Pages, because the needs of our readers (and editors for that matter) are different from those of readers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the New York Times or the Spider Man comic books. I think you are looking at this backwards. It doesn't matter that is not a reference citation. The relationship is inverse. References, just like , are inline editorial commentary, and as with all other inline editorial commentary (including dispute notes, cleanup instructions, etc.), Misplaced Pages consistently superscripts them to lift them out of the way of the reader's eye-path when skimming the prose rapidly. It's a very sensible usability decision. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 19:42, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

It also brings style inconsistencies across articles where some editors do not know about the template, and simply type "". Even sic doesn't say it should be superscripted. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 02:48, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

The article Sic is written about general (and thus generally offline) usage; it is not Misplaced Pages:Sic. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 19:42, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I know that. Do you suggest that we also superscript any explanatory or missing material within square brackets in quoted text, and bracketed ellipses for deleted material? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 20:16, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

It isn't about inline editorial insertions; it is about editorial insertions that indicate the reader must look at the bottom of the page, or the end of the work, to find the insertion, vs. insertions that are self-contained. Asterisks (in almost all publications) and footnote numbers (in many but not all publications) are superscripted, letting the reader know the insertion will be found somewhere else. Sic is self-contained and never superscripted. Mathematical superscripts derive from a different tradition and are not comparable to footnotes, sic, or astrisks. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 20:02, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I must be typing invisible characters or something. I've already addressed this something like 4 times. Reference citations, with footnotes as the end, are only one kind of editorial insertion that Misplaced Pages superscripts. All of the inline dispute tags ({{dubious}}, etc.) and cleanup tags ({{clarity}}, etc.) – i.e., editorial interpolations – are superscripted. I'm unaware of any of them other than reference citations that make footnotes or anything else as the end of the page. It was already noted that asterisks and, in some paper publications, citation footnote numbers are superscripted off-WP, so I'm not sure why you are mentioning that again. Your assumption that they are superscripted " the reader know the insertion will be found somewhere else" is just an assumption, and not backed by history (superscripts go back over millennium, and originated as scribes' notes added to earlier manuscripts – i.e., a general convention for editorial interpolations, and thus the reason for superscripting of things like asterisks even today in paper publications). What does math have to do with it? Unless I missed it, no one has been talking about exponents or fractions; math isn't relevant here.

The relevant discussions are: a) Are s editorial commentary interpolations? b) Does Misplaced Pages consistently superscript editorial commentary interpolations to get it out of the visual flow of the prose for our readers? c) Do WP:MOS and other WP style guidelines recommend what usability and other factors indicate is best for our readability and our readers, even if it conflicts with dead-trees style manuals sometimes? d) Are MOS and Misplaced Pages guidelines generally strongly supportive of consistency and strongly resistant to exceptions justified by little more rationale than that some group of editors would be happier if they had an exception that suited their preferences? And, e) is there something magically special about that indicates it should somehow not follow the long-established WP convention (that as already noted is part of a design and presentation paradigm that intentionally diverges from dead-tress publishing, for good reasons)?

The answers to these questions are: a) Yes. b) Yes. c) Yes. d) Yes. e) No.

— SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 23:58, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I've previously resisted using the "sic" template because it was rendered as a superscript, which is an unusual and unnecessary innovation. Misplaced Pages should feel free to invent new styles when the demands of an online encyclopedia call for innovation. This isn't one of those times. Keep "sic" inline, down where the rest of the world puts it. Cheers! —Kevin Myers 20:42, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

WP did invent a new style, a long time ago, to superscript such interpolations for the benefit of increased readability of the main prose; this happened precisely because the demands of an online encyclopedia called for it. It was overall a huge hit. What's happening here now is some editors are seeking a special exception to this, for reasons that have yet to be logically explained in a way convincing to those who disagree, and without addressing the counterarguments raised against it. I also have to note the fait accompli nature of the unilateral change to the protected template, which was made (while out-standing objections were already on the table) by an admin who is a party to this debate, which seems to be devoid of other admins. This is debate resolution by fiat and a conflict of interest, not consensus. While I won't go so far as to say it was an actionable abuse of admin power, it is certainly a misuse of it.

PS: One might as well "resist" using headings because they only capitalize the first letter and proper names (not usual practice on paper), or "resist" using tables of contents because paper encyclopedia articles usually don't have them, or "resist" writing biographical articles about people who use initials, since "X. Y. Zounds" with spaced initials (WP:NCP's specification) is very uncommon off of Misplaced Pages. Etc., etc. How about just do what is best for the encyclopedia (which includes consistency, to a much greater degree than most editors think about) and put your pet peeves aside. (Two of the aforementioned, the weird heading style and the spacing of initials, are really, really, really irritating to me, but here I am three+ years later, doing what MOS says, because consistency and consensus in the project are more important (even to me, not just objectively) than me getting my way about nitpicks. :-) — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 23:58, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I've seen many publications that use sentence case for headings, and I've seen encyclopedias with table of contents at the beginning of articles. I have yet to see any publication other than Misplaced Pages that sets sic as a superscript (maybe there's one). Regarding your question above "is there something magically special about that indicates it should somehow not follow the long-established WP convention?", for me the answer is yes. I like to distinguish what is a "conventional" editorial insertion, as used by everyone else, from "wikipediaisms" such as and , which are only used here and often are only of interest to Misplaced Pages editors. --Itub (talk) 09:50, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Over 5 days later

21:48, 27 August 2008 – 23:57, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I've left this topic alone for some time here, and on returning I see nothing new that addresses the arguments I've raised, only partial rationales that can't get past "but isn't a reference citation", ignoring the bigger picture, nor any solid rationales for why this change would be a good idea (as opposed to why not changing it is a bad one), with the only argument seeming to be "well, that's how it's done on paper". Arguments that do little but defend against that with which they disagree are weak and don't provide anything substantive with which to work. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 23:58, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

That centuries of Western typographical tradition has developed a way of doing things, that virtually all professional typographers and designers (in print and in electronic media) are doing it this way, and that all English-language readers are used to it—this is a good argument. Any speculations that doing it a different way improves “usability” (or indeed, readability) is B.S.—(until someone presents the results of a verifiable user-testing study). The “long-standing” Misplaced Pages penchant for superscripting editorial comments is an example of amateur, committee-run typography, and it is Not. Good. To start replacing orthographic and typographical convention with our kaffee-klatsch inventions is not only arrogant in the extreme, but bloody embarrassing too. —Michael Z. 2008-09-04 15:49 z

By the way, WP:NOT#PAPER speaks only about size limitations for articles. It says nothing either way about implementing new hypertext expressions, and is light years away from the topic of style or conducting typographic experiments. It pointedly deflects these questions to the MOS. —Michael Z. 2008-09-04 18:21 z

Again, do you suggest that we also superscript any explanatory or missing material within square brackets in quoted text, and bracketed ellipses for deleted material? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 17:35, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I cannot possibly comment on typographic conventions and the like, as I am anything but an expert in the field. However, I have an observation to make: grouping dispute and cleanup tags with sic tags is something I find unintuitive, considering that they have a fundamental difference of purpose. Dispute and cleanup tags are of essentially temporary nature and are not supposed to exist in the finished form of an article. They are notes for the editors—and perhaps, to an extent, for the readers—so that a problem with the quotation can be known and ultimately dealt with. Sic tags, on the other hand, are permanent and are meant to be read by all readers or confusion might arise; this applies always and in every stage of the article, including the finished product. I don't see why the two cases should be treated identically. Waltham, The Duke of 23:25, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Scrolling in articles

It doesn't make sense to me that this text is buried in WP:CITE, when references are only one example. Doesn't it belong here?

Scrolling lists, for example of references, should never be used because of issues with readability, accessibility, printing, and site mirroring. Additionally, it cannot be guaranteed that such lists will display properly in all web browsers.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

I've never seen it used anywhere else besides references (it probably exists for some long lists and such though). If someone saw a scrolling list of references then the first thing they would do is check the policy on citations, so WP:CITE. Gary King (talk) 05:14, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

They are also showing up in articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:45, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

The closest thing I am aware of are panorama pictures in city articles and tallest-buildings-in-x lists. Would you care to cater an example? I am quite curious to see what you are referring to. Waltham, The Duke of 00:02, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

No responses, so I'll try again. Does anyone disagree that the text, currently located at WP:CITE, but pertaining to all portions of the article:

Scrolling lists, for example of references, should never be used because of issues with readability, accessibility, printing, and site mirroring. Additionally, it cannot be guaranteed that such lists will display properly in all web browsers.

belongs here at MOS rather than buried at cite, since it's a global issue? Scrolling lists are creeping into articles, and they don't mirror, print, et al. An example (since corrected) was at Washington,_D._C.#Demographics (see the version before it was corrected here. The old version doesn't show a scroll bar on my laptop, but did on my other computer, not sure what that's about, but the nominator solved it by converting to a vertical template.) At any rate, I am increasingly seeing scroll bars in the text of articles, there have been many others. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:03, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

• I agree that these shouldn't be used in articles, and that if they are being used, then the quote belongs here rather than at WP:CITE. Hesperian 04:21, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm restoring this section from the miserable archiving system on this page after it took me ten minutes to locate it. The issue was never fully dealt with. The text added here was the same as what was at cite. The question is whether we should have scroll boxes at all, including hidden text, within prose. Since no one else has addressed it, I will go edit the page myself, although my mangled prose will probably need fixing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:14, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't follow "miserable archiving system"; it seems pretty user-friendly to me. A simple text search on the main archive page will find any word in any heading or subheading for all 97 completed archives, that is, up through archive #101. A text search in archive 102, which isn't finished, will find the rest. Would you like to be able to find words in the text as well without grepping the database dump? (That doesn't sound right, somehow.) - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 03:42, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I often resort to Google to find stuff buried in the archives. Something like this will do: --Itub (talk) 11:33, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Excellent advice. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:30, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Scrolling should not be used. in article sections. Full stop. It makes articles more difficult to navigate for negligible gain. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 00:05, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

It makes the page a little shorter so I don't need to scroll down as much to reach the bottom. It doesn't work on my work computer, but it does at my house and seems pretty user friendly. When you click on the numbered reference in the text, it brings you down to the reference and highlights it (I use firefox). I don't see any problem with it. I mean we use the columns too and they also have compatibility issues and make it hard to notice improperly formatted references. Grk1011/Stephen (talk) 03:21, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Anyone agree or disagree? Grk1011/Stephen (talk) 16:53, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Strongly disagree. "Doesn't work on computer" and "seems pretty user friendly" are mutually contradictory statements, as are "doesn't work on computer" and "don't see any problem with it". What identified problems have been recorded with columnar display, and where? I don't find it hard to notice improperly-formatted references in columnar display, myself, BTW. I think people who spend a lot of time cleaning up refs simply learn to see trouble spots, regardless of the layout. I have to concur with Dank55, et al. - lots of pain, no real gain. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 19:29, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

However (i.e., in counterpoint to what I've already said above), something probably does need to be done for articles with enormous amounts of sources. It could be scrolling, or it could be the / trick used by navigation boxes and other templates, or something else. An article like WP:CUEGLOSS, when fully sourced, is going to have a very, very large refs section (the one it has now is already quite large by most standards). If it wasn't using {{Rp}}, the refs section would probably be 10x its current size, due to dependence on an comprehensive book reference that sources probably 75% of the terms in the glossary here. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 19:34, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I was saying that on some computers it looks the same as if you did not have it, not really a problem, the same is true for the columns. For those who can see it, if comes in very handy, the pages look a lot neater. Grk1011/Stephen (talk) 19:56, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Compulsion

The following edit, on one of our more obscure subpages, reveals a fascinating mindset:

Yes, Anderson, you oppose the whole idea of the MoS, and we're all heartily sick of it. Of course you oppose any strong moves to reform the project that might involve ... that c word ... compulsion. Fine, you've had your say. Many people happen to think that this is important enough to require strong guidance.

(I intentionally omit the signature; the personal issue that preceded it should be dealt with in another forum.) My question here is whether indeed compulsion is the whole idea of the MoS, as this seems to say.

• Is it feasible for MOS to compel the rest of Misplaced Pages?
• Have we authority to try to do so?
• Is it the best way to get the rest of Misplaced Pages to improve their English? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

For contrast, I have presented the idea that there are five approaches to MOS, of which compulsion is only one (and rarely the most effective) on my user page. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:21, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Manuals of Style that are devoted to a single publication (as opposed to defacto general purpose ones like Chicago Manual of Style) do indeed compell authors; the deal essentially is "follow this style or else your article will not be published". If that is not our intent, we should just delete the manuals of style. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:23, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

But is it the only thing we should do? The approaches I classify are Discuss the possibilities (with their advantages and disadvantages), Make a recommendation, Establish a rule (especially for FA), and Conduct rules (basically don't switch from one established style to another). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:29, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

That seems like a fair enough summary (other than "rules" should not be limited to FA, but even apply to stubs just created). However, the opening question is rather loaded. Whomever you were talking with (I can guess) is clearly using "compel" as a metaphoric shorthand. Everyone here already knows (I hope!) how WP policy and guidelines work, and that WP:IAR is policy, so it is literally impossible to truly force compliance with this or any other guideline, or any policy that does not have a legal requirement behind it. This does not stop this and various other guidelines from using words like "must" and "cannot" and "mandatory". WPians know that "must" in this context means "really, really, really should, unless it causes a problem so severe that you have to invoke IAR in some particular unusual case", and so on. We'd all get sick to death of seeing longwinded but more accurate wording like that in about 5 minutes. I.e., please don't be so literal. It comes across as trying to pick a fight or generate noise instead of raising a legitimate dispute, issue or question, and some might interpret this as disruptive. (NB: I am not labeling you disruptive, as a close reading of WP:DE makes it clear that to do so is a direct accusation of bad faith - far too many people call someone a "DE" without understanding this; what I mean is that MOS is notorious for fractious debates, and tempers can run hot here, so don't fan the flames without good reason.) — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 05:45, 29 August 2008 (UTC) PS: The quoted party didn't say "compulsion is the whole idea of the MoS"; those were independent sentences making independent points, so that was a red herring. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 05:47, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that compulsion is really an option, and especially not on enwiki. The sheer variety of articles – both current and future – makes it nigh on impossible to have useful prescriptive rules which cover all of them. Nor could such rules be enforced across all articles, and all revisions… That doesn't mean that MOS is useless either: it is a collection of "best practice", a standard to aim for, but there will always be occasions (even at FA) where it is not applicable. Physchim62 (talk) 23:50, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Date range rule is no good

"Date ranges are preferably given with minimal repetition, using an unspaced en dash where the range involves numerals alone (5–7 January 1979; January 5–7, 2002) or a spaced en dash where opening and/or closing dates have internal spaces (5 January – 18 February 1979; January 5 – February 18, 1979)."

This seems to be a fossil from a time before Misplaced Pages reformatted date links according to user preferences. Nowadays, the minimal repetition practice just doesn't work - it'll just give either "5 January–7" for half our users or "5–January 7" for the other half. The standard should therefore be changed to favour each end of the range being given as both day and month.

The spaced en dashes also cause a problem for year pages. I've always done them as

• February 5-February 6 - A tornado outbreak, the deadliest in 23 years, kills 58 in the Southern United States.

since, if the dash has spaces around it, then it becomes too similar to that used between the date and the event description, hence hard on the eyes to identify it as an event covering a range of dates:

• February 5 - U.S. stock market indices plunge more than 3% after a report showed signs of economic recession in the service-sector. The S&P 500 fell 3.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 370 points.
• February 5 - February 6 - A tornado outbreak, the deadliest in 23 years, kills 58 in the Southern United States.
• February 7 - Space Shuttle Atlantis launches on mission STS-122 to deliver the European-built Columbus science laboratory to the International Space Station.

Making this a spaced en-dash actually makes the problem worse, since an en-dash implies a higher-level division than a simple hyphen used as a dash. An unspaced en-dash makes it a little better, but even if this is done, we ought to standardise on at least an en-dash between the date and the event.

OK, so this bit of the discussion is probably better suited to Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Years rather than here. And it's actually OK to use plain hyphens in the meantime under the "except where common sense and the occasional exception will improve an article" provision. But my first point, about the dates of the year being given in full, is certainly no exception, as dates will nearly always be linked in practice. -- Smjg (talk) 21:29, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, date linking has recently been deprecated (see vast discussions and changes at WT:MOSNUM), so the first point seems moot. I don't like your suggested format with hyphens meaning "to", either - seems highly non-standard. Can't you use a colon instead of a dash before the event?--Kotniski (talk) 21:48, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I see, that MoS page states "The linking of dates purely for the purpose of autoformatting is now deprecated." Half the problem is that many people probably don't see it as linking them purely for autoformatting, but merely a matter of keeping Misplaced Pages's look and feel consistent. Probably for years to come (unless some bot comes round unlinking them all and expecting individuals to revert those that should've remained linked) the vast majority of dates on Misplaced Pages will be linked, and people will continue to follow this example.

Moreover, Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Years explicitly dictates that dates on year pages be linked. Unlinking them would be a radical change to the format of these pages, as would the other thing you suggest: changing the hyphens to colons. Do you think that such radical changes are worth it - sufficiently desirable and/or feasibly implementable? Maybe it's time for another survey.... -- Smjg (talk) 23:49, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I think bots probably will soon begin delinking full dates, just as they already delink solitary years. So hopefully editors' habits will change accordingly, and "consistency" will come to mean not linking dates for no good purpose. Year pages are a special case, I suppose; if links are desired there, then separate rules have to be established. But I see no reason to allow hyphens instead of normal en dashes meaning "to" - that just looks bad. How is it normally done at the moment? If there is no consistent style then the question of radical change doesn't really arise.--Kotniski (talk) 05:19, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Indeed; it's one of the reasons that date autoformatting was a bad idea in the first place. Smjg, if you encounter this problem, simply remove autoforamatting from the whole article, taking care to view the diff for any false positives the script may produce (these should be reduced to a miniscule proportion soon). Date and year ranges require an en dash, both in main text and article titles. See WP:DASH. Oh, and I can hear Anderson now, fast approaching on galloping horse to trumpet his "do as you please" anti-MoS theory! Chaos would ensue if people took any notice ... Tony (talk) 05:39, 29 August 2008 (UTC) PS And yes, we do need to build into the guideline an exception for the linking of date fragments (not the autoformatting of whole dates) in articles on such fragments. In a year article, links to other year articles should be acceptable; in an article on a month, to other months, etc. Tony (talk) 05:41, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

• Rudis indigestaque moles... But what would actually happen is that most editors would ignore WP:MOSDASH, as they do now, and that Tony would actually have to persuade them into doing what he wants, instead of threatening them with "MOS breaches". O the horror! Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:26, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

So you're suggesting that, if a year page contains a date range written in a way that breaks autoformatting, all dates on that one page should be unlinked? I'm not sure if this is desirable. ISTM year pages are one place where it's desirable to keep dates of the year linked, what with dates being the whole subject of these pages. (Conversely for the year links on day-of-year pages). If OTOH we do decide to unlink these, we probably ought to increase their prominence in some way, such as making them bold. -- Smjg (talk) 11:33, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Kotniski, you seem to have got things mixed up a bit. There is a consistent style: linking all dates on these pages, and using a spaced hyphen between the date and the event. The radical changes you proposed affect this. OTOH, there is no consistent style for ranges of dates on these pages. I have been implementing the style I gave at the beginning because it looks tidiest under the constraints of the consistent style that we do have. But if these constraints are changed, then that'll affect what looks right as a notation for date ranges on these pages. I'll see what I can come up with. -- Smjg (talk) 11:33, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

What do ISTM and OTOH mean? Can you provide an example of a page with this issue? I don't see any advantage in linking whole dates in a single item on one of these chronological pages: a year, perhaps; June 24, perhaps; but why both at once? In fact, convince me that June 24 should ever be linked. Tony (talk) 12:14, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

To Tony's first question: "it seems to me" and "on the other hand", I guess. But to Smjg, if you really insist on continuing to link all the dates (ugh!) and using spaced hyphens (double ugh!), then I guess the best way of doing it without making things any worse is to use some form of piping, like "February 3–23 - battle of..." (I trust the piping overrides the autoformatting.) But we should really be considering a mass change of style for these pages (at least to get rid of the spaced hyphens, which WP:HYPHEN rightly prohibits).--Kotniski (talk) 14:17, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

It just goes to show that there's no perfect solution. Using piping to override the autoformatting just means that the entries will be in a mixture of day-month and month-day formats for many of us. Thinking about it now, maybe a mass change of style is the answer, as long as we go about it in the appropriate manner (which means, at the very least, taking the discussion over to Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Years and establishing a consensus). -- Smjg (talk) 15:51, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Good idea; but let's always bear in mind that "many of us" here means a very very small percentage of our readership, and one which should be even smaller than it is. I see no reason for WP editors ever to work with autoformatting switched on, or any other tool which prevents them from seeing pages in the form the public sees. And the form the public sees must never be allowed to be worsened, even slightly, for the sake of what are quite negligible benefits to that negligible percentage.--Kotniski (talk) 16:33, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

We should not edit that way, but some of us also read the encyclopedia. Autoformatting was intended for those people, as a perk to become an editor. (I still think it was a bad idea, but we should give it its due.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:55, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Those who have user accounts on Misplaced Pages are far more likely to be the ones who edit than those who don't. So you think the vast majority of people who have user accounts should just pretend the date format pref doesn't exist? (And while I'm at it, I shall remind you that this pref also affects the way dates display in page histories and the like, which most non-editors are unlikely ever to read.) And "the form the public sees" - what sense is this supposed to make? The public sees what the public sets in his/her/its user prefs. -- Smjg (talk) 18:29, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

The public (non-logged-in users; the vast majority) don't have user prefs. What editors do is up to them, of course, I just find it strange that someone who writes something would choose not to see it in the form in which it is going to be generally read. The main point is that in deciding how to format these pages, we should pretty much ignore issues of autoformatting, and concentrate first and foremost on getting it right for the ordinary reader. --Kotniski (talk) 18:57, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Right. This is a global public encyclopedia, not a private editors' club. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Do lengthy, non-neutral quotations belong in the article?

First of all, I am somewhat surprised that the MoS gives no hint as to when should we use quotations. A usage of a lengthy and non completely neutral quotation is being discussed at Talk:Sejny_Uprising#Same_old_business_again; comments would be very much appreciated as at this point we only have two deadlocked editors there.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 22:33, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Not really appropriate here; that's a content question. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:33, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. The non-neutrality issue is covered by WP:NPOV as a matter of policy. The topic of "relevance" is not even the subject of a guideline, but is rather a matter of various essays, all of which can be found via WP:RELEVANCE, which suggests that relevance as a WP term has no broad consensus definition yet. I'm not aware of a guideline on "brevity" or "conciseness" either. WP:CONSENSUS policy is also obviously at play; the burden is on the editor who wants to change the article to convince other editors that this is a good idea. See also WP:BRD - if the B and the R are happening over and over again without the D part happening (or happening kinda, but not producing consensus), then the simple flowchart at WP:CONSENSUS is not being followed. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Portal

Where should links to portals within articles go?? (i.e. see Shannara....there is a link to a portal at the top right. Should it go there, or at the bottom of the article? the_ed17 21:58, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

See {{Portal}}. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

See WP:LAYOUT. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:40, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, yeah, but the template points to the same stuff, and is a faster read. :-) — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 00:25, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

WP:ACCESSIBILITY

Asking again...WP:ACCESSIBILITY is an important page. It's not currently in the style cat or in CAT:GEN, but I would be happy to put it in both, if someone who knows more than I do about images and tables will confirm that it doesn't contradict pages in the style cat or image cat. Sandy often checks articles for compliance with WP:ACCESSIBILITY, so we want to make sure to bring this page to the attention of editors. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 03:28, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I think it's a good move. IMO, WP:ACCESS should be more than a guideline, because if we don't follow it, it's likely we are discriminating against those with disabilities. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 03:50, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I do not know what the style cat is, why there is one, or what it means. It's marked as a style guideline. Do we now have a hierarchy of style guidelines? If we do, 1) I'm unaware, and 2) ACCESSIBILITY should be one of the most important ones, as explained by Matthewedwards. (Why is the font on this page horribly messed up? Is it a scheme to keep people from participating here? :-)) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:39, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I think it just puts all the style guidelines in one category. As for a hierarchy, we probably do. WP:MOS being at the top, the next ones being those in the first section of {{style}}, and the bottom ones being those of specific Wikiprojects, such as WP:MOSTV, WP:MUSTARD and MOS:FILM. I don't treat WP:ACCESS as a style guideline, because every section of that page already has a dedicated MoS guideline. I follow those, then check that my work is accessible and treat it as a policy. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 05:00, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Per WP:List of guidelines, the list of Misplaced Pages guidelines is Category:Misplaced Pages guidelines (shortcut CAT:G). None of the accessibility pages is in that cat or any subcat. Work with me here; I'm trying to get WP:ACCESSIBILITY listed as a guideline. I like the stuff I see, but I'm not familiar enough with image and table issues to know if that page conflicts any current guidelines. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 13:16, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Neutral for now. I have to observe that WT:ACCESSIBILITY sometimes (including right now) has somewhat revolutionary-toned debates on it that, boiled down, seem to suggest that WP:ACCESSIBILITY is the most important thing in the world, and that WP:MOS and everything else should be sort of forced to do what it says. I don't find this attitude or approach very constructive (unless it is a clever agent provocateur tactic, which is possible – I've used it myself before, as at WP:NCP – get lackadaisical but numerous and organized editors not complying with a WP-wide guideline riled enough to change the guideline they are in constant conflict with, to now encompass their needs, instead of simply ignoring it and undermining its guidance value). That said, good points are being raised there, and I cannot for the life of me think of a reason that anything sensible/consensus recommended by WP:ACCESSIBILITY should not be implemented at MOS, NC, LAYOUT, etc., so that they do not conflict with it. I don't have a position on what sort of designation (guideline, essay, policy, etc.) or sub-designation (style guideline, etc.) WP:ACCESSIBILITY should have, and would probably want input from WP:WPACCESS (the project) on the matter before formulating a solid opinion on it. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 18:26, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Agree with all of that. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:20, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Excess non Latin script usage

On articles related to mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic topics, I've noticed almost every term, mostly proper nouns has the non-Latin spelling. For example, see List of rivers of China. Are the such scripts really necessary outside the main article or is this an excess? I personally feel this is an excess, and should be curbed as it lends little value to a reader on non topical pages. =Nichalp «Talk»= 07:38, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Depends who the reader is. If I could read Chinese, I would be very interested to see the Chinese characters (particularly since they are not deducible from the Roman script). Since I can't, I don't care (as a reader) one way or the other. So better to include the information, for those who can make use of it.--Kotniski (talk) 16:01, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I can see a value for searching. If I encounter 黃河, and search for the string in English-language pages, I may encounter an en:Misplaced Pages page, and find out that it is the Huang He River. Of course, in that case, Yellow River also has the hanzhi, but not all the rivers in the list have articles.--Curtis Clark (talk) 18:16, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

That's unfortunately besides the point if an article exists or not. Is it is really useful to have every third sentence with a non Roman equivalent? =Nichalp «Talk»= 18:49, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

That's an excellent point. In the age of search engines, the way to draw people to a page is to use the right search terms. Mandarin characters are the right search terms, if you're trying to attract people who read them as well as English, and we are; those are the people likely to know the most about things in China. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 18:25, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

It might be more useful to search the Chinese WP, and see if there is a link to a corresponding article in the English one; if that failed, French or German would do as backup. But these also have their useless aspect; at the moment, I'm seeing this section as having two little square boxes. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:29, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Code2000 is what I use. I'm clueless on hanzhi (although I can use SC Unipad to figure out kana), and although I can sound out Russian, I usually have no idea what it means. But it's still nice to have the stuff in the original language in case I should ever need it.--Curtis Clark (talk) 05:25, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

What I'm trying to point is not the use of non-Roman scripts, but the need for it for pages that are not directly about the topic: Korea under Japanese rule has a bit. Why would it be useful to a reader on this page? We don't have the Cyrillic equivalents for Oblasts of Russia (similar to the list of Chinese rivers), so why keep double standards? =Nichalp «Talk»= 18:49, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree that excesssive translations or transcriptions can be annoying in running text, but in lists I don't see much objection to them (except possibly that they might sometimes make list items spill over the ends of lines, but that's not so likely with the Chinese characters). There is a clear difference between Russian and Chinese, though: if you know Russian and you see the Roman transcription of a name, you can deduce the original Cyrillic from it. Same doesn't apply to Chinese.--Kotniski (talk) 18:56, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I cannot read Russian, so for a lay person like me, making sense of Cyrillic might very well using a mirror to check and see if the mirror equivalents make some sense in English :) But on a more serious note, be it a Russian or Chinese noticeboard, the script still does not make sense to me... No matter how similar cyrillic characters appear to the Latin script. =Nichalp «Talk»= 19:21, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I eally don't see the harm in including this extra information, nor do I see why Nichalp (talk · contribs) should be so put out by it. Personally, I used Misplaced Pages last week to find the correct transliteration of a Japanese street address, and why not? Physchim62 (talk) 19:00, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi, I don't think you got what I was saying. Having the Japanese transliteration of say Tokyo is perfectly fine and justified on the Tokyo page. My grouse is having a the same transliteration for all Tokyo appearances. =Nichalp «Talk»= 19:21, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Regarding Tokyo, see Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles)#Using Japanese in the article body, which addresses exactly that topic. The idea is simple: In an article about Topic X, the opening sentence should give the Japanese script for Topic X. In another article that links to Topic X, editors should not give the Japanese script for Topic X, since it's only a click away. We acknowledge that articles such as lists (especially glossaries) and sections that catalog items (such as stations on railroad lines) can have Japanese script so that it prints together with English text. But in ordinary running text, since this is the English Misplaced Pages, we should write in English.

We welcome discussion of the MoS-JA at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles). Fg2 (talk) 05:27, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I'll answer further queries tomorrow. Got to go. =Nichalp «Talk»= 19:21, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

So if I'm following correctly, what you are objecting to is repeated use of the untransliterated strings in an article, not their single use in arguably appropriate places?--Curtis Clark (talk) 05:25, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Not exactly, see my post below Michael Z's comment. =Nichalp «Talk»= 06:36, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

The native-script names of things should be present, once, in their own article, for accurate naming, for comprehensiveness, and to assist with search. It may also be useful to have them in stand-alone lists—this also has the benefit of showing the names of things whose articles are red-linked.

But articles' text should be written for the English-language reader, and not cluttered with foreign script which the reader cannot be expected to comprehend. Normal words and names should be translated to English. Foreign names should be romanized for accessibility, and even in linguistics articles romanized transcriptions are preferable to foreign script where they are suitable to convey the point. —Michael Z. 2008-08-31 05:47 z

I think this is a balanced view. Cao Cao violates it repeatedly.--Curtis Clark (talk) 14:58, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Take a look at Cao Cao. Is it necessary to have all names, titles and places with the Chinese equivalents? Take Literature in the Hoysala Empire on the other hand. Kannada is not used anywhere in the article as local equivalents for names or places. =Nichalp «Talk»= 06:36, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Nichalp and believe having every Non-English term in another script becomes a bit annoying. As Nichalp has also pointed out, this phenomenon occurs much less frequently in Indian related articles. The only exception that I'm aware of is Glossary of terms in Hinduism which has the Sanskrit/Devangari/Hindi equivalent after every word, and that too in bold. It didn't in the past and despite being able to read the Sanskrit, I don't see any purpose in it on the English Misplaced Pages and plan to remove it in the near future. Gizza 08:03, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I would say that a glossary is one of the places where foreign-language names would be appropriate, since it directly speaks to the meaning and perhaps source of words. In this case, I would suggest un-bolding all of the Sanskrit, since it is part of the gloss, and not the term being glossed.  —Michael Z. 2008-08-31 17:09 z

One possible reason for the paucity of Indic examples is that until recently, fonts and rendering engines didn't handle Indic scripts well, but East Asian scripts have always been straightforward for any system that can handle multibyte characters.--Curtis Clark (talk) 14:58, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think Misplaced Pages was ever held hostage to the availability of fonts. For the past four years, I have never noticed any flagged issues with Indic fonts that would hinder the need for addition of Indic text. We also have a gothic wikipedia that requires one to download esoteric fonts to view the text. =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:53, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

It's not the availability of fonts so much as the ability to do complex shaping. Two of the people who work for me are from India, one from Ahmedebad in Gujarat, and one from Kolkata. We examined web pages in Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali, using the rendering engine in Firefox 3 and the fonts supplied with Windows (except for Bengali, iirc, where there isn't a Windows font, so we used Code2000). They found problems in every page in all three languages, primarily where display order and reading order differ. Considering that Hindi written in the Devanagari script, perhaps the most ubiquitous Indic language/script combination on the web, still has minor issues after all these years, and that Bengali web pages are still somewhat of a novelty (according to the person from Kolkata), it's no wonder that there's not more Indic on en:Misplaced Pages. (See also Help:Multilingual support (Indic).)--Curtis Clark (talk) 17:39, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree. The rendering does not appear clearly on Firefox. But that did not stop the hi:[REDACTED] from taking root. =Nichalp «Talk»= 10:40, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

In English language newspapers in Chinese speaking areas it is common practice to follow all transliterated Chinese names by the Chines characters in brackets (at least the first time they occur in an article). Since guessing the spelling from the transliteration is not generally possible, it helps to identify the person unambiguously and to support starting a search in other media. I support doing the same in Misplaced Pages. −Woodstone (talk) 09:47, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I oppose doing the same in Misplaced Pages. First, Misplaced Pages is online (it may be appropriate for a print version to have a different style guide) so instead of writing the characters, we should provide a link (at least the first time) to the article on the named person; the characters are appropriate there. Second, Misplaced Pages is not a specialized publication for the Chinese-speaking community; it's for the general English readership. Non-English content in articles should be limited to the minimum; the link takes care of the need to identify the person unambiguously and the characters are unnecessary. These two major differences make me oppose this style. Fg2 (talk) 09:58, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

That's right. For illustration of the native script, the name can appear once in the titled article. In other articles, linking the English name suffices. This is not a multilingual encyclopedia, but to help various readers we do present the native name, as well as providing potentially dozens of interwiki links. Nor is this an English-language learner's tutorial. —Michael Z. 2008-08-31 17:03 z

Hey, why don't we remove all mathematical equations and chemical reactions schemes as well, as not all of our readers can decipher them. Judo, kayak and a few tens of thousands of other articles should be deleted for not having English titles. We'll have to remove all the photos at breast because I can't look at them at work (after all, pornography by region is work-safe once you scroll past the title) Come to think of it, maybe we should give up trying to write an encyclopedia at all, as it poses accessibility problems for the ignorant. English Misplaced Pages should be restricted to the Misplaced Pages and Misplaced Pages talk namespaces, and non-Latin scripts have no place on it! Physchim62 (talk) 10:33, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I believe you have not understood what I have to say. Please read my post again. =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:53, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

That fact that Judo and Kayak are not English words has no relevance. It is okay to have articles on them when all the terminology is transliterated into the Roman script. An analogous example would be having the article moved to 柔道 because that is the name of it in the Chinese script. And mathematical equation are supposed to be in an encylopedia despite not everyone understanding what they mean. But information written in Chinese and Arabic is not supposed to be in an English language encylopedia, especially so frequently. And your point about pornography is a complete non sequiter. That is about what you like/dislike or consider to be taboo. Misplaced Pages allows it because it is not censored but this discussion about non-Latin scripts has nothing to do with "censoring" them. We are discussing whether they have any purpose here. Gizza 12:02, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Nonsense!

Kayak and judo are perfectly understandable English words (in use for 250 and 120 years, respectively). 黃河 is not an English word. The former are used in English, the latter can only be presented in an English-language article to illustrate some point. —Michael Z. 2008-08-31 17:03 z

I completely agree that sometimes foreign script use can be excessive; there are plenty of examples of that. But it's a subjective thing, how much is too much, and there are plenty of examples of articles in which what might look excessive to one person is a fairly necessary (or just useful, helpful) amount to another person. As an editor who works extensively on Japan-related topics, I generally include in-text kanji when the romanization or translation alone does not fully indicate what is being referred to as clearly as if the kanji were included; there are often terms that could be translated a variety of ways, and so in order to be clearer about what's referred to, we include the kanji. For students of Chinese/Japanese/other languages and the according history of the respective country, the use of foreign language terms is often more recognizable, more quickly understandable, than using just romanizations and translations. And it's useful and interesting for learning new terms. So I would definitely be opposed to any motion to eliminate foreign language terms entirely from main text sections. Again, I acknowledge that there are certainly cases where it's a bit excessive, but I don't think there is any way to make a policy for this that would fairly and justly address all possible situations, reasons for using the foreign script, etc. LordAmeth (talk) 15:11, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

That would be useful if the general English-speaking population could understand kanji or katakana. But a vast majority cannot and cannot be expected to do so. On the Tokyo page 東京 would be acceptable and very useful, elsewhere it would be a hindrance to easy reading with no tangible benefits to a reader. =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:53, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it is a matter of judgment, but the matter is to judge what is necessary to get the point across to an English-language reader, sometimes to eliminate ambiguity—but often a plain link or a single mention will suffice. This is not an annotated encyclopedia aimed at Japanese (or any other) learners of English. —Michael Z. 2008-08-31 17:03 z

Concur generally with Fg2, above, or rather with the materials cited by that editor. Don't use the native-language version all over the place in running text, only where it makes sense. Several cases where it makes sense: a) Lead of article pertaining to the translated topic; b) usages in running text for which there is nowhere to link; c) glossaries and lists, unless consisting of nothing but entries that do have somewhere else to which to link (generally, I'd say don't provide the non-English for something that has an article, only for entries that don't have any other "home" here other than the list they are in; some might disagree with this last point, as giving the list an inconsistent appearance, so it's not a point I would even hold to strongly). — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 18:08, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Having read lots of articles by LordAmeth, I see his point about leaving room for judgment. A valid question is, how strong should a rule on avoidance of foreign script be? We should not make it so strict that, for example, bots could enforce it; some judgment is necessary. Still, I think it's an important guiding principle, and I continue to favor it. Fg2 (talk) 21:11, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok, so do we have consensus on the following:

1. Restrict the local scripts to the "home" article
2. Avoid scripts in running text
3. Scripts are acceptable on non-home pages where they can provide context to a term that cannot be adequately transliterated in English. This should be used sparingly.

Regards, =Nichalp «Talk»= 10:40, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Some (minor) issues:

1. "Local script" needs to be reworded; hanzhi, Devanagari, and Cyrillic are in no sense local. I would suggest "non-Latin script", except that...
2. What about the parts of the Latin script in Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional, and all the diacritics and modifier letters? One might argue that these are unnecessary for English, but ǃKung people, Oʻahu, Māori, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh suggest that many of these have found their way into English, and many transliteration schemes use these as well (e.g. "kṛṣṇa"). It's arguable whether Sḵwx̱wú7mesh has more recognizability for an average English speaker than Русский, but it's a slippery slope. I'd be in favor of a guideline that referred to "non-Latin scripts", and then re-evaluate after a while to see how it works.
3. I'd like to see something about redlinks in lists. In List of rivers of China, the hanzhi accompanying the redlinks might be the only way to fully specify the rivers.
4. I'd amend "Avoid scripts in running text" to "Avoid non-Latin scripts in running text outside of the lead or an etymology section".

--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:33, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I sort-of concur with Nichalp's take as modified by Curtis Clark, but it's still not really there yet. See Five-pins for example. I think that the non-lead uses of Italian in that article are perfectly appropriate and would still be appropriate even if the game were Chinese and used Chinese characters where Italian is used in this case (so long as Latin-alphabet transliterations were also provided). If we say it's okay to use non-English to provide the real names of things unless they are some script the average American or British person can't read, this will seem a bit discriminatory. That said, we don't need this stuff all over the place (e.g. if the five-pins article had provided Italian for everything to do with the game, instead of just a handful of particular terms of art), only where the inclusion is important in the context. Or something like that. I've had my head in template ParserFunctions all day, so I'm not really thinking in "guideline wording mode" right now, sorry. I can mostly do one or other but not both during any given editing marathon. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 00:23, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

I definitely see the point to this, and it contrasts with "Cao Cao was then instated as the Great General (大將軍) and Marquis of Wuping (武平侯)" from Cao Cao, in that the latter doesn't include transcriptions or transliterations. And the Chinese article on cricket includes the English names (in the Latin alphabet) of the players and parts of the game (and if Babelfish is to be trusted, no sound-transcriptions, either). How about "If unmodified and un-anglicized terms from a foreign language have specialized use in English, they may be included in transliterated or transcribed form, and optionally in the original script."?--Curtis Clark (talk) 03:48, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the extended Latin scripts are also a major problem. It becomes that much harder to make sense of something not written in the 26 alphabets of the English language in running text. Sḵwx̱wú7mesh is one awful title. Should we notify all the noticeboards to discuss this issue? =Nichalp «Talk»= 14:01, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

All the suggested wordings sound too over-specified and micro-managing to me. There will be many specialized and unanticipated cases, which would be made vulnerable to lawyering by such a detailed and absolute edict.

I think the guideline should present a general goal, and allow editors to use their own judgment in how and when to implement it. —Michael Z. 2008-09-02 16:03 z

Article development

WP:Article development has been marked as a style guideline for a while. It seems to me this is a good how-to page, a good page to point people to in See also sections, but it isn't and shouldn't be a guideline. (Look, and you'll see what I mean.) There has been very little activity in the article or on the talk page. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:35, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. —Centrx→talk • 23:22, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Yep. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 00:07, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

En dashes and categories

Several 2008-09-01 discussions concern the use of dashes in categories involving a range of years. It has been asserted that WP:DASH does not apply to categories. But surely an article and a category about the same topic should use the same type of dash, no? — CharlotteWebb 22:45, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Using the appropriate dash rather than a hyphen for page titles is a relatively recent change--previously, all page titles used hyphens--so it may not have been thought out in regard to categories. Previously, hyphens were standard or allowed for ease of use. This was decided to be not especially compelling for page titles which rarely change and which can be easily referenced by a redirect with a hyphen. If categorization requires the exact title of a Category, not a redirect, then this reason does not apply to categories because the use of dashes in category names thus makes it much more difficult to categorize any page. —Centrx→talk • 23:20, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Unless things have changed then category redirects don't actually exist, in that articles added to a redirected category don't get added to the target category. There is a bot which corrects these errors automatically but I don't know how often it runs. I think there is a good basis for not changing category titles at this time. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:58, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Concur. I don't see much evidence that the bot(s) run frequently at all. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 00:01, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

I disagree: with redirects, all category names wrongly using a hyphen should be corrected. Tony (talk) 01:24, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Leave well enough alone. It is preferable that categories, which are hard enough to reach, should use keyboard-accessible characters. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:11, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Why have WP:DASH then? Why apply it only to articles and not categories? I don't understand the purpose of having competing style guidelines for different namespaces. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:23, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Why indeed! I suspect I'm about to provoke howls of protest and derision, but WP:DASH seems one of the most pointless and irritating parts of MOS - it doesn't make articles any easier to read for the great majority of users, and it makes things harder for editors, either to know which dash or hyphen to use or how to enter them. Bin it!Nigel Ish (talk) 19:17, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Sure I'm not necessarily in favor of having different dashes, but it only compounds confusion by having competing and self-contradictory guidelines. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:09, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Lead section

I can't seem to find a definitive answer to this. How should birth vs. stage names be handled in the intro? I've seen many ways of doing this:

• Kid Rock (born Robert James Ritchie)…
• Kenny Chesney (born Kenneth Arnold Chesney)…

or

• Robert James Ritchie, better known by his stage name Kid Rock…
• Kenneth Arnold "Kenny" Chesney…

I prefer the first set, as they match it up better to the title of the article, but so often I've seen people change it to the latter without explaining why. I also think that the first set is much easier in cases where the stage and birth names are quite different. However, I've yet to find anything in the MoS that suggests either way. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • 00:21, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

I took a look at Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (people)#Nicknames, pen names, stage names, cognomens assuming that would help. The examples it gives are:

• George Eliot article starts, "Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot"
• Le Corbusier article starts, "Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier"
• 50 Cent article starts, "Curtis James Jackson III (born July 6, 1975), better known by his stage name 50 Cent"
• MC Hammer article starts, "MC Hammer (born Stanley Kirk Burrell"
• Dizzy Gillespie begins, "John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie"
• Scotty Bowman begins, "William Scott "Scotty" Bowman"

so there's a lot of difference. Perhaps WP:BLP has something. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 01:36, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Kenny Chesney (born Kenneth Arnold Chesney) sounds like a legal name change; Kenneth Arnold "Kenny" Chesney sounds like a nickname. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 04:04, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Robert James Ritchie, better known by his stage name Kid Rock…...

is smoother writing than the parentheses. As long as all common names, including the off-stage name, are in the first paragraph and visible through bolding, it really doesn't matter. For comparison, many articles about non-English speaking people begin with the local form of the name, like Horace, which begins "Quintus Horatius Flaccus (), commonly known as Horace...". Some of them even omit the English form of the name, because it is the title. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:18, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Two styles of navigational templates, is one bad?

Template:NBA Awards is a navigational template that is placed vertically on article pages, down the right hand side. Template talk:NBA Awards#Alternate template gives a design for the same template using {{navbox}}. The creator of the original (in use) template said, "I like the current version better because people can click on the links at the top of the page". A discussion ensued, and I said "WP:NAVBOXES should be at the bottom of the page, not in the lead."

I was then asked to return to the talk page and comment once again. I did:

This template appears in the lead section of NBA All-Star Game Most Valuable Player Award. It links to NBA Coach of the Year Award, NBA Rookie of the Year Award and Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy. Those awards are all independent to the All-Star Game Most Valuable Player, even though they are related to each other in the grand scheme of things. Further, the Coach of the Year article does not provide any information that is important to All-Star Game Most Valuable Player article, which doesn't provide any information that is important to the Rookie of the Year Award. That is why my personal preference is to see navboxes at the bottom of articles. Navbox content is not often all that relevant to the content of the articles they appears on. Navboxes usually contain links to related articles and do not provide further understanding of the subjects of the pages they appear on. Lede sections are supposed to be a brief overview or introduction to the rest of the page content. When navboxes appear in the lead, they give the impression that they are contributing to the understanding of the article content, when in fact they do not. They just provide distracting links to other semi-related pages. This is why I don't understand your comment, Chris, "I like the current version better because people can click on the links at the top of the page." Don't you want people to read your article? What if one of the links in the navboxes appears to be more interesting than the page they're currently on?

Anyway, in either format, the template brings together a collection of links of similar articles. It look awkward if the links were all crowbarred into normal prose, and if they weren't in a template they'd all be listed in the "See also" section rather than the Lede section. With that, I've done quite a bit of digging around to find something that can confirm one way or the other.

WP:Lead says Navigation templates may be in the Lede. That page links to WP:BETTER, which says they should go at the very end, as a navigational footer. BETTER links to WP:LAYOUT, which says the lead section may have navboxes, but also that "Various navigational aids go at the end of the article, following the last appendix section."

All those guidelines link to WP:NAVBOX, which says "There are two basic layouts : (1.) On the right side of page - for example {{History of China}}. (2.) Footer boxes - for example {{Health in the People's Republic of China}} designed to appear at the bottom of each article." It goes on to say, "For footer boxes, {{Navbox}} is the standard. Existing hard-coded collapsible tables or NavFrames should be converted to {{Navbox}} if possible. This standardizes the look and to eases future maintenance." This template obviously isn't a collapsible table, and while it isn't coded like a Navframe, it does appear to be a one, albeit without the collapsible bits. If we look at the code for this template, it begins with "{| class="navbox"", if that's the case, it should be a standard navbox. Finally I looked at WP:ACCESS to see how our handicapped readers deal with right-hand column tables. That page also allows this kind of navbox, which it calls a "sidebar", to be present in the lede. WP:MOS incidentally doesn't mention navigational boxes.

So while I don't like it, it seems this template style is allowed. And while it is, I won't oppose any articles or lists at FAC/FLC when they do use it, but I will continue to request that they change it for the reason I gave in my first paragraph.

I then said I would bring the discussion here, because it isn't just this template that does things like this and more discussion is needed. The two I can think of right now are {{Formula One}} and {{World Rally Championship}} (which also happen to appear after infoboxes, something one of the style guidelines I linked to above discourages).

My personal preference would be for horizontal navboxes at the end of the article, the reasons given in the first paragraph of my quoted text. Am I justified in this, or am I flogging a dead horse because four style guidelines say its okay? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 09:23, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

The Military History Wikiproject uses a set of campaignbox templates, which can be used either way, based on {{Military navigation}}, a standardized application of the navbox. As far as I know, we haven't received any complaints about these.

There was some talk about the accessibility of such templates at WT:ACCESS. It's preferable to have such navigation templates appear after the first heading, so screen reader users don't have to tab through them, but can jump to the first heading. The collapsible campaignbox was said to be less trouble by one screen-reader user. —Michael Z. 2008-09-02 13:47 z

It is generally preferable, for the majority of users (and some users employing screen readers; some only want the summary version) that the sort of quickie summaries available in infobozes be quickly available. If the infobox doesn't offer a quick and convenient summary, there's little reason to have it at all. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:13, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

These aren't infoboxes though because they don't provide information. They're navigational boxes. I just don't get why you'd want to introduce an article, or a section, with links to other pages that don't provide information about the page you're on. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 17:55, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

They're still summaries of player X's awards, and links to them. There's a case we should not have them at all, because they don't really provide enough additional information; but if they remain, they should be readily visible. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:09, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

No one is introducing articles with navboxes. They are appearing as collapsed, titled nav lists, which are easily skipped whether you are browsing with a visual browser or a screen reader. They are conveniently placed at the top, where the reader can be aware of them before or after they read an article's intro. A good example is Operation Barbarossa, which has three campaignboxes just below the infobox (most occurrences have only one).

This follows common practice on many websites, where topical or secondary navigation links are found near the top, visually subordinate to the site's main navigation links. Placing these apart from Misplaced Pages's project-oriented navigation links, but clearly subordinate to an article's infobox reinforces the nature of these navboxes to the reader. —Michael Z. 2008-09-02 22:13 z

Italics in links

Both here and at WP:ITALICS, we're saying nothing about the fact that linked words and phrases are less likely to be italicized; we used to. Linked words and phrases on Misplaced Pages, in mature and not-so-mature articles, tend not to be italicized to point out that they are words used as words, or foreign words, or for emphasis. Not never, but a whole lot less often. I was just doing a review at FAC where the reviewer insisted a linked word should be italicized, and WP:MOS and WP:ITALICS give no wiggle room at all on this; shouldn't they? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:33, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

That's because they are less recognizable as italics if they're blue. In principle, however, articles should be equally readable if they are not hyperlinked, so I'm not sure there is that much wriggle room. What did we say, when we did? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:32, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I just checked at one-month intervals around the beginning of this year and I can't find it. It said something like, italics are less likely to be used to denote a word-as-word or for emphasis when a word or phrase is linked. I've got a vague recollection this subject came up recently, maybe in May. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 00:49, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I found the previous wording from WP:MOS in Archive 94, along with a suggestion by some new guy named "Dank55" who was arrogantly making suggestions about a page he had barely read: "Linking a term provides sufficient indication that you are using a term as a term, which italics." - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 00:56, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that's actually non-workable, since if you repurpose WP content, and WP has been designed to be content repurposed from the start, in some way that does not make use of links, blue, etc., you get gibberish because the distinction between use and mention is lost. It's not that things are less likely to be "recognized" as italic if they are blue, it's that editors feel that they've already emphasized the word, which of course isn't true all - all linking signifies is that there's an article or section or something relating to the word/phrase linked, without any form of semantic implication for the linked content, as content in its context. This is actually a common error that I fix when I'm gnoming, and I've never been reverted on such a fix (to my knowledge), not even once. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 08:00, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

For example, the printable version of the articles (available via the link in the toolbox) does not color the hyperlinks. --Itub (talk) 09:18, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Whether words need emphasis of any kind for readability is such a subtle issue that even the most prescriptive style guides tend not to tackle it (except in easy cases), and it's just not going to happen that we're going to get every editor to "pretend the links aren't there". The combination of a very subtle stylistic issue, plus the fact that you're asking editors to ignore something that's right in front of them, guarantees that some editors will see too much fiddling with italics as overly intrusive. I'm not saying you guys aren't right; I'm saying we have to use a light touch, and pick our battles. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Left-aligned images directly below subsection-level

The MoS says: "Do not place left-aligned images directly below subsection-level (=== or greater) headings, as this disconnects the heading from the text it precedes."

What would be the recommendations for the format of a page such as Moorcroft, which appears to suffer from two instances of left image below heading? Anyone care to reformat as a tutorial? --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:41, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Move the second image on the left down a paragraph (possibly down to the references) because it also sandwiches text. This will be unreadable on some monitors. The first image could also migrate down a paragraph; but this also comes under the balnket clause about dealing with conflicts in our advice. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:04, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Text formatting merge proposal

Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (text formatting) serves no purpose at all, as it is simply rehash of WP:MOS (and in one place WP:MOSNUM). To the extent it may say anything distinctive that point should be added to MOS/MOSNUM, but otherwise this is just a blank-and-redirect. See also the closely related discussion at WT:MOSNUM#Text formatting math section merge proposal. The merge-from page is inconsistent on many points with both target pages, and its talk page is evidence of a great deal of confusion being sown among editors as a result of this break-away "guideline"'s existence. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 05:30, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

PS: I have edited a few bits of it to comply better with MOS/MOSNUM, but much of it is still messed up. There are probably a few points in it not presently in either of the controlling guidelines (which is why I suggested merges instead of just wiping it).

PPS: We should probably also go over Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (capital letters) to ensure it hasn't diverged off into Nonsense Land, too, though it is clearly too large and detailed to merge into MOS. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 06:32, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

This all sounds good to me. Tony (talk) 06:39, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

And me.--Kotniski (talk) 07:35, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

If you can eliminate duplication, I will be happy. Lightmouse (talk) 08:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

National varieties of English in International Articles

I'm okay with the British spelling of words in an international article such as 2008 South Ossetia war but I do have a question. I don't know if it's still in this group of articles or not, but there was a sentence that said something to the effect that "The United States Embassy organised an evacuation of it citizens....." I changed it to "organized" under the justification that the United States does not "organise" an evacuation but does "organize" one. A US embassy would truly not ever "organise" anything, but it would "organize" something. I only changed the variety because the entire sentence involved the actions of the United States Embassy. This situation was not mentioned in the MoS, and goes against the "Consistency within the article" section. But I felt it was the right spelling for the above mentioned reasons. Would anyone please comment on this. I feel this is a legitimate situation which is not covered in the MoS. Jason3777 (talk) 21:52, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

The variety of English should be consistent throughout the article, except in direct quotations. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 22:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Of course you don't change the language of a sentence every time you mention an entity from a different country. —Michael Z. 2008-09-04 23:19 z

I completely agree, but I am not talking about a different language; I am talking about the spelling of a specific word (i.e. "c" ==> "z"). US Embassies don't "organise" evacuations, they "organize" them. This is suppose to be an international encyclopedia. Is British English the only appropriate spelling of ALL international articles? Jason3777 (talk) 01:17, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

British English is used in all articles with strong ties to the UK, such as Liverpool or J. R. R. Tolkien. If an article is about a non-English speaking country, the first major contributor chooses the variety of English to use. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 01:32, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Jason, a US embassy does indeed "organise" when this is being reported in British English; just as a UK embassy would "organize" in AmEng. Just as important, "it" should be "its" in the original quotation. Tony (talk) 01:46, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I just wanted some feedback. I majored in English Literture in the US and got points deducted if I used British spelling on exams even if it was a course on British writers. Just wanted to know what the deal was. And I do know the difference between it, its and it's. (Come on it was a typo). I was just asking a question on a talk page. If you see I do this on an article page, please correct it. I'd do it for you. Jason3777 (talk) 02:32, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, Jason: it was uncalled for (and I thought it was third-party text). Tony (talk) 03:07, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

C'est rien. Jason3777 (talk) 03:21, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I think it's clear that the language variety should be consistent within the article and not vary depending on the topic of a particular sentence. But on "-ize/-ise" specifically, is it not true that the "-ize" forms are acceptable also in British English (and possibly all other Englishes)? (See American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize.) That being the case, there seems to be no reason for us not to use -ize everywhere.--Kotniski (talk) 07:24, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I fear you will find that to be a controversial suggestion. As the above says "however, the -ize spelling is now rarely used in the UK in the mass media and newspapers, and is often incorrectly regarded as an Americanism." Whether or not it is "incorrect" in my experience that is how it is very widely viewed. Yourz etc. Ben MacDui 07:50, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The Guardian organise 6,890, organize 87. The Daily Telegraph organise 7,890 organize 387. The ise have it. Ty 08:07, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't want to make a big deal of it, but aren't the above both British media? Jason3777 (talk) 08:32, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Jason: Yes, I think that's implicit in the point being made, which concerns transatlantic differences.

General remarks: Since the mid-60s, there has been a clear move in the UK, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand from "-ize" (and its siblings "-iza" and "izi", known to all professional editors) to the "es" form. In Australia, this has been ensconsed in the Australian Government Publishing Manual since the early 70s, I think. In the UK, the OED has strangely failed to adjust the order of zed and es in its entries, so that the zed continues to be privileged as "first spelling". This is despite widespread preference for the "es" outside North America, except for a few notables, such as OUP and The Times.

Then there's the irritating fact that unless you know how to stop it, Windows computers revert back to US spelling (bringing with it the zeds) every time you log into Word. Worse still, the so-called Australian spellchecker for both Mac and Windows versions of Word forces the zed—still, after all of those updates! (I have to insist that people use the UK spellchecker, which allows both es and zed.)

My strong preference is that engvars outside North America use the "es" form. This webpage provides interesting information on the matter. Tony (talk) 08:38, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Y'all, I can write British and I have no problem doing it unless it is an American article. I just wanted to know what form of spelling to use in the international articles. It's weird; why do I find myself always stepping into a "hornet's nest"? Jason3777 (talk) 08:57, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, the answer, pretty clearly, is "whichever style is already being used", with the exception of articles with a strong connection to a particular locale. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 09:31, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Weasel

Several of us have problems with WP:WEASEL. It seems to cover things already covered on policy pages (and their talk pages) such as WP:V and WP:NPOV, and it seems to me that people never really settled on whether the page is supposed to be about "some people say", or about something much broader. I don't like the name of the page, either. On the content side, many people have raised issues, including Silly Rabbit and Johnbod, recently. Feel free to jump in. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 18:10, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

"No." versus "#" in sports articles

There is a question in FAC as to whether or not the MoS has any conclusion about the use of #1 vs. No. 1 in prose (versus in tables). Quick background: college football and basketball (among others) use poll rankings as a barometer of team success and, in the case of highest level college football, determine a champion. In the current scheduling table, the default is "#". The sports media uses a mix of both, however I've noticed that The New York Times, the bastion of prim-and-proper, conservative writing uses "No." (example). I couldn't seem to find the answer in the archive. --Bobak (talk) 20:06, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

My impression is that # is regional whereas 'no.' is less so. The examples that you quote all appear to be from one region. It would be interesting to see examples from others. Lightmouse (talk) 20:11, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Both #1 and No. 1 are sloppy writing. In careful writing it would be number 1, or even better number one, just as it is pronounced. −Woodstone (talk) 20:27, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The hash mark draws attention to itself in running text—I think it would be more suited to a grocery list than an encyclopedia article. Writing out number would be best, but abbreviating no. is fine if it appears many times.

If the number is being referred to, then it shouldn't be capitalized. If a player is being referred to, then I suppose he would be called, e.g., Number 99, but isn't it preferable to refer to a person by his name? —Michael Z. 2008-09-05 20:35 z

Most recent discussion was here: WT:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)/Archive_106#Question on #1 vs number one. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:09, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The broader question (per the previous discussion) is whether this was ever addressed in MoS? If not, the article complies with WP:WIAFA and is promotable; we're tying to find out if it complies with MoS. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:26, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The closest thing I can come up with is "Proper names, formal numerical designations, and other idioms comply with common usage (Chanel No. 5 ...)" from WP:MOSNUM. I don't keep up with most of the more targeted style guidelines; I don't even know what sports-targeted style guidelines exist. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:57, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:ENGVAR#Opportunities_for_commonality, the sadly too-often overlooked and IMHO most important paragraph in that section, would suggest that number is preferable: # is not in common use in UK English. Kevin McE (talk) 22:19, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

So, striking "#", it seems were now discussing "No." versus "number": we're seeing the AP Style (from the previous discussion, thanks Dank55) favoring "No.", do the English use that as well? Using "number" for ever instance (and there are many in a college football season article) might throw off American readers. --Bobak (talk) 23:04, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I prefer No. over number, and since this regularly comes up in sports and music articles, I do wish it would be addressed in MoS. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:19, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

1. In any case, cogent reasons in terms of our readers are required, not the implication that the endorsement of dead-tree style-guides is central to what we allow online. On the last example, why would we want to explain how to do something we only grudgingly accept? The three, wide, put-your-finger-between-them dots are unnecessarily disruptive to the visual appearance and reading experience of our text. Game over.

1. In any case, cogent reasons in terms of our readers are required, not the implication that the endorsement of dead-tree style-guides is central to what we allow online. On the last example, why would we want to explain how to do something we only grudgingly accept? The three, wide, put-your-finger-between-them dots are unnecessarily disruptive to the visual appearance and reading experience of our text. Game over.

1. I place tight limits on my time budget for fighting your contrarian pet-peeves, so I'm not interested in a drawn-out battle on this one. TONY (talk) 04:30, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

To actually say dont put up blank lines by typing blank lines is.............mmmm Lets not discuss the content of what was written , lets discuss how its written , but the actual content, topic, the message, or perhaps the truth of what was actually said, or its just not your idea of personal beleif. Regardless of all that , the original topic was never addressed. Only the format? Makes no sence. We are carbon copy in DNA design, but thank heaven we are not carbon copy in the minds. Sencyman (talk) 06:38, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Editing comments

Others' comments

It is not necessary to bring talk pages to publishing standards, so there is no need to correct typing errors, grammar, etc. It tends to irritate the users whose comments you are correcting. Do not strike out the comments of other editors without their permission.

Never edit someone's words to change their meaning, even on your own talk page. Editing others' comments is sometimes allowed, but you should exercise caution in doing so. Some examples of appropriately editing others' comments:

   * If you have their permission

This is copy paste from the talk page guidelines , do not complain about the spaces. And unless you have permission to change this page. Then please dont do so. Sencyman (talk) 07:13, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Category names

There has been some opposition to the use of en-dash in category names (not explicitly addressed in WP:DASH). It seems to me that these should be agree with article names (eg Arab–Israeli conflict and Category:Arab–Israeli conflict rather than Arab-Israeli conflict presently under cfd along with many other such.) Occuli (talk) 12:59, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikiproject Opt-outs (and date-linking)

This discussion has raised a few questions as regards the MoS's applicability. To what extent do we allow individual WikiProjects to make style guidelines that run against the general MoS? Does consensus for this have to be expressed explicitly in discussion on the project talkpage, or as is being argued here is consensus expressed in the current state of the articles? What if articles are members of multiple projects? Does a tag claiming articles for a particular project suffice, or do we actually expect input on those article in the name of the project?

I have my own answers to these questions, but I'm interested in the wider views of MoS contributors. You may also like to contribute to the original discussion

It probably depends. Topic areas may be associated with particular registers or symbolic conventions, and it may be beneficial in some such cases to relax the global rules slightly. But I don't see how the practice of wikilinking years could be affected by a tennis-related context. Ilkali (talk) 16:01, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can see, only one person at WikiProject_Tennis is asking for an exception. The exception to MOS compliance is defended on the basis of preserving the 'status quo' and 'pre-existing consensus'. The many date defects and inconsistencies are defended on the basis that the articles are 'work-in-progress'. Those are two opposing philosophies. Sounds like ownership to me. Lightmouse (talk) 16:08, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Nicely argued, Ilkali and Lightmouse. Here's another argument: if you're looking for a project where people don't try to force their will on other people, then you're looking for some project other than Misplaced Pages. There are plenty of opportunities on the web to write whatever you want. Those of us more interested in process than in outcome will try to keep the ride from getting too bumpy; if some guys get together and call something a guideline, and their ideas seem to us to be overbearing or divorced from the commonalities of professional English, we will probably say something. But FAC people have historically tended to be more interested in the style guidelines, and if people who spend most of their time reviewing GAN's or reviewing for wikiprojects complain that the style guidelines reflect the preferences of FAC people, but then they don't voice their opinions at style guidelines pages, well ... On Misplaced Pages, anyone with a beef can remove a guideline cat from a page or add it to another page they prefer. WP:Process is important. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 17:43, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

1. Heat, October 11, 2008, p.45
2. Morning Star, September 13, 1973, p.4