Wikipedia:Common-style fallacy

This is an WP:NSF

This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia has its own set of policies and guidelines for article content and naming (which are distinct from each other). Facts on a subject are drawn from reliable sources, but no particular subset of them dictates how Wikipedia must write. Style is a matter of Wikipedia community consensus, based on general-audience style guides, not mimicry of any particular genre (or trademark).

The common-style fallacy (CSF) is the flawed reasoning that if a particular typographic stylization turns up commonly in

Our WP:COMMONNAME rubric helps us determine what the name of something is, e.g. Alien 3, versus "Aliens 3", "Alien III", "Alien: Part Three", etc. How the name is stylized is a matter of differing convention in different writing genres (e.g. marketing materials, news journalism, books about science fiction filmmaking, media studies journals, etc.). In the marketing for that film, to continue with the example, it was often styled Alien³, but this is not really the name of the film; it is not a.k.a. "Alien to the Third Power" or "Alien Cubed". It was just a stylization in PR writing and logo design, which was "honored" by various news publications, but quite reasonably ignored in mainstream writing, across multiple genres of publication, and it is usually given in reliable sources as Alien 3. (Plus, some other marketing material gave it as "ALI3N", among other variants.)

Confusing a name with how it is styled in various contexts is like confusing your co-worker with the business attire or scuba gear you've seen her wear on different occasions in different contexts. She is not a different person because she is dressed up differently.

In rare cases, a name stylization is more like a collection of tattoos, i.e. it's a positive identifier. There is no question that the iPhone is the iPhone, not the "Iphone".^[2] It will be clear when such a special case applies, specifically because the stylized version will be almost universally used regardless what kind of publication it is found in, from books, to newspapers, to academic journals. This exception for overwhelmingly consistent use in reliable sources is already to be found in both Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks and (more narrowly) Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters. If WP:COMMONNAME actually had anything to do with this sort of question, those guidelines would not exist, and we would simply do a head-count of how many sources write "Pink" versus "P!nk" for the singer by that name and stylization, and automatically go with whatever had a 50.01% majority. We do not do this. What we actually look for is near-total conformity with a stylization. Thus, the singer's article is Pink (singer), and same for Kesha (not "Ke$ha") – but Deadmau5, not "Deadmaus".

This above-mentioned kind of "positive identifier" case is a per-name determination, and cannot be applied to an entire class of subjects, such as operating systems, titles of published works, financial services corporations, etc. How those names are styled varies by genre (with most of them dropping the stylization).

There are many genres of writing, with different levels of formality and different conventions. Encyclopedic writing is notably toward the formal side of the spectrum. Wikipedia closely follows the stylistic norms of publishers of non-fiction books (which is what an encyclopedia is, after all). While this system is less formal and much less jargonistic both in content and style than the high-academic style of scientific and humanities journals (from which Wikipedia also borrows many features, when they aren't problematic for our readers), it is nevertheless also much less vernacular, compressed, and lowest-common-denominator than the news style of everyday journalism and public-relations writing.

The conventions of these different types of writing are well-codified in various regularly updated

Like all professional-grade publications written by multiple people, Wikipedia has a

There are many house styles in which mimicking trademark stylization is considered "correct" by that particular publisher, and the majority of these are the stylesheets of low-end news organizations and blogs, especially in the entertainment and tech sectors. Theirs are not Wikipedia's house style, nor are they general styles, but specific to a particular market segment, subscriber base, or individual publication or blogger. However, the AP Stylebook (and its very similar erstwhile competitors like the UPI Stylebook) are used so broadly by news publishers that they are a de facto general style for news writing (though some newspapers also have their own house styles that diverge from that baseline in numerous ways). As a result, various news-style quirks make frequent appearances in the results of Google (or Bing, or Yandex, etc.) searches for news source material.

One of the most frequent symptoms of the common-style fallacy at work is mistaking the way a group of newspapers write something for being the only or best way to write something, especially when one has not run into any sources other than news ones. The problem is, of course, that news writing and other forms of writing take programmatic, rule-based approaches to style matters, so someone is only looking at one "style program" when looking at those particular sources; from a style standpoint, they are all essentially just one source, the AP Stylebook.

Even where encyclopedic and news writing share some things in common, such as overall article structure basics (title, lead paragraph, section subheadings, paragraph breaks, supplementary material at the end, and sometimes use of a sidebar to summarize details), there are very significant differences. Even the

A concrete, topical example: There are three well-documented conventions for the initial letter-case of prepositions used in the titles of published works and other compositions:^[4]

• Capitalize prepositions of four letters or more (for, in, With, From, Amongst, Between); this is the news journalism extreme.
• Lowercase all regardless of length (for, in, with, from, amongst, between); this is the academic extreme.
• Capitalize if five letters or more (for, in, with, from, Amongst, Between); this is the reasonable compromise approach used by Wikipedia, and by most mainstream book publishers.^[5]

(All three systems agree to capitalize any word if it is the first or last word in a title or subtitle.)

It is not reasonable to demand that we capitalize, say, pop song titles the way that music magazines do, since we already have a style system for handling titles of works, and it is not the same system used by most of those magazines. The same publications would also apply their capitalization rules to journal articles, or book titles; there is no special convention for song titles.^[6] The idea that there is one is an illusion produced by willful engagement in original research with a desire to get an over-capitalizing result (see next section). It is fandom hand-waving.

Making this "it must be styled just so" leap is forbidden

We sometimes use online searches in internal discussions about the Wikipedia title policy, naming conventions, and style guidelines, to get a sense of the implementation level of a usage matter in particular publishing circles, by shaping searches and limiting them by source type, age, language, and location, but these are only used as part of a larger consensus-building discussion, grounded in Wikipedia policy, and always with the understanding that such search results are partial glimpses at data, limited to particular types of publications, and skewed by various factors (often including marked limitations of and biases in the search tools). When it comes to actually determining what an article's name should be, such searches cannot be relied upon as if they are sources themselves (your interpretation of their results is, again, original research). They are only a means for finding and looking at actual sources and the subject-specific facts they contain, again with the caveat that the data set is limited and uneven.[7]

Another frequent case of abuse of online search results to try to "prove" a common-style fallacy is attempting to use English-language news sources (e.g. from Google News searches) to make a point against the use of diacritics for biographical subjects for whom that usage is preferred and well-sourced. If high-quality academic sources use the subject's culturally appropriate diacritics – and thus are reliable sources that their use is attested for the subjects in question – it doesn't matter how many American or British newspapers ignore and drop the diacritics; their laziness in this regard has no impact on Wikipedia, which will follow the more reliable sources, not the more common but weaker ones. Many Western news publishers (and

The common-style fallacy relies in part upon a key falsehood in the faulty reasoning behind the specialized-style fallacy: the assumption that sources that are reliable for facts being reported about a topic are somehow transubstantiated into reliable sources, purely through example, of how the English language must be used when the topic in question in involved. In reality, the only reliable sources for how to write formal but not excessively academic English are style guides devoted to writing such material – the very guides upon which MoS is based. Even these are not laws, but guidance that Wikipedia's own editorial community will take into account when coming to consensus on Wikipedia's own house style.

The "apply the style most commonly seen in sources according to my Google searches" idea is completely unworkable (aside from the frequent

The common-style fallacy has additional logic problems that can be dispensed with quickly:

• Search engine results and their order are strongly affected by paid
  undue weight
  to stylized presentations preferred by marketers, and undue elimination of acceptable stylization like correct diacritics when doing so is preferred by certain publishing blocs for their own convenience. Search engine placement, in short, reflects marketing, not reliability.
• Doing proper search-engine tests itself requires a certain level of expertise, to weed out various form of skew, or even totally invalid results. How to do this varies not only by search engine but even by search type at the same engine. Example: In many cases, it requires detailed knowledge of Google Ngrams and its limitations (both in search functionality and in what its corpora contain and how they differ) to extract anything like accurate results out of it.
• The entertainment press in particular is not
  independent
  of the entertainment industry, and largely tries to keep industry players as happy as possible by doing whatever they want stylistically. Most of these publications derive the majority of their income from advertising revenue from film studios, record labels, and other entertainment industry interests. Furthermore, many of them are directly owned by the same international corporations who own the studios and labels (and many city newspapers as well). They have a doubly vested interest in mimicry of the stylization in logos and marketing materials.
• The ground truth is that people in general do not "obey" or expect extraneous marketing stylizations. No one writes that they bought their shirt at "macy^★s" or just got a "SONY" stereo for their car. Even the idea that people are following marketing/journalism style in overcapitalizing song titles turns out to be provably false.^[8]

The Manual of Style already has provisions (e.g. at both WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters and WP:Manual of Style/Trademarks) to accept a simple stylization matter that is also accepted by virtually all sources across all publications styles (not just one) to be intrinsic to a particular name. In practice this is limited to:

• Unusual but semantically meaningful capitalization ("intercaps" or "camelcase"): iPod, CentOS
• Conventionalized dropping of capitalization of an acronym: Nabisco
• Conventionalized capitalization of an acronym some might not have thought of as one: IKEA, SAGE Publications
• Fusion of words or names, when the usage is a legal matter (found in corporate documents, trademark registrations, etc.): DaimlerChrysler, GlaxoSmithKline
• Simple substitution of a letter or letters for some other letter or numeral (Deadmau5, Left 4 Dead)

It does not extend in any cases to:

• All-capitals for emphasis SONY, TIME magazine, The GAP
• This includes small capitals: Green Mountain Coffee, Downton Abbey
• Jumbled capitalization with no semantic meaning: ebaY
• "Dingbat" substitutions or insertions: E*trade, C|net
• Changes that require special markup and may cause accessibility problems: Alien³
• Run-together words that are not found in corporate, trademark, and other legal registrations, nor accepted by most sources, just seen as a matter of logo stylization: Baker&Taylor, JCPenney

The special case of "all-lowercase as a stylization"

• This has been accepted in a handful of cases for individuals who use it themselves and for whom virtually all sources also use it: for k.d. lang, but not for "e.e. cummings" (see E. E. Cummings).
• It is accepted for software that only exists as a command-line executable given in all-lowercase, even when it is an acronym or contains one that would otherwise be capitalized: ntpd for the Network Time Protocol daemon in Unix/Linux, but NTP for the Network Time Protocol itself.
• It is not accepted for trademarks and logos: citibank, sears.

Any exception for a particular case (on the basis of near-universal, cross-genre usage regarding that case) does not extend to applying such a stylization approach to everything somewhat similar to it. This includes but is not limited to:

• Dropping capitalization on all acronyms pronounceable as words, even when some generally reliable sources do it: Unesco, Nasa (this is a style advocated and used by various newspapers, especially in UK, but also including some US ones like The New York Times; it is not catching on and is not used here)
• Over-capitalizing titles of works: "Do It Like A Dude"
• Starting names with lowercase where not universally supported: Some new "existentialOS" should not be written that way using iOS as an excuse, because virtually no professionally produced sources would give it as anything but ExistentialOS, except
  WP:Common sense
  always applies.

It does not matter that these changes are sometimes applied by some specialized-genre style guides or individual publishers' house style in other kinds of writing. They are not applied by Wikipedia's, or other mainstream, formal-English style manuals.

Wikipedia's editors just have to absorb and live with the fact that they cannot randomly apply conflicting style regimes from unrelated forms of writing.

All of the following are expected, per applicable policies, from those who write for this project:

• You will not
  "right" or "wrong" in some absolutist prescriptivism
  sense).
• You will not
  forum-shop
  it.
• Even if you don't bother to comply with our house style while writing new material, you
  efforts by others to bring "your"
  material into compliance.
• You will not engage in
  Arbitration Committee
  cases about style and article titles.)