Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/France- and French-related articles

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Naming of French railway station articles

The standard (

here
) differs from the pattern used for all other railway stations, and is widely disregarded for French stations. I therefore propose a revised standard, more in line with practices for other countries.

  1. Some stations are known by established common names. This includes
    Châtelet–Les Halles
    . [There may be a few others to be added to this list]
  2. Other station articles should be titled "xxxx station". Where disambiguation is necessary, a suffix can be added e.g. to distinguish
    Luxembourg station (in Luxembourg City) from Luxembourg station (Paris)
  3. Where a station serves two communities, the two should be separated by an unspaced endash (e.g. Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines–Montigny-le-Bretonneux station or Mitry–Claye station
  4. Where a station is one of several serving a city, the qualifier should be preceded by an unspaced hyphen (e.g.
    Versailles-Chantiers station
    .

Comments please. Colonies Chris (talk) 15:26, 13 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Looks plausible. But I'd like to see a substantial list of examples of where this proposal would lead to changes. Dicklyon (talk) 22:37, 15 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
See the subcategories of Category:Railway stations by department, and Category:Réseau Express Régional stations, I'd say it's about a thousand articles. I agree with moving the articles to an English title, I don't think "gare de" makes sense to most users of English Wikipedia, and apart from some well known stations like the main terminuses in Paris, they're not known under their French name in English. Markussep Talk 08:57, 16 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would certainly agree that station names should be in English; I can’t see any justification for using the form Gare de... here, any more than using "London Waterloo station" (instead of
    inconsistent with other, similar articles. Our treatment of every other rail network would seem to use English for station names, as do pages on networks in other Francophone countries (in Belgium, for example, or Canada, or Switzerland
    ).
As for the exceptions, I agree that Gare d’Austerlitz (for example) is common in English, but I can’t see why using the official name ("Paris-Austerlitz railway station, commonly called Gare d’Austerlitz…") would be unreasonable, and it would have the advantage of consistency. Moonraker12 (talk) 22:34, 17 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Disagree, station is ambiguous. The suffix should either be "railway station", as is in use in English articles (
    name commonly used in English-language sources) or retained in their original form of "Gare de". As Colonies Chris has moved hundreds or articles to grammatically incorrect names I have moved back some, as a re-move cannot be done, a request will have to be made, thus blocking your changes, for now. Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons 09:50, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply
    ]
This change to the naming guideline was agreed after discussion, as you can see above. I see you have renamed dozens of station. Please cease. If you wish to reopen the discussion, you may do so, of course, but you may not reverse the agreed changes. I will take action to get you blocked if necessary. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:16, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that "railway station" would be a better choice, and would in line with most other European articles. It's probably the best translation for British English, moreso than "x station" which is in use in North American articles but reflects American English usage. A few weeks ago I drafted a proposed naming convention that would unify the disparate mostly-informal standards in use: User:Mackensen/Naming conventions (railway stations in Europe). You can see from the talk page that "x railway station" is by far the most common usage; prior to the recent change in French stations (including Monaco), Germany was the only other country using "x station", which is inconsistent with the other German-speaking countries. Mackensen (talk) 13:19, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Does everyone agree that "X station" and "X railway station" are both more appropriate than "Gare de X", that "X station" is the short-term status quo but a change to "X railway station" merits serious consideration, and that reverting to "Gare de X" would not be a positive step at this point? Certes (talk) 13:54, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A fair summary. In the meantime, I will ask admins to revert all of Captain Scarlet's renamings. Colonies Chris (talk) 15:46, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'd also like to point out that Captain scarlet's renaming frenzy shows a lack of understanding of French - for example renaming Le Grand Jardin station as Gare Le Grand Jardin is both a contravention of the naming guideline and incorrect French (see fr:Gare_du_Grand-Jardin). Colonies Chris (talk) 16:01, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The articles are now back to "X station". Shall we leave them there, or does anyone oppose the current titles strongly enough to continue the discussion? Certes (talk) 22:56, 14 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fine just leaving them as "X station" for the mass majority of the stations. i just came across this so the only thing that i'd add to the guidelines is that railway halt's should be title "X halt" instead of x station as in french they'd be refered to as "Halte de X" see

Aguilcourt-Variscourt halt as an example. don't know if it is worth adding a fifth guideline to the naming conventions or not. Epluribusunumyall (talk) 08:53, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
]

I think there's a good deal to be said for the French articles to be internally consistent and consistent with articles in naming countries, which would point towards a gradual move to "x railway station" for main line articles. To respond to Epluribusunumyall (talk · contribs)'s point, I'm not a huge fan of distinguishing halts from stations as part of the article title. English, by and large, doesn't do this, and unless the sources are absolutely consistent there's going to be a lot ambiguity in titles. Mackensen (talk) 12:08, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Style problems

I've noted that a multitude of French railway-station articles have been established with obviously wrong features. It's a great pity they weren't done with regard to en.WP's style guide: please no French flag in the infobox; "located" is used without purpose; common terms are wrongly linked; "high-speed" lacks the hyphen; and range dashes are wrongly open rather than closed. Sigh. Tony (talk) 08:36, 18 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Naming of tram stops

Following on the above discussions, I propose that articles on tram stops follow the format "X tram stop." This matches the usage in the UK and is a natural disambiguator. I'm aware of the 52 articles in Category:Tramway de Bordeaux; there may be others. Mackensen (talk) 23:00, 13 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS, which is more than a decade outdated

At

WP:CONSISTENT
, anyway.

That is, this MoS page has been carving out an exception to

WP:COMMONNAME
policy, in favor of mimicking what some off-site style guide does. That's a total CONLEVEL failure.)

I therefore propose that only the first system (the Imprimerie nationale / Académie Française method) be preserved in this guideline. It is also favored by Le Petit Robert, Le Quid, and L'Dictionnaire de citations françaises, etc., and can be found in English-language advice on writing French works' titles, like current

WP:CONSISTENT
policy, and otherwise will be beneficial.

PS:

MOS:CAPS, etc., in suggesting to imitate book/album/etc. covers and marketing, when it should say (and I'm pretty sure it used to say) to follow the orthography of the non-English language.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:07, 14 December 2020 (UTC); rev'd. 08:16, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply
]

Specifically on opera titles: Grove hasn't changed their usage. Usage in French-language sources is inconsistent – fr:La Jolie Fille de Perth (opéra), even for non-operas: fr:Le Rouge et le Noir, fr:La Grande Vadrouille, Le Bon Usage (Grevisse, who advises "to avoid arbitrariness and discrepancies, the simplest and clearest use is to capitalize the first word only, whatever it is."), Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, fr:Guerre et Paix, Poil de carotte which in French is apparently spelled fr:Poil de Carotte. Are we supposed to implement the bowl of spaghetti that is fr:WP:TYPO#TITRES, cases 1, 2, 2b, 3, 3b, 4, which apparently is based on the Lexique? Mercy! – I notice that in a previous discussion on this page La bohème has also been mentioned; Euphegenia Doubtfire explains why this is hilarious. La rondine falls in the same category. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:58, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
La rondine is Italian, and fr:La rondine clearly states the French-language title to be L'Hirondelle. Also, many examples you cite have an adjective or qualifier placed before the main noun of the title, a rarer case in which they would be capitalized, unlike for instance the second substantive in La Peau de chagrin. This gives a slightly distorted view of the guideline. Place Clichy (talk) 18:22, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Michael Bednarek's view sounds more practical. Tony (talk) 11:35, 2 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Except that it does not result in "a simple, widely followed guideline", it results in multiple, conflicting guidelines. See also
Talk:L'ange de Nisida#Requested move 8 December 2020, where we have people from WikiProject Opera arguing for a third and different "standard".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:48, 3 January 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
Looking at fr:Liste_des_œuvres_de_Jacques_Offenbach it's possible to correctly work out the capitalisation of all but one work using only three of the traditional rules. (1) if the title begins with an indefinite article or is a set phrase, then only the first word is capitalised. (2) if the title has no article or a definite one, then capitalise the first noun and any preceding adjectives/adverbs. (3) if there is a list of nouns separated by 'and'/'or'/'nor' then each is capitalised. (Le Financier et le Savetier, ou Guerre et Paix). The rules are consistent and predictable. Scarabocchio (talk) 15:52, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Update: Talk:L'Ange de Nisida#Requested move 8 December 2020 closed (perhaps narrowly) with consensus to move, from "L'ange" spelling.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:05, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose – Is it possible that there are regional distinctions to be made here, à la
    French immersion
    school system (from kindergarten to grade 12) in the 2000s and early 2010s.
I agree with
MOS:ENGVAR, we should prefer no national variety of French over any other. 207.161.86.162 (talk) 06:54, 22 March 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
Well, no, it is not possible there are regional distinctions in French to be made on English Wikipedia, "à la MOS:ENGVAR", because this is a one-language site, MOS:ENGVAR is not MOS:ALL-LANGUAGES-IN-THE-WORLD-VAR, there is no MOS:FRVAR, and the guidelines are for a consistent house style, not for recording world-wide variation. One cannot extrapolate from policies and guidelines about specific things to apply them to superficially similar things that have nothing to do with those policies and guidelines. The goal of
WP:POLICYFORK after one has been detected.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:53, 22 March 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
While it's clear that the OQLF standard and Académie standard are different here, we shouldn't expect the OQLF standard to apply to anything that originated elsewhere than Canada.
WP:N. I don't see that happening too often. One exception is Category:Quebec films by French title, which is a container of redirects that does not use English-language titles by design. Edit: This category doesn't have anything to do with opera or paintings, so off-topic to this discussion. 162.208.168.92 (talk) 23:09, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
  • Ardently support Finally! I'm baffled at the idea of using secondary, English-language sources for this. None of them are consistent, due to carelessness. That means all our French articles will end up capitalized in a variety of conflicting ways. This is also frankly a
    WP:SYSTEMICBIAS
    issue: it's perfectly reasonable for senior newspaper editors not to check French grammar books before hitting publish, but that doesn't mean they get to redefine the French language.
DIE SCHONE MULLERIN (German) is gibberish, while Die schöne Müllerin is not. "Die angeln" and "Die Angeln" mean different things, and so do l'État and l'état (French). Accents matter too, like pêcheur and pécheur, or mat and mât, and careless English-language publishers omit those all the time. Our rule should be the simplest possible rule: follow the proper grammar of a language when writing in that language. For French capitalization, it's all explained this entry of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. Note that contrary to some arguments above, these rules apply to the whole Francophonie, and are identical in Québec, Belgium, etc. And I'll note that actually, most of our French titles seem to comply with these rule,s so it's simply a matter of enforcing consistency.
That means fixing the blasphemously-named Académie Française, to start, and all these other abominations. Cheers to all (including the heathen !oppose voters, and my gratitude to User:SMcCandlish for starting this discussion. DFlhb (talk) 20:59, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per DFlhb and the precedent set by
    WP:MEDRS. While our usual practice is to follow the majority of mainstream English sources, we can deviate from that if we have reason to believe that they do a poor job at a particular thing. However, for Canadian works I can imagine preserving an exception for when the OQLF standard differs. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 21:30, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Support Foreign titles are quotations, so the spirit of
    WP:COMMONNAME, because reliability in one dimension, like film criticism, does not automatically transfer to other dimensions, like foreign-language orthography. As DFlhb has pointed out, that English sources introduce these variants cannot prima facie be assumed to have a better reason than incompetence. Or maybe deadlines? Paradoctor (talk) 19:42, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Oppose – Following the proposal, English Wikipedia articles should use capitalization according to the rules of the Académie française, except when a local consensus, based on WP:COMMONNAME, decides otherwise? I suggest that instead of attempting to follow the labyrinthine rules at fr:Wikipédia:Conventions typographiques#Titres d'œuvres et de périodiques en français or the above-mentioned 7. Majuscules dans les titres d’œuvres, we follow fr:Usage des majuscules en français#Règles simplifiées – La majuscule est limitée au premier mot du titre, quel qu’il soit, ainsi qu’aux noms propres figurant dans ce titre. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:04, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Compared to English title case, I don't see much difference by way of complexity. Paradoctor (talk) 17:57, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    It is not difficult, but there's a mindset that says that it is complex/ contradictory/ blah. See my comment from 15:52, 9 January 2021 that spells out why the examples of complex/ contradictory/ inconsistent usage are nonsense. Scarabocchio (talk) 19:04, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The very reason that this topic will never die until it is resolved properly, is the partial embrace by a small corner of the enterprise of the 'simplified' rules for capitalisation. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Many editors, both actual and potential, expect to see an academic register in the language used. Scarabocchio (talk) 19:09, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    So ... (in response to @Michael Bednarek post of 12:58, 14 December 2020):
    (1) if the title begins with an indefinite article or is a set phrase, then only the first word is capitalised.
    (2) if the title has no article or a definite one, then capitalise the first noun and any preceding adjectives/adverbs.
    (3) if there is a list of nouns separated by 'and'/'or'/'nor' then each is capitalised. (Le Financier et le Savetier, ou Guerre et Paix). The rules are consistent and predictable.
    La Jolie Fille de Perth. Rule 1 doesn't apply. The noun is 'Fille', and according to rule 2, we also capitalise preceding adjective "Jolie" = La Jolie Fille de Perth
    Le Rouge et le Noir. Rule 3. The word 'et' is a copula that joins two separate phrases. The caps rules reset, so we capitalise the first noun in the second phrase = Le Rouge et le Noir
    La Grande Vaudrille. Rule 1 doesn't apply. Rule 2: capitalise the first noun and any preceding advectives/ adverbs = La Grande Vaudrille
    Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Rule 2: capitalise the first noun and any preceding advectives/ adverbs = Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
    Guerre et Paix. Rule 3: The caps rules reset, so we capitalise the first noun in the second phrase = Guerre et Paix
    Poil de Carotte is a set phrase ('redhead'), rule 1.
    Sorry, @Michael Bednarek if it looks like I am picking on you, but you are not alone by any means. At least four editors within the Wikipedia Project Opera have posted lists of examples of 'inconsistent' or 'contradictory' French caps over the last 8, 10, 12 years and 95% of them correctly match the expected Académie française use. When I went to check the remaining 5% of examples, I found that frWP did not use the reported case. The use of caps in frWP and in 'respectable' French is both consistent and predictable. Scarabocchio (talk) 19:39, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    This is getting interesting ! The WikiProject Opera resistance to the Académie française caps is based on a number of objections. (1) "French caps are inconsistent/ hard-to-understand" (wrong, and I *will* carry on addressing this if absolutely necessary); (2) "we use simplified rules" (this is exactly the reason that this topic will come up year after year after year; and we should use respectable, academic, 'proper' registers in an encyclopedia); (3) "Grove/ Oxford Music/ Oxford Dictionaries are the standard source for the specific sector of opera and we follow their usage" (a: this makes work lists of, say, Adolphe Adam, a French composer who worked in both opera and ballet, an ugly mess. His list of ballets have the conventional French caps, but his list of operas are (inconsistent) in WPOpera caps style. b: I was talking to Oxford Music in January 2023 on a different topic, and they mentioned that they were in the middle of a language review. It looks like the just-released 6th edition of the Dictionary of Music may have changed to use 'proper' 'French' caps); (4) "it will be a lot of work to correct the orthographies" (I wrote some code/ scripts to do this automatically. I tested them out on the French Opera article, and they seemed to work rather well. I am more than happy to revisit these if we can get a consensus for 'French' caps) Scarabocchio (talk) 21:49, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • France- and French-related articles need to follow en.WP's MOS, like all other articles. Tony (talk) 22:56, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    That's a pointless comment, given that we are just discussing what the MOS should say. Paradoctor (talk) 23:18, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Those rules still strike me as labyrinthine, and I have great difficulties with the concept of 'set phrase' – is that the reason for Ma mère l'Oye? If so, is there a catalogue of them? Or how are they determined? As for French rules vs. English usage: Académie Française and La Vie Parisienne defy French rules here because of WP:COMMONNAME. BTW, the English Wikipedia is not alone in using simplified caps – our German colleagues, who are not naturally opposed to caps, do the same. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:11, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    ... and the rules seem natural to me. It's not like we are writing these title phrases from scratch, but referencing them or taking them from French language sources where they will have French-style caps. Currently, to share/ move texts about French works between frWP and enWP, we have to change the caps to match the local rules. enWP doesn't seem to have many problems with the titles of books, artworks or plays (or of the ballets of Adolphe Adam). Following the Académie rules should simplify our work and save us time. One the reasons that Oxford Dictionaries was developing new guidelines on orthographies was to make their data more consistent across multiple publications, and to simplify the management of their data back-end. We should do the same. Scarabocchio (talk) 10:39, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Re Oxford: Some libraries use radical lower case for book titles, e.g. Worldcat (War and peace: a historical novel,
    OCLC 679897477). Wikipedia doesn't do that. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:08, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    This kind of
    not constrained by paper. Paradoctor (talk) 14:38, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    This is true, but we need some kind of systemic approach to this, because the current morass kind of boils down to "do whatever the hell you feel like", relying on either/or wording in this "guideline" which is failing to guide, relying on some wikiproject's demands, relying on totally conflicting off-site usage in English-language RS, relying on French sources, or just making crap up as you go along. The result is a confusing
    WP:CONSISTENT failure, recurrent editorial conflict, and probably a lot of reader confusion about why our capitalization of this stuff is veering around wildly, like drunks are at the keyboard.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:18, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    When I work on an article, I will visit it in other languages to check consistency, see if there's valuable referenced content that's missing in one or more articles. I did a burst of work on the operas of Charles Gounod that involved comparing, updating and importing material between the frWP and enWP. I read a lot of French texts in an educated language register, so Le Monde every day for example. The capitalisation rules have become natural, and I can glance at the list of Gounod's operas in French Wikipedia and everything is predictable and 'normal'. I did a lot of work on the enWP equivalent, and the caps are all over the place, filled with 'schoolboy errors', and with no pattern or plan. Even within a given article, eg La colombe, the case flips from one sentence to the next. It's an ugly mess, it wastes my time looking up which French words are going to capitalised in English in any given case, and it makes enWP look unacademic and unserious. Scarabocchio (talk) 13:58, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would like to point out that the Oxford University Press style [2] guideline cited and linked by this proposal applies when one is writing in French, not English, i.e., it applies if you are writing for the French Wikipédia, not the English Wikipedia. However, these rules may apply in the English Wikipedia within a citation to a book written in French. It is usually the case that the capitalization of French titles and proper names is anglicized when used in English-language publications. --Robert.Allen (talk) 23:16, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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