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Capitalizing complete sentence quotations

Currently, this style guide suggests de-capitalizing quoted sentences:

  • Changing capitalization so that sentences begin with capital letters and do not have unnecessary capitals in the middle (the oft-repeated maxim "a penny saved is a penny earned").

However, I have never seen another English-language source that does this, and every grammar guide that I could find on the internet recommends the opposite:

  • "When quoting, the first word of a complete sentence should be capitalized, regardless of its placement within the main sentence."[1]
  • "Capitalize the first letter of a direct quote when the quoted material is a complete sentence."[2]
  • "Always capitalize the first word in a complete quotation, even in midsentence."[3]
  • "Capitalize the first word in a quotation if the quotation is a complete sentence or if it is an interjection, an incomplete question, or fragmentary response."[4]
  • "Use a capital letter with the first word of a complete sentence of a direct quotation."[5]

Also, I checked the Chicago Manual of Style (which I have a physical copy of) and The New York Times, and they both disagree with our recommendation. From a practical point of view I also think that our recommendation is bad advice as it can potentially change the reading of the sentence (by implying that the quotation is a partial, rather than complete, sentence). Would anyone object if I remove the bullet point cited above? Kaldari (talk) 19:17, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Reviewing the archived discussions which led to the adoption of the guideline might show valid reasons for it.
—Wavelength (talk) 19:26, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
The last discussion on the topic (as far as I can tell) was at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 130#RFC: shall changes in beginning of sentence case be allowed in quotations?, which favored retaining a very differently worded guideline:
  • If an entire sentence is quoted in such a way that it becomes a grammatical part of the larger sentence, the first letter loses its capitalization (It turned out to be true that "a penny saved is a penny earned").
The implications of that guideline are very different from what it has morphed into since 2012. I agree that it is OK to de-capitalize if the quoted sentence becomes an integral part of the parent sentence grammatically, but that is very rarely the case. Somehow what was originally a rarely allowed exception has now become the recommended standard, even though it is, in most cases, grammatically incorrect (in the opinion of every grammar guide I can find). Kaldari (talk) 19:57, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
  • I think this advice is consistent with other choices in the MOS that favour de-capitalization over capitalization, even where some style guides disagree, so I believe more views are needed before removing this point. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:24, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
    Is there actually disagreement among style guides on this? I haven't been able to find any (although I don't have access to the AP Stylebook or some other print-only ones). Kaldari (talk) 20:53, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
    Also, notice how de-capitalization in this case can cause confusion:
    The doctor said "He only has a week to live."
    The doctor said "he only has a week to live."
    The second sentence is more ambiguous and confusing. Kaldari (talk) 21:09, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
I don't think anyone is suggesting the second style for direct speech, which is anyway rare in an encyclopedia. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:26, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
That seems to be how people are interpreting the current guidelines.[6]

I agree the current wording is misleading, verging on outright incorrect, and has incrementally drifted away from what we arguably had some sort of consensus for at some point, despite its flaws, which was the 2012 wording quoted above. The older wording roughly agrees with a few external style guides (our current wording on this probably agrees with none). However, in both cases MoS's conceptualization and illustration of the idea is sorely confused and confusing, because it's equating aphorisms and epigrams with quotations, and the two are not the same thing. We probably do not need to retain capitalization of any form of cliché when it appears mid-sentence. Some external guides would, others would not. Most would not use quotation marks; some would use italics, some no markup. Most of those things are pretty arbitrary, reall.

The serious WP problem with regard to just reverting to the 2012 version for actual quotations is that it violates the principle of minimal change (PMC) rather badly. We should probably adopt the strictest of the numerous approaches to this issue, and not change the case, in either direction, unless it's done with a bracketed editorial change, writing to avoid that construction if possible. Another issue is that many if not most editors, and external style guides, will not accept The doctor said "He only has a week to live." or even The doctor said "[h]e only has a week to live." as valid, due to lack of punctuation. External style guides almost unanimously want either a colon or a comma here, and the majority of them recommend a colon when it's a complete sentence:

  • The doctor said: "He only has a week to live." – The most commonly attested style in style guides for a full-sentence quotation.
  • The doctor said, "[h]e only has a week to live." – Seen in some academic writing, but awkward.
  • The doctor said: "[h]e only has a week to live." – Seen rarely in some academic writing, but awkward and pointless (it results from the bad combination of a rule to not modify quotations without square brackets, and another rare one to not capitalize after a colon even for a full sentence following it).
  • The doctor said, "He only has a week to live." – seen in much journalistic writing, but violates the PMC, and does not comport with the common colon-before-full-sentence rule. [Copy-paste error!]
  • The doctor said, "He only has a week to live." – seen in much journalistic writing, but does not comport with the common colon-before-full-sentence rule.
  • The doctor said, "he only has a week to live." – seen in some journalistic and much Web writing, but violates the PMC, and most style guides, and those that do comma-before-full-sentence.
Sources that favor the colon do want a comma when not quoting a complete sentence, and are sharp about this distinction, which is quite valuable since it's an extra signal to the reader whether the quotation is fragmentary or not:
  • The governor concluded, "and that's all I'm going to say."
Virtually all style sources use neither colon nor comma when the construction flows grammatically without it: The doctor said James "only has a week to live". (Note that it's not necessary even under logical quotation to include terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks with something that's just a fragment, and it's advisable not to do so.)

I know this is how I write here, no one reverts me when I fix stuff to be written this way, and I don't seem to need to do it all that often. I thus move that we adopt the three "rules" illustrated in green here, and permit the use of bracketed changes of case when they seem necessary (e.g., when beginning our own sentence with a quote that was not the beginning of the quoted sentence: "[O]nly has a week to live" was the doctor's prognosis), but not "silent" changes that mislead the reader (as in The doctor said: "he only has a week to live." when the original was "He ..."). It would be hypocritical to retain logical quotation on a PMC basis, and then ignore the PMC to mimic sloppy, journalistic writing style, especially after so many things from journalistic style have been rejected as unencyclopedically informal, or expedient at the cost of clarity. Although I can think of someone who would have made some kind of WP:ENGVAR argument, there is no strong national tie. There's a bit of favoritism toward The doctor said, "He only has a week to live." in American sources, and toward The doctor said: "He only has a week to live." in British ones, but it is not universal, and WP has a clear rationale (actually multiple ones) to prefer the latter.

If we start adopting journalistic quotation style, this will breathe new life into all sorts of tendentious, disruptive campaigning, e.g. against dashes, against a consistent approach to dates, placenames, and measurement/unit handling, in favor of always capitalizing job titles, toward the over-capitalization of trivial words in work/composition titles, etc., etc., etc. There are dozens of ways that news writing diverges from the more formal register WP uses, and agitation for journo style is probably the #1 source of MoS-related conflict (or maybe #2, after the WP:SSF).

Sourcing work for this should probably be done at Quotation marks in English, since it covers capitalization after, and punctuation before, the opening quotation mark, and the article badly needs work in this regard. We might even want to defer consideration of the the above until this work is done.

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  15:44, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Why does The doctor said, "He only has a week to live." violate the PMC? This is probably the most common form in journalistic writing (for example, it's what the NYT uses) and I would favor allowing it. In the meantime, while we are hashing out the details, what should be done with the existing bullet point? The only reason I started this discussion in the first place is that I wanted to stop people who were de-capitalizing everything and citing this guideline (which definitely violates the PMC and common English grammar to boot). Kaldari (talk) 17:06, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
Fixed: That was a copy-paste error on my part. I corrected the example, above. The only problem with it is that the it doesn't agree with the "colon-before-full-sentence" rule advanced by most academic style guide, and which provides a useful signal to the reader that the quotation is not a fragment; if we use the journo comma here, we lose that feature.
The bullet points in the present guideline text: I'm not sure. For the very short term, I would suggest marking them with {{disputed inline}} or at least {{under discussion}}, pointing to this thread.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  17:16, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Kaldari started off this thread by quoting the MOS:

  • Changing capitalization so that sentences begin with capital letters and do not have unnecessary capitals in the middle (the oft-repeated maxim "a penny saved is a penny earned").

But it's important to understand the context of that guideline. It is amongst a list of changes one is allowed to make to a quotation without being viewed as having misquoted the source. A similar example is being allowed to change slanted quote marks to straight quote marks. Just because it's allowed doesn't mean it's always a good idea. Kaldari also says the Chicago Manual of Style disagrees with our recommendation. But my version (16th ed.) says in sec. 13.13 "the first word in a quoted passage must often be adjusted to conform to the surrounding text. In most types of works, this adjustment may be done silently, as such capitalization does not normally affect the significance of the quoted material, which is assumed to have been taken from another context. In some types of works, however, it may be obligatory to indicate the change by bracketing the initial quoted letter; for examples of this practice, appropriate to legal writing and some types of textural commentary, see 13.16."

Section 13.14 gives examples of changing the capitalization or not, depending the degree to which the quoted passage is integrated into the whole sentence:

Benjamin Franklin admonishes us to "plough deep while sluggards sleep."

But

As Franklin advised, "Plough deep while sluggards sleep."

Perhaps the problem is that some of the items in the list of things that can be done to a quote should always be done (changing slanted quotes to straight quotes) and other things are optional (expanding abbreviations). But I wouldn't want to over-complicate the guideline by trying to include language to indicate mandatory vs. optional changes, because one can usually find a rare exception for something that approaches being mandatory. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:35, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h: Yes, part of the problem is that editors are taking the examples of what is allowed, and enforcing it as what should be done. I think we should be more clear on which is which, as right now it is ambiguous. Kaldari (talk) 16:55, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
Jc3s5h, good point about context; so is the one on the always/optional distinction. We basically need to rethink the whole mess, and put the right stuff in the right place. The very fact that we have the 'As Franklin advised, "Plough deep while sluggars sleep."' example indicates we don't really want people to de-cap that, especially not a full-sentence quote.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  17:24, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h, SMcCandlish, and Peter coxhead: What do you think about removing the current bullet point and adding the following guidance at the end of the "Typographic conformity" section (to reflect what was agreed on in the previous discussions):

When quoting a complete sentence, it is recommended to keep the first word capitalized unless the quoted passage has been integrated into the surrounding sentence.
  • Right: Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world."
  • Permissible: Gandhi admonished us to "be the change [we] want to see in the world."

The issue of commas and colons is already dealt with in MOS:QUOTEMARKS and referred to from the colon and comma sections, so I don't think we need to repeat it in MOS:QUOTE. Kaldari (talk) 01:46, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

I have two issues with this:
  1. We should illustrate use of the colon in the first example, since it's what most style guides advise; the comma in such a construction is journo style, which WP is not properly written in. Even if (right now) MOS:QUOTEMARKS is treating colon, comma, or no-punctuation as permissible, we should illustrate the academic usage, not the sloppy usage. (And I'd bet real money MoS will not remain wishywashy on the punctuation point; sourcing that, in depth, as a distinction between formal and informal writing is on my to-do list as I work on Quotation marks in English.)
  2. The entire point of the whole thread above is that permitting a "sneaky" change to the quotation violates WP:PMC and is against everything MOS stands for on quotation accuracy, so it should be: Gandhi admonished us to "[b]e the change [we] want to see in the world.", and the lead-in sentence should read When quoting a complete sentence, it is recommended to keep the first word capitalized unless the quoted passage has been integrated into the surrounding sentence (case changes, like other alterations, are indicated with square brackets).
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:59, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish: Personally I'm fine with both of those changes, although the 2nd one might be somewhat confusing since the whole "Typographic conformity" section is about silently changing quotation formatting. I don't think we want to encourage people to use brackets when changing hyphens to dashes or replacing guillemets with straight quotation marks, for example. How about I change the example sentence to use brackets for the decapitalization, but don't add your commentary about it (since it could be interpreted too broadly)? Kaldari (talk) 02:21, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
Right, hadn't thought of that. Like I said much earlier, part of the problem is the advice is scattered instead of in one place.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  04:20, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
PS: A minor issue is that the second example isn't something we'd actually use in an article (WP doesn't speak of "us" and "we", per MOS:PERSON). Too many MOS examples are like this, and seem to represent casual, journalistic, business, and other non-encyclopedic writing. All the cartoon quotations at MOS:LQ are an obvious example.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  06:59, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
It was hard coming up with a good example of a quotation that would be easily recognized as a complete sentence and could be unambiguously integrated into the parent sentence, but if you have any other suggestions for an example, I'm fine with changing it. Kaldari (talk) 19:12, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h, @Kaldari: I tried some repair on the Gandhi quote in second example by taking out the redundant and interruptive "that" in my earlier revision, but it's still poor, though better than the original for multiple reasons. (No offense intended; it's actually very difficult to come up with a good example using famous quotation; I tried for about an hour.) The problem is that the whole construction is unencyclopedic; it's something for a dictionary of quotations and a book of advice, which WP:ISNOT.

We need to replace it with something actually illustrative of how we write here, not marred by two editorial [changes] at once, and without first- or second-person pronouns. Something along the lines of:

  • Right: Primarily because of the hyperspatial vortex coefficient, the report concluded: "Flux gate capacitors cannot exceed the quantum tribble function."
  • Acceptable: In concluding that "[f]lux gate capacitors cannot exceed the quantum tribble function", the report was criticized for relying so heavily on the hyperspatial vortex coefficient.

But I'm so dead tired my brain is rebelling and demanding that I hit the pillow. Can youse guys come up with a good one? It's way more important that we give examples that match our usage, even if there invented, than that we try to find great quotes from famous people. We quote statements from sources way, way more often than notables' bon mots. But a real example is probably easy to find in any MEDRS dispute. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:54, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: actually I think the reason it's hard is this. When writing in encyclopedic language about a conclusion, it's almost always easy to fit the quoted part into normal text, and this is what editors usually do. E-cigarette is, rightly, a good source of direct quotations. Consider an example. This source contains the sentence "EC use releases negligible levels of nicotine into ambient air with no identified health risks to bystanders." Now this could be used in Wikipedia by some device such as A 2015 Public Health England report concluded that: "[Electronic cigarette] use releases negligible levels of nicotine into ambient air with no identified health risks to bystanders". However, this is clumsy, and the actual wording used as of now is A 2015 Public Health England report concluded that e-cigarette use "releases negligible levels of nicotine into ambient air with no identified health risks to bystanders". Only if the quoted sentence is well-known in its entirety, i.e. as a sentence as well as for what it says, is it likely that we wouldn't be willing to extract from it and thus avoid the issue. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:20, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
@Peter coxhead: Sure; I wasn't suggesting that we use a phrasal or even whole word substitution, just the first letter (I tweaked the pseudo-example to make this clearer). We often really do not want to move that first word out of the quotation. To go back to the Gandhi one as an example before I hit the sack, Gandhi admonished us to be "the change [we] want to see in the world." does a great deal of violence to the quote, which if he said it aloud would have come out as: "Be the change you want to see in the world". The be is integral to the quote. But it's still a poor example for our purposes. Using the gibberish examples above, we would probably not want In concluding that flux "gate capacitors cannot exceed the quantum tribble function ..." in many cases (e.g. because "flux gate capacitors" is a unitary term of art). Meanwhile, In concluding that flux gate capacitors "cannot exceed the quantum tribble function ..." removes so much from the quote we would probably just summarize unless what remained quoted was something that really, really needed to be quoted verbatim and still made sense when quoted in such fragmentary form.

Anyway, if we use something realistic in the format used for the pseudo-example, we could even include our standard suggestion to rewrite to avoid the need for the change, but I think Kaldari's "Acceptable" gets that across nicely without having to spell it out. Really, the point of the segment is: "Keep the capital if the quote works well as a sentence after a colon; don't keep it – but don't transgress WP:PMC – when the quote needs to flow into the surrounding sentence." Ideally we can illustrate the entire set of concepts in just two variants of one example. My eyes are too lidded to go look for it right now. Good night!  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  12:57, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Where was it agreed that the square brackets in Gandhi said one should "[b]e the change you want to see in the world." were correct usage? The word is not changed, only its capitalisation; it has exactly the same meaning. It should be written Gandhi said one should "be the change you want to see in the world." --Redrose64 (talk) 21:42, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
It's one of multiple styles, and is the most consistent with WP:PMC; whether MOS should directly recommend it is the subject of a thread lower down on the page. The gist is that if we have WP:PMC and other guideline sections like WP:LQ that are firm in agreeing with and bolstering it, then it is self-contradictory for MOS to recommendation quotation styles that "sneakily" change the content in meaningful ways (e.g. mislead the reader into thinking that the quoted material is not a fragment, or that a quote short-but-complete sentence is a fragment). We have no encyclopedic reason to mislead readers at all, especially not because "I don't like to bother to indicate editorial changes when I'm quoting", basically. Tony1 is correct below that this need not apply to things MOS makes an explicit normalization allowance for, like which glyphs are used – i.e., typographic matters that do not affect the wording per se. Capitalization is on the cusp between those two categories, but because I can, as just shown, mislead the reader it should be considered in the latter category.

Because it doesn't flow as visually smoothly as text without brackets, most of us would rewrite when possible. Something like According to a November 2015 study by the NIH, "[t]he rate of reported cancers of this type has dropped steadily since 1990". is rarely needed. If that was a full sentence, do: According to a November 2015 study by the NIH: "The rate of reported cancers of this type has dropped steadily since 1990." If it was not, do: "According to a November 2015 study by the NIH, the "rate of reported cancers of this type has dropped steadily since 1990"., or "According to a November 2015 study by the NIH, the reported incidence of this type of cancer "has dropped steadily since 1990"., or whatever. Simple.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:46, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Which style guides say that The doctor said, "He only has a week to live." "does not comport with the common colon-before-full-sentence rule". I have never seen this rule.  – Corinne (talk) 00:09, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
Then you need a lot more style guides. :-) MOS is not the place to source English usage matters. That should be done (for this question) probably at Quotation marks in English as the most logical place, since this is a question of how to punctuate before and capitalize after the opening one. I spent about 2 hours satisfying your questions yesterday on another (internal policy-analysis) matter; this is something you can do the research for yourself.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:38, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Notice: RfC at VPPOL may have implications for MOS:LIFE

There's an RfC at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Wikipedia:Disambiguation and inherently ambiguous titles about the sentence in WP:Disambiguation that encompasses the long-standing practice at WP:RM of permitting natural disambiguation for precision-and-recognizability reasons even in the absence of an actual article title collision. This frequently arises with breeds, cultivars, landraces, and other non-human populations the names of which may be confused with human ones (e.g. the move of Algerian Arab, now a disambiguation page, to Algerian Arab sheep, and of British White to British White cattle to ease confusion with the White British).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  17:14, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Proposed new bullet point

I propose an addition bullet point under:

Article titles, headings, and sections[edit]
Article titles[edit]
Main page: Wikipedia:Article titles
When choosing an article's title, refer to the article titles policy. A title should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with the titles of related articles. If these criteria are in conflict, they should be balanced against one another.

...followed by several bullet points

--

The proposed new bullet point is that:

  • Article names should not become named objects unless commonly used in English. One should avoid using a Wikipedia article name as if it were a TV episode name or event name.

The rationale is that frequently, I see examples like this...

Linate Airport was the site of the Linate Airport disaster on 8 October 2001, when Scandinavian Airlines Flight 686, which was bound for Copenhagen Airport, (comment Linate Airport disaster appears to be used only because it is a WP article name. A better alternative would be "A collision involving Scandinavian Airlines Flight 686 pm 8 October 2001, which was bound for Copenhagen Airport,...)

André Adam (10 September 1936 – 22 March 2016) was a Belgian diplomat. He was killed in the 2016 Brussels bombings.

Ensign Hapuna of the Royal Hawaiian Navy (talk) 19:32, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

  • Oppose: This is a proposal without an actual rationale. It's perfectly reasonable to use phrases like these. We have descriptive disambiguation for a reason: We often have to construct an article title for something that doesn't have a proper name, e.g. the 2016 Brussels bombings, and we do so on the basis of what seems to be the most natural way to phrase it. That necessarily means it will typically be natural to use it in articles. The Linate example above is an example of poor writing because it's redundant; "Linate Airport was the site of a disaster on October 2001, when ..." would be better. This would be better simply because it's writing that is good not terrible, not because the terrible version is recycling the name of an article title. It would also have been legitimate to have written "She was killed in the Linate Airport disaster on 8 October 2001, when ...", in a context in which the phrase "Linate Airport" had not been recently used before the sentence. The Brussels example above is also just fine.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:42, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Use of bold lettering

I find several articles that are using Bold lettering to highlight something. I'm sure it is incorrect, but couldn't find anything in the manuyal of style that mentions the use of boldface type. Did I miss it? StarHOG (talk) 17:01, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

An example is always good. --Izno (talk) 17:06, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
MOS:BOLD says "Avoid using boldface for emphasis in article text." Pburka (talk) 17:08, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
Yep. This can usually be converted on-sight to italics. I generally leave it as-is in a quotation if the quotation also contained italics, since the use of both was intended as two different forms/levels of emphasis. It is also customary in some citation formats for the volume number, etc., but general use in general prose as emphasis should be changed to italics.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:54, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

In considering software or distribution products that are typically only provided as online/broadcasted services, such as online websites, software with online functionality (like MMOs), television and radio networks, and the like, and where that service has been fully terminated making the product non-functional or usable, it seems odd to use present tense to discuss the product in the lede. For example Google Reader currently starts with "was an RSS reader"; if it was switched to "is a discontinued RSS reader...", it implies that one could get it, which of course is not true. (In contrast, the current example of a "PDP-10 is a discontinued computer line" makes sense since with effort I can still find a PDP-10 in existence even if I can't buy it new). I would propose that TENSE reflect that when specifically talking about a service that can no longer be used or accessed at all because it was discontinued, that we write that in the past tense. Note that this does have some blurred lines. Taking an MMO as an example, while the MMO may be discontinued one could potentially still find physical or digital copies of the software, suggesting we use "is" for tense in the first sentence, but because the software is otherwise non-functional without the server to support it, it still makes sense to use "was" for the tense. --MASEM (t) 21:55, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. Software (or other digital content) is not the medium on which was distributed, but the product/service as an operational thing. The fact that I can find an archived copy of Google Reader doesn't make it a still-extant platform. This would not apply to, say, games or applications produced for and usable within a discontinued operating system, since they can still be operated in still-running examples of the OS, on old machines or in virtual machines. Super Mario Brothers is, not was, a video game. I can play it on my Mac right now in an NES emulator, and I can play it more directly on an old NES from a second-hand store.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:52, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
The 2nd example in the Tense section now reads: "Earth: Final Conflict is a Canadian science fiction television series that ran for five seasons between October 6, 1997 and May 20, 2002.". Would you be changing that? While broadcast TV is not the same as software, both are intangible products and there are some similarities. Does it matter if recorded versions of the TV show are nowhere available? In any case, what new examples will illustrate this new rule? DES (talk) 23:26, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Cleaning up and normalizing MOS:ENGVAR, WP:CITEVAR, etc.

Please centralize discussion about this cross-page cleanup in this thread. We'll probably advertise it via Village Pump and WP:CENT when the most obvious copyediting is done and some proposals may need to be made.

I've started compressing out massive redundancy at MOS:RETAIN, which is still much too verbose.

MOS:RETAIN Wording as of this writing

When an English variety's consistent usage has been established in an article, maintain it in the absence of consensus to the contrary. With few exceptions (e.g., when a topic has strong national ties or a term/spelling carries less ambiguity), there is no valid reason for such a change.

When no English variety has been established and discussion cannot resolve the issue, default to the English variety used in the first post-stub revision to introduce an identifiable variety. The variety established for use in a given article can be documented by placing the appropriate Varieties of English template on its talk page.

An article should not be edited or renamed simply to switch from one variety of English to another. The {{subst:uw-lang}} template may be placed on an editor's talk page to explain this to him or her.


I did the same and more at WP:CITEVAR [but it was reverted, pending further discussion]: merging redundant sentences; normalizing to MOS:RETAINS's sensible standard of first post-stub revision to establish a clear style; removal of the same kind of infantile, claim-staking WP:OWN / WP:VESTED nonsense already purged from MoS, fixed reversal or order of consensus determination (CITEVAR had "first major contributor" (now "first non-stub..." first, but it's a last-resort default if consensus process fails). Between Peter coxhead's earlier work on the section and my last major go, this section is now a concision model for MOS:RETAIN.

WP:CITEVAR wording as of this writing

As with spelling differences, editors should not change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference or to make it match other articles. If you believe an established style is inappropriate for the needs of the article, seek consensus for a change on the talk page. If discussion does not resolve the issue, default to the style used in the first post-stub revision to introduce a consistent citation style. If an article has no consistent citation style, an editor may use whichever style seems best for the article.

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:47, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

To-do

There's a lot more to do.

  • The "parent copy" of this should be in MoS, with each of the derivatives linking to it, so we stop "advice-forking" or "rule-forking" (which inevitably turns into WP:POVFORKing over time).
  • The entire MOS:ENGVAR section (RETAIN is just one subsection) and all its "children" need to be made consistent with each other, and to use the best wording that can be merged together (or written anew), and each made mutually consistent in terminology and approach, to the extent possible.
  • Especially weed out any lingering, "I was first", "you get to choose the variety FOREVER", "first major contributor gets the last say", un-wiki, anti-collaborative nonsesense, which transgresses multiple policies.

The sections found so far that need this treatment (feel free to add more) are:

Also with wording that may be implicated:

To-do list

The first two items are from Wikipedia talk:Citing sources, generalized [will need more drafting]:

  • A consistent style needs a note (even a footnote) defining it, in the context of guideline implementation, as non-trivial and an actually discernible style (consistent, programmatic). For ENGVAR, needs to be identifiable as a major English dialect; for CITEVAR, even an invented one is okay, and they'll cover that over there; for DATEVAR, needs to be a MOS-accepted date format [but this does not apply to dates in cite style with special requirements], etc.
  • A note (or the footnote) also needs to explain something like: {{tq|Recent changes to insert material not compliant with the established style does not somehow make for lack of a consistent style that can then be "normalized" to a new style without consensus."

Let's get to it. We've been talking about this for months. I've left pointers to this discussion at WT:MOSNUM and WT:CITE for now. I figure MoS should get is own house in order before trying to harmonize with TITLEVAR.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:47, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Discussion

We need to be careful of the structure of the linkage. While the intent of WP:CITEVAR is essentially the same as WP:ENGVAR, WP:CITE is not part of WP:MOS, and it specifically contradicts certain aspects of WP:MOS. (For example, if one is following APA Style in a particular article, one would write the publication date "2016 March 22" even though this is not an approved style in WP:MOS, and whether to capitalize titles with headline case or sentence case depends on the citation style adopted.) Thus we should not introduce any structure that suggests the entire WP:CITE is part of, or subservient to, WP:MOS. Jc3s5h (talk) 12:19, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
@Jc3s5h: I understand the concern! And really thanks very much for raising it that clearly. I have been thinking (agonizing) about this for years, and theres's happily a simple way to resolve it, already implemented successfully at WP:SAL. Details below (at #Resolving the conflict between WP:MOS and WP:CITE when I catch up with the edit conflicts), including proposals for how to heal the "citation style rift" as well as the "competing style guideline rift", potentially with no drama at all.
Anyway, should that idea fall apart, yes, linking from the one page to the other can be done carefully. The principal idea is to explain the concept and define the shared terms (see to-do list above – what does "consistent style" mean and not mean?, etc.) in one place, so a year later we don't have another guidance fork confusing people and causing conflicts. It would be WP:MOS#RETAIN defining what "consistent citation style" means. Look at it this way, WP:AT policy and naming conventions guidelines defer all over the place to various MOS sections, and all is well. (The problems arise when it does not, e.g. the constant confusion that COMMONNAME is a stylization policy; "common style" is handled actually by MOS:CAPS, MOS:TM, and a few other provisions.
I've noted this at WT:CITE, and I'm noting here too that Wikipedia:Citing sources has nothing to do with the MoS. If anyone wants to propose changes to CITEVAR, please do it at that talk page, not here. Many thanks, SarahSV (talk) 14:26, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
I fully agree with SarahSV on this point. DES (talk) 15:24, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
@SlimVirgin, @DESiegel: It "has nothing to do" with MoS because we've erected an artificial wall, for a reason that can very easily be resolved. See the subsection below. If the guidelines intrinsically had nothing to do with each other, CITE wouldn't have style rules of any kind in it, MOS would never refer to citation formatting, CITE would have no MOS shortcuts, MOS wouldn't have loaned RETAIN language to CITE almost verbatim, etc.  :-) What's really happening is MoS has nothing to do with CITE's content and editing guidelines, which, as at SAL, are the bulk of the material. Meanwhile CITE has part of MOS in it, the style part of CITE, and is denying that's it's part of MOS. There was a reason (and past tense is operative here): For years, because of a wikifeud, the main MOS has resisted recognizing that MoS style rules are overridden, inside a citation, if they conflict with intrinsic style rulesof a particular citation style [except in cases it would case technical problems]. For a long time, there was resistance to the idea of importing external citation styles, especially if they did anything "un-MoS" like smallcaps.

That feud is over. There is clearly a WP-wide consensus that these cite styles are permissible and should be, well, in their style, not half in their style and half in MoS style. So, we just make it part of MoS, and all is well for the first time in a very long time. Right now, we basically have a POVfork situation, but the viewpoints have become the same again. I feel pretty confident in saying this because I used to be one of the vocal opponents of using external styles. I changed my mind, and I don't know anyone who has not either seen the light or become resigned to the fact. I might have been the last hold out for all I know.
[My road to citation Damascus: Aside from it just becoming clear that "the meta-RfC was closed", as it were, what convinced me was a conversation with a chemist who made the case that our readers totally WP:DGAF (not his words) about citation formatting, but our expert editors care about it a great deal. It is a touchstone for them, an anchor of familiarity in the chaos of writing in an academically alien environment with rules that are (aside from complicated) seemingly backward to them. We want secondary sources. They can't cite their own influential paper without getting accused of self-promotion. Admins younger than their university students have more authority than they do. They have to cite sources for things they consider ridiculously obvious. We have old research we're reporting as factual when a paper came out last week blowing holes in it, just because there aren't any literature reviews that have caught up to it yet. But they can deal with all this if you let them cite how they know how to cite, using the format is "real" to them. I found this very compelling.]
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:37, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

In the "to do list" above, the text "A consistent style needs a note (even a footnote) defining it [in the context of guide guideline implementation] as non-trivial and an actual style (consistent, programmatic and identifiable)." appears. I object to this strongly if it is intended to say or imply that a "consistent style' must be a documented or published style. If it doesn't intend that, i want to know what an "actual style" means. And insofar as this regards citation styles, I want to see this discussed at WT:CITE, not here. DES (talk) 15:45, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@DESiegel: Sorry, that as about a 5 second brain dump, as I tried to keep up with edit conflicts. It doesn't mean a documented style, just "if no one can tell there's a style here, it's not a style, it's inconsistent formatting". The word "identifiable" is probably the main problem ("recognizable" would have same ambiguity problem; I've tried "discernible" now, though for language it will have be specifically identifiable as a real English dialect; for dates, one of the acceptable date styles [unless in a citation format that uses one that's not, I know]). It's not meant to conflict with your wording a WT:CITE, it's was an attempt to genericize the gist of it, before I forgot.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:37, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Question: I brought this up in an earlier discussion: I rewrote Ukiyo-e completely from scratch in my sandbox and then copy-pasted it over the old article. I have no idea what the old ENGVAR or any other VARs were and don't care. After replacing the old article with 55kb of text, if someone threw a fit about any of the VARs, would that be legitimate grounds (under the current wording) to futz with the new article and "restore" it to a VAR that belonged, essentially, to a different article? Note: nobody actually threw a fit, and the article has gone FA without anyone objecting—this is all hypothetical. I think such futzing would be POINT-ily and LAWYER-ly disruptive and would like to see the wording discourage such disruption. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 13:21, 23 March 2016 (UTC)
  • @Curly Turkey: I think that would be WP:LAWYER / WP:GAMING, since they are essentially different articles, the change would serve no encyclopedic or editorial purpose, and (in this scenario) it has no come to pass that a dispute arose about what style to use, and discussion failed to come to consensus, which would be a prerequisite of defaulting to first post-stub revision to introduce a style; it sounds like your total overall was the revision that made it not a stub. More generally speaking, if you mean that the whole first post-stub / first major contributor stuff seems pointy and lawyerly, I strongly agree, but I wasn't trying to change the guideline, just word it sensibly and resolve contradictions between the variants of the guideline on different pages.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:22, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Resolving the conflict between WP:MOS and WP:CITE

Teaser: Treat the variants of {{Guideline}} "tags" as tags.

WP:Stand-alone lists (formerly MOS:SAL) used to be a drama factory, even to the point of people denying that it wasn't a guideline because "MoS is a style guideline, and this is a content rule! That's not valid!" or "This is a naming convention, I wanna to take the MoS tag off it and get rid of the style rules", etc. Today it is part MoS, part naming convention, and mostly content guideline, each part distinguished as such, but centralized at that page instead of split up. because it makes more sense for editors' sanity. Zero drama, way more clarity. We need more of that. Many (most?) of us consider WP:CITE part of MOS to the extent it covers style. It even has shortcuts in it like MOS:IBID. The roadblocks are easy to clear if we just do it, or more like just agree to let them roll away – he've been holding them in place with great effort on a steep hill. This entire split is illusory and worse that pointless; all it does it cause FUD and confusion (for everyone, not just the pages' editors, who are mostly the same people; it's really schizophrenic).

How much trouble could it possibly be to add a line-item to MoS saying that certain style rules do not apply inside citations that follow particular defined styles? Cross-referenced to the more detailed MOS section at WP:CITE on this citation styles, just like MOS-main leaves the details of list article formatting the SAL, and just summarize a few key points. (And be specific enough that people don't do stupid or WP:GAMING things. "Ooh, I can use 40 flag icons and 50-point font because it's inside a ref tag!" No.)

So: MoS (our own left hand) scratches the itch at CITE (our right) to not have default MoS rules bollix up APA, Vancouver or whatever citations. CITE scratches MoS's itch: "yes, WP has a style guide, and our style material is [now] an intact part of it, just like at SAL". MOS scratches back: "Of course MOS is not a content guideline and WT:MOS discussions are not going to change citation procedures; that's not part of the MoS section." CITE scratching back: "Sure, WT:CITE will not make up new style rules that conflict with MOS." Much better than two itchy hands for no reason. Suddenly everyone's happy, especially the whole rest of the editorship, who have long been conflicted about which "competing" style guide to follow as soon as they hit a <ref> tag. Imagine the joy over at Help talk:CS1. Aside from these citation-style-specific matters, citations do actually follow MoS; there really is only a very small bridge to rebuild.

Then there will no longer be any perceived "threat" to the content guidelines in CITE, just as there is not at SAL (mostly the same people again). I think this is more urgent than it may seem, too. We are getting an increasing number of problems as people try to fork "their" page further and further from MOS, largely due to miscommunication and no small amount of territoriality. So much so that there was serious talk only a month or so ago of mostly merging AT back into MoS. It would probably be far more productive, for the same reason SAL material is topically centralized, to do a sectional "virtual merge", with style material in it being organized into a MoS-tagged section.

I've wanted to see an end to this divisiveness for so very, very long. At any rate, this is not a proposal to !vote on right this second. People probably have things to add to or modify about this idea. I do have to point out how flawlessly the SAL solution has worked, though. It's just been totally painless.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  15:13, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Recent edit

Unproductive time-sink  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:34, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

SMcCandlish Regarding your recent edit to Wikipedia:Manual of Style, like you, I am all for clarity and conciseness, but I think there may be some problems with the wording you introduced. (I mean no harsh criticism of your commendable effort; this is not easy.)

1) When you tell editors to "default" to something (a) it may not be clear to all editors what that means; I think more ordinary words should be used so they know what to do, or not do, and (b) usually, I believe, the verb "default" is used for something non-human: X defaults to Y when...; furthermore, the noun/adjective form is more common: "the default is", or "the default setting is".

2) Adding the phrase "to introduce an identifiable variety" after already saying editors should "default" to something – which could mean "leave it the way it is", but is not clear as I mentioned above – is confusing. What does that mean, anyway? Does it mean to ensure consistency in the article or to post a tag that identifies the English variety to be used in the article, or something else?

I actually like the first sentence the way it was written:

When no English variety has been established and discussion cannot resolve the issue, the variety used in the first non-stub revision is considered the default.

I think it is the second sentence that needs re-writing:

If no English variety was used consistently, the tie is broken by the first post-stub contributor to introduce text written in a particular English variety.

Saying, "the tie is broken" makes it sound like this is a competitive sport. I think it should be more descriptive:

  • If there is no consistency in the variety of English, the variety used in the first text added to the article post-stub will determine the variety to be used in the article.

 – Corinne (talk) 14:27, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Please fix your diff link so we can see what edit you're referring to. A more typical problem is that it takes a while some someone to notice and fix inconsistent variants. One should not try to go back before that point and argue about which variant to use based on contributions that don't firmly establish a variant. Furthermore, as we saw in a recent RM, an article might be stable at a variant for years, and then someone creates this "tie" via argument so that they can go way back and change it. This needs to be avoided. We need a better concept of when a variant is "established". Dicklyon (talk) 15:03, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
I've fixed the diff link in Corinne's comment, since it was trivial to fix. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 15:09, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. I see from the context that my concerns were not well founded; the concept of "established" is clear there. I withdraw and strike my comments. Dicklyon (talk) 15:26, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
@Dicklyon:Struck or not, it's a good point; even if if it's in a foot note we have to identify this as WP:GAMING and invalid, or people will continue to try. You want New Zealand, or whatever, back so just argue and argue until no consensus is declared and you get it back by default. It a nasty abuse of process.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  15:47, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish and Dicklyon: I'm not sure that this is clear enough. Here's the thought experiment:
  1. Citation style A is established in an article by Editor 1 working on it regularly.
  2. Editor 1 stops working on the article, and due to contributions from ignorant or apathetic users other citations in style B are introduced over a period of a few months or years without objection.
  3. Editor 2 comes along, improves the article a bit, and makes the citations consistent in style B.
  4. Editor 3 comes along, advocating style A, and makes an edit changing all the citations to style A.
  5. Editor 2 objects and reverts the edit.
Ought the guideline to support use of style A, or style B, in this scenario? B would be the established style at the point of conflict, but A would be the first consistent format used in the article. I think that B is clearly preferable there; Editor 3's changes violate the well-agreed-upon "don't make solely stylistic changes" rule. However, change the timeline in step 2 to "a few days" of inconsistency, and Editor 3's position becomes much more reasonable, because then the situation is much more like the "whoops, citations are inconsistent now" gaming that we'd prefer to avoid. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 20:14, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
Essentially the same thing is being said (among others) at duplicate-ish discussion at WT:CITE.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:19, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict)@Corinne: Addressing various points:
  • I agree "default" is bad in this context. But not just as a verb: people just skimming may misread is as "the default is to use the first post-stub version" (period), when it's actually the last resort. The present wording as of this writing (I'm not sure who fixed it) is "When no English variety has been established and discussion cannot resolve the issue, use the variety found in the first post-stub revision to introduce an identifiable variety" This seems. highly satisfactory.
  • Tag: It would definitely mean be consistent in the article; those English variety tags are descriptive not determinative of the content (if the content changed the tag would change with it; templates serve editors, not the other way around). Fixing the "default" bit resolved the "cascading confusion" effect.
  • I did remove "the tie is broken" on purpose, as dispute mongering and anti-collaborative.
  • "If there is no consistency in the variety of English, the variety used in the first text added to the article post-stub will determine the variety to be used in the article." – That's a very different rule. The rule is if the attempt to reach consensus fails, then use first post-stub style. If there is consistency, anyone can impose a variety (though if they impose one that makes no sense, it will end up being disputed, of course). And "the article post-stub" is awkward (and would require commas, otherwise "article" is an adjective referring to a "post-stub". Anyway, the current text (for this moment, ha ha) looks just about perfect.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  15:43, 22 March 2016 (UTC) Corrected.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  02:15, 23 March 2016 (UTC)
I appreciate everyone's thoughts here (and thanks for fixing the diff). I still don't understand a few things, and since I do a lot of copy-editing I need to understand all of it:
(a) In this version that SMcCandlish feels is "highly satisfactory":
When no English variety has been established and discussion cannot resolve the issue, use the variety found in the first post-stub revision to introduce an identifiable variety
I do not understand "to introduce an identifiable variety". Do you mean, after determining which English variety is found "in the first post-stub revision", to make the article's English style conform to that style? If that's what you mean, I think it needs to be expressed in a way that everyone will understand. To me, the word "introduce" suggests adding something to the article when in fact it will just be fixing spelling and a few words so that the style is consistent.
(b) I wasn't worried about the tag that indicates which English variety is used in an article. I only mentioned it as I was guessing as to what was meant by "to introduce an identifiable variety".
(c) I really don't understand the last thing that SMcCandlish wrote (last bulleted item, above). I understand the need to attempt to reach a consensus first. I understand that strong national ties to a subject may be a determining factor in which English variety to use. I don't understand why my version of the sentence:
If there is no consistency in the variety of English, the variety used in the first text added to the article post-stub will determine the variety to be used in the article.
is "a very different rule" from:
When no English variety has been established and discussion cannot resolve the issue, use the variety found in the first post-stub revision to introduce an identifiable variety
Of course "and discussion cannot resolve the issue" can be added to my version; in fact, the entire first part, "When no English variety has been established and discussion cannot resolve the issue", can be substituted. Except for what is, to me, an unclear phrase, "to introduce an identifiable variety", the middle part of the sentence is the same. I think "used in the first text added to the article post-stub" is just as clear as "found in the first post-stub revision", but the latter phrase is fine also. I didn't say "article sub-post", as you wrote above. I was using "post-stub" as an adverb. My version is worded differently, and your version may be preferred, but I don't see how it is "a very different rule". If it is really "a very different rule", then I am missing something. I also think it should be "if", not "when". I propose the following wording, a blend of the two versions above:
  • If there is no consistency in the variety of English, an effort should be made to reach a consensus. If these attempts fail, use the variety found in the first post-stub revision to establish the variety for the article.
 – Corinne (talk) 00:35, 23 March 2016 (UTC)
"To introduce" → "that introduced" (yes, it was potentially ambiguous, and could be read as compressing to "variety found ... to introduce a... variety", though not a likely interpretation due to the separation). Fixed in MoS now.
 
The two passages you're comparing are different in several very substantive ways. The top one (yours) speaks of the first text added to the post-stub version. I.e., the post-stub version already exists by that point no matter what. The first text added to it might be the character "u" to fix a typo, or could have even been a deletion of material, and neither that edit nor any other edit before it may have an identifiable style yet. The bottom one speaks of the revision (edit), after stub status, that definitely introduced a recognizable style (it may or may not be the revision that created the first post-stub version, and the language was crafted that way on purpose). The top version is totally missing the consensus discussion (and its failure) which is the only thing that actually triggers the post-stub version ever being returned to, in the bottom version (and in the old text we cleaned up), which is the intent; this is two major differences at once. But it goes even farther afield.
 
In your version, if the page is ever inconsistent, it reverts, no matter what, to the style (whether there is an identifiable one or not) used in exactly the first edit [which may not have had any style] made after the post-stub version already existed [with or without a recognizable style yet], and no discussion is ever involved, much less failed to come to consensus. It's essentially nonsensical when operationally analyzed, even if it grammatically parses. In the bottom one, there must be an inconsistent state, then a discussion about it, then a failure to reach consensus in that discussion; only after that chain of circumstances does the post-stub version come into play, and it is whatever revision after stub status that actually produced an identifiable style (no lesser revision will do!). Basically, while they have some words in common, the two passages have nothing else in common at all. I think you're approaching this from a linguistic parsing angle (and catching syntactic things I missed by doing so), but not doing any actual policy analysis on the result (which is my strong suit; that was much of my job for a decade+).
 
"Article post-stub" is not just as clear, but confusingly ambiguous and an almost archaic construction that one would use commas with, so it cannot be mis-parsed. It's too awkward, especially for non-native English speakers. To me, it looks in this form like it means a stump of a wooden post to which articles have been affixed. Adding the commas makes is parse properly, but is a very awkward construction. Better to use plain, more everyday English.
 
"If" and "when" are pretty synonymous in this sort of construction generally, but in this case, "when" better signifies the beginning of a rule, rather than something that might be a side note about the rules.
 
Sorry about "sub-post"; that was a typo on my part; I corrected it above. Anyway, I know you were using "post-stub" in "article post-stub" as an adverb; it's just not a useful construction here.
 
The blended version does have some plainer-English benefits in the first half, but in the second half, it reintroduces the "to establish" ambiguity we just fixed – it can be parsed as use the variety found in the first post-stub revision that established the variety for the article or use, to establish the variety for the article, the variety found in the first post-stub revision – and neither version is viable anyway. The grey version is confused and confusing, because the entire scenario is that no variety has been established; we're going back to the first non-stub version that introduced, not "established", an identified style. The red version is just non-operable, since the first post-stub revision may have had no style at all.
 
At this point, I've spent about 10× longer explaining why these copy-editing attempts are not viable than I've spent working on actual content this afternoon, so I'm going to have bow out. Thanks for catching those ambiguities that you did, but I think this guideline text and discussion is out of your Wikipedia policy awareness depth at this point.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  02:15, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Confusion of code with style; not reverting to old code

A concern was raised in the forked discussion at WT:CITE#Consistent citation style that if someone wants to change from one form of <ref>-based citation code formatting to a different one with the same end-user output (style), e.g. to WP:LDR, that a failure to reach consensus about such a change would constitute a total failure of consensus about style [in that scenario, of WP:CITEVAR style, but the issue is generalizable to ENGVAR and DATEVAR], and thus result in defaulting back to the first non-stub version of all of it, e.g. to citation formatting from 2005 that pre-dated the introduction of the ref tag!

That would not be a desirable result, obviously, and one we an't permit as a valid interpretation. The general WP principle – which a style guideline can't undo – is to default to the status quo if there's no consensus for a change, regardless what kind of change it is. This whole conversation points out the futility of trying to treat code-level aspects of formatting of citations (or anything else) as "style". It results in some of us mentally wikilawyering ourselves into an anti-WP:COMMONSENSE absurdity.

The VAR rules should be written clearly enough to prevent anyone trying to WP:GAME with such an interpretation, but we needn't take the interpretation seriously ourselves. The simplest solution is to clarify in some way like the following:{{block indent|1=

  • Code formatting is not style; if the output looks the same, no style change has occurred.
  • A change of formatting or of style is, like any other change, subject to normal consensus formation process.
  • Should consensus for a change of either sort fail to emerge, default to the status quo ante (i.e. the last stable style or code), per standard operating procedure.
  • If the dispute is about what style (output, not code) would be best for the article, and consensus is not reached, then and only then default to the first post-stub style that was introduced. This does not mean revert to non-modern code.

But get this across in more compact wording.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:48, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

  • At least for citations, the consensus is clear that a change in coding is a change in style. I know you don't like that, SMcCandlish, but it has remained remarkably consistent over a period of years. That is one reason why more generalized discussion here is not going to be considered binding at WP:CITE. DES (talk) 20:34, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
@DESiegel: you and others constantly claim that the consensus has remained remarkably consistent over a period of years. What had remained in place for years at WP:CITEVAR was the text before this edit on 4 October 2015. I can only repeat that it represents an extension to the meaning of "coding style" – it extends it beyond visible style, or whether templates are used to achieve the visible style, to where the full citation is placed. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:07, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
Peter coxhead that edit made "coding is style" more explicit, but in previous discussions dating back at least to 2010 (at least one of which was I think linked much earlier in the thread here or on WT:CITE) that consensus interpretation (that a change of code structure is a change in citation style) had already been established. DES (talk) 21:26, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict)@DESiegel: No, that isn't clear at all. That interpretation is directly disputed by multiple editors, including me, Peter Coxhead, and others, and it transgresses several policies including WP:EDITING and WP:OWN. There's an entire thread about that at WT:Citing sources#Instruction creep in WP:CITEVAR. Just repeating the assertion, that no one can change your citation code without permission, on this page instead of that one doesn't make the objections to this idea disappear.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:29, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
Yes you and others have objected, but I think the consensus has nonetheless been clear. As to it being recent, see Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Archive 28#Consistent style among other discussions. If you really think this is in dispute, we can have an RfC on WT:CITE to settle it, i hope once and for all. DES (talk) 21:33, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
The RfC should resolve it, but this shouldn't go unaddressed. When multiple editors raise reasoned objections and those objections have no been addressed, then no, the consensus has not nonetheless been clear. Consensus does not require unanimity – we regularly move past tendentious objections that either present no rationale or which recycle a rationale that has been debunked – but the objections in this case have been presented and have not been refuted, just hand-waved at or outright ignored.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:58, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
That isn't always true. If one group presents a rationale for a rule, and another much larger groups says "We understand your point, but we simply disagree,thinking that this other rationale trumps yours" the larger group has not really "refuted" or "debunked" the opposing rationale, but they may have consensus none-the-less. DES (talk) 23:32, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
I'm coming to the conclusion that we simply need to RfC this "CITE-OWN" thing at Village Pump and get it over with. It really isn't plausible that the community supports the idea that every single reader-invisible detail of citation coding is meant to be covered by CITEVAR; it's a view held by, from what I can tell, a grand total of four to six editors (four active, and two I can think of from a couple of years ago).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:37, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
OK I have created WT:CITE#RFC: Is a change in citation markup method a change in citation style?, and advertised it at the pump. I think the issue has been presented reasonably neutrally. i hope we will come to a clearer conclusion. DES (talk) 22:08, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Should it be "a hotel" or "an hotel"?

I see both used, but which is mos-compliant? Is there any relevant guidance? Dondervogel 2 (talk) 09:21, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I couldn't quickly find coverage of this in the MOS. The rule given in http://www.dailywritingtips.com/using-a-and-an-before-words/ seems reasonable, but does not provide a cast in stone answer. It seems natural to write an hour and not a hour because the pronunciation begins with a vowel sound. I've rarely heard the word homage pronounced with an initial hard 'h' sound, but I have sometimes heard that pronunciation. I've usually heard the word historical pronounced with a hard 'h', but I've sometimes heard it pronounced with a soft or silent 'h'. This doesn't answer your question, and it is perhaps a question which ought to be addressed in the MOS. Perhaps it is addressed there, and I missed finding it. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 11:22, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
ENGVAR may be a concern here... My understanding is that "an hour" is UK US English, while "a hour" is US UK English. In other words, both may be equally correct, depending on context. Blueboar (talk) 11:32, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
Speaking as a British copy editor - "an hotel" is considered archaic by most today, including, for example, the Guardian style guide. Popcornduff (talk) 11:45, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
"an hour" is correct English, even by the standards of the BBC or those with a posh education. The "h" is always silent. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:47, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
The only North Americans who say "a hour" are those who speak dialects that use "a" before all vowels—in all dialects the "h" is silent. It is never acceptable in writing. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:18, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
It's an ENGVAR issue. We run into it all the time in plant articles over the words "herb", "herbaceous", etc. The "h" is not pronounced by most North American English speakers (although it is by some), so for them it should be "an herb", "an herbaceous plant", etc. The "h" is pronounced today by most speakers of (encyclopedic) British English, so it should be "a herb", "a herbaceous plant", etc. Ideally try to avoid the indefinite article in front of words in which the "h" is variably pronounced in different dialects of English, otherwise, even if the article is clearly marked with its ENGVAR, experience shows that editors will constantly "correct" a to an and vice versa. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:21, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
Yep - but for the record, to answer the OP's question, British people rarely (if ever) pronounce "hotel" with a silent H. Popcornduff (talk) 12:49, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
And neither do Americans. See books n-grams. Dicklyon (talk) 15:32, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

(ec) Americans likewise, in careful speech, but we sometimes elide it in fast speech (I imagine Brits do too?). The interesting thing is that even the fast-speech omission of the pronounced h seems to attract "an". But that isn't something you'd do in writing.
There is also a tendency to use "an" in some high-register speech even when the h is pronounced. The phrase "an historic" seems especially prone to this, for some reason. It may be an affectation, or even just a mistake, but it is definitely heard. --Trovatore (talk) 15:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
It is most definitely an affectation. Reyk YO! 09:16, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Both "an historic" and "an hotel" are useless and moribund in British English. Britons across all dialects rarely say "istoric" or "otel" in the present era, coinciding with the decline of "cut-glass" RP, and hence there is no reason to write it that way. I was taught to say "an otel", &c., and still do, but I always write "a hotel", as that is how most people speak nowadays. The real reason for this pronunciation was in an earlier desire to mimic the fashionable French, from which the word "hotel" comes. Regardless, I wouldn't say that we should mass change any instances of "an h" to "a h", but I wouldn't recommend that people write using "an h" either. Really, the MoS does not require guidance on this matter. If anyone has further interest in this matter, they might find the following bit of Hansard amusing. Even in the recalcitrant, and still largely 'ereditary', House of Lords of 1999, "an" was out. RGloucester — ☎ 16:01, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
  • I have lived in the Northeast, Midwest, and now midatlantic US. In all these regions, plus interactions with people from many other areas of north America, i have generally heard "an historic" with the H fully sounded, the start of historic being pronounced like "hiss" (the sound made by an angry cat). I would consider "a historic" simply wrong in writing. "hotel" is more of a mixed bag in my experience. But in any case this is not a detail that I think Wikipedia need have guidance on, particularly since it does seem to be an ENGVAR matter. DES (talk) 20:58, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
    • Goodness, what a mixed bag. My question was prompted by encountering the words "an humid climate", which seemed wrong to me. I used hotel as an example because I hoped a general rule might exist that would apply to both. It seems not. But thank you all for your reactions! Dondervogel 2 (talk) 23:17, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
      • As an Australian (which mostly uses British spelling), I would say 'a hotel', 'a herb', 'a humid climate' and 'a historic event' because we pronounce the leading 'h'. We understand when we hear the 'an' versions but it sounds archaic to us. As many have said above, this is covered by ENGVAR as a regional variation of English (US vs the rest of the world) and should be no harder to apply than 'colour' vs 'color' (ie consistently use US spelling in the article or consistently use British spelling in the article and don't change from one to the other without a good reason and consensus).  Stepho  talk  00:10, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
        • But there's no English variant that would use "an hotel", nor "an humid climate" as far as I know, unless you include archaic variants. So are we done? I hope so. "An historic" is on its way out, too, and it's more British than American according to books n-grams, and I've never heard of anyone suggesting "an" when it's pronouned with the "hiss" as DES says; maybe his region is weird that way? Dicklyon (talk) 00:18, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
            • "my region" includes or has included Wisconsin, Michigan, New York (both upstate and Manhattan), New Jersey, and most recently Maryland. If all of those are abnormal, then "normal" needs redefining. Of course it is possible that i hang out with a weird subset of people, or that I'm not listening as closely as I think I am. But for what it's worth... DES (talk) 01:04, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
              • Yeah, maybe we just hang in different circles; in all my years in America (mostly not in those regions), I've never heard such a thing. You're probably hallucianting; but ask some friends and see what they say. Dicklyon (talk) 01:08, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
          • More ngrams --Boson (talk) 00:48, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
    • To DESiegal: The people you have "generally heard" are flatly wrong. "A historic" (with the "H" pronounced) is correct in speech, and it should be written that way as well. The rule is that if the article is followed by a vowel sound, you use "an". If it isn't, you use "a". There really is no doubt or ambiguity about it. I agree with some other commenters here that "an historic" (with the h pronounced) caught on a couple of decades ago as an affectation. It's still wrong. Jeh (talk) 01:04, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
      • Jeh, when you say pronouncing the 'h' in 'historic' is flatly wrong, are you talking about a global rule that covers all major dialects of English or are you talking about the regional dialect used in your local part of the world (USA from your user page)? The 'h' is most definitely pronounced here in Australia, hence this is covered by ENGVAR. To back this up, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/historic says the 'h' is optional and therefore so is the 'an'/'a'.  Stepho  talk  06:15, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
        • (facepalm) No, that's not what I said at all. DES wrote "i have generally heard "an historic" with the H fully sounded". When I cited what DES had "generally heard", that referred to the entire rest of his sentence, including the word "an". Furthermore the point of this discussion is not whether or not to pronounce the "h", but whether to use "a" or "an". "An historic" with the H sounded is flatly wrong. Jeh (talk) 11:35, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
  • The rule is very simple. If the H is pronounced, it's "a". If it's not pronounced, it's "an". I haven't seen a solid case made for any of the supposed exceptions. Therefore, I would say that both "an hotel" and "an historic" are as wrong as "an horse" or "an house". Reyk YO! 09:14, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
It's important to add the rider that we're talking about writing in an encyclopedic style. In fast speech, aspiration is reduced, and many English speakers say "an 'otel" even if in slow careful speech they would say "a hotel". And you may indeed hear something like "an hotel" with sufficiently weak aspiration on the "o" for the speaker to insert a "n" – in speech, it's a continuum, not an either/or. But formal writing is different; it's based on slow careful speech in the appropriate dialect.
(Side point: you'll also hear people reading historic texts, like the 1662 prayerbook, and using "an" with "h", e.g. saying "an humble" when the original would have been pronounced "an 'umble". This creates the false impression that in speech "an" + "h" is acceptable and indeed traditional.) Peter coxhead (talk) 11:27, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

See the first entry in Garner's The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style, which supports "a" and quotes Mark Twain, 1882, "Correct writers of the American language do not put an before those words." Dicklyon (talk) 15:25, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

  • It's "a hotel", "an hour", "an honest ...", "a historical". The "an hotel" and "an historical" usage was a lingering Briticism that even British style guides have dropped, so we have no reason to retain it here. It's obsolete, and definitely not a MOS:ENGVAR matter. "An" is only used before h- words if the letter is silent consistently, not just in localized dialects (otherwise, we would always use "an", since the h- is always silent in some dialects: "King 'Arold died on 'is 'orse with 'is 'awk in 'is 'and 'n' 'is eye full o' arrow.")  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:47, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

    To amplify Dick Lyon's citation above: The updated and internationally expanded Garner's Modern English Usage (which supersedes the ODAUS and its larger version Garner's Modern American Usage) concurs, on pp. l, 1. It notes of the historically attested variance of a / an usage "that's no excuse for a modern writer". It includes an analysis of this trend over time, with authorities since Fowler's Dictionary of English Usage (UK, 1926) agreeing to use a not an before words like "historical" and "humble" despite the existence of regional dialects in which the h- is silent. It contiues: "Today ... such wordings as *an hypothesis, *an hereditary title, *an historic era are likely to strike readers and listeners as affectations in need of editing". It's listed as stage 4 in the language change index ("virtually universal but is opposed ... by a few linguistic stalwarts (the traditionalists that David Foster Wallace dubbed 'snoots')". That's a compelling reason to avoid doing it here.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:18, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

    • I see more consistency in the replies now, and infer a general consensus in favour of "a hotel" and "a humid climate" on the one hand (because the h is pronounced in these examples), and "an hour" and "an honour" or "an honor" on the other (because it is silent). Dondervogel 2 (talk) 21:21, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Revisiting curly quotes

It may be time to hold an RfC – after some additional usability checks – on permitting (maybe even recommending) curly quotes instead of straight ones. It appears that the last remaining technical issue is in-page searches in Internet Explorer, a browser that Microsoft has already replaced, but which still has a userbase in older versions of Windows. No one that I know of has even tested this in years. It's worth seeing whether current versions of IE even still have the problem that a search for Sofie's Choice will not find the string Sofie’s Choice or vice versa (and doing similar tests on double quotation marks).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:01, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

There's still the technical issue where a person using a web interface to compose their changes has no easy facility for insertion of curly marks. I don't want to need to compose my changes in MS Word to get them to be compliant, and I would prefer not to hunt and peck through either another page for a curly mark to copy-paste or the character insertion interface. --Izno (talk) 19:13, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
Agree with Izno. There is zero reason for a purely cosmetic change like this. MarnetteD|Talk 20:08, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
I agree. Even if all the technical issues were solved, it's still introducing extra complexity for very dubious benefit. Just aesthetically I don't like them, and no, I don't think that's an argument that should be avoided. --Trovatore (talk) 20:17, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
There's no requirement to "comply" with an MoS preference when writing new material (it's just disruptive to tendentiously interfere with others doing so), and the characters would surely be added to the editing tools below the editing window. So I'm skeptical this is a solid objection. That said, I don't have very strong feelings on the matter. I simply raise the issue because many others periodically have. A substantial amount of the sporadic vitriol directed toward MoS as "making up rules out of nowhere" (which almost never actually is true, but in this one case is) is about this specific issue. Even ease of entry is not always a point in favor of straight quotes. It takes non-trivial work to "correct" them from curly versions when copy-pasting from other publications, e.g. copying titles of works or quoted statements. Perhaps permitting either as long as the article is consistent is a sufficient compromise. It just seems that the rationale for actively preferring the straight ones and hunting down the curly has essentially evaporated [7] with recent changes to MediaWiki.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:37, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree that there's no requirement, but this is a collaborative atmosphere; if at all possible, it is (at least) my personal expectation that I write in !compliance with the style guide (or any guideline, naturally), so as to lessen others' burden.

I'm not sure I agree regarding non-trivial work--copy and pasting a Word document (for that's where curly quotes surely originate for the most part) into Notepad before saving sanitizes the input. (It also washes away some UTF-8/16 characters of course, so editors need to be wary, of course). --Izno (talk) 22:52, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

When I first started writing on Wikipedia, I was very confused by the fact that when I typed inverted commas for bolding or tables or whatever, they did not work at all. Low and behold, I realised that, as a Mac user, my OS automatically types with curly marks, as opposed to straight ones. This was messing up the code, and hence I had to figure out how to get rid of the so-called "smartquote" feature. It isn't just an MS Word thing. RGloucester — ☎ 00:41, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
Same goes for quotemarks in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These, generally speaking, allow either single or double quotes interchangeably (provided that pairs match), but they must be the straight kind: they don't allow any curly characters - putting e.g. <table class=“wikitable”>...</table> simply will not work to apply the wikitable class to a table. Most browsers will skip right over it, and apply no class at all. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:24, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, I use a Mac and Linux mostly; there is no Notepad, and any good, modern text editor will actually preserve the curly quotes, since they're perfectly valid Unicode. I don't use MS Word at all, and the majority of the curly quotes/apostrophes I introduce and have to "correct" come from, as I said, copy-pasting quotation material, and source names in quotes (article titles, song titles, etc.).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:50, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
For what it's worth, German Wikipedia uses curly quotes without the sky falling in.--Boson (talk) 21:12, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
Attempt not to characterize objections as doomsayings. :') --Izno (talk) 22:52, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
It's been alleged that most Wikipedias in languages that use these kinds of quotation marks (vs. guilemets, etc.) use the curly quotes at this point. I have not verified this personally, but AGF and all 'at.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:50, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
It should be pointed out that conversion of straight to curly quotes cannot be done automatically (both because the determination of which is a begin-quote and which and end-quote can be complicated, and because, in XML contexts, the curly quote is wrong), while conversion of curly quotes to straight quotes can be done automatically (if sometimes incorrectly). I haven't brought this up before, because the reasons for using straight quotes are still clear. If most browsers ignore the difference, now, then (1) Semi-automated changes can no longer be done by users, as it would be impossible to use the browsers' search functions, and (2) fully automated methods are wrong. There seems no reason to make things extremely complicated for the editors to make a marginal inprovement (if any) for the readers. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:31, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Wording at WP:Citation needed

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia talk:Citation needed#Apologies, but object strongly, to content in article here based on decades of experience. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 23:21, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Using links in the body of the article, for non-free images.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question.

I came across an article that had info boxes with links to non-free images, in place of actual images. I was of the opinion that this was non-standard, and pretty ugly. Are there any previous cases, guidelines, etc that cover this type of issue?

[[8]]

The above is one (of many) instances of info boxes with links in the article.

This is the current format of the info boxes (although I have aligned it to the left, so it fits a little better on this talk page):

Exterior shutter

Madeleine's bedroom window
showing the exterior shutter

Spacecowboy420 (talk) 09:10, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Is this likely to be better dealt with at MOS/Images ? Spacecowboy420 (talk) 09:12, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Episode count in TV show franchise articles

We should episode count on TV show franchises pages, not in season pages if that makes any of you feel better. Episode count in franchise pages, like NCIS franchise, Chicago franchise, Law & Order franchise and such, should have episode appearance count because they can intertwine in different shows. Like what you see in Chicago shows you'll see main characters from Fire, P.D. and Med appear in different Chicago shows as guest stars many times before. Some main characters in those franchises sometimes never appear in that episode for storyline reasons and other reasons, despite the fact they are credited in the episode they didn't appear in. All the more reasons to have episode appearances count in franchise pages. BattleshipMan (talk) 14:49, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

As I explained on your talk page, as a result of this discussion consensus was that we do not include episode counts, anywhere, as they do not serve an encylopaedic purpose. I don't see why an exemption should be granted for franchise articles. The information regarding appearances should be detailed in the prose. A raw episode count serves no purpose. This discussion is more appropriate at MOS:TV than here, since the issue is specific to that part of the MOS, and WP:TV in general. --AussieLegend (✉) 15:15, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Just add an apostrophe?

In Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Singular_nouns, the three options include #2 "Just add an apostrophe" (for singular nouns ending with one s). Is it true that this style is recommended by any reputable grammar or style guide? I'm familiar with the others, #1 being what Strunk & White says, and #3 being seen in some less prescriptive guides. But #2 – where does that come from? Dicklyon (talk) 04:24, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: For what it's worth, the Chicago style guide (16th edn.) explicitly advises against #2, but it does note that Some writers and publishers prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in s. The Associated Press style guide says that only an apostrophe should be used after all proper nouns ending in s, though the AP guide is a bit bizarre on other fronts. —Nizolan (talk) 18:03, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
So no guide recommends #2, as far as we know still? Shall I take it out and see if anyone balks? Dicklyon (talk) 19:35, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
Seems reasonable to me. I think the wording of #3 is a bit strange as well. It seems to imply that there are some nouns where the possessive is only correctly pronounced the same as the base noun (for example, it seems to suggest this about Moses). I do not believe this is true. As far as I know, all nouns ending in /s/ or /z/ can be correctly possessive-ized (sorry for the neologism) by adding /ᵻz/ (in other words, MOH-ziz-iz is just fine). --Trovatore (talk) 19:46, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
I also think Moses' is fine in writing, but I would say it must be pronounced with two syllables, and Moses's must be pronounced with three. --Trovatore (talk) 19:48, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
On that point, the Chicago style guide also notes that there is a traditional rule that classical names ending in -es (or vowel-s) are possessivised with only an apostrophe. I'm not familiar enough with style guides to say if this is widely repeated in current guides, but (again for whatever it's worth) I know it is also the recommendation given by the thesis style guide at the History Faculty here at Cambridge (downloadable here), so it is "a thing" in some places at least. —Nizolan (talk)
Agreed. But that's really part of option #3, which is about to be renumbered #2. Dicklyon (talk) 23:41, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
Right. The point I don't get is that some people seem to think the simple-apostrophe versus apostrophe-s is ever not connected to the pronunciation. I'm not sure whether they think Moses' can be pronounced with three syllables or that Moses's can be pronounced with two, but either way, I think they're wrong. --Trovatore (talk) 00:39, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
I see. I think I pretty much agree that the orthography is usually connected to the pronunciation, unless you adopt system 1, in which case you would write Moses's and some might pronounce it without the final syllable. Why would one disconnect these things otherwise? Dicklyon (talk) 00:51, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Use of en dashes between physical locations

The use of en dashes between physical locations has become a bit of an issue after a recent page move. I have an opinion on this but I was seeking clarification. When talking about a road (in this case the "Pacific Motorway") between Brisbane and Brunswick Heads, which is correct:

  1. Pacific Motorway (Brisbane–Brunswick Heads)
  2. Pacific Motorway (Brisbane – Brunswick Heads)

The MOS is bit vague on this. Examples point to one of the options being correct, while MOS:ENDASH can be taken as pointing to the other. --AussieLegend (✉) 11:04, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Option one is correct. Dashes for ranges between locations are unspaced. The part about using either spaced endashes or unspaced emdashes is in reference to their use as parentheticals – like this – not for their use in ranges. oknazevad (talk) 00:08, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
In compounds when the connection might otherwise be expressed with to, versus, and, or between. The article is about the section of the Pacific Motorway between Brisbane and Brunswick Heads; or that runs from Brisbane to Brunswick Heads, right? If so then the first sentence of that article should be modified to this:
The Pacific Motorway is a motorway in Australia between Brisbane, Queensland, and Brunswick Heads, New South Wales through the New South Wales–Queensland border at Tweed Heads. (replace the spaced hyphen with an unspaced en dash.)
—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:31, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
I may have misunderstood the MOS, but the relevant part about spacing is in the In ranges that might otherwise be expressed with to or through section: "The en dash in a range is always unspaced, except when at least one endpoint of the range includes at least one space". The disambiguation term is the range Brisbane to Brunswick Heads, or Brisbane through Brunswick Heads. At Talk:Pacific_Motorway_(Brisbane–Brunswick_Heads)#Title, HandsomeFella has said "I'm pretty sure that goes for date/time ranges only" – if the ranges section is really meant to refer to only certain types of ranges, perhaps this could be clarified in the MOS. - Evad37 [talk] 02:10, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

MOS:SUBSET

  1. About one of the examples given, The elements in stars include hydrogen, helium, etc.... I must confess that i saw nothing wrong with it, until i searched the archives and realized that both "include" and "etc" cover the same idea. (Maybe there should be more emphasis on this detail in the guideline?) But, still, what is the suggested phrasing in this case, because i can't think of a different/better one? :">
  2. And while i'm at it... The other example, Among the most well-known members of the fraternity are included two members of the Onassis family, seems a bit too long-winded to clearly make a point. Is the issue here that "among ... are" and "included" overlap?

Thanks. -- 79.115.170.40 (talk) 22:55, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

How about if the topic is debateably tied to either one of HK or Mainland China, the latter of which would definitely not be covered under TIES. Faye Wong has had a mixture of British and American spellings for over a decade, the earliest versions seeming to favour American spelling ("flavor" has apparently survived since 2004), but could an argument be made that the article should be using "Hong Kong English", which presumably (I don't know) would be closer to British? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:05, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I figured as much, but the question is whether Hong Kong English is widely enough used among native Hong Kongers to justify enforcing TIES on all Hong Kong articles, even ones where the subject also has ties to obviously non-English-speaking parts of China. My understanding is that the first language of the majority of Hong Kongers is Cantonese, and probably the majority of people who use British English in their daily life are British ex-pats, not native Hong Kongers. Faye Wong is not part of either of these groups, as she appears to have been born and raised in Mainland China, and I would guess only learned Cantonese and English starting in her late teens. Applying TIES would be saying that because Faye Wong lives in a region that was once a British colony, where a majority of people are not native English speakers but learn British English as a second language, our article is so closely tied to a region that uses one variety of English that we should overrule the main ENGVAR guideline as well as WP:NOTBROKEN and replace the (older) American spellings in the article. Now, given that one of her most famous songs (the theme from that oneFinal Fantasy game) was entirely in English, a good argument could be made that if she has close ties to one variety of English, it is whatever variety she sings in, but... Ugh. My head hurts. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:16, 4 April 2016 (UTC)
Well, I'm not going to pretend I understand the English situation of Hong Kong, but I suspect if it came down to a dispute then WP:TIES would side with BrEng, weak as those TIES may be, as I doubt TIES could be argued for any other ENGVAR. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:14, 4 April 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, but the majority of articles on English Wikipedia are not affected by TIES one way or another, and I think that at least some of the HK-related articles are the same. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:23, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
With most articles on WP no ENGVAR could be argued; with most of the rest TIES is unambiguous. Occasionally there's an article like War of 1812 that has strong TIES to more than one country, in which case WP:RETAIN applies. You've perhaps identified a grey area—you might get away with making the whole article AmEng, but I suspect if anyone disputed it, in the absence of any competing ENGVAR TIES, the result would be to go with HKEng. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:51, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
I believe the explicit answer is that TIES applies to HK articles in case of disputes, but there's no immediate need for "enforcing TIES on all Hong Kong articles". Unless you really enjoy rewriting articles just for pedantry. ;) -- 5.12.115.133 (talk) 11:04, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Icons#Use of flag icons on genocide-related articles.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:30, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Neutral notification of move discussion

There is a discussion underway to move the article Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (with a single comma) to Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Please share your opinion on the matter at Talk:Martin Luther King, Jr. Day#Requested move 22 April 2016. Thank you. Dicklyon (talk) 03:48, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

"because titles with en-dashes are hard to type"

User:AnomieBOT has been adding new redirects to talk pages with en dash in their titles, "because titles with en-dashes are hard to type". Do people really ever type the titles of talk pages? I understand it's encouraged for article titles, but talk pages, too? Anyway, since about April 7 it has added about 30,000 of them. That tells me that the MOS has succeeded in educating users about how to use en dashes in various contexts (scanning quickly I didn't notice any misuses, but there could be some of those, too). Dicklyon (talk) 03:38, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I can say that I strongly support this. I've always known the difference between an en dash and a hyphen, but when I first came to Wikipedia, I was confused by the fact that typing something like "Blah blah blah xxxx-xx" would not get me to "Blah blah blah xxxx–xx". Typing an en dash is a pain, and most people are not even aware of the distinction between en dashes and hyphens. They look very similar when viewed on a computer, as opposed to in print, and the redirects do nothing but prevent the type of confusion that arises when one types the proper name of a page into the search bar, except with a hyphen instead of en dash, and ends up at the search page with a "no such page exists" message. And yes, I do type talk page names into the search bar. RGloucester — ☎ 03:44, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
OK, it's all good then. I usually just type the article name, and click talk when I find it, since there are many good redirects for articles. By the way, they're real easy to type on a Mac keyboard – at option-hyphen since 1984. Dicklyon (talk) 03:58, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I've never been good with key commands (or other computer-oriented tasks), but I shall remember that for the future. I've previously resorted to copying one from wherever I'm able to find one, and then pasting it in to where I need it. Such a method suffices in most cases... RGloucester — ☎ 05:00, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
An en dash is pretty easy on a Windows machine, too: Hold the ALT key and type 0150 on the numeric keypad, then release the ALT key. An em dash is ALT and 0151. The NUM LOCK can be on or off, doesn't matter. Chris the speller yack 21:23, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I think most people consider that "pretty hard", as it's many keystrokes and there's no good way to remember it; and it only works on a numeric keypad (which you don't necessarily have). And in most Microsoft and Windows program, you can type two hyphens for autocorrection to em dash, but there's no correspondingly easy way to get an en dash, so Windows users never learn about it. Dicklyon (talk) 20:03, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
I certainly type the titles of talk pages directly into the URL bar. I type fast, so it much quicker for me to type Talk:Dunning–Kruger effect than to load the article and click on its talk link. I also use a Mac, which makes typing en and em dashes trivially easy (shift-option-hyphen for em dash). For Windows and Linux people it's more complicated, with numeric codes or a GUI character picker, so the shortcuts are useful for them. Remember the WP:RFD mantra: "Redirects are cheap." :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:03, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Ambiguity in the Plurals section

Under Plurals, it says "allow for cases" where the common dictionary plural differs from the original root-language plural. To me, "allow for" means it's OK to use the non-dictionary-preferred form, but the examples given seem to indicate the opposite. The two dictionaries I use most both list "excursuses (also excursus)" as the plural of excursus, so I assume we are not talking about words for which the dictionary omits the archaic plural entirely.

Full disclosure: I want to use the dictionary-preferred plurals in every case. I particularly dislike the affected "aquaria," which I see all over the place in Wikipedia.

Can we adjust the language in the MOS so that this is a little clearer, one way or the other? Krychek (talk) 19:26, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

"Aquaria" seems affected to you; "aquariums" seems quite wrong to me. There are ENGVAR differences, differences of usage in different topic areas, etc. The MOS sensibly allows variation. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:09, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
I'm not sure it does. The MOS is not simply vague; it's self-contradictory. Krychek (talk) 20:19, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
Which ENGVAR uses "aquaria"? I know I do, but is that an American thing? Dicklyon (talk) 04:00, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Latin affected editors would prefer "aquaria". Does ENGVAR restrict its scope to variations that cross physical boundaries? To me, aquaria would be preferred to an uncountable plural, aquariums to countable plurals. Go stand near the aquariums. That type of fish are usually bred in aquaria. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:48, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Ah, the Latin-affected variant of English. I didn't know about that one. Dicklyon (talk) 05:06, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Didn't know, or had not thought of it that way?
Look here and tell me if you agree that the circumstances are primed for an aqauria battle? Law and medicine subjects, which are more-so latin-affected, aren't ready yet. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:10, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
It is quite a bit of antiquarian nonsense, if you ask me. "Moratoria" or "referenda"? No way. "Moratoriums" and "referendums", certainly. There is no reason to retain Latin structure in English, and it merely confuses people who do not have the luxury of a classical education. Indeed, the OED considers "referenda" to be archaic. "Aquaria" is even worse.... RGloucester — ☎ 05:13, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I had forgotten we were fighting about moratoriaums. Added here. I don't think the case is made that latin-affected plurals are archaic. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:17, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
This is one case where Ngrams really isn't helpful. It has a disposition towards good book sources, which is usually a good thing, but in this case results in a bias toward to stilted academic writing that is not meant for a broad audience, and which doesn't represent how people actual speak. The vast majority of people are not usually in the habit of saying curricula, syllabi, referenda, planetaria, &c. It simply doesn't make much sense to make life harder for the reader, given that the "s" forms are in common usage, and are nowadays even found in "good" sources. Indeed, I find such usages "affected", and this is coming from someone who naturally has a very "affected-sounding" speech pattern. RGloucester — ☎ 05:22, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
"This is one case where Ngrams really isn't helpful". Did you look at the result first? Redirects will solve any problems. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:25, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Except that very often the main article title is singular and so doesn't give guidance, resulting in slow edit wars in the content and auxiliary articles, particularly lists, often get moved backwards and forwards because there's no central control. CFD has similarly had a few problems over the years because there's usually no main article to follow. IME this is most definitely not a case of national variety - the same debate seems to be waged everywhere and I suspect the real difference between countries can be chalked down to a) how long a classical education remained standard amongst those who got published and b) the levels of deference or hostility to those who have that classical education in a particular society (seriously how many people get pissed off at being berated for not using a plural that was part of their berater's education but not their own and instinctively reject it outright?). Timrollpickering (talk) 22:10, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I don't know. I have no real world experience of people being emotionally affected by classical spelling styles. I maintain support for the ENGVAR-style Latin-affect suggestion, along the lines that the original style of the first non-stub version of the article should be maintain until there is a consensus supporting a good reason to change it. Categories should defer to parent articles. Categories without parent articles in active dispute over styling I see as examples of WP:LAME. The few times I have engaged, my opinion tends towards deleting categories without parent articles; there are too many categories already, if there is a good case for a new category there is a case for writing the parent article. I expect there may be good counter examples, but I don't think every issue is important. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:18, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
Usually the category does have a main article but it's named in singular and so sidesteps the plural debate. The use in the article's content often changes and has never really carried the day at CFD. Timrollpickering (talk) 18:34, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
I think that's just called English, though I admit that with the lack of classical education in recent decades, Latin plurals are on their way out, slowly. I sat through a tech talk where the new Ph.D. speaker used criteria and criterion exactly reversed; it was painful. Dicklyon (talk) 05:31, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Yep. It is English. There never has been a reference, or perfect, or classical English. Latin plurals are being let go, very very slowly. New PhD speaker? Typically, they should be thought of as an apprentice, head full of PhD stuff often with poor context, but instead the expectation is of expertise. An hour later, he probably realised what he'd been saying. The shame burns. My interpretation for a message to us? Advise newcomers of the teachings of the MOS, gently. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:06, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I work in a shop, with barcoded stock. Today I sold several "cactii", according to both the label on the pot and the till VDU. It's clear to me that although Latin singulars (aquarium, cactus) may be familiar to many, their correct plurals are not. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:11, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Fundamentally, ENGVAR is a compromise allowing Yanks and Brits to work together. Even the other national varieties are mostly a distraction — mostly their formal written versions are close enough to BrE not to really matter much in encyclopedic writing, maybe with the exception of Canadian which is 50% or so.
But phrasing it that way too straightforwardly would not have gone over well, so we have the "national varieties for English-speaking countries" workaround.
Trying to generalize that further, to things like "Latin-affected", does not strike me as a good idea. --Trovatore (talk) 19:32, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps we should all agree to use Canadian spelling as a compromise? :-)
@RGloucester: so would you recommend criterions? I doubt biologists would agree to accept genuses rather than genera. And then what? Specie as the singular of species, which I see all the time? Peter coxhead (talk) 19:47, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I don't want to play the académie anglaise game. What I said above is rather simple: in as much as a form based on English grammar (as opposed to being based upon arbitrary notions of correct grammar in a "dead" language), such as "referendums" or "aquariums", is common used and accepted, I believe that that form should be used. I've not seen any evidence of common acceptance of "criterions", but who knows? I haven't spent any time looking into it, and don't plan to. To be clear, I do not want the MoS to proscribe or prescribe a form in cases like these. This is pure conjecture, on my part. RGloucester — ☎ 20:07, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
No need to prescribe, but I'm pretty sure that criterions would just be corrected as an error. Nobody does that. Dicklyon (talk) 20:19, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Interestingly, a look at the Ngrams for "criteria" versus "criterion" shows that usage of "criteria" and "criterion" roughly matched each other until some point in the 1950s, when "criteria" began to rise heavily, whilst "criterion" began a long decline. Presumably this implies that many people began to start saying "a criteria", which is certainly something I've heard before. I'm sure you fellows don't like that either. RGloucester — ☎ 20:33, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Why must we constantly try to reinvent the wheel? Dictionaries exist for a reason. Standard spellings have already been sorted out for us. I know dictionaries might not always agree with each other, but when they do (as is the case with aquariums), can we for once just take the path of least resistance? Please? Krychek (talk) 20:39, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Then why have any MOS at all? The goal of such an endeavor is to make Wikipedia somewhat consistent. If you disagree with that notion, I guess you'll need to start a campaign against the entire MOS. Krychek (talk) 21:12, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
  • You are posing a classic false dichotomy. If not complete direction on everything, why have any direction? Either the style guide must be absolute, comprehensive and rigid, or have no style guide at all? It is very easy to have somewhat consistency while allowing editor's to choose for aquaria/aquariums according to what seems to best suit the use. when writing, do you get hung up on synonyms? Please don't suggest, for example, always using the shorter synonym. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:08, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
@Krychek: but there isn't a standard plural for aquarium in dictionaries; as far as I can tell all the most authoritative dictionaries give both aquariums and aquaria. So both are allowed here. Consistent use of either in an article should not be corrected. The fact that you don't like aquaria and I don't like aquariums is irrelevant. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:23, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
@Peter coxhead: The first listing is generally understood to be preferred, which I do understand is not exactly the same thing as "standard." At any rate, we've strayed far from my original purpose here, and that is to make the language of the MOS less self-contradictory. If the consensus is that non-preferred plurals are to be allowed, then those examples need to be removed (or corrected to say both plurals are fine). Otherwise, they indicate the opposite of what the MOS is supposedly trying to say. Krychek (talk) 19:25, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
@Krychek: dictionaries don't have "preferences"; that's the task of a style manual. I do agree that the MOS needs to be clarified. It seems to me that the consensus here is to allow any of the accepted variants found in quality dictionaries so long as there is consistency within each article. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:20, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
@Peter coxhead: splitting hairs does not tend to sway opinions, but fine, I'll play -- the first entry in a dictionary generally comes first because it is more common. And nearly every style guide on the planet is going to use the first spelling as its preference. So again, we are back to reinventing the wheel. In other parts of the Wikipedia MOS, the more widely used of multiple alternatives is preferred (WP:COMMONNAME, etc.), but just not here, for some reason. Krychek (talk) 15:24, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
@Krychek: well, if we're splitting hairs, I'd say that WP:COMMONNAME is constantly misinterpreted to mean that commonness rules all, whereas it's only one of the criteria set out at WP:AT. And the same applies here, I think: commonness overall is not the only issue. If it were true that the more widely used of multiple alternatives was always preferred then Wikipedia would be written in US English. [For what it's worth, Google ngrams show that "aquariums" overtook "aquaria" in the American English corpus around 1982, whereas "aquaria" remains more popular (just) up to the last year of data (2008) in British English.] Dictionaries are also inconsistent: MeriamWebster online gives "femurs" before "femora" but "tibiae" before "tibias", but it would surely be more appropriate to use "femurs" and "tibias" in an article or "femora" and "tibiae", the choice depending on the nature of the article. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:20, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
It's actually worse than that, Peter coxhead; COMMONAME isn't even one of the WP:CRITERIA, it's just the default choice, as the name most likely to comply with the criteria. The criteria themselves actually overrule COMMONNAME, though it doesn't happen every day). This COMMONNAME fetishism really has gone too far in the last few years.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:20, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
The WP:Specialized-style fallacy notwithstanding, deference should be given to specialist usage when it does not conflict with conventional usage in mainstream publications, and when we're in the specialized context. Last I looked (in the 1990s) in any depth, aquarists and terrarists mostly prefer aquaria and terraria over the -iums plurals. So prefer those spellings in articles on those topics (and closely related ones, like tropical fish commonly kept as aquarium pets). In an article about something else entirely that mentioned aquariums in passing, use the aquariums and terrariums plurals that would be mostly likely found in general non-fiction writing, I would say (at least for North American English – Peter Coxhead may be right that there's an ENGVAR difference, with the -ia forms still preferred in British English).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:20, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Use versus mention in lede sentences

In this edit I tried to fix what I find as a not-uncommon weird lede structure of the form "The <title> refers to ..." or "The <title> is the name of ..." – essentially mixing up the possibility to use the subject name or to refer to it. A possible fix would be "<Title> is the name of ..." or something like that, italicizing the mentioned term. But it seems preferable, and much more common to just use instead of mention, as "The <title> is ...".

Question: is this addressed anywhere in the MOS? If not, should it be? Dicklyon (talk) 18:36, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Here's another like that: [9]. Should the MOS contain advice to prefer such? Dicklyon (talk) 17:09, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

For Jack Rose (cocktail), I would suggest re-phrasing the sentence so it is more like the first sentence of Manhattan (cocktail)... using "A" instead of "The". No opinion on the Metalergical Lab. Blueboar (talk) 17:36, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
I'm OK either way on "A" vs "The" there. Feel free to change it if you care. Dicklyon (talk) 20:04, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
On second thought, I think "A" doesn't work with "classic" in there. So, "A X is a cocktail made with ... " or "The X is a classic cocktail, ..." Dicklyon (talk) 20:07, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
I felt almost sure that it was in WP:LEADSENTENCE somewhere, but found I was mistaken. I certainly remember seeing it corrected in the early days. "A spade is a tool..." is pretty much indisputable, and that form should be used where possible if it is natural. However, a first sentence opening "Jack the Ripper is the best known name given to an unidentified serial killer..." can also be the best option. William Avery (talk) 18:15, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
And would you then italicize if referring to the name Jack the Ripper? Dicklyon (talk) 20:04, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
Personally I'd prefer quotes. The actual article only bolds it. William Avery (talk) 21:13, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
I agree with the change made at the Jack Rose (cocktail) article as an improvement and with Blueboar's "use a not the" suggestion for that sort of case). Most cases of "The [Title] is the name of" or "[Title] is a term for" constructions are pointless excess verbiage, of the same class as "in order to" instead of just "to". Sometimes these constructions actually need to be used, however, especially when the term is common but a misnomer, biased, or dubious in the real world, so if we said something about this in MoS, we'd need to allow for exceptions, say why there would be some, and gives examples. One is at Bigfoot: "Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch) is the name given to a mythological ...". I would suggest that this isn't really quite a case of the use–mention distinction, but a use that is being qualified, and the way we do that in English just happens to be pretty much the same way we handle a words as words mention, without quite really being one. The subject of the sentence really is Bigfoot, not the word Bigfoot. That is, the lead doesn't continue "... creature, and was first introduced in 1892 as Big-foot. The etymology of the word is...". It's not a WP:DICDEF. Contrast this lead with that at Fuck, which really is about a word as a word, and italicizes it.

I contend such distinctions very often, especially in articles on alleged new animal breeds (most of which are really landrace populations, and some in-bred pets a few people are trying to promote for profit, often with multiple names. To make up an example (and thus avoid picking on a particular article), one of them might start: "Quux dog is a name advanced by the Baz Kennel Association (BKA) for a variety of dog originally found in Shangrila. The local landrace population is referred to as fnordu in Shangrilese. It is a large herding dog, and [descriptive stuff here]. Starting in 2005, Western breeders in Idaho and New South Wales have been working to develop a standardized breed from imported Shangrilese specimens. The BKA recognizes these selectively bred dogs under the name Quux in the breed registry's "Experimental" category, but no other registries recognize either the Western or original dogs as a breed." Something to that effect. The original PoV-pushing version might have read something like "The Quux dog or 'Fnordu' is a breed of herding dog from Shangrila. It is [description]." I restructure the material to be more factual and to avoid implying questionable assertions about breed status, even to remove the "The [Name]" construction that implies that the population is singular, unique, and universally recognized as such. This kind of cleanup comes up frequently with "designer crossbreeds" being aggressively promoted as "new breeds" but which are not; there's no such thing as "the" labradoodle, and it is not a proper name; there are just labradoodles (or a labradoodle, in the singular, per Blueboar's comment about a vs. the, above).

Anyway, the point is that sometimes less direct wording is necessary, but its not necessary to italicize (or quote), as words-as-words, any alternative names that are not being approached as linguistic material. Using either style may be confusing, especially when used with proper names; the italics are easily mistaken for emphasis or the marking of a foreign term, and quotes are apt to be inferred as "so-called" scare-quoting. I'd make an exception for nicknames and epithets like "Jack the Ripper"; those conventionally go in quotation marks anyway: Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson. See, e.g., Black Dahlia, which gets it just right. There's no need to mark up something like Bigfoot or Jack Rose with quotes or italics, except later in the piece: "The name Jack Rose derives from ...".
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  02:03, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Wow, it sounds like you've really thought this out, as usual. Thanks for all that. But shouldn't we have a short version at least, with a few lead examples, in the MOS some place, such as at WP:LEADSENTENCE? Dicklyon (talk) 02:12, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Does anyone have a problem with "would" in "Their descendants would continue to inhabit Pitcairn into the 21st century" or with "just" in "just one surviving mutineer"? I've been told they don't sound right to BrE ears. - Dank (push to talk) 12:05, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

No problem for my British English ears. The "would" I can find no possible problem with. Conceivably H. W. Fowler might have considered the "just one" as somewhat transatlantic, but we have moved on. William Avery (talk) 12:31, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

About overuse of quotation

I added the following as I have been seeing lots of quote spam in the past few months..--Moxy (talk) 17:40, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

"While quotations are an indispensable part of Wikipedia, try not to overuse them. Brief quotations of copyrighted text may be used to illustrate a point, establish context, or attribute a point of view or idea. It is generally recommended that content be written in Wikipedia editor's own words. Using too many quotes is incompatible with an encyclopedic writing style. Consider minimizing the use of quotations by paraphrasing, as quotes shouldn't replace plain and concise text."

Might be an interesting addition to say something along the line of "Using too many quotes is incompatible with an encyclopedic writing style, and may indicate a copyright infringement.", with the appropriate link or two. --Izno (talk) 18:08, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Arbitrary changes of style, notation, formatting and convention

In the Manual of Style we have a section National varieties of English with a shortcut (MOS:ENGVAR), which is useful to cite when reverting edits that arbitrarily change the variant of English used.

Regarding other style options we have the third paragraph of the lead (...editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a good reason....), and also a link to an Arbcom decision regarding changing date notation between BC/AD and BCE/CE. This is less easy to cite. So could we have a section that proscribes arbitrary changes of style - with a handy shortcut?

The sort of style changes I have in mind include changing between and [10] and between ordinary brackets and square brackets [11] and between LaTeX and HTML (without consultation or consensus). --catslash (talk) 21:23, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

It's important to remember that the only reason we have ENGVAR (and MOS:CITEVAR, and MOS:DATEVAR) is to suggest (these are just guidelines, remember) some exceptions that consensus may agree we should make to WP:EDITING policy (which otherwise allows, even encourages, editors to edit as they see fit, constructively). These three very particular kinds of changes so frequently lead to intractable debate that it's better for the community and the project if people just stop changing from British to American English (etc.), stop flipping date styles around, and stop radically changing citation styles, without very good reasons. The amount of dispute those three cause is directly disruptive. That's not the case with minor squabbles over exponent formatting, or any of the other 1,000 or so style choices we're faced with. They're almost always resolvable with an article-level talk page discussion, and when not can be RfCed on this page for more general application (and often "codification" of a clearly preferred result in MoS or one of its subpages; that's how much of MoS was organically generated).

At this point, I'm not sure how we could craft a general rule – if consensus actually wanted one, which does not appear to be the case – that wouldn't be abused by WP:OWNers to WP:GAME everyone half to death. The most likely and negative result of it would be that someone who favors a non-encyclopedic style (e.g. all the comma abandonment that is common in news writing – In 2016 David Bowie died of cancer) would feel empowered to fight forever to prevent anyone else improving the prose and formatting. If some particular mathematical styles should be left alone, because people fight endlessly about them, project-wide, that might be a rationale for a "MOS:MATHVAR", but I don't see any evidence the problem is widespread enough to warrant this. I don't see any discussion at Talk:Triple product indicating intractable dispute about the math formatting edit you use an example of a problem, for example. Where there's no smoke, there's probably no fire. Anyway, there is no "consultation" process, and consensus is not required to make a change (consensus is required for a change to stick). "That wasn't discussed first" is not a real revert rationale; "this is problematic because [legitimate reason here], see discussion on talk page" is a real rationale.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:48, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree with much of this, but not with the last sentence. It's enough reason to revert that the change is not an active improvement. Changes that don't really hurt anything, but also don't really help, should be reverted. --Trovatore (talk) 08:43, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
I should have made it clearer that I was not seeking a new guideline (and certainly not one specific to mathematics), merely a name for the guideline already present in the lead. --catslash (talk) 16:00, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Single quotation marks

Even though MOS:SINGLE says that in simple glosses, "unfamiliar terms are usually enclosed in single quotes",[1] that section links to Gloss (annotation) § In linguistics, which references only Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, a book printed and bound in Great Britain (where in most contexts, ' is used instead of "), and a book in which the author does not distinguish between the singles and doubles (for example, "books or articles on ‘proper’ English ..."),[2]: 10  and moreover, uses ‘typographical quotation marks’ instead of the typewriter‑style 'apostrophes' and "straight quotation marks" that MOS:QUOTEMARKS recommends.

I am not aware of any other English‑language encyclopedia that differentiates between single and double quotations in the way we currently recommend, and the contents of MOS:SINGLE appear to be what came from a 2006 discussion which found house style recommendations for double quotation marks or parentheses, but not for single quotation marks in glosses only. There is no support whatsoever for the use of apostrophes in glosses and quotation marks elsewhere, which is what we currently recommend.

The answer is probably just that: replace the text like so:

  • Simple glosses that translate or define unfamiliar terms are usually enclosed quotation marks or parentheses:
    • Cossack comes from the Turkic qazaq "freebooter" or
    • Cossack comes from the Turkic qazaq (freebooter).

—LLarson (said & done) 15:05, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

"No support whatsoever"? Um, no. Try a tsunami of support from every style guide in entire field of linguistics. As for what we're linking to internally being inadequate, it's just because we have a gap in our linguistics articles, and no better place to link. There's no reason for us to be linking to it. Anyway, it's completely standard practice to write Mi casa es su casa, 'my house is your house'. This is done with or without the comma; it tends to be dropped in journals, but the text is clearer with it in many cases in encyclopedic writing, or sometimes preceded by "literally" or "lit." or "meaning" or "translated as", or used in a "foo, [Language name here] for 'bar'" construction, etc., as the context seems to warrant. As a linguistic style sheet from Albany U. [12] puts it: "Glosses (i.e. translations) for data are given in single quotation marks. Unless sentence structure warrants otherwise, glosses follow the cited data immediately, with no other punctuation." On WP, our sentence structure often does warrant otherwise.

The single quotes are uniform, very nearly universal, usage in all linguistics materials, and it's very useful since it distinguishes precisely what the thing is, a gloss of what just came before, and not some other kind of annotation. Most obvious external source for this is the Linguist Society of America stylesheet: "After the first occurrence of non-English forms, provide a gloss in single quotation marks". The Chicago Manual of Style also covers this. So does the Canadian Journal of Linguistics style guide [13]. So do university linguistics dept. style guides (e.g. this one): "Use only single quotation marks for quotes within quotes and for glosses of foreign words. ... Cited forms in a foreign language should be followed at their first occurrence by a gloss in single quotation marks." And this one from U. of Alabama: "After the first occurrence of non-English forms, provide a gloss in single quotation marks". And various ones provided by linguistics professors/researchers like this one by Haspelmath ("Single quotation marks are used exclusively for linguistic meanings, e.g. Latin habere 'have' is not cognate with Old English hafian 'have'."), and another by Gruyter Mouton, and so on. There are only two major linguistics journals that don't insist on it. But seriously, you can just Google this in five seconds and find a whole flood of material about this [14]. Interlinear, morpheme-by-morpheme glosses should be formatted as un-bordered tables. This is part of the Leipzig Glossing Rule], a widely adopted standard (may well be near-universal now; I can't remember the last time I saw linguistic material that did not follow it, and it was already standard by the 1990s in all the classes I took in the subject. One of the above cited pages says it is part of basic competency in the field now.)

If I didn't have real work to do today, I could easily provide 50+ citations for this stuff in about an hour or two. Please do your research before coming here and declaring what the real-world "facts" are. "There is no support whatsoever"? When you come here with confrontational declarations like this but clearly haven't looked into the matter and are just going by your vague opinion of how things should be, you will not gain any traction on any concern you might be trying to raise. PS: You seem to be unaware that in plain ASCII, as we use for punctuation characters (i.e. not curly quotes, per MOS:CURLY), the apostrophe and single quotation mark are the same character. PPS: The parenthetical style is sometimes used, but only with the single quote style, and the distinction between them is that the parenthetical is an extremely literal translation and the singled-quoted one a usage gloss, e.g. "Soy bien cabrón danzando (I am [a] good goat dancing) 'I'm darned good at dancing'". This is "high academic" style that one would not normally use in an encyclopedia, because it will not be clear to non-linguists what the distinction is; we would explain it in prose, and probably link to wikt:cabrón so people can see the literal and informal meanings and usage.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:28, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

You’re 100% correct about the parenthetical—that’s garbage and I definitely wasn’t channeling high academy but just confusing it with another concept. Mea culpa.
Months ago, I found something on your user page that’s stuck with me and been inspirational: “Greetings! I'm a real person, like you. Collaboration improves when we remember this about each other.”[15] I’m disappointed and apologize for my post coming across as “confrontational declarations”; similarly, I’m disappointed that in light of this, you’d respond with what came across as somewhat patronizing and heavy on sarcasm. This is about how an English‑language encyclopedia should look, not about us; to that end, two days ago, I left an additional message on the talk page of the template that brought me here.[3]
Your response seems to discount the core of my message, that is: How does an English‑language encyclopedia use quotation marks for in‑text translations, (and not so much how the Leipzig Glossing Rules apply to linguistics papers)? While I am aware that MOS:CURLY prescribes 'apostrophes' and typewriter‑style "quotation marks" in lieu of ‘single’ and “double” quotation marks respectively, that doesn’t mean that “the apostrophe and single quotation mark are the same character”. Even though the apostrophe suffices on Wikipedia in all instances where an editor might wish to use ‘ or ’, that doesn’t mean we’re working in an environment constrained by ASCII‑only conventions: 🤔. As technology begins to allow for it, I believe that the English‑language Wikipedia too will eventually graduate to the typographical punctuation seen in offline encyclopedias.
To substance, I apologize for citing the 2006 talk page conversation and its sources instead of better sleuthing before posting. What remains is that neither of us found an encyclopedia that uses apostrophes for glosses and typewriter‑style double quotation marks elsewhere. What I have found, but hadn’t sought prior to my previous post—sorry—is Encyclopedia Britannica, which, although also published in Great Britain, uses double quotation marks (albeit “typography” not "typewriter") where Wikipedia does and ‘single quotation marks’ (but not our 'apostrophes') for short foreign‑language glossing. Ignoring these two differences, I believe we are otherwise in agreement.
I remain admiring of your work, grateful for your attention here, and thank you for your helping me, especially in the Template namespace. —LLarson (said & done) 16:34, 16 April 2016 (UTC)
Tone: Fair enough. At various MOS page's we've long had problems with "style warriors" showing up with "no support whatsoever" claims, based on original research or no research, some of whom have campaigned for years about one pet peeve or another. So, I shut down claims like that that can't be backed up the moment I see them, and pretty firmly, to short-circuit another pet-peeve holy war. It's nothing personal; I'm programmatic in my approach to such claims, because WP:LAME WP:DRAMA predicated on them is the biggest time waste in this entire sector of the project.

Quotation mark vs. apostrophe: I wrote carefully for a reason: "in plain ASCII ... (i.e. not curly quotes, per MOS:CURLY), the apostrophe and single quotation mark are the same character." They are. You can look this up in any ASCII table. The curly glyphs are not ASCII, they're Unicode. I agree that en.wp will eventually probably use typographic (curly) quotation marks and apostrophes; several of the non-English ones already do. I very recently raised a discussion on this page about the idea of migrating to this usage now, and there were objections, so "not yet". Straight quotes are just plain ASCII (and also part of Unicode as such, since it's a superset). Your argument that WP in general is not limited to plain ASCII is correct, but not relevant; en.wp is presently limited to plain ASCII quotation/apostrophe punctuation for most purposes.

Re: "How does an English‑language encyclopedia..." – What matters here is is how WP collectively wants to do it; we do not have to ape the style of other encyclopedias. When I arrived here a decade ago, WP was not recognizing the use of single quotes for glosses. This was irritating to anyone from a linguistics background, and linguistics editors just used it anyway, per WP:IAR. Now the usage is sanctioned (in the positive sense), because it is in fact standard usage for glosses; even Chicago Manual of Style says so. So consensus changed. You seem to have arrived years later to reverse the change in consensus, and made a claim that the usage wasn't supported by any real-world sources, but it definitely is, so at this point I guess I don't see what the conversation is about.

Re: "neither of us found an encyclopedia that uses apostrophes for glosses and typewriter‑style double quotation marks elsewhere." That's meaningless, an apples-and-oranges comparison. You won't find a paper encyclopedia that doesn't use curly quotes, and it would use curly glyphs for both quotations and glosses. WP uses non-curly for both cases. So this scenario of "is there an encyclopedia using curly for one and straight for another?" isn't likely to exist, and wouldn't matter anyway, since who cares? WP has its own house style. If it turned out that the World Book Encyclopedia coincidentally happened to do precisely what you were looking for, WP would have no reason to adopt the split-style practice. Another way of approaching this: When WP switches to using curly quotes for quotations, it will also switch to using them for glosses.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:48, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

So, "even Chicago Manual of Style says so", eh? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:54, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
Martin, these weird one-liner sarcastic comments you add to every other MoS- and AT-related thread are not constructive. No one can read your mind. There's at least 4 things I can think of off the top of my head, some of the mutually exclusive, that your sarcasm could indicate. Please just state what your issue is clearly.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:57, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
SMc, "every other MoS- and AT-related thread"? Not sure I'm quite that busy, or knowledgeable. And please tell us what are the four things. I'm suggesting that the Chicago Manual of Style has an untouchable pre-eminence as the basis for the Wikipedia Manual of Style. But at least we have a number of style guides listed under "External style guides." Can you tell us if we should use the The Guardian Style Guide for articles written in British English, or is that advice meant generally, with no relevance to WP? Martinevans123 (talk) 07:49, 25 April 2016 (UC)

References

  1. ^ Wikipedia:Manual of Style § Single quotation marks (this version)
  2. ^ Campbell, Lyle (2004) [1st pub. 1998 by Edinburgh University Press]. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (2nd ed.). The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-53267-0. LCCN 2004042637.
  3. ^ “You know I’m pretty fond of you and your work, but this doesn’t look quite right to me; apologies if I got the order of operations wrong, but I brought it up on MOS talk instead of here. Thank you, again.”

Anyone know when the "glosses" line got added to MOS:SINGLE? I don't recall ever seeing that usage at FAC, and I'm concerned that it's going to confuse some writers. - Dank (push to talk) 04:31, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

On my Mom's 87th birthday: [16]. Dicklyon (talk) 05:22, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
Okay, the discussions were at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Linguistics/Archive_11#Glosses: Single quotes or double quotes? and Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_160#Suggested section "9.2.4. Linguistic use". McCandlish, I'm not following your argument at the second link ... I don't object to mentioning this exception at MOS, but why aren't we being clear that this punctuation is seen mainly among linguists? Most Wikipedians won't know what a "gloss" is, so they'll decode the meaning from context, and will assume we're saying single quotes are fine in word definitions. This one is going to create headaches at FAC. - Dank (push to talk) 12:27, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
What sort of "headaches at FAC"? Can you point to examples? It difficult to understand what alleged problem you want to address and how to potentially address it otherwise. The single-quoted gloss usage is for providing translation glosses (mi casa es su casa, 'my house is your house'), and can also be used for explicit definitions of English words as words being treated as linguistic units (as in: the term gloss in this context does not mean 'shine' or 'sheen'), not for running-prose explanations of the meaning of English terms used in context (which uses no markup: Albinism, the lack of melanin pigment, is genetic), nor for presentation of words as words themselves (usually italicize: The word albino is considered offensive by some as a description of people with albinism; or quotation marks when the context is already using italics for other purposes). MOS has various terms in that are not everyday words; editors know how to use a dictionary and can easily find out what gloss means in this context. The reason MoS is the length it is and non 10× longer is we trust editors to look up terms and concepts that may be unfamiliar to them; it's not MoS's job to act as a linguistics and copyediting instructions course, just a quick reference.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:48, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
People were interested in this issue 8 months ago ... is there still interest, or has this been put to bed already? - Dank (push to talk) 22:31, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
Well, the issue was that we were not accounting for a common, standardized use of single quotes, people wanted it addressed, and so it was. Now it's April 2016, and one person doubted that the style was real, I proved it is, and then you posted a request for info on when the change was made, which was provided. I asked for examples of it supposedly causing problems, and you didn't provide any. So, I still don't see a current issue/problem to resolve, and things seem stable and uncontroversial.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:57, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
Some advice, please: I just tried to update the ukiyo-e article with this style of glossing, but it seemed to work particularly badly with terms with long glosses in the middle of running text. I had:
Utamaro (c. 1753–1806) made his name in the 1790s with his bijin ōkubi-e ("large-headed pictures of beautiful women") portraits, focusing ...
and nearly changed it to:
Utamaro (c. 1753–1806) made his name in the 1790s with his bijin ōkubi-e 'large-headed pictures of beautiful women' portraits, focusing ...
which looks pretty disastrous to me. At the moment I've got:
Utamaro (c. 1753–1806) made his name in the 1790s with his bijin ōkubi-e ('large-headed pictures of beautiful women') portraits, focusing ...
Comments or advice? Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:22, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
I'd leave it as it was. Whatever else it is, "unfamiliar terms are usually enclosed in single quotes" is completely wrong as a descriptive statement about WP style, since this is super-rare. To argue against it in terms of Planet MOS I'd have to read all that stuff by SMcCandlish, so that's not really an option. Johnbod (talk) 18:07, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
I'm inclined to agree. Wikipedia is not a linguistics journal, and the recommendation appears to introduce problems that nobody seems interested in addressing. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:39, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Discussion notice: OldStyleDateDY

See Template talk:OldStyleDateDY for a discussion about a proposed cosmetic change to the output from this template. ―Mandruss ☎ 06:22, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

quotation marks and punctuation

Is there somewhere I can read the most up to date discussion this? I just realized it seems to be promoting British usage in American articles which seems insane to me. -KaJunl (talk) 13:32, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

You're probably referring to MOS:LQ. It's not about British/American differences, but the logical fallacy of including punctuation inside quotemarks when that punctuation is not part of the quoted phrase. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:38, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
Actually that reasoning, by itself, doesn't fully explain the guidance at MOS:LQ. In the second example given there, Marlin needed, he said, "to find Nemo"., the full stop is part of the quoted phrase I need to find Nemo., but it is placed outside the quotemarks because the quote is not a complete sentence. Just sayin'. ―Mandruss ☎ 08:38, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

USA all the way

I see no good reason for the stricture on this abbreviation. It isn't the only "United States" in the world or even in North America, and the abbreviation is not rare in respectable publications. U.S.A. All the Way - Walter Kirn, nytimes.com. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:20, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

  • I've always found the injunction to use "US" not "USA" odd, particularly since the main taxonomic databases I use in preparing articles (e.g. the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families, GRIN Taxonomy, the World Spider Catalog) all use the three letter abbreviation, with or without full stops (yes, I'm British). That's presumably why, to give just two of many, many examples that could be given, the multipage List of Araneidae species and the List of Lilium species use "USA" not "US". Peter coxhead (talk) 15:20, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
  • My only comment would be that this should not be changed without a more formal RfC consensus to change it. If you wish to pursue this, you might as well get that RfC started. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:35, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
  • My comment was in the spirit of "why?" rather than asking for a change. I had assumed that it was the preference of US editors here. I'm certainly not interested in starting an RfC. As an aside, the opening of United States captures the existing inconsistency nicely: the opening starts with "United States of America (USA)" and then goes on to say "commonly referred to as the United States (U.S.)", so the prime position is given to the three letter abbreviation without full stops/periods. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:03, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
  • My general sense is that "US" is more used than "USA" in formal registers. Note that the article Jim Henderson cites, while it is indeed in a "respectable" publication, is found in a rather chatty and informal column. Moreover "USA" is often associated with sports fandom, which Wikipedia should stay far away from (even in its sports-related articles). --Trovatore (talk) 08:38, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
It is highly dependent on context. There is nothing wrong with "USA", necessarily. However, in everyday prose, "US" conveys the same information whilst being a character shorter. However, as Mr Coxhead noted, there are circumstances where using USA is standard. This is already allowed for by the MoS, however, because the MoS is a guideline that allows for exceptions on the basis of editorial consensus. I see no need for a change. RGloucester — ☎ 13:26, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
I think both should be allowed. But "U.S." should always have periods. Maurreen (talk) 02:57, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
Full stops are not presently used in that manner outside North America, and hence such a proscription on their omission cannot be enacted. RGloucester — ☎ 03:34, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
This discussion is on the same issue. Valenciano (talk) 11:04, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Plurals and band articles

There is currently a discussion happening at Talk:Boys Like Girls#LANGVAR edit warrior that would likely be of interest for this project. Walter Görlitz (talk) 07:31, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

RFC regarding COMMONNAME and MOS

Please comment at WP:VPP#RfC: MOS vs COMMONNAME. --Izno (talk) 13:08, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

closed. Dicklyon (talk) 22:37, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

WP:HYPERHEADING

Hey guys :) Does anyone have any useful suggestions or ideas for things that could be included in the WP:HYPERHEADING article? Olowe2011 Talk 21:22, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

{{main}} is an alternative to {{see also}}. 'see also' implies the link goes to something related but necessarily the same as section topic. 'main' implies the link goes to something that talks about the subject itself and that this section is a mere summary of that other article.  Stepho  talk  21:43, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
Why was this page created and tagged as a guideline without consensus? --Izno (talk) 22:01, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
@Inzo it has consensus. It's simply a re written version which is beginner friendly of a guideline on this page (WP:MOSHEADINGS.) It's actual content does not differ, only the style and tone. Olowe2011 Talk 22:25, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
Regardless of whether or not it intends to offer a rewritten version of the same advice, it's a new page and needs a very high level of consensus to mark it as a guideline. Because guidelines like these are widely used by many Wikipedians, they need many hands to be properly formed. Something like the error noted below confusing headed and headings has already been caught because of more people looking at it. That's why this discussion need me to happen before the guideline tag is applied. As for the page itself, it looks pretty good on its own, but there's already too many MOS subpages as is, so I do question the need. oknazevad (talk) 13:14, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
@Stepho thanks for the suggestion :) I have added a main. Olowe2011 Talk 22:25, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
(i) Please be careful to use appropriate terms: headings are the parts of a page marked up in HTML with <h1>...</h1> to <h6>...</h6> tags, or in Wikicode with =...= to ======...======, such as the page title "Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style" or section title "WP:HYPERHEADER"; whereas headers are things that go at the top of a page, section or table, like the box containing "This is a talk page. Please respect the talk page guidelines ..." seen when editing this page. (ii) Why does your page not link back to Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Section headings or an equivalent shortcut such as MOS:HEADINGS? (iii) Why have you gone against that advice in this very thread? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:32, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
ah @Redrose64 I did not realize it applied to talk pages however, thanks for keeping me informed! With regards to the linking back I will implement that somewhere in the guideline page cheers! :) Olowe2011 Talk 00:21, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
Comment Rosered64 - Your suggestions have drawn my attention towards some very important things which are being changed such as the header - heading as mentioned. Thanks again for the information! Olowe2011 Talk 00:29, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Is there any technical reason for not using links in headings? In articles {{Main}} and {{See also}} are better, but I can't see a problem with using them on talk pages. nyuszika7h (talk) 19:27, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Request for Comment: Quotes and italics (at MoS:Comics)

Please take part in a discussion on when to use italics and when to use quotemarks in titles at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Comics#Request for Comment: Quotes and italics. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:16, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

August 19 thru July 7

When I saw this construction for the first I corrected what looked like an obvious error, by changing "thru" to "through". But then I noticed that this spelling of "thru" is quite common when making statements about climate. It still looks mighty weird though. Is it an ENGVAR issue? Dondervogel 2 (talk) 21:29, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

It does look like ENGVAR: [17]. I am from the UK, and agree that it looks odd, but I have seen it used by Americans. MOS:RETAIN seems to suggest that leaving it as-is would be the best choice, unless something other than "thru" would make more sense to more people (MOS:COMMONALITY).
I don't know how common it actually is in American English – wikt:thru says it is "less used in formal situations", and suggests "to", "till" and "until" as British alternatives (e.g. "the average window for freezing temperatures is November 16 till March 10" looks better to me), but input from more people would be good. anowlcalledjosh (talk) 21:30, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
I believe "THRU" originated as an American alternative to "through" on road signs, and isn't fully accepted in contexts where space isn't severely limited. Another subtlety is that in the US, "August 19 through July 7" means that the July 7 is included in the period. "August 19 to July 7" is ambiguous, at least in the US; the last day included in the period might be July 6, or it might be July 7. Jc3s5h (talk) 22:55, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
As a speaker of UK English, I can confirm that "19 August to 7 July" is ambiguous. To make it clear whether 7 July were in or out one would use either "19 August to 7 July, inclusive" or "19 August to 7 July, exclusive". I think 19 August is included in both cases (not really sure). In the body of a WP article there is no real space limitation, so can we conclude that "through" is preferred, except in verbatim quotes? Dondervogel 2 (talk) 06:59, 14 May 2016 (UTC)
Generally, "thru" in unacceptable outside of informal contexts (e.g., texts and tweets) and signage (e.g., "drive-thru"). "Through" is more grammatically correct.SciGal (talk) 18:22, 14 May 2016 (UTC)
Regarding this diff, thru may be informal or archaic, but it's not an abbreviation. It's likely derived from the Old English thurh or thuruh. Pburka (talk) 21:49, 14 May 2016 (UTC)
It probably is derived from the Old English "thurh" or "thuruh" but via probably "through". Anyhow, I'd say that "thru" would be too informal for WP. As for the alleged ambiguity of "Monday to Friday", to me that would include all or part of Friday (i.e. it's pretty unambiguous) but "Monday through Friday" would not help whatsoever to clear anything up (even if there were ambiguity). I don't perceive and difference in meaning of "Monday through Friday" to "Monday to Friday" (but I'm not American). To me, "Monday through Friday" is simply a strange Americanism presumably short for "Monday through to Friday", which (to me) is the same in meaning to "Monday to Friday". So, if writers on pages in US English use "Monday through Friday", fine, but I hope they're not expecting to convey some nuance which is going to be lost on the rest of us. Jimp 07:24, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Another one falls into line

NYT. Tony (talk) 07:19, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

ENGVAR and pagemoves

Right now, the policy firmly states An article should not be edited or renamed simply to switch from one variety of English to another. But what if an article title goes against WP:TIES? Imagine an article about "Lorries in the United States", for example. With that in mind, I'm suggesting that this be added. Nyttend (talk) 02:29, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Renaming something on the basis of TIES would not be "simply switching from one variety to another", it would be done to comply with the guidelines. No change is needed. RGloucester — ☎ 02:48, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
I wouldn't mind this change by Nyttend, since discussion might show that a change is better and/or more appropriate. Wikipedia is also WP:Consensus-based. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 06:34, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
If there's a good reason to change the variety, go ahead, that's a valid exception. Jimp 07:30, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose – The guideline is already clear that a change is allowed if said change is not simply to change the variety, but is done for some good reason, such as TIES. The proposed change will open a wave of nonsensical discussions about changing the variety, legitimising requests to "simply" change the variety as long as a discussion is held. Such a massive change would require an RfC, and I doubt anyone would support reopening the ENGVAR can of worms. RGloucester — ☎ 16:32, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose the Article titles policy covers name changes. That suggested rewording of the MOS is outside the scope of the MOS. -- PBS (talk) 16:37, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Comment' @Nyttend edits such as this are WP:POINTy because they disruptive to make a point:
    • such edits make changes, however temporary that may be, and those may be read by a person not knowing that it is just a temporary example (we expect guideline pages to be relatively stable and not have to check the edit history every time to see if someone is making changes to emphasise a point under discussion on the talk page)
    • such edits clutter up the the edit history making it difficult to see the wood for the trees,
    • such edits trigger events in watch pages, with false positives forcing those editors who watch this page to check for a change unnecessarily . -- PBS (talk) 16:54, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose WP:MOS is a guideline; Wikipedia:Article titles is a policy, and therefore overrides the MOS. From a practical point of view, all I can see is endless and fruitless argument over the spelling of articles like Armour and 393d Bomb Squadron. Hawkeye7 (talk) 23:40, 24 May 2016 (UTC)
  • This "we've got bigger d..ks than you" nonsense is against everyone's interests—except for those of WP:AT diehards who seem to want to rule the globe. So let's see no inconsistency introduced because "we trump you". The text at both AT and MOS should reflect this, and MOS is the style guide. Tony (talk) 07:23, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Support Clarifies that this page says the same as Wikipedia:Article titles, which most people always thought it did. Presumably this is what Tony's cryptic comments mean. Johnbod (talk) 13:11, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
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