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Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (categories)/Usage of American

There is discussion at the above page which seeks a consensus on what term to use when describing the nationality of people from the United States of America in category titles which use the format nationality foo. Please participate. --Hiding talk 10:48, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Tenses

I'm currently writing an article about a defunct game, and I'm not quite sure what tense to use. Should I say "Z-G WAS the first", or "Z-G IS the first"? I'm fairly sure the latter is more correct from a purely english standpoint, but which does the wiki prefer, in this case? --InShaneee 19:29, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

If Z-G is no longer around, I'd use the past tense. No one would say that George Washington is the first president. --Mwalcoff 23:22, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

I'd say the past tense is correct - unless the game still exists and is in widespread play. As for the wiki, to my knowledge there isn't a preference; because this is a grammatical point I find it unlikely it will gain entry either (unless it's really, really controversial, which it's not, I think). -- Neonumbers 09:07, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Unless all traces of the game have been removed from existence, then the game still exists and should be referred to in the present tense. It does not matter if the game is no longer being produced or played very much. The example given, however, is confusing, because whether or not something still exists has no bearing on which tense should be used in the given example. In a sentence like that, the tense is constrained by the context of the predicate, not the subject. You would say, for example, "In 2001, George Bush became [past tense] the first president of the twenty-first century. However, even though Washington is dead, you would also say "George Washington is one of the most important figures in American History" (not was).

If you're talking about the contents (or story, etc.) of the game, then like novels and movies, they exist in a kind of "permanent present". In Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield runs away from school. The character of Sugar Kane Kowalczyk in Some Like It Hot is played by Marilyn Monroe ("was" would be OK here too if you were talking about Marilyn's life rather than the content of the movie). Sonic the Hedgehog is a blue hedgehog. So "Z-G was the first ...." but "In Z-G, the main character is ...." and "The storyline occurs ....". Note, however, that you would say "The graphics were designed..." because the context is the people who designed the graphics, which is an activity that took place in the past, but you would say "The graphics show the score using..." because here the context is the game itself, which still exists. --Nohat 17:59, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Nohat here. Chess is still widely played, for example, but one shoud write for example: "Chess was the first battle game to acheive wide use" because that is a statement about the history of chess, or of games (I have no idea if it is true, it is just an example) while one would write "In nine-man's-morris, a move is made by..." even though that game is obsolete and almost never played any more, because that is talking about the game, not its history. --DES ^(talk) 18:13, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

I have fixed the tenses on the article in questions, Z-G. --Nohat 18:29, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

{{style}} style

I would like to find the appropriate place for discussion of whether all style articles should have the same style template -- two wikipedians deleted it from WP:Manual_of_Style_(mathematics) (I admit to being one of them), as the sidebar looks clumsy in that article. Perhaps there should be a separate "style 2" template which only has a pointer to this manual? --Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:56, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

The thing is, there isn't really a place... I once asked about {{guideline}} but no-one seemed to notice. But I say that, because they're all part of one big document, the same sidebar should be on each. --Neonumbers 07:30, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I find that sidebar useful, and think it should remain on all the MoS pages. Gene Nygaard 14:28, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Transliteration

Oughtn't there be some guidance on this page as to transliteration? For instance, we should say that Greek names ought to be Latinized - Herodotus, not Herodotos; Menelaus, not Menelaos; and so on. Given that this is almost always the more common English name, this is somewhat self-evident, but I think it should be instantiated as a rule. It'd be nice if we had some guidelines for translating, say, Arabic names, as well. --john k 04:29, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

The guidelines are far from clear. For instance, the practice for Chinese people is almost always to use the most up to date transliterations- except in really famous cases like Confucius. Other languages differ still more. I think a lot of it has not been worked out yet, so any such document would be a bit premature. --Maru (talk) Contribs 22:39, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Loan words vs non-English words

There is a section titled Loan words but which is about non-English or foreign words, rather than loan words as described in the loan words article. I suggest this section of MoS should be titled Non-English words rather than Loan words. I was going to suggest Foreign words but that is not always accurate for English-speaking countries that also have native languages (i.e. non-English but not foreign.) Nurg 23:35, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

National varieties of English (UK, US and other spellings)

Do you think it would it be a lot of trouble to provide a special markup for spelling localisation? We could have something like

{{GB::colour|US::color}}

, so that WP would be displayed consistently in one style, according to user preferences. At the moment there are inconsistencies across related articles, or even in the same article. Plus some people tend to be anal about this and a lot of time is wasted "correcting" and "correcting" back, edit wars, etc. --PizzaMargherita 10:26, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes. Few would know of it, fewer would care, and even fewer would bother to learn it and go out of their way to apply it. A better idea would involve bots going around tagging known spellings (in a basic search and replace). --Maru (talk) Contribs 17:30, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

I think you'd be surprised. The word will spread very quickly, people would learn by example and the Wiki would settle to this superior equilibrium more quickly than you'd think IMHO. Bots are obviously an option for the most common words. They will make mistakes, but they will be fixed in no time. PizzaMargherita 17:37, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I think even that idea is unnecessary. First, for all the debate and arguments - there are few differences between British and American English. For most articles, there's no difference at all. In others there are a few subtle differences - which could just as easily be typos as anything deliberate. In a very, very small number, there are substantial differences, but these tend to get edited out fairly quickly. So let's not make a mountain out of a molehill (it's only a few molehills we have at present), jguk 17:42, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

I think PizzaMargherita's idea is a good one. We have far too many embarrassing edit wars over where to put punctuation around quotation marks, color v. colour, curb v. kerb, transport v. transportation, and so on. A localization feature would definitely cut down those "spell check" edits so that people could concentrate on substantive issues. --Coolcaesar 23:55, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

In the case of punctuation, there's a Wikipedia style that overrides what people might think about local styles; I've not seen many edit wars over U.S. vs U.K. spelling, though I've come across a number of cases in which editors have "corrected spelling" because they didn't know about other varieties of English. Mind you, I was unaware that anyone used "curb" to mean "kerb" (or vice versa). --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:51, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

In American English, "curb" is used to describe both the hard concrete or asphalt edge of a road (the noun) and to limit or stop something (the verb). For example, "Don's erratic driving was curbed when his vehicle was deflected by the curb."--Coolcaesar 22:17, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

"In the case of punctuation, there's a Wikipedia style that overrides what people might think about local styles". Precisely my point. Why imposing a style when you can have it as a user preference? Why do you think there's been all that fuss about the quotation style? Because many people were wasting a lot of time on that, and from what I've seen UK vs US spelling is a similar resource drain. PizzaMargherita 17:37, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

For the record, I was unaware that "kerb" was even a word until now. If I saw that in an article, I would immediately "correct" the spelling to "curb." And I completely agree with PizzaMargherita... a localization feature would be a welcome edition to wikipedia. -Parallel or Together? 07:10, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

But how is a preference able to distinguish between those uses of a word that can be freely localized, and those that cannot be; that is, how do we avoid the U.K Labor Party? 128.174.36.220 18:22, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

The mechanism I have in mind is very flexible. Unfortunately I cannot explain the details because I don't know enough about Wiki templates and stuff, but basically it would work like this.

• If you are talking about the "Labour Party" you would write it as is, like you do now. Anybody manually correcting it as "Labor Party" is clearly making a mistake.
• If you are talking about labour/labor in general, then the editor would write something like

  {{GB::labour|US::labor}}

  . The server would work out what a specific user wants to see and display the correct thing. Casual readers (i.e. not logged-in) would get the default. (Which default? I don't really care, but if you do, we could do something smart with the IP address.) Note that with this mechanism in place it is very unlikely that a casual reader changes a word to his preferred spelling, because as soon as they see the template, they think about it twice, possibly learn about yet another benefit of being logged in, and if they care so much about these things they will propagate this idiom in other articles and for other words. Also note that this mechanism can be extended easily to other varieties of the English language (Canadian, Australian, Jamaican, Liberian, you name it) if and when the need arises. Finally, the same mechanism can be used by other languages, some of which may well be even more susceptible to local varieties. PizzaMargherita 20:28, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

This would make wikitext totally unreadable and editing a chore. Articles would be in a constant state of semi-localization. Dealing with different punctuation styles would be even more complicated. Anyway, what's the point? I'm Canadian, but somehow I can understand British and U.S. English just fine. —Michael Z. 2005-11-4 20:47 Z

"Articles would be in a constant state of semi-localization." Could you please expand on this? We are probably not on the same page. The way I see it, that's the current state. PizzaMargherita 21:06, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Also could you please explain how the following would be "totally unreadable" and "a chore to edit"?

I have a poor sense of {{GB::humour|US::humor}} because I'm a pizza.

PizzaMargherita 21:13, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Actually, if we are prepared to lose a little flexibility, we don't even need to repeat the list every time, which will be centralised in the template itself. We just write, e.g.

I have a poor sense of {{EN::humor}} because I'm a pizza.

which would render as specified by your profile. PizzaMargherita 21:30, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Ye gods—what a waste of time and processing power! I can read–fluently and comfortably–U.S. English, U.K. English, Canadian English, and a host of other regional dialects. Anyone who has learned to spell well enough to notice that non-American English has a bunch of extra 'u's in it can certainly handle reading the different versions. Beyond some chauvinistic desire to see all articles appear in a personally-favoured flavour, what purpose is served? Someone would have to write the necessary changes to the Wikimedia software to even permit this. Someone would have to manage the updating of seven hundred thousand articles; an automated changeover would result in errors like the above-mentioned Labor/Labour Party problem. Editors would have to be trained to use the new forms/templates, as well as to even recognize where different variations of a word exist. (See the curb/kerb discussion above—this one's a particular mess because 'curb' can be used as a noun in U.S. and Canadian English, but is not the preferred form in British English.) Our already overworked and overtired servers would have to deal with all these unecessary customizations, plus store all the additional edit histories and logs generated by adding these templates to articles. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 22:02, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

I thought it was clear: the problem is not that people can't read variations. It's that some waste their (and others') time (and yes, server resources) with spelling edit wars. As a bonus we would have localised and consistent versions of WP without branching. I very much doubt that parsing

{{EN::humor}}

and looking up a preference is gonna put unbearable strain on the servers. PizzaMargherita 22:23, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Having that many smart templates in a page will probably add to page load; no telling how much or how little. But another problem is that when some words are templated in an article and others are not, readers will end up seeing a mix of two different English versions created by this templating. Anyway, there are probably better things to spend programmer time on. —Michael Z. 2005-11-4 23:25 Z

Load time: one DB query (easily cached in memory) and a handful of machine cycles. Trust me, there are things that take far longer.

Mix of styles: you are missing the point of the proposal entirely. The big difference is that with such a mechanism in place there would be an equilibrium which is the one and only correct equilibrium, which will please everyone, and to which every good-intentioned wikipedian will actively contribute to reach. As opposed to the current chaotic situation whereby there are opposing forces trying to pull the spelling to "their" side, and the WP in this sense will never reach an equilibrium.

Developer time: Our decision on whether or not a feature is desirable should be independent from that factor. If we decide that a feature is desirable, then the developers will prioritise it. Maybe it will never see the light, because it's such a low priority, but it should stay in the to-do list. PizzaMargherita 08:43, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

I concur. For example, supporting images and other media on Wikipedia is a huge burden on the servers (to handle all the uploads, image resizes, etc.) but Wikipedia does it anyway because the articles look more interesting with illustrations. If there's enough demand for language localizing, eventually some of the developers will take it upon themselves to do it. --Coolcaesar 21:16, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

← dragging this back to the left margin ← The difference between this proposal and supporting inline images is that images have the power to significantly improve the quality of our articles. Cloud would be a much weaker article with only verbal descriptions of cloud types. Tubular pin tumbler lock becomes virtually self-explanatory with its accompanying high-quality diagrams. Articles don't lose value or comprehensibility (except in certain extreme cases) when different English spellings are used. Although the developers can do whatever they want with the Mediawiki software, I imagine that they realize that offering colour/color preferences should be a low priority. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 23:25, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

As I said, the other difference between this proposal and supporting inline images is that the former would have virtually no impact on page-load time. As for priority and developing resources, let's put it this way: I'm gonna do it, ok? In fact, I'll do it right now, unless somebody comes up with a good reason not to. PizzaMargherita 23:52, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

What would this "viewing mode" default to? US or UK spelling? Commonwealth editors will be annoyed when it is US English by default, and US editor won't like default UK spelling... Nobbie 09:26, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

This is a fair point. (This default would apply to people who are not logged in, or did not set their preference, right?) As I said, let's just pick one, say US. If they don't like the default, they can create an account and set their preference. But the important thing is that if they want to "fix" the "misspelling" they bump into the template, and therefore (I maintain) they would think twice before making the change. PizzaMargherita 11:03, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I'd like to read about US topics in US spelling and UK topics in UK spelling. Would your proposed system be able to handle that? Or does the use of templates not apply to articles that are related to English-speaking countries? Nobbie 16:09, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I think everybody will agree that writing "The UK Labor Party" is just wrong. In such cases, you would write the only correct spelling, "The UK Labour party", and you would not use the templates. Templates should be used in "neutral" contexts. PizzaMargherita 17:19, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

How would the title of an article be handled? Will the title and URL of manual labour change according to one's preferences, or possibly appear in a different form of English than the body text. How will wiki links be handled?

Will this affect caching? Sounds like two or more versions of pages will be cached on the Squid servers. Or will each request with a different language force a page to be re-cached?

My biggest problem with this proposal is all the extra mark-up and duplicated words and phrases in Wikitext, which is already getting too hairy with lots of inline templates. It is counter to the idea that wikitext is easy to read and write. —Michael Z. 2005-11-6 19:12 Z

Titles: Good point. I don't know the details of the implementation. If somebody does please come forward. It can't be rocket science. Anyway with this proposal in place and without touching the titles, things would be strictly no worse than the current situation.

By the way, funny how the link you offered illustrates the issue very clearly. Its history counts 12 edits, of which 3 to switch spellings back and forth throughout the article. Also interesting how the article, entitled "Manual Labour", belongs to category "Labor".

Caching on Squid servers: I'm equally ignorant, but I would guess cache both. I have one question though: how do skins (the incredibly essential user preference that nobody could live without) affect caching and page-load time?

Duplicated words and phrases in Wikitext: Sorry, I don't understand where the duplication would be in the following

I have a poor sense of {{EN::humor}} because I'm a pizza.

Extra mark-up in wikitext: So do you honestly think that beginner editors would not be able to read and edit the example above? Somebody with a signature like yours shouldn't be allowed to say that :)

Seriously, let's assume that a new guy comes around and tries to edit the sentence above, say to substitute "poor" with "good". One of the following could happen:

1. He investigates what the funny template is, and he becomes a better wikipedian–much in the same way people learn (or don't learn and manage to survive) what that scary   is and when it should be used
2. He thinks: uhm... something funny is going on there, I'll do my change and leave that alone.
3. He cocks it all up and breaks the page. Not an irreversible disaster as we all know.
4. As soon as he sees the template he is scared to death, unplugs his computer and dials the national emergency service.

One of these scenarios, you will concede, is very unlikely. PizzaMargherita 21:50, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm not too convinced, but I understand your reasoning. You'll need an exhaustive list of variant spellings, see User:SpNeo/Spelling_Guide (overview) and [1] for resources. SpNeo 21:08, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

So the suggestion is to have a central location for all misspellings? Or each page to define variations in a single place? It seems to me that dialectic differences go beyond spelling (I wish I had an example. Does anyone have one?) and into grammar, punctuation and phrasing (these differences might be verging on the ultra-anal; again, I have no examples). Before reading this discussion I posted a suggestion for a pretty-much identical system: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (spelling)#Tagging_pages. All I'd like to add to the discussion is the possibility of having everything required to render the text in each individual tag, the tags wrapping phrases and not just single words, and the symbols for dialects perhaps being <language>-<country>, like "en-GB", "en-AU", "en-US", "es-ES", "es-MX" etc. - information which can be obtained from users' locale and things like that? (vague guess). So an example of wrapping single words might be:

There was immense [[dialect:en-GB|humour|en-US|humor]] in the way she fell off the [[dialect:en-GB|kerb|en-US|curb]].

And wrapping the whole phrase could be:

[[dialect:en-GB|There was immense humour in the way she fell off the kerb|en-US|There was immense humor in the way she fell off the curb]].

However, wrapping the whole phrase in this exampe is a little insane, but as I say I can't think of any grammar / punctuation / phrasing examples.

It seems this could go beyond dialect differences, since it is about people's preffered style. So maybe there could be a more general tag which could be used in this way. Can anyone think of any examples beyond dialect? Could information be gleaned from user info like browser/locale etc., or would it need to be configured? If so, a default behaviour would have to be decided. It's basically adding more meta-data to the content. For example you could wrap plot spoilers in some tag (maybe it's already done in this way) and the user could decide they don't want plot spoilers to be displayed. --Splidje 15:18, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

There would be a central database of spellings, that maps

{{EN::humor}}

to "humour" if your preference is en-GB and "humor" if your preference is en-US (and so on for other dialects). If users do not specify a preference, they get the default, which could be US, I don't care. If they care, they should set their preferences accordingly.

This means that you would not (as I was misguidedly originally proposing) have something like

[[dialect:en-GB|humour|en-US|humor]]

every time, because it would be redundant given the centralised database of variants. Redundant means potentially wrong, unnecessarily more difficult to maintain and more complicated.

I understand what you mean by other grammatical/punctuation variations, but I think we should stick to spellings to start with, for the following reasons: 1. It's much simpler 2. It would be much easier to convince people that this is a good idea (and as you can see it's not easy) 3. That enhancement is probably not needed. In other words, I think that anything more complicated than "downtown" vs. "city centre" should not be done just yet.

Finally, please let's carry on the debate on the spelling discussion page, this page has been archived. PizzaMargherita 17:56, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

"See also" and "Related topics" sections

I have a bot fixing various mistakes in the "see also" and "external links" sections, while is going it could easily turn "related topics" into "see also", as it seems a bit strange to me that we have 2 names for the same thing, especially as "related topics" isn't used that much anyway (at a guess I would say 90% of articles use "see also"). what do you think? Martin 17:58, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Go for it! --Maru (talk) Contribs 22:26, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

From my experience there are not many "Related topics" left. I think it is time to get rid of them as well as to update the respective section in the Manual of style (Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#"See also" and "Related topics" sections). Cacycle 00:23, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Great! I am glad to see somebody doing all this. Bobblewik 13:45, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I've been bold and removed "related topics", my bot will take a while to finish, but soon everything should be nice and tidy. Martin 14:57, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

By the way, the MoS on "See also" now says: "If you remove a redundant link from the See also section of an article, it may be an explicit cross reference (see below), so consider making the link in the main text bold instead" but there is no mention of makinging "explicit cross references" bold, nor anythining else about them, below, nor above on thsi page either. is this a reference to soemthign that was changed or removed? DES ^(talk) 15:29, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

The reference to bolding "cross-references" is immediately below (like the next sentence), so the phrase "see below" is a little misleading. But this use of bold text isn't applied extensively in WP; more often, {{main}} is used, or something like Circumcision is illegal in many countries; see Legal status of circumcision. So I propose we dump the reference to bolding completely. —Wahoofive (talk) 16:13, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I have never seen it used. Martin 16:22, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Paragraph spacing

Shouldn't there be at least two or three more pixels of spacing between paragraphs? I recently edited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bipartisan_Campaign_Reform_Act and decided to double space the paragraphs. I think the paragraph spacing should be equal to the height of a line, like it is now in the text box I'm typing in.

Here's a second paragraph to demonstrate how close it is to the one above by default. The problem is made worse when the last line of the paragraphs end close to the right margin, because there's even less space to indicate the paragraph's end. If everyone indented, it wouldn't be such an issue, but I wouldn't suggest that.

This paragraph is double spaced from the one above. There should be no need to double space paragraphs to obtain proper spacing.

This paragraph is single spaced, plus I used the paragraph style "padding-top: 8px;", as I did with the one below. There's less spacing than the double carriage return, but this is acceptible to me too. I'm viewing it in Internet Explorer.

This paragraph is single spaced, plus I used the paragraph style "padding-top: 8px;", as I did with the one above. There's less spacing than the double carriage return, but this is acceptible to me too. I'm viewing it in Internet Explorer.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.247.88.14 (talk • contribs) 2005-11-01 13:22:05

I am content with the default amount of space between paragraphs. If I were not happy with it, I would edit my monobook.css to change the spacing with some CSS statements like the ones you have inlined above. I'm not sure whether or not anonymous users can have their own stylesheets (try editing User:71.247.88.14/monobook.css), and you would have to consider the possibility that your changes would affect other people (if you're not on a static IP address, for example). —HorsePunchKid→龜 19:06, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I concur with HorsePunchKid. I personally prefer the current paragraph spacing, most users prefer it as well, and no one's brought it up as an issue until now. Anyway, if a substantial minority does begin to complain about it, the better solution would be to add a feature to Preferences for adjusting it on a per-user basis, not goofing up individual articles or the main Monobook.css file (which already gets fooled around with enough as is). --Coolcaesar 06:30, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Let's see how a paragraph looks when superscript or subscript is used. Here's a superscript test to test my theory that a superscript creates extra line spacing and makes a sentence look like a new paragraph when it's not: E=mc². More space is created above the line with the equation to make room for the superscript 2. Here's a subscript test: CO₂. More space is created below the line with the formula for carbon dioxide to make room for the subscripted 2.

Here's a new paragraph using the current Wikipedia spacing. I'm going to preview this now to see whether the paragraph spacing looks appropriate with all the extra line spacing due to subscripting and superscripting in the previous paragraph. I see the problem I expected, at least in Internet Explorer 6. It's not just a matter of preference. It's a matter of supporting superscripting and subscripting while still being able to distinguish paragraphs by the spacing. Unless you all have no difficulty noticing a single extra pixel of line spacing. --Barry 08:39, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Spaces before and after mdash?

I went to this page (the project page, not this talk page) to see if it offered any advice on whether or not I should use spaces before and after mdashes and ndashes. It didn't address the topic, but I saw that the page actually follows both practices. For example, in the section on "Punctuation", it has:

• Though not a rigid rule, we use the "double quotes" for most quotations—they are easier to read on the screen—and use 'single quotes' for "quotations 'within' quotations".

• Therefore, avoid excessive use of contractions — such as don't, can't, won't, would've, they'd, and so on — unless they occur in a quotation.

I have a preference for spacing before and after, but it's not a strong preference. Obviously a space before but not after is wrong, as is a space after and not before. I sometimes come across errors these on Wikipedia, but if I'm correcting them, I'm not sure whether I should remove the space on one side or add it on the other. Is there a standard policy on Wikipedia? I'd like to be consistent.

Also, I've read comments on talk pages about when to use mdashes and when to use ndashes. I've also read about it in Hart's Rules There seem to be different opinions, and again, I'd like to follow the official policy, if there is one. Can anyone locate me to a page that would help me? Thanks. Ann Heneghan ^(talk) 11:11, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

See the supplementary manual Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes). (Available only through the navbox to the right. Shouldn't the main text at least mention it?) Femto 11:52, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Femto's cmt sounds sensible and noncontroversial; one-liner duly added to "punctuation". –Hajor 14:29, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Obviously Ann Heneghan had already seen that page; it's no help for the question she asked. The answer is, you can just go with your own preferences if you correct one with spaces on one side and not the other, either add a space on the other side or delete the one that's there. I don't see any great need for a more specific rule, to always or never use the spaces, or to use them only for particular purposes. Gene Nygaard 15:24, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Just some things to consider: No spaces is more common but makes it more likely to confuse a dash for a hyphen, and sometimes an unspaced dash looks like it's touching the letters, which I don't think it should. I started using spaces around dashes on my website after I noticed that dashes aren't spaced farther from the text when text is justified with CSS, even if the words get more spread out. This makes dashes look even more like hyphens. Barry 01:12, 4 November 2005 (UTC)