Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 194

Added options #5 to #8: I might be sympathetic to some of these new options: #8 might even become my preference, unless someone is devoted enough to upgrade it to an acceptable essay (option #5), which would then probably take a lot of work. I'd avoid option #6 (for the AT/MOS confusion); Option #7 could maybe be acceptable, but there's more to identity than the identity of individual persons (identity as a group, etc). --Francis Schonken (talk) 09:35, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, I probably should have thought to include those (other than the MfD one, since we don't delete old proposals; they get marked Rejected, or occasionally Historical if they were never actually proposed). On the redir question, I would redir it to NCP, without the # part.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  09:58, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Please don't change the numbering, my reply above would become unintelligible without it. "Take to MfD" means: ask the community whether it should be deleted or kept: maybe there's little chance the result of the discussion would be delete, but it can be taken there. I'd not take option #9, while too confusing. --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:21, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

If the page would be renamed as a consequence of option #5, it is still to be decided what to do with the original page name: as a redirect it would probably better not go to the subsequent essay, and the redirect left after a page move may, in fact, better be taken to MfD, or in that case probably better

WP:RfD, to avoid further confusion (option#8). --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:27, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Added #10 while that option was suggested below in the extended discussion section: I'd not do that though, a clean rejection (#4) seems preferable as far as I'm concerned. That, in combination with going back to the pre-2017 version (as suggested below), seems acceptable to me; would still prefer #8 though. --Francis Schonken (talk) 11:34, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't see the point of this profusion of mostly redundant options, some of which would never happen (proposals get {{

Rejected}}). But whatever.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:09, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

• Option #11 (which I just added). I realised that option #4 would freeze the AT/MOS confusion under a project space title that would normally indicate a page with WP:AT-related content only. Redirecting a non-viable separate "naming convention" article title to the general AT policy seems the only viable option. Also, so many article titles are one way or another identity-related (think e.g.
  Burma: identity was an underlying current of many of its related article title discussions). Many years ago we folded quite a few subsidiary naming conventions (especially quite a few former naming conventions that were transcending topic areas) back into the general policy page, so it is not as if we would be doing something exceptional when proceeding with option #11. As a second choice I'd still see a cycle at WP:MfD possible (option #8): if kept the page would need to be purged of general MOS type of advice, retaining only what relates to article titling directly. Sorry that it took me a few intermediate steps to come to that realisation, but I struck quite a bit of text above which would make your reading time shorter again. --Francis Schonken (talk) 14:36, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
• Comment:
  talk) 22:49, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
• Do 2, 4, and 9: Move it to
  Rejected}}, and redirect the original name to WP:Naming conventions (people). To the extent it has good ideas in it, several of them are already covered at other pages, and those that potentially should be integrated into a guideline can be proposed and discussed one at a time on their individual merits. It is not an {{Essay}}, since it doesn't present a particular viewpoint about a subject, but a list of proposed line-item rules about unrelated subjects.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:20, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Update: I've done a cleanup pass on it, without deleting/changing anything controversial in it, just fixed flat-out errors, bad formatting, and other issues no one's likely to revert me on. Also flagged two line-items in it as having policy problems, and outlined them in detail on the draft's talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  09:56, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

• Comment Anything to do with the title of articles should either be in the
  Article Title Policy
  or in one of its guidelines which are called naming conventions. Placing guidance in the MOS—which is a manual of style for the text inside an article, and is not directly tied to Article Title Policy—is a recipe for future confusion and bickering. This is because those who are very active in the MOS prefer rule base dictates over following usage in reliable sources (which is the fundamental guidance in Article Title Policy).

• If you want to redirect a naming convention to remove the content such a page, the place for this discussion to take place is on the talk page of the proposed redirect/deletion not here.
• Why have you not advertised this at
  WT:AT
  ?
• This has been a proposed guideline since it was created in 2008. So why have you recently updated it instead of marking it historical?

From what I have read of the draft it is not a naming convention as it specifically says in the lead "labeling people and organizations in Wikipedia articles". So I for one would tend to suggest options 1,3, or 8 but definitely not a redirect for the reasons I have given. My preference is to revert it to the edit before you edited it and mark it {{Historical}} and/or {{Failed proposal}}. -- PBS (talk) 10:54, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

You seem to have answered your own questions to the extent they're not answered by the maybe-merge-maybe-mark-Rejected proposal itself.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:06, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

• Comment - Whatever happens, this is something that needs to be decided by a broad swath of the Wikipedia community, and is not something that can be determined by a relatively small clique of "MOS regulars". Please advertise this discussion in as many different venues as possible to bring in more comments. Blueboar (talk) 14:29, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Agreed.

talk) 22:49, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Post pointers as you like; the notice at

WP:VPPRO seemed sufficient to me. My principal concern here is that we no longer have something that dates at least in part to 2005 continue to have "proposal" on it as if it's under current discussion when hasn't been for ages. Discuss it and decide what do with it (either in one fell swoop, or piecemeal). Note that I haven't !voted at all this, just suggested some of it may be salvageable. I may pick an option or combination of options from the list at some point. [Have now done so.]  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:10, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

[Updated. 02:22, 13 September 2017 (UTC)]

I think it a very bad idea to move it and redirect it. Just mark the thing as rejected. The reason for this is redirects between

WP:AT naming conventions and the MOS should be discouraged as many new editors (and it seems to me some more experienced ones) have difficulty telling the difference. I really do not know why you have created a storm in a tea cup over this. Be bold (or I will) and mark it as {{Failed proposal}}. If someone wants to reanimate the corps they can follow the guidance in {{Failed proposal}}. -- PBS (talk) 09:38, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

But it's the very fact that this is proposed style guideline material – with nothing in it pertaining to naming conventions in particular – that is the key problem. Pages like this, regardless what tag is on top of them (and we do tag and preserve them, not delete them), perpetuate and worsen the confusion between NC and MOS pages, and encourage further

WP:NCP, the actual NC guideline on biographies, while the failed proposal full of style material be moved to a name that describes its actual content, and be marked failed/rejected. So long as it remains with its present content at its present name it continues to sow confusion between what is a style guideline and what is a titles-only naming convention (and what is a perennial proposal and what is an actual guideline). I raised this at all because someone, on this very page, recently cited NCIDENTITY as if it were an actual guideline (and no one in that discussion bothered to check). This is also why I want to not move it to WP:MOS/Identity but to WP:MOS/Identity_(proposal) so that it is never again unclear that it is not a guideline. In retrospect, it might have just been better to be BOLD on all of this, but a) people tend raise an alarm any time people get very bold with guideline-related material of any kind, and b) this page in particular has been argued about for years, and the actual guideline material we do have on the topic, at MOS:IDENTITY, has also been highly controversial, so "discuss before acting" seemed wise in this case.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:36, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Does anyone actually object to a) tagging it {{

Rejected}}), b) renaming it to match its content, and c) redirecting its old name to WP:Naming conventions (people)?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:37, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Quotation marks seem most appropriate, as a sub-work or minor work. It was first published article-style in a literary journal, then later as a chapter in an all-Eliot book. If it's ever been published as a stand-alone work at all, it would have been posthumously.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:30, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

@

Chang hen ge (poem) article (which italicizes), or vice versa. I'm kind of leaning in favour of changing the Bai Juyi article to use italics, if only because that article is a mess, while the article on the poem was italicized by User:In ictu oculi, who is usually pretty good with MOS issues. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:45, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

I wouldn't take my italicizing as gospel, I have found the guidelines somewhat confusing. But generally in academic publishing a work of fiction would be italicized to show that e.g. Bai Juyi is a created work and not a Mr Bai Juyi. If our en.wp guidelines contradict this (do they?) then the guidelines need correcting to real world best practice. In ictu oculi (talk) 11:50, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

@In ictu oculi: Sorry, I did it again. I meant that you italicized the name of Bai Juyi's poem in our standalone article on the poem, but in the main Bai Juyi article the same poem's name is not italicized. I'm not talking about any work named Bai Juyi. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:56, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

And it's not a choice between italics or nothing, but between italics and quotation marks, both of which indicate a title of a work (just of different sorts). At some point the distinction between what should get italics and what should get quotation marks is fuzzy and arbitrary, e.g. that between a novela and a novelette. In the case of "Chang hen ge", it should clearly be quotation marks since it is not an "epic poem", but is quite short (full text with translation here). It seems to be a traditional title that is treated as the "real" title of the work; it's not a constructed designation (e.g. first few words from the first line) or a description, so it doesn't appear to be one of those "neither italics nor quotation marks" cases.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:29, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

No that's my fault I didn't read carefully what you said above. As far as titles goes Chang hen ge (poem) need italics. In the article body I would have thought "Quotation marks seem most appropriate, as a sub-work or minor work" as SMcCandlish says. In ictu oculi (talk) 12:39, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

This is really down to the judgement of an individual editor. I hope that everyone editing has enough common sense to work out what constitutes an epic poem. Anything which is not obviously epic should have its name inside quotes, not formatted in italics. Whether it was published as part of a collection, in a magazine/newspaper or on its own should give you a good idea as to how to format it.
–Sb2001 ^{talk page} 18:19, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Well, in this case it's old manuscript material. But anyway, I don't understand the idea it belongs in quotation marks but the same editor wants to italicize the title of the article on it. That's not how it works.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:02, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

See [3]. Basically,

Also, it's hypothetical, but if the answer to the above is "No", would that still be the case if it was more substantial, like if I was quoting a source that spelled the name of the article subject "Li Ho"?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:46, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

It seems reasonable to do that if confusion could result if the name were not normalized, but in a case where the alternative version has already been given, or the difference is very slight, the likelihood of confusion seems low, thus the practice might be unnecessarily nit-picky. The material in question mentions

Mao Tse-tung. We probably would not change quoted material that used the latter to read "According to Mao [Zedong]", or the like, for the same "it's not really necessary" reason.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:14, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Do not change the quote to fit the rest of the article, just because it is a different spelling. As long as it is clear to the reader what is meant, you should leave it as it is. In my experience, quotes are only changed when there is an error, rather than a stylistic difference. I am sure the MoS says this somewhere.

language reference desk could offer you some advice. Regarding different spellings of the article's name: include a note in the lead, to mention the other spellings.
–Sb2001 ^{talk page} 18:04, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Right, that section is

WP:PMC. Where there's a "massive" name difference, it may be seen as beyond a matter of mere style. E.g., to most people over about 30, Zhuangzi (book) is unrecognizable (to us it's Chuang Tzu). But WP is using the most modern romanizations pretty consistently, like it or not. Normally, we'd resolve potential confusion by linking. But we also try to avoid linking inside quotations (other than in square-bracketed editorial insertions), though Wikipedian feelings about this may have softened a little. If we were quoting "According to the Chuang Tzu ...", we could conceivably do something like "According to the Chuang Tzu [Zhuangzi] ...", or "According to the Chuang Tzu [Zhuangzi] ...", or "According to the [Zhuangzi] ...", as the context seemed to warrant. This sort of thing is really most apt to arise when there are multiple very different names from different languages, though, rather than just a change of romanization approaches. Anyway, the point is that an editorial change is permissible if it's square-bracketed, helpful, and doesn't alter the meaning in any way. What we definitely don't want is un-bracketed stylistic shifts that are beyond the very limited normalizations permitted by MoS (e.g. converting guillemets and other non-English quotation marks inside a quotation to the type used in English).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:50, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Absolutely agree with everything that SMcCandlish says. There is an useful useful template for inserting square brackets on either side of the added or modified content, here: {{Bracket}}. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 19:24, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

I propose that the talk page of any MoS sub-page that hasn't had a post in a year or longer be redirected to

• It's peripherally related, but honestly, I kinda wish there was an "
  MOS noticeboard" similar to RSN, BLPN and FTN. I kinda feel like the talk pages of policies/guidelines should be reserved for discussing amendments to said policies/guidelines, but it seems like the vast majority of threads in the archives of this page are people asking questions about how MOS applies to this or that specific article or group of articles. At least, this is how I have often used it, and no one has ever called me out on it, apparently because I had no other choice. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:50, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

That said, I am leaning toward supporting the proposal as presented. Subpages are messy and encourage

WP:OWN. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:54, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

• I think this is a good idea but let's proceed carefully. MOS works remarkably well, its stability has been hard-won, and we musn't accidentally screw that up. I think our guiding principle should be to reduce the isolate of the less-watched pages, not to consolidate all pages (less-watched or not) just for the sake of some blind principle that everyone interested in any MOS issue should see all MOS issues. EEng 19:49, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

@EEng: I'm not sure if I agree with you that MOS works remarkably well, or that it is stable to begin with (let alone how hard said stability might have been won). Yes, the main page might work well and have a hard-earned stability, but this is obviously not the case for the subpages that would be affected by this proposal.

• SMcC may remember the
  WP:KOREA
  , and I don't think that's a particularly well-kept secret. Said editor group, by definition, has a systemic bias in favour of the "official" English spellings used by the South Korean government, while English Wikipedia is supposed to be based on high-quality English-language sources, which tend overwhelmingly not to use the post-2000 "official" spellings.
• The same is essentially true of several other MOS subpages such as
  MOS:CHINA
  , though in a less obviously problematic fashion (the Chinese government's "official" romanization system has much broader, though hardly universal, acceptance among western academia).
• At least one subpage I could name was essentially "ruled" by a single user for several years (it would be borderline gravedancing if I were to name him, and I honestly think he was a great editor in everything but his localized OWN behaviour, so I really don't want to do that).
• Many of the other subpages are, frankly, terrible and need serious attention -- why, for instance, is
  MOS:INDIA
  so much shorter than those for other regions that honestly present far less complex style issues than India (which is home to literally over 1,000 languages, almost none of which traditionally use roman as their primary writing system)? I can't help but feel that has some relation to the sorry state of a lot of our India-related articles that MOS:INDIA gives hardly any instruction.

I get the impression that your view that MOS works well and is stable is the view of someone who hasn't done much work on the subpages that are the ultimate target of this proposal, though I apologize if I am mistaken.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:55, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Dispute at obscure subpages, and subpages that need a lot of cleanup, don't change the fact that ten thousand potential editorial disputes are avoided each day by the guidance MOS provides. By that measure it works well. EEng 14:39, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't doubt that there is still a lot of conflict about details, even on this page right now, but I think overall it's still a great success. I think those who created this and monitor it deserve a lot of credit. Our MoS is big and unwieldy, but Wikipedia is beyond big, and needs a comprehensive style manual. For instance Chicago Manual of Style's new 1,146 page 17th edition is ginormous, and for specialist areas it refers to other style manuals for details. We've got work to do, but I think we should be proud of what we have.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  17:53, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm proud of MoS (and its not-excessively-sub-topical side pages). To get as far as it has – given often nationalustic conflict between off-WP style guides on virtually every style question, and very strong and sometimes idiosyncratic views about style matters from editor to editor – yet not be a Chicago- or New Hart's-length pile of

WP:CREEP, and manage to cover a lot of specialized stuff most style guides would skip ... well, that's really quite remarkable.

Anyway, one of the ideas behind the talk-page consolidation is to draw more attention to subpages that badly need work. It would help in normalizing the country/culture-specific ones to cover the same cite things with a similar organization and approach, fur example.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:32, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

The idea's been discussed before; a proposal for an MoS noticeboard was rejected several years ago, and WP:WikiProject Manual of Style was created with something like this in mind, then went moribund. Ultimately, it's probably too late to do anything about the community's habit of using guideline talk pages as de facto noticeboards for discussion of compliance with and interpretation of them. There's also the issue that noticeboards have a tendency to be used as "enforcement and punishment" venues, not places to ask questions. On the other hand, we now have a profusion of noticeboards, down to a rather micro-topical level, where once there were only a few, for central policy concerns. So the community take on what a noticeboard is and is for may have shifted. In the end, I suspect it would just be a maintenance/bureaucracy layer – that we'd end up spending a lot of time moving posts from here to there, and that the incoming stream of "noticeboardy" posts here would not abate by much. I also suspect that part of the reason MoS is as stable as it is, is the level of churn here. It both keeps people (from all over the project) actively watchlisting, and informs the watchlisters (and more sporadic visitors) in hard-to-miss ways exactly how difficult it is to craft much less change this kind of policy (in the general policy analysis sense of the word) without unintended negative effects.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:08, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes: noticeboards sound like daunting places—mainly because of the most famous one. Editors may be reluctant to ask for advice at somewhere they think they will be sanctioned. This page serves the function well enough; there is no need to create another layer of hassle. And for inexperienced editors, when they go to the support venues, they will be directed here.
–Sb2001 ^{talk page} 17:52, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Yep. The primary source of opposition to the idea of an MoS noticeboard was exactly that people feared they'd be "prosecuted" at it over style nitpicks, though such was never the idea. In retrospect, they may well have been correct, since there's no way for the originators of a noticeboard to control how that page is used a year or 5 or 10 later, and most of the noticeboards do in fact have a complaint-and-punishment air about them.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:00, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

I do agree with what you are saying, however I think that there is more to be done. My main concern with the sectional talk pages is that one very often receives no reply. Well, until another editor turns up months later to offer some advice for a problem which passed some time ago. The idea of adding redirects to here if there have been no comments in a year is good, but we certainly need to be looking at adding them for when fast replies are not received. This turns the task into something considerably larger.
–Sb2001 ^{talk page} 17:52, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Baby steps. :-) The problem you point out has a lot to do with why I'm proposing the talk-page consolidation above. The more MoS questions are directed to the WT:MOS page, the more likely they are to be addressed at all, quickly, and with input from multiple editors. A handful of MoS subpages' talk pages are themselves well attended, e.g.

WP:MOSCAPS, but the rest mostly are not.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:00, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

• Suggestion... what if we called it "MOS help desk" instead of "MOS Noticeboard"? Blueboar (talk) 19:15, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

That would probably go over better. In actuality, people are free to go create that page or (even and) an MoS noticeboard right now; if people hated it, they could try to delete it at MfD and redirect it back here, but they'd have to have a good reason. I'm just skeptical that either type of new page would be very useful; people would likely continue to come to this page to post style questions and disputes. But I've been wrong about things before. Maybe it would work out really well. A potential upside I could see to a help desk page is that it might help avoid

WP:HD does not appear to have any topical sub-pages, so this would be a new animal entirely.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:41, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

• No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no to any kind of MOS help desk or noticeboard. We get enough trivial stylistic disputes on individual articles forum-shopped to the various WP talk:MOS/X pages without actually inviting it. If there's a recurring problem that a change to MOS would alleviate, that's different, and is what the various WP talk:MOS/X pages are for. As noted in the earlier thread I suspect consolidating many of them is a good idea. At least let's do that first before thinking again about any kind of noticeboard or help desk. EEng 19:49, 19 September 2017 (UTC)
• If anyone's curious (and a glutton for punishment), there are about 19,000 words on the question at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 122#Proposal: creation of "style noticeboard". It seems like a good idea to me, probably as a help desk, but many people see grammar, spelling, style, etc. as tools of <exaggeration> punishment and terror to be abused by despots </exaggeration> and don't want any more of it.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  20:55, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Aye, that's the thread I was thinking of. The only way something like that would ever fly (and I share EEng's skepticism about the utility of the idea) is Blueboar's "help desk" version. I wonder who would volunteer to staff it? I don't want to spend all day answering style questions. I address them here primarily to indicate "yes, we already have an answer, so no, you don't need to go change MoS", because I care about guideline stability. On a help desk that wasn't also the talk page of the guideline, the preservative motivation wouldn't be present.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:37, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Which makes me question whether this 'help desk' would turn into another

WP:RD/L. If editors are offering opinions at such a venue, they will be treated as fact. As least if they come here, others may dismiss—quickly—the initial answer. The trouble is, none of us know every section of the MoS back-to-front (well, except for SMcCandlish), so it would be difficult to regulate the sorts of answers being given. It is not reasonable to ask people to learn all of the guidelines, so we would need to trust the judgement of the 'staff'. I cannot see many people willing to man it, simply because of the pressure which would be placed upon them by observers who perhaps have slightly better knowledge on one particular issue. Whilst in theory I support the idea of a help/reference desk, I cannot see it working. What we could work on is publicising this page a little more effectively. There could be some sort of reforms, to turn it into more of a welcoming environment. I would find that a far more attractive as an idea. A softer approach, eg not all biting a newbie for wanting to change something due to ignorance, would certainly not go unappreciated. My problem was that I did not know there was an MoS—we could do with a system that notifies new editors of its existence, and encourages them to have a glance over it before making grammatical/stylistic edits. Then, they could ask questions at our bang-up-to-date MoS information centre. That said, I do not know how the 'welcome' templates look at the moment. Maybe they are directed here already.
–Sb2001 ^{talk page} 23:21, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Personally I think anyone using eg for e.g. should be barred from this discussion.^[FBDB] EEng 00:28, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

OK, so I was having lunch and eating a scotch egg. Then I read "eg not all biting a newbie" and had this weird vision of the aforementioned in pursuit of a hapless IP user! :-) Martin of Sheffield (talk) 11:48, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Aggressive egg. EEng 14:45, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

But remember that if you summon minions that are not random, that's WP:Canvassing.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:46, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

It probably would save a lot of trouble to add a link to MoS (or at least the summary version) in all the "here are important basics" welcome templates that don't already have one.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:38, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Are you aware of the stupid rule at the comics wiki-project MoS, which states that editors should use a hash rather than the numero sign. Is this not defeating the point of the MoS—consistency across the whole of WP? –Sb2001 ^{talk page} 19:59, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

It has been this way at WikiProject Comics for about a decade now on perhaps a couple thousand articles, for the same reason Projects devoted to biochemistry or other specialized fields have MOS specifics appropriate to that field. In this case, the vast, vast majority of secondary-source references reporting on comic books, as well as the industry standard itself, uses the number sign (#) rather than "No." — which, it could be argued, is less accessible than # to non-English speakers. To put it colloquially, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." --Tenebrae (talk) 20:07, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Yep. This was actually added into the main MoS a few years ago (at

activism which isn't what we're here for.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:54, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Why would the MOS specify the numero sign in the first place? At least where I'm from that symbol is virtually never seen. --Khajidha (talk) 13:27, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. We're actually advising against various other obscure Unicode symbols, e.g. the one-glyph character for ... (…), and the pre-superscripted ² character (²). Most publications that use numero do it as no. or No., not as №.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:32, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Even the abbreviation "No." is pretty rare in my experience. --Khajidha (talk) 15:17, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I think it's a US/UK division. The US tends to use a hash (#), the UK tends to use "no". For instance you would never see a headline "Talks at #10" in the UK, whereas "No 10" is immediately obvious as referring to the Prime Minister's residence. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 16:13, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes. That does appear to be the case. And the full point afterwards seems to be heading for extinction. –Sb2001 ^{talk page} 19:32, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

It's not an ENGVAR matter, because there's neither a "clean break" internationally, nor intra-national consistency. To look at this Downing side matter in detail: No[.] 10 [Downing Street] is a proper name in this context, not just an address; it's used as a metaphoric (technically metonymic) stand-in for "the British prime minister, or the collective office thereof", in the same way that "White House" and occasionally "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" are used to mean "the US President, or the administration thereof". No 10 Downing Street is also sometimes just called "10 Downing Street" [4] or even (mostly in headlines) "Downing Street" [5], and might even turn up as "10 Downing" or even just "Downing" if the context is clear enough. "Street" is also sometimes abbreviated. If the first bit is included, it would be rendered "No." in US publications, though they're not apt to use it as a PM reference, since it's too opaque to their audience; but it's the typical abbreviation of "number" in American journalism, with capitalization or not being a matter of house style, though it'll always be capitalized for an address. American address style doesn't use "No." or "#" for street addresses, though often uses one or the other (usually "#") for unit numbers if they're not identified more specifically ("Apt. 12", "Suite 200").

Side comment: this piece (on topic: uses "No 10" by itself in reference to the PM's office) makes me wonder if we can have an encyclopedic article on the cats of 10 Downing Street. People keep writing about them, going all the way back to the early 20th century, as I discovered while working on the article Manx cat. Heh. We have some separate articles on various US presidents' dogs, but I wonder if they wouldn't be better combined into a single piece on presidential pooches. {end whimsy mode}

In more general terms, the supposition that "[t]he US tends to use a hash (#)" isn't accurate, aside from maybe how individuals write online. Some British writers (the ones following Oxford rather than British-press style about when to drop "." from abbreviations) will also spell it "No." or sometimes (not for an address) "no." The British press are not unanimous in their "death to full points" march, anyway; see "No. 1" used by the BBC here (pp. 76, 96). One can also find British publications actually using the numero symbol, if you dig around, but it seems to be only as a layout decoration thing, e.g. the front cover of the BBC piece already cited. You can find American book covers also using the symbol, but it's rare in running prose. There are also weird cases, e.g. "No.1" with no space [6] but they also appear to be marketing layout gimmickery on covers, only (the same book using "No. 1" internally).

To get back to "#" and comics: RS about comics usually use "#", and the general public does, too. Journalism tends to use "no." or "No.", just because they have house styles against "#" in general, but they rarely write about specific issues of comics, so they don't have a normative effect on the usage in that context. A book entirely about British comics uses "#" throughout [7] (though the publisher is US-based, and the book was actually printed in Canada), for what that's worth. Virtually all books on comics do, even those not produced by comics publishers (e.g. art "coffee table" books from Taschen, etc.). The non-comics-publisher books on comics are probably the most reliable sources from a WP perspective, being independent of the subject and fairly academic in intent and style. Examples: [8], [9], [10], [11] (all from first page of "comics art" Google Books search). Many of them more literally are academic (art history/philosophy works intended for a university audience). WP's allowance of "#" for comics edges toward a WP:Specialized-style fallacy case only on first glance. It's missing the "violates the principle of least astonishment" criterion of an SSF – it's not confusing to anyone, and doesn't produce a "WTF?" reaction in the minds of readers unfamiliar with the topic, because "#" is one of the long-standing, standardized ways to abbreviate "number" in English. While it's not favored by news publishers, it is actually also fairly common in writing about sports (e.g. league and tournament rankings [12]) and entertainment (e.g. pop singles charts [13] [see "Discover which song was #1 the day you were born" sidebar], and movie box office sales [14]), for example, not just comics. But it's really, really common for comics. Another point against an SSF determination is that there's no hint of a camp of specialists trying to tell WP how it has to write, and tendentiously fighting against resistance from all over WP. WP's been using # for comics all along, and virtually no one has been objecting.

Having reconsidered it for half a month, I still conclude that we wouldn't gain anything by trying to "ban" the # symbol for comics; it would require a zillion mostly manual edits, would lead to a "wikirevolt" of comics-focused editors, and would provide ammo to anti-MoS editors, who are presently very few in number. Let's not breed more of them. In effect, such a rule would be like telling biology editors they can't italicize the scientific names of organisms here; the style isn't just what they're used to as specialists, it's what everyone's at least a little familiar with, and it doesn't surprise anyone, though you can probably find someone somewhere who doesn't like it. I'm normally "Captain Consistency" (issue #1 out soon!), but I just can't see a good case for hyper-consistency against "#", especially since we actually don't have consistency on "no.", "No.", "no", "No", "number", and "Number" in general, even for things like addresses and rankings. If we were going to get more consistent, start with that mess first.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:51, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

The British news style seems to be heading for 'No10' (pretty much all tabloids use this, and the Times and Guardian are sometimes daring to go there). I do not know anywhere near enough about comics to say specifically whether the numero sign is better than the hash. I happened to turn up at an article and change the '#'s to 'No.'s. It seemed a little strange that there would be different guidelines. I must point out that your idea that only news style drops the points is simply not true. Internal university style guides are getting rid of them, major institutions and government departments lost them long ago, and even NHR gives acknowledgement to the undeniable trend. The BBC currently does not use full points, except for 'N. Ireland' on the website. It is always written as 'No' (apart from the unavoidable anomalies every establishment suffers).
–Sb2001 ^{talk page} 18:47, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, they're doing "No10" for the same reason they do "9pm"; it's to save column space; journalism will generally sacrifice clarity for space-savings at every turn. BBC is news; same boat, just sinking less rapidly. NHR correctly observes that the style exists (the post-Ritter editions are taking pains – arguably too-strenuous ones – to be descriptive as well as prescriptive), but it's still not Oxford U. Press style. Universities' internal style guides for how they present to the world (like those of other corporate entities) are marketing style, which is a derivative of news style. MoS doesn't take anything at all from government/military/legal style guides other than a handful of militarisms and legalisms, and grudgingly at that; it's simply a different writing world. I wasn't meaning to imply that no one in the world is dropping all dots from all abbreviations other than British journalists. Rather, they're the ones pushing this style strongly, and of the sources with that style, they're the only ones that have an influence on WP reader and editor expectations about semi-formal English to any notable degree.

Anyway, the numero is a weird case, because "No." (and increasingly "no.", at least in dialects not on a dot-dropping bandwagon) is an approximation of a symbol, more often written with an underline under an elevated but shrunken "o". But this symbol itself is an abbreviation of a Latin word, arising in a time before abbreviation styles settled. So, well, it's just odd: an abbreviation that became a symbol and turned back into an abbreviation. No wonder its form is subject to dispute. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:13, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Resolved

 – WP:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Should "Sir" and "Dame" be treated as part of someone's name, and be given such recognition in infoboxes, etc? (permalink) – RfC concluded to treat them as pre-nominals, and that no additional rule-making is needed.

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see

• Support Makes sense, anything to discourage meaningless bickering over arbitrary changes is good. --Jayron32 01:13, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
• Support and ditto. Cinderella157 (talk) 01:39, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
• Perhaps this is a vain hope, but how about we just stop pointlessly re-writing dates? Alsee (talk) 03:09, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

  Because consensus has determined it's not pointless, or we wouldn't have

  MOS:DATE, and the biggest "style fight" in WP's history would not have been about date formatting. If you weren't around for that, count yourself fortunate. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:58, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

I believe we should be taking more than a little interest in the style and formatting of Wikidata outputs. I've sounded a warning at the Wikidata state of affairs discussion that has been playing out during September. That page contians many expressions of caution, dismay, and alarm at the potential pitfalls of Wikidata's ability to roll out text at its whim, and at the lack of control we will have over the inevitable encroachments on en.WP.

Wikidata is an important project that will be riding the transition from biological algorithms (that's us, as creative editors) to electronic algorithms (that's machines that generate and read WP text). It's the latter that will slowly grow to dominate WMF sites from the mid-2020s onward, in a process that will be occurring in the economy at large in the first half of the century.

I urge editors to keep abreast of the developments, and to be ready to insist that Wikidata consult us on style and formatting before releasing on our site each displayed text that it proposes. This should be a matter of established protocol, in my view.

Tony (talk) 10:17, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

@User:Tony1, are you indicating a cross-Wiki integration of articles that relies on an algorithm to interpret the nuances of language between language projects and may or may not effectively consider the policies and guidelines that have evolved in each language domain of WP? Cinderella157 (talk) 10:51, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Cinderella, I don't know enough about the structure and processes of Wikidata to say. All I know is that there's been no consultation—and that does not augur well. If Wikidata outputs are somehow filtered for each language-WP, well yes, it needs to write and implement algorithms according to our style guides. Tony (talk) 11:33, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

The problem is that it's often very difficult to determine the parts of the MoS that apply to a given article, because of the wide variation that is allowed. I think that we may have to agree to mark articles more clearly as to their ENGVAR, date formats, citation styles, etc. if there's to be reliable automated mapping between data sources and the English Wikipedia. Eventually, I suspect, the pressure will be to allow less variation.

It's a bit off the style issue, but nevertheless I think the following is relevant. Wikidata now handles the links between articles in different language Wikipedias (the language links you see in the left margin in the desktop website). However, Wikidata works on the basis that there's a 1:1 mapping between articles. This is simply false, for all sorts of reasons. If there's only member of a taxon, we have only one article with an appropriate redirect; some other Wikipedias always have one article for each rank regardless of how many members there are. Concepts vary from one language to another; thus we have an article at Berry covering the ordinary language concept, and another at Berry (botany) covering the botanical concept. Some topics are more important to some language Wikipedias than others, so their articles have been split to keep the length down, whereas other Wikipedias have a single article. When the mapping between languages isn't 1:1, then it's pretty random which pair get linked. I and others have raised more than once the need for Wikidata to reflect reality and change the design of this part of the system so that non-1:1 mappings are handled. Nothing happens, so we're stuck with a mess. I fear this doesn't augur well for the future.

Peter coxhead (talk) 13:03, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. I've had concerns along these lines for years, going back to my focus on cue sports. What "billiards" means, for example, varies wildly between varieties of English, and once you start trying to map an article here to one at it.wikipedia or es.wikipedia or ru.wikipedia you run into some conflicts. Hell even what "pool" means varies, and worse yet there's a conflict between eight-ball and eightball pool (they're different but related). When non-English Wikipedias cover these topics they often conflate them, or cover only one of them, or have them as sections a bigger article, or whatever.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:09, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

The previous discussion [15] ended in general agreement that archaic spellings should be avoided unless necessary, but with no actions or specific proposals. Would anyone object to the following bullet point being added to

• When more than one variant spelling for a word exists within a national variety of English, the most commonly used current variant should be preferred unless the article subject is better served by using the older form.

Or does anyone have a more elegant, accurate solution? Scribolt (talk) 06:15, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

• Support in principle. I would copyedit "unless the article subject is better served by using"; that's not our typical approach. More like "unless there is consensus at the article's talk page to use". Also, "the older" isn't always going to be applicable; use "a less common". Could also add a point that the usual way to determine this is to see which spelling is listed first in modern dictionaries, though this could be added later, and is probably better as a footnote. This may also need a clarification that it does not apply to specialized
  term-of-art or jargon usage, e.g. connexion in Methodist connexionalism, or provenience in archaeology versus provenance in art dealing (they have distinct meanings, and an artifact can actually have both a provenance and a provenience). We probably would not need more than two examples. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:31, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Agree with your suggestion to identify an agreed consensus as the reason for inclusion, and for less common vs older. I would have thought that this change would also address your subsequent point in that if there is a legitimate reason to include something specialised, it would have to be explained and agreed via discussion. Scribolt (talk) 14:53, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Well, much of the disputation about this before has been about jargon and terms of art, so this seems like a likely source of future dispute. It's better to curtail a zillion talk-page agruments about in-context jargon by mentioning that it's permissible (within the bounds of

MOS:JARGON, of course) rather than have people fight it out again and again.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:24, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

• When more than one variant spelling for a word exists within a national variety of English, the most commonly used current variant should be preferred unless there is a consensus at the talk page of the article to use the less common alternative. This would not apply in cases where the less common spelling has a specific usage in a specialised context e.g. connexion in Methodist connexionalism.Scribolt (talk) 14:27, 25 September 2017 (UTC)