Pmanderson (talk | contribs) →En dashes in page names: reply |
The Duke of Waltham (talk | contribs) →Opening sentence in lists: Comment |
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:It may not be laziness, but a lack of knowledge of what to do. I usually write as the first sentence something like "'''List aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa''' is a compilation of xxxxxxxxxxx.", where xxxxxxxxxxx explains the list contents using words other than contained in the name of the list. This uses the name of the article/list at the very beginning of the first sentence (like all Wikipedia articles should) and offers more information than provided by the name of the list. Please feel free to post this technique as a suggestion in the List MoS. [[User:Bebestbe|Bebestbe]] ([[User talk:Bebestbe|talk]]) 15:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC) |
:It may not be laziness, but a lack of knowledge of what to do. I usually write as the first sentence something like "'''List aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa''' is a compilation of xxxxxxxxxxx.", where xxxxxxxxxxx explains the list contents using words other than contained in the name of the list. This uses the name of the article/list at the very beginning of the first sentence (like all Wikipedia articles should) and offers more information than provided by the name of the list. Please feel free to post this technique as a suggestion in the List MoS. [[User:Bebestbe|Bebestbe]] ([[User talk:Bebestbe|talk]]) 15:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC) |
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::No, it's almost always better ''not'' to repeat verbatim the title wording. Take it straight on to give the reader ''new'' information. See my link above. [[User:Tony1|<font color="darkgreen">'''TONY'''</font >]] [[User talk:Tony1|<font color="darkgreen">(talk)</font >]] 15:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC) |
::No, it's almost always better ''not'' to repeat verbatim the title wording. Take it straight on to give the reader ''new'' information. See my link above. [[User:Tony1|<font color="darkgreen">'''TONY'''</font >]] [[User talk:Tony1|<font color="darkgreen">(talk)</font >]] 15:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC) |
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::: I regret to say, Tony, that I do not approve of your change to the lead in the slightest. Yes, the first sentence repeats the title, but the title is the subject of the page, and that subject should always be introduced in the article, and more specifically in the first sentence. [[Blue Iguana]] may not start with "This is an article about Blue Iguanas", but this is because articles should not refer to themselves, which is practically never true for lists; the article still has "Blue Iguana" in the first sentence, most prominent in its bold typeface. I should agree with a change not saying "this is a list of..." as long as it still introduces the subject, but your edit simply removed the introduction. The list as it stands now makes no sense without the title, a situation which should be avoided in all mainspace pages; the title is not any more integral a part of the prose than headings are. [[User:The Duke of Waltham|Waltham]], <small>[[User talk:The Duke of Waltham|''The Duke of'']]</small> 21:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC) |
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== En dashes in page names == |
== En dashes in page names == |
Revision as of 21:51, 23 June 2008
En dash or em dash in tables?
I'm finding it unclear whether ndashes (–) or mdashes (—) should be used in tables to mark "empty cells". For some reason I remember reading it somewhere, perhaps in an old version of the MOS, that mdashes should be used. This is also what a lot of WP:FLs use (though this may in part be because I always say they should be used in my WP:FLC reviews). A recent discussion at WT:FLC#hyphens in blank squares: why not en dashes? brought this issue up, and I just wanted to get a firm answer from the caretakers of MOS. Once this has been confirmed, could a line please be added to WP:DASH. Thanks! Matthewedwards (talk · contribs · count · email) 05:08, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
- I would propose one em dash since it's "fuller" than the en dash. [[::User:Headbomb|Headbomb]] ([[::User talk:Headbomb|ταλκ]] · [[::Special:Contributions/Headbomb|κοντριβς]]) 16:51, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
- In any event, using two dashes, be them en or em dashes, is probably not an option. A single character ought to be used. Waltham, The Duke of 20:50, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
- I agree with His Grace. And it's a matter of balancing the too small and the too large. To me, the en dash is just right: big enough to be unambiguous; not so big as to draw attention to itself, away from the substantive information in other squares. TONY (talk) 02:30, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
- I also agree that only one should be used, rather than two. WP:HYPHEN states not to do --, so it would be odd to advocate –– or ——. Whether – or — is used, I don't mind. My only concern is consistency, and many lists use a dash to identify "N/A" information. Matthewedwards (talk · contribs · count · email) 02:40, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
- I prefer em-dashes, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it's that big of a deal. The important thing is that we're consistent. Drewcifer (talk) 09:51, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
- Why? Why does it matter? We have dozens of ways of making tables; why does this one variation matter any more than the variation between all dashes and "N/A"? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:37, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
- If you're going to ask that, you might as well ask "What's the point of the MOS at all?". There are many many different ways of doing anything, and the MOS is here to standardise it. There is already a section on WP:HYPHEN and WP:DASH which explain which and how they should be used in prose, this will just explain which and how they will be used in tables. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 18:59, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
- What's the point of the MOS at all? To provide advice where useful, reasons for the various positions that literate English can take, and rules where there is project-wide consensus. Most of this page does not satisfy any of those criteria, but that's its fourth value: to show what a guideline page should not be. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:13, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
- If you're going to ask that, you might as well ask "What's the point of the MOS at all?". There are many many different ways of doing anything, and the MOS is here to standardise it. There is already a section on WP:HYPHEN and WP:DASH which explain which and how they should be used in prose, this will just explain which and how they will be used in tables. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 18:59, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
- Why? Why does it matter? We have dozens of ways of making tables; why does this one variation matter any more than the variation between all dashes and "N/A"? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:37, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
- I prefer em-dashes, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it's that big of a deal. The important thing is that we're consistent. Drewcifer (talk) 09:51, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
- I also agree that only one should be used, rather than two. WP:HYPHEN states not to do --, so it would be odd to advocate –– or ——. Whether – or — is used, I don't mind. My only concern is consistency, and many lists use a dash to identify "N/A" information. Matthewedwards (talk · contribs · count · email) 02:40, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
- I agree with His Grace. And it's a matter of balancing the too small and the too large. To me, the en dash is just right: big enough to be unambiguous; not so big as to draw attention to itself, away from the substantive information in other squares. TONY (talk) 02:30, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
- In any event, using two dashes, be them en or em dashes, is probably not an option. A single character ought to be used. Waltham, The Duke of 20:50, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
- Yes, Anderson, we all know your contrarian views on MOS. Thank you for restating them again in case we'd forgotten them. IMO, en dashes should be the standard; ems are just too large and unnecessary draw attention from the substantive information in the table. TONY (talk) 02:17, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
- Yes, I have just stated three functions this page could have, which would be actually useful to the Wikipedian community at large. Would you care to explain at length why you disagree with them? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:52, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
- All unhelpful comments to the contrary aside: back to the matter at hand. It appears there is no clear consensus on the en-dash vs. em-dash thing, but that there is some agreement on the fact that there should only be one dash, and that it should indeed be a dash (as opposed to a blank cell or N/A). So can we agree at least that far? As far as the en vs em thing, can we just leave that part up to the user? Or should we make a hard and fast rule anyways, with the slight advantage above going to em-dashes? (3-1 in favor of it) Drewcifer (talk) 07:35, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
- Heh, it was on my to-do list for today to come here, reboot this thread and find out what the next step is in regards to getting something finalised and mentioned on the MOS page. I was beaten to it..! -- Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 08:33, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
- Drewcifer's view finds me perfectly agreeable. We could try to make a decision here, but if it doesn't happen, something very likely (by the way, I prefer en dashes, so the score is now 3–2), a simple suggestion to avoid hyphens, double characters, and N/As would work. This is mostly a matter of appearance, after all, as the character will not affect any text. Waltham, The Duke of 18:27, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- Could somebody check 13.33 of this Chicago Manual of Style page; its called "Empty cells". (Subscription required) indopug (talk) 01:06, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- (←) Good idea, indopug. To quote the Chicago Manual of Style:
"If a column head does not apply to one of the entries in the stub, the cell should either be left blank or be filled in by an em dash or three unspaced ellipsis dots. If a distinction is needed between “not applicable” and “no data available,” a blank cell may be used for the former and an em dash or ellipsis dots for “no data” (see table 13.8). This distinction must be made clear in a note or elsewhere. (Alternatively, the abbreviations n.a. and n.d. may be used, with definitions given in a note.) A zero means literally that the quantity in a cell is zero (see table 13.3)."
- We've agreed against the empty cell, and I doubt three unspaced ellipsis are the way to go. So does that somewhat settle it in favor of the em-dash? Drewcifer (talk) 07:40, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- CMOS alone? Why is that the only external reference? It's a very faulty publication, even if it's good in patches. I do wish they followed their own advice in the publication itself, but there are numerous anomalies, only pages' distance from the so-called rules. CMOS is for hard copy. Here, my feeling is that en dashes, not em dashes, are about the right size. Anderson will push his usual "anything goes" line (you wonder why we bother having a style manual), but I trust that will be ignored here in favour of basic consistency. TONY (talk) 08:47, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- So far this is the only 3rd party source we have to go by. I checked my MLA manual, and it doesn't mention it. Drewcifer (talk) 08:50, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- I have no manuals to go and look at but the CMOS is used prolifically, and so I ask let's follow their example. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- So far this is the only 3rd party source we have to go by. I checked my MLA manual, and it doesn't mention it. Drewcifer (talk) 08:50, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- CMOS alone? Why is that the only external reference? It's a very faulty publication, even if it's good in patches. I do wish they followed their own advice in the publication itself, but there are numerous anomalies, only pages' distance from the so-called rules. CMOS is for hard copy. Here, my feeling is that en dashes, not em dashes, are about the right size. Anderson will push his usual "anything goes" line (you wonder why we bother having a style manual), but I trust that will be ignored here in favour of basic consistency. TONY (talk) 08:47, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- And I find that en dash are too small on monitors. While I do have a strong preference for em dashes because of their "fuller" look, I really don't see the harm in allowing users to choose between either, as long as they are being used consistently within an article, and that they are always centered. I would also like to see that users make sure that the significance of em/en dashes is in the table is clear. I would recommend something like the next table, but that might be too stringent. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 13:32, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Dash | Code | Meaning |
---|---|---|
- | - | Hyphen are not to be used to indicate anything in a table. |
− | − | Minus sign should only be used in the same way a plus sign (+) would. |
–?– | –?;&nash | Unknown/No data |
— | &emdash; | Not applicable |
Headbomb: So you suggest we do the PManderson thing and allow a choice between en and em dashes? I suppose on this occasion I could be swung around to agree, reluctantly. (Never let it be said that I'm inflexible!) And although your system of symbols in the table are logical and nicely worked out, I think they're too elaborate for this context. TONY (talk) 13:37, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Well like I said, I'm personally against en dashes as they are not visible enough in a table, and I will never use them unless there's a consensus that em dashes are evil. I would much rather have em dashes all across than a mix of en dashes and em dashes, but if we can't find consensus on this, then MoS shouldn't favor either. The table thing isn't meant as much more than a way to present things on the MoS. I'm a fan of tables, as they allow things to be summed up very neatly. See Common mathematical symbols for another example of the "summarization power" of tables. With em dashes, of course :P. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 14:38, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Paragraphs in block quotations
WP:MOSQUOTE recommends using <p>...</p> paragraph tags around each paragraph in a block quotation. An easier workaround is to nest a single div, then wikitext respects the line breaks correctly. So the example becomes:
<blockquote><div> And bring us a lot of horilka, but not of that fancy kind with raisins, or with any other such things—bring us horilka of the purest kind, give us that demon drink that makes us merry, playful and wild! —Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba </div></blockquote>
Result:
And bring us a lot of horilka, but not of that fancy kind with raisins, or with any other such things—bring us horilka of the purest kind, give us that demon drink that makes us merry, playful and wild!
—Michael Z. 2008-06-12 04:33 z
WP:Captions, WP:PERFECT
WP:Captions doesn't get as much attention as some pages. This was just inserted in a new section last night: "Unless relevant to the subject, do not credit the image author or copyright holder in the article. It is not necessary to fulfill attribution requirements of the GFDL or Creative Commons licenses as long as the appropriate credit is on the image description page, and it implies ownership of free content, which contradicts Wikipedia policy." Thoughts?
Also, an editor wants to largely rewrite WP:PERFECT, and we haven't attracted any discussion there. Please see the talk page. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 12:28, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
- The editor can try as much as they want; the page will never reach perfection. :-D
- The captions addition looks reasonable. Waltham, The Duke of 23:40, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Please can I have permission to write 'there is a 9 mm gap' and 'there is a 9 millimetre gap'
Please can I have permission to write 'there is a 9 mm gap' and 'there is a 9 millimetre gap'. Currently the former is permitted but the latter is forbidden. Both are identical except that one is symbolic. Both are unambiguous. Lightmouse (talk) 12:34, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
- In this respect, ISO has identical requirements with those of our MOS, I believe. How sage of them to take us as the standard. TONY (talk) 12:38, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
NIST's Special Publication 811 (page 16) takes the same position described by Tony1. They say it is because "the value of a quantity should be expressed in a way that is as independent of language as possible". On pages 17 and 18 the same guide says that "key elements of a scientific or technical paper, particularly the results of measurements and the values of quantities that influence the measurements, should be presented in a way that is as independent of language as possible" and that using symbols rather than spelled-out units promotes language independence. They go on to say
Occasionally, a value is used in a descriptive or literary manner and it is fitting to use the spelled-out name of the unit rather than its symbol. Thus, this Guide considers acceptable statements such as “the reading lamp was designed to take two 60-watt light bulbs,” or “the rocket journeyed uneventfully across 380 000 kilometers of space,” or “they bought a roll of 35-millimeter film for their camera.”
Even though the MOS suggests more extensive use of spelled-out units than NIST does, I think that a person with limited ability to read English is more apt to pay attention to the parts of an article that does uses symbols (such as tables), so when using symbols, we should follow NIST's lead and try to be as language-independent as possible.
I am not familiar with the customs of other languages as far as whether or not numerals used as adjectives are separated from the noun with a hyphen. Since I don't know any better, I will suppose NIST knows what they are talking about and that it does indeed vary from language to language. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 13:21, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
- Indeed. Consider the following statements:
- "they bought a roll of 35 mm film for their camera"
- "they bought a roll of 35-mm film for their camera"
- "they bought a roll of 35-millimetre film for their camera"
- "they bought a roll of 35 millimetre film for their camera"
- "they bought a roll of 35-millimeter film for their camera"
- "they bought a roll of 35 millimeter film for their camera"
- as above but with thirty five, thirty-five, thirty-five-mm, thirty-five-millimetre, thirty-five-millimeter
- The first one is language independent and compliant with international standards. So I that is a *good thing* and the international nature of Wikipedia would imply that it should be more positive about such a version than regionally biased publications. All are unambiguous in English. I like the fact that I am permitted to write 'of 35 mm film' but I do not like the fact that if the unambiguous '35 mm' is expanded to the unambiguous '35 millimeter', it is forbidden without a hyphen. Lightmouse (talk) 13:58, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Your example might be the most unambiguous of the lot; there are many cases much more confusing. Compare, for example:
- "The fountain was lit for one hour."
- "The fountain was lit for one-hour periods."
The sentence must make sense as a person reads it; omitting the hyphen from the second sentence will cause a person to read it as the first, only realising their mistake (or, rather, the writer's) when reaching periods. I'd give you a better example—preferably one with millimetres—but I am not inspired enough at the moment. You get the point, though. Waltham, The Duke of 00:28, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
- His Grace is right: good writing eliminates the need for readers to reverse-disambiguate, even if it would take only a fraction of a second. Here, the preceding "a" does make it clear, but try the plural: "9 millimetre gaps [should be avoided]". Not nine gaps of a millimetre each, so "9-millimetre gaps [should be avoided]". Easiest for readers, then, if it's consistently applied whether or not there's preceding deictic ("a", "the", "these"). The appearance of a symbol rather than a name for the units is enough to signal that single millimetre gaps are not intended: you can't refer to mm (meaning "a single millimetre") using a symbol. TONY (talk) 04:01, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
I take the point about mm adding a useful layer of context.
On the point about amibiguity, I agree that it is possible for ambiguous phrases to exist. That is my entire point. The hyphen is a very useful tool to disambiguate values. I will argue strongly for them in values with ambiguity, and against them in values where there is no ambiguity. Many editors use hyphens for disambiguation and not otherwise, yet this mandatory rule for mandatory use of hyphens in all cases turns such writing into a crime without a victim. Quotes about hyphens include "If you take the hyphen seriously, you will surely go mad" and Churchill's "One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided as far as possible". Please think carefully about what I am suggesting: I am lobbying for an end to the mandatory use of hyphens where values and units are unambiguous. If you interpret that as lobbying for a ban on hyphens, then you misunderstand my point. Lightmouse (talk) 10:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
- To quote the English major sitting next to me: "Why do we care"? Language independence is a spurious issue; we are in English. Accessibility in multiple languages. which is what MIT means, is handled by having multiple Wikipedias. On hyphenation, we should follow usage, which has always been less hyphenated in American; therefore this is an ENGVAR issue. Delaying the reader by an unexpected huphen is as bad as causing him to hesitate over the absence of an expected one. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:44, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
"Many editors use hyphens for disambiguation and not otherwise, yet this mandatory rule for mandatory use of hyphens in all cases turns such writing into a crime without a victim." No, Anderson: you're the victim. TONY (talk) 03:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- Lightmouse and I have been discussing this issue elsewhere. As I noted there, I've always taken the hyphenation of adjective phrases to be standard grammar. I feel it would be simpler to just follow that rule than to have to judge whether the hyphen is needed for disambiguation. Allow unhyphenated adjectives when they aren't needed for disambiguation and you're likely to find the same when they are needed, simply through editors' mistakenly following the examples they see.
As for its being an ENGVAR issue, less hyphenation in general in some dialect group does not equal less hyphenation of adjectives in that dialect group. The argument is making a slight logical jump.
Regarding language independance; if others use this argument to base their standards on, good for them; but I agree with Anderson, this is the English WP. That said though, hyphens still should not be used with abbreviations/symbols, since it's just not done that way in English (whatever the reason be).
JIMp talk·cont 04:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- Jimp does correctly see a logical jump; but part of the American disuse of the hyphen is indeed its disuse in compound adjectives unless necessary for clarity. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
I have no statistics but my belief is that ambiguous unit values are rare. I cannot think of a single instance where I have come across a need to disambiguate a unit value with a hyphen. There are cases where I use hyphens as part of grammar but this is not one of them. I frequently read adjectival unit values freely written on Wikipedia and elsewhere that do not have hyphens. It makes no difference to the readability and unlike many grammar issues, it does not look odd. I would not be making such a fuss if it were not hard-coded into the widely used convert template. It is not opt-in, it is not opt-out, it is enforced. Anyway, it seems that I am the only one speaking out against this and I hate to disagree with some of the respected editors here. I have stated my opinion and I have not convinced you. Lightmouse (talk) 19:12, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- I will support this; but then I respect some editors less than you do. The solution is not to use the template where its results are strange. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- Anderson: North Americans are by no means some monolithic block in their attitudes to hyphenation. Have a look at Scientific American. TONY (talk) 03:36, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Unflagged quotes
I have been informed that the article Edmonton municipal election, 1963 contains a quote. Now that I know it is a quote, I can see it. However, I have mistaken it more than once for ordinary text and converted a unit in the text. This has unintentionally annoyed the most frequent editor (User:Sarcasticidealist). I think that there is something unusual about unflagged quotes. There must be some way in which that article can flag quote text to the uninitiated user. Can anyone suggest what needs to be done? Lightmouse (talk) 11:05, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
- If it's a direct quote, the editors inserting it should make that clear. Personally, I either use regular double-quotes "like this," or the {{cquote}} tag (though that tag can get distracting for large numbers of quotes). — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 12:03, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
- I hope you don't do it like that: MOS clearly states that the comma needs to be after the closing quotation, no matter how Anderson would like it to be. TONY (talk) 03:34, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- Yes, Tony, we all know you've continually pressed for this provincialism, in an effort at language reform. "A little learning is a dangerous thing." Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:18, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- I hope you don't do it like that: MOS clearly states that the comma needs to be after the closing quotation, no matter how Anderson would like it to be. TONY (talk) 03:34, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
The tag would make it easier for a bot to avoid. I am in the bad books of the principle editor, having failed to see the unflagged quote on three occasions. Can you take a look at the article? Lightmouse (talk) 12:34, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
- Yeah, I took a look. I can see why the editor doesn't want the quoted material converted. And quoting could interfere with the flow of the article (most of the text outside the tables would be quotes). However, as you point out, it causes confusion for other editors, who don't realize it's direct quotes.
- I suggest bringing this up on the article's talk page for discussion. See if Sarcasticidealist would be willing to place quotes himself, or allow you to place quotes. My personal suggestion would be to quote the actual ballot questions themselves, individually, and leave the result numbers unquoted. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 12:59, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
- We should not write for the convenience of bots. !!!!— Preceding unsigned comment added by Pmanderson (talk • contribs) 22:59, June 15, 2008 (UTC)
Has anyone ever created a bot that successfully avoids quotes? That would be quite suprising, considering the may ways quote marks are used. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:13, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
- A bot could avoid an entire page containing the string 'quote'. If the option exists, some bot tasks would make use of it. Lightmouse (talk) 21:52, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
- Edmonton municipal election, 1963 doesn't contain it. A comment could be added, but that's a one-time solution. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:59, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
- An article might not contain the <blockquote> tag, it might only have quotation marks. These are tough for a bot to keep track of, since they are also used for other purposes, such as a symbol for arcseconds. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 05:03, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
This is why commenting on the talk page is a good idea. Bots can do that; they can even be programmed to avoid doing a page twice. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:56, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
Double quotes would be fine too. I don't care how it is done. Something needs to be done to that article. Lightmouse (talk) 04:46, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- I have no problem with one time solutions; the one I would propose here is an "avoided articles" list for the bot, such that after one (reported) false positive, the bot is told to avoid that page. I have no problem with occasional false positives, since these are the price you pay for having bots, and I think the price is well worth it. My concern in this case was that this was a four-time false positive, and I was beginning to become irritated (though you're not in my "bad books", Lightmouse, and I'm sorry if my message was too harsh). If you could just add the article to an avoid list for your bot, and agree to do the same with any future false positives reported to you, I'd be quite satisfied. Failing that, I don't object to having quotes put in the article, but, as I'm no MOS-guru, I'll leave it to somebody else to determine the appropriate way of doing so. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 04:52, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm no kind of guru either but I've had a go at the article. I put the excerpts in blockquotes, hope that this sorts things out nicely for all concerned. With respect to conversions to metric, perhaps some could be provided as footnotes. JIMp talk·cont 05:04, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- Your work looks good to me (including the footnote). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 06:25, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
I've gone ahead and added the footnote. JIMp talk·cont 07:30, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks. That should make it easier to avoid in future. I hope!
- I do go to great lengths to avoid false positives. By their nature, false positives are visible and frustrating to the victims. They damage the reputation of the bot.
- PS to Sarcasticidealist, your message was not harsh, in fact I think you have been very reasonable. I hope we have got a good solution. Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 19:26, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Footnotes not at the foot?
The "section management" subsection says: "The standard order for optional appendix sections at the end of an article is See also, Notes (or Footnotes), References, Further reading (or Bibliography), and External links; the order of Notes and References can be reversed."? Does anyone know why footnotes are not at the foot? Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 19:01, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- Sure they are References, Further reading (or Bibliography) and External links are under-foot. Why's a hot dog not a dog? ... But seriously, though, it's because the notes are meant to be more closely tied to the text, they are more or less an addition to the text so should go with the text. JIMp talk·cont 19:11, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the quick response. I understand the reasoning but I wonder whether it takes into account that folks generally get to the footnotes by clicking on a link (and return to the text the same way). So there is no benefit to putting the notes closer to the text (and there is a detriment because readers have to scroll through the "footnotes" to get to potentially valuable information). Were those factors considered when it was decided that Wikipedia footnotes are like hot dogs?Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 19:47, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
- I decided it yesterday. :-D
- Seriously now, I agree with Jimp; the "See also" and "(Foot)notes" sections are closely connected to the article, in contrast to the following sections, which are effective exits from Wikipedia. The distinction is mostly one of relevance, but it concerns usability as well: with the exception of succession and navigation boxes, categories, and sister-project boxes (all of which are at the bottom anyway), all useful information to people not really concerned about further research ends with the "See also" links (if present), unless there are notes unconnected to referencing, which are right below said links. Waltham, The Duke of 03:08, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
This doesn't respond to my point that interactive users can jump to footnotes. (In fact this brings up an additional consideration: If "footnotes" comes before other sections then any footnote in the later sections will will appear above the footnote signal. That doesn't make sense if, as the responses to my comments seem to say, we should ignore the interactive features of on-line footnotes.) Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 12:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- Excellent point; I have only now noticed it. In none of the appendix sections are footnotes ever used. It is a wiki-universal constant. Thus, it is to the readers' advantage for the footnotes to be as high as possible within the appendices, and currently they occupy the second slot—if it weren't for the importance of keeping "See also" first, we'd see the footnotes in their place. Actually, there are many articles, like Palace of Westminster, where footnotes are first due to an absence of a "See also" section; this is desirable, because it indicates that the links have been integrated in the article's text. In a perfect article, the footnotes would be first, right under the text. And everything below them would be footnote-free.
- As far as your initial question is concerned, thereto I am sorry to say I had forgotten to reply, the answer is simple: Wikipedia is not paper. Footnotes were at the bottom of pages in books, where there were neither internal ("See also") nor external links. Special accommodations must be made, of course, for electronic means of communication. Now, scrolling may be unpleasant, but there are benefits in keeping the footnotes where they are. Semantics (relevance to text) and the lack of footnotes in the appendices are two. Another is that having the footnotes at the bottom would worsen the position and visibility of the categories and would be a rather awkward way to end the page (the navboxes don't really match after the footnotes). Another still is that footnotes cannot come after the external links, the sole difference of which from references is that they are not used for sourcing. I suppose I could find more if I did some research.
- The fact is that the order of the appendices has been discussed much, and the current order has evolved through widespread editing practices (most of Wikipedia's articles have such sections at the bottom, so the experimentation field is, and has been, vast). Not much has really changed that could make the arguments leading to the current consensus moot. Waltham, The Duke of 17:15, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- Thank you very much for the education. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:50, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- The section you're quoting continues: "For information on these optional sections, see Wikipedia:Layout#Standard appendices and descriptions...", and there's additional explanation there, including, appropriately enough, in the footnotes. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 23:20, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Fractions
Some mention should be made (if there is a preference) of how to write fractions. Use the characters like ¾ or do it manually like 3/4? I believe there are only characters for the 4 or 5 most common fractions. Or should fractions be done away with altogether and only decimals used? Miken32 (talk) 03:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- It is neither possible nor desirable to do away with fractions altogether. The less common fractions can be constructed using the {{frac}} template. e.g. {{frac|22|7}} gives 22⁄7. Hesperian 03:34, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
misleading (deceptive?) edit summaries
Anderson marked his recent edit of the "Ellipses" section as "ce", but it was no mere copy-edit. Among about a dozen changes were:
- several substantive changes in the guideline (the removal of "recommended" and "strongly deprecated", and the morphing of a direction "Put a space ..." into a description "A space ... will render it more visible");
- the removal of the "With square brackets" subheading, without prior discussion of how this is an improvement;
- the use of a wrong word "Elision" as a subheading ("would've" is an ellision); and
- a change that rests on a technical point that we'd all like to know about ("Three spaced periods (. . .). This is an older style that is unnecessarily wide and requires non-breaking spaces to keep it from breaking at the end of a line." --> "may require").
I am reverting this change pending Anderson's raising of these issues here; that is the way things are done for all but non-substantive changes. At the very least, I must ask Anderson not to conceal substantive changes to MOS under edit summaries that indicate otherwise. I'm retaining his one worthwhile, uncontentious change, from "reliable" to "predictable".
- The section was, and remained, under a clean-up tag. It needs to cleaned up largely because the present evaluations are:
- "part of sentence ... another part" is acceptable.
- "Part of sentence … amother part" is disrecommended.
- "Part of sentence . . . another part" is grudging tolerated, if formatted as done here; if it is to be forbidden, there should not be instructions on how to do it.
- "Part of sentence...another part" is forbidden, although it is quite commonplace.
- Does anyone claim that those exact prescriptions are either rational, or commended by any external style guide? if not, they should be cleaned up. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:06, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
In addition, I ask Anderson to take note of His Grace's edit summaries concerning Anderson's removal of the guideline WRT em-dash spacing. This is yet another instance in which Anderson's unilateral changes have had to be fixed. TONY (talk) 04:02, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- It has never been consensus to forbid the spaced emdash, which is the house usage of several respectable publishers. Our last poll on the matter showed a majority, but not consensus, to deprecate it; of those, several resisted deprecating it so far. This is the sort of nonsense that brings MOS into disrepute. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:06, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- You mention consensus, but I am not certain that you fully understand its meaning: it is in both the numbers and the arguments. Although in this case we've had a support percentage of over 70–75%, which is often interpreted as consensus on its own, personally, I always take arguments into consideration. Apart from "I like it" and "it is used in some style guides", I cannot recall any meaningful arguments specifically in favour of spaced em dashes; there was a rather out-of-place one about ASCII, which was easily refuted, and some concerns about a proposed conversion scheme that's never actually left the drawer. On the other hand, there are arguments about wrapping, intrusiveness, and consistency that do tip the balance towards unspaced em dashes—arguments which were not satisfactorily countered.
- All in all, the decision was legitimately taken by the community, after a discussion and a subsequent poll confirming the result. Consensus was then applied... And you were left to argue the case on your own.
- And, I must say, rather badly, too. Even if you were right, acting as you do would only serve to weaken your position. Waltham, The Duke of 22:31, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- Anderson: Again, His Grace has concisely packaged your lesson. In addition—
- I think we expected an admission and apology for misleading us in your edit summary, even if it had been inadvertent. But nothing ... silence ... as though you think such deception is acceptable behaviour. Why do I still bother to carefully delineate substantive and non-substantive changes in my edit summaries, I wonder?
- I understand your wish to put a contrary view, but your three examples above contain mistakes and are not entirely clear.
- In any case, cogent reasons in terms of our readers are required, not the implication that the endorsement of dead-tree style-guides is central to what we allow online. On the last example, why would we want to explain how to do something we only grudgingly accept? The three, wide, put-your-finger-between-them dots are unnecessarily disruptive to the visual appearance and reading experience of our text. Game over.
- I place tight limits on my time budget for fighting your contrarian pet-peeves, so I'm not interested in a drawn-out battle on this one. TONY (talk) 04:30, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
Three threads
I see three threads here.
- Whether Sept is disruptive or not is a question for Sept (and I have emailed him personally) and for WP:ANI or Arbcom, not for any of us. I have my opinion, which I would be happy to share with WP:ANI or Arbcom, but it's above my pay-grade to offer it here.
- Although I don't see a credible threat to Wikipedia at this time, Wikipedia will founder at some point in the future if we don't find a way to generate high-quality articles at a faster rate, especially by integrating the efforts of people who don't currently see themselves as Wikipedians. Encyclopedias used to be boring, but now that Wikipedia is at the top of most Google searches and is the staging area for so many content fights, encyclopedias are sexy as hell, and everyone wants to get in on the act. And Google and Encyclopedia Britannica actually pay people to write articles, so if we don't get our act together, one of these days we're going to get our asses handed to us. Content experts simply have no interest in writing articles in an environment where the rules for how to write seem arcane, not well explained, and transitory from day to day. That's an impression that many have, but contrary to Sept's position that Featured Articles are crap, we really have nothing to be ashamed of; we've all tried to balance competing concerns without being authoritarian. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes not, but we have nothing to be ashamed of. Which segues into...
- It's always possible to argue that we got it wrong, and the wiki way is to be just as patient, transparent and flexible as possible. There are an endless number of judgment calls available on balancing the needs of editors vs readers, less-experienced vs more-experienced writers, academicians vs journalists vs bloggers, Wikipedians vs "itinerant" content-experts, usual journalistic practice vs what would be ideal for the visually impaired (see WP:ACCESSIBILITY), North American vs other flavors of English, and on American English pages, guidance from MLA (for academicians) vs Chicago (for authors) vs AP Stylebook and The NYT Manual of Style and Usage (for journalists). We could fill the page with the available tradeoffs that can never quite be settled. The hardest tradeoff is what is (in the minds of Wikipedians, as reflected by page content) vs what should be, or could be if we're lucky. The point (and I do have one) is that Wikipedia is not helped by obsessively wringing our hands and bemoaning our lack of certainty several times a day on multiple style guidelines pages. Writers are not served by continually shifting the goalposts in a pseudo-random way, and even if we thought this approach were a good thing, it would seal our eventual defeat at the hands of Google or EB or any other company that doesn't require writers to put up with this kind of crap. Let's do something really big, the bigger the better...involving Arbcom would be fine with me. Let's ask all of our more prolific writers, and journalists and academics not closely affiliated with Wikipedia as well, to spend some time looking over and talking about the style guidelines, do the best job we can to make sure everyone is heard and that all possible tradeoffs are respected as tradeoffs (rather than just labeling unpopular opinions as "wrong")...and then stop. Just stop. Stop inviting editors to make changes to style guidelines and then slapping them down when they do (which happens on a daily basis), stop inviting accusations that we're not educated or broad-minded enough in our recommendations (we make the invitation by not justifying and pointing to the consensus-generating discussions), stop the daily warfare over doubtlessly fascinating fine points of English usage that we don't have time to obsess over any more. Wikipedia's coverage of a number of subject areas is atrocious, and many people are expecting a printed encyclopedia next year. Anyone who knows Wikipedia well enough to be arguing about style guidelines would be much more useful writing and reviewing articles. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 16:53, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hm, no replies, and Tony tells me it won't work; I trust his judgment, but that makes me sad. To clarify, I think my suggestion would probably require Arbcom, or possibly Arbcom rubber-stamping something done at MEDCAB, saying "the following long list of issues is settled for now"; none of us here has the authority to say that. The big issue here is the chilling effect on bringing more good writers in to Wikipedia; they're chilled because we don't make the effort to make the connection between Wikipedia's writing rules and culture and what they already know, and Wikipedians are chilled because we feel fragile (needlessly) and don't want strangers changing things from what we know. If I'm not being persuasive, perhaps all this will make more sense if we can recruit more good writers to Wikipedia, and watch what happens. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 12:02, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- I may have, once again, made the issue too complicated. The "crap" I'm referring to isn't any particular bad advice in the style guidelines...otherwise I would have changed it...it's dumping the unpleasant back-and-forth process of making these difficult judgment calls on the heads of random editors as a way of avoiding taking a stand ourselves. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:03, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
Language differences proposal
I have never stated a topic like this before, so I thought it might be best to start here. I believe that the minute differences in language and spelling between UK and US English can be reconciled using a translation system that is similar to the process that has been developed for the Chinese WIkipedia. Under their translation system, users have a choice of selecting either one of the following as their "viewing language" on Wikipedia:
- Traditional Chinese
- Traditional Chinese with Taiwan-specific vocabularies
- Traditional Chinese with Hong Kong/Macao-specific vocabularies
- Simplified Chinese
- Simplified Chinese with Mainland China-specific vocabularies
- Simplified Chinese with Singapore/Malaysia-specific vocabularies
I believe that this system has the potential to, in addition to bridge the difference in language, localize the encyclopedia for users in the wide and diverse Anglophone world. With this system in place, we can disregard the rules in regards to "-ize" or "-ise" or "-or" [as in behavior] or "-our" [as in labour].
So, I would like to put this out as a feeler, and see if anyone is interested in pursuing this further. Arbiteroftruth (talk) 06:27, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- I'm not aware that anyone has written such "translation" software either inside or outside of Wikipedia. I'd love to have some kind of tool like this, but I'm dubious. There are plenty of British TV programs (sorry, programmes) in which the language still sounds foreign to me, despite years of effort to pick up the language. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 11:53, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- And that's the point of my proposal. We can completely localize Wikipedia for all English users, so British articles will look American to our American users. Someone will need to contact the Chinese Wikipedia on their translation softwares though. I know they exist, but I don't know how it works on a deep level. I do, however, know how it roughly functions.
- Their translation software functions through a set of keywords, and whenever they see those keywords, they will convert them from Traditional to Simplified, or vice versa. However, these conversions, due to the intricate nature of Traditional and Simplified Chinese, don't always work properly, so a template was established that allows a conversion to occur on a per-article basis. I believe with this, we can "separate" our Wikipedia into two major languages: US English and UK/Commonwealth English, without actually forking the project (foolish to do so, I would say), and have both of the "editions" to be readily accessed. Arbiteroftruth (talk) 13:40, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- Sounds like a can of worms to me, technically and in terms of the politics. I kind of like the melting pot we have of accepting and editing in each other's variety, enabled by the within-article-consistency rule, which works beautifully. The differences between our varieties, let's face it, are superficial—much less of a deal than between those Chinese dialects listed above. And there's the business of proper nouns, quotations and references. Oh, what a mess it would be. TONY (talk) 13:57, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- Their translation software functions through a set of keywords, and whenever they see those keywords, they will convert them from Traditional to Simplified, or vice versa. However, these conversions, due to the intricate nature of Traditional and Simplified Chinese, don't always work properly, so a template was established that allows a conversion to occur on a per-article basis. I believe with this, we can "separate" our Wikipedia into two major languages: US English and UK/Commonwealth English, without actually forking the project (foolish to do so, I would say), and have both of the "editions" to be readily accessed. Arbiteroftruth (talk) 13:40, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
[after numerous edit conflicts] Would it require us to mark it up? e.g. "The {{color}}s of the rainbow are..." Who would determine the mapping? e.g. who decides whether UK "elevator" must map to US "lift"? And how do you decide when US lift means UK elevator, and when it just means lift. Surely there are situations where a two similarly spelled UK words map to a single US word, or vice verse; how would such mappings be handled? How would quotations be handled? Would it fix article titles too? Hesperian 14:02, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- Ditto Tony: I like the local colour given by the variants: it's not as if it ever causes problems in comprehensibity, and it doesn't hurt us to be reminded that there's more than one way to skin a cat almost-instinct 14:07, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
I see Wikipedia, and more generally the internet, as a force that will eventually re-unify the English language, after a long natural process. In my opinion that's a good thing, not something to be prevented using technical means. The Chinese situation is special for two reasons: The traditional/simplified split hasn't grown organically but exists for political reasons. And as far as I know the Chinese writing system is used as a kind of interlingua between several mutually unintelligible languages. In that respect it's probably a bit like having a single Wikipedia for Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese (except that the Catalans would certainly be opposed to such a proposal). --Hans Adler (talk) 14:31, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- I doubt the translation could be complete, and a partial translation would be unpleasant. Consider "the red-colored woolen jumper" where colored was translated because the software could handle it, but jumper was not because the translator didn't know if it meant a sweater or a skydiver. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 14:34, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hans Adler, I partially agree. English has been and is subject to both centrifugal and centripetal forces. The Internet is just the most dramatic source of the increase in the centripetal in that balance—an increase that had been growing more gradually since the introduction of telegraphy, telephony and the rest of the ITC structure that has emerged over the past 150 years. But English is and will continue to be subject to centrifugal forces among non-native speakers around the world, who have a right to their own brand of the language. It will essentially become more and more a binary structure: the standard native ancestral English of the eight or so countries that might be classified as such; and a wealth of fragmented non-native local varieties, rich in their own ways. TONY (talk) 16:18, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
I want to make a response to the aforementioned questions here.
Regardless of whether English will be reunified in the future, we are dealing with the present. At this point in time, there are variations between different forms of English. Now, as far as server-side translation goes, it can be cumbersome, which is why I believe the per-article translation solution (in Chinese Wikipedia, they do this through a template) is a solution that fits our situation better for region-specific words. For words such as "colo[u]r", the server-side solution will be a better fit. This combination of solutions will do the trick. Now obviously, the problems with Chinese Wikipedia is much bigger than ours (theirs deal with readability, ours deals with the more minute matters that will not render a page unreadable), but I wanted to propose this to see where we can go with it. I think localization, while not an urgent matter, will make English Wikipedia much more special, and can serve to eliminate some of the rules that goes with styles and grammar (we can dispose with those regarding region-specific spellings) if this is implemented. Arbiteroftruth (talk) 17:20, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
Now, to give a sense of how the per-article translation thing can work, I will show you how those editors over at the Chinese Wikipedia deal with this.
They have this template that manually translates specific words within an article, which is the solution we can implement in our case. For example, let's say we are dealing with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (film). The English title is different. So, we do it as follows:
---
{{noteTA (the title name for the Chinese Wikipedia translation template)
|T (for page title)=en-us (for US English): Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (film); en-com (for Commonwealth English): Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (film)
|1 (for word 1)=en-us: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone; en-com: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
}}
---
So this is how it could work. It doesn't require too much markups. One template takes care of all words mentioned on that very page. No fuss. Arbiteroftruth (talk) 17:31, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- I wouldn't call this "no fuss", especially if the main purpose is to hide from clueless Americans the fact that there are people out there who speak and write a different variant of English. Or to have a technical solution that allows us to serve the Great Fire of London as the "Great Fire of London, England" to all those who need this explanation (so they don't book a ticket to nearby London, Ontario to see how much is left of the Roman city walls) without bothering the Brits with this nonsense. We are not a company who try to make money off a perfectly polished product; Wikipedia can afford this kind of rough edges. And one of the strengths of Wikipedia is that it's relatively immune to feature creep. --Hans Adler (talk) 17:50, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hear, hear. This is, to use an expression I've seen several times lately, a solution in want of a problem. Sure, there are some debates here and there, but the language issue is not causing any significant disruption (excluding this page :-D). The implementation of this proposal would significantly complicate page syntax, confuse editors (most of whom edit across the linguistic board), and engage server and editor resources for little practical gain (all articles are, or at least should be, legible to all readers right now, and the feature would probably only be available to registered users). Basically, it's more trouble than it's worth. I see no reason to compartmentalise the different language variants—with unforeseeable results on the quality of prose—and there are more important things to use our resources on anyway. Waltham, The Duke of 20:48, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- If I may offer a slight correction, Your Grace, this is an unworkable solution in want of a problem. Hesperian 01:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hear, hear. This is, to use an expression I've seen several times lately, a solution in want of a problem. Sure, there are some debates here and there, but the language issue is not causing any significant disruption (excluding this page :-D). The implementation of this proposal would significantly complicate page syntax, confuse editors (most of whom edit across the linguistic board), and engage server and editor resources for little practical gain (all articles are, or at least should be, legible to all readers right now, and the feature would probably only be available to registered users). Basically, it's more trouble than it's worth. I see no reason to compartmentalise the different language variants—with unforeseeable results on the quality of prose—and there are more important things to use our resources on anyway. Waltham, The Duke of 20:48, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
The problem with this idea is that it isn't ambitious enough. We should be internationalising all vocabulary and grammar. For example, instead of writing
- great idea
, we would write
- {{adjective-noun-pair|{{great}}|{{idea}}}}
This would expand to great idea for English speakers, but the {{adjective-noun-pair}} template would know to put the adjective after the noun for French speakers, and the other templates would expand to French words for them, so for them this markup would yield
- idée excellente
(Of course, we couldn't actually call those templates adjective-noun-pair, great and idea; we would have to come up with language neutral terms.) If enough effort was put into templatizing the grammar and vocabulary of every language and language variant in the world, then we could abandon this ridiculous idea of having a Wikipedia in each language, and write a single Wikipedia that could be read in the language of choice. The efficiency gains would be enormous, the only, very minor, downside being that only a handful of savant linguists would be able to contribute. Hesperian 02:11, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- P.S. Yes, I am being sarcastic, and yes, I already know that I know nothing about French. Hesperian 02:11, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- It might be of interest to you that this relic of French, namely nouns preceding adjectives, is an integral part of blazon, the jargon in which coats of arms are recorded. The strange writing style and obscure terminology ensure an exotic result that barely reminds one of English. :-) Waltham, The Duke of 04:17, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- The inverted word order doesn't necessarily come from French: it's what we call "marked" grammar. "The light fantastic" is an example. English grammar is binary in that many constructions are either marked or unmarked. Unmarked is the default.
- Concerning the proposal: I think it's doomed to failure. Let me make a point that the differences between the writing (and speaking) styles of individuals (subtle grammatical features and other choices) are typically greater than those between the so-called varieties of English. As the song says, "You say neether, and I say nyther". We are indeed lucky that the varieties are so trivial in their differences. It's remarkable. TONY (talk) 04:27, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- The example I am giving is from French. In any case, what you say is interesting. Perhaps there could be such a thing as convergent evolution in linguistics? Few optimum forms? Waltham, The Duke of 06:53, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- Convergent evolution? Has His Grace been reading Geoffrey Miller's book by any chance? TONY (talk) 08:12, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- Not yet. (Bloody exams...) But I watch a lot of documentaries. :-) Waltham, The Duke of 05:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Good luck, Duke. From the link Tony offers: "The theory makes many testable predictions". I'm not a psychologist, but I love popularized evolutionary psychology for exactly that reason: it comes off as a lot of handwaving at first, but then you realize that if various statements were wrong, they'd be easy to disprove, and they're damned hard to disprove. There's a lesson somewhere in there for WP:MOS, which I'll discuss down at #Stability. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 19:17, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- (nods) Scientists should never underestimate the power and importance of common sense. Waltham, The Duke of 05:26, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Good luck, Duke. From the link Tony offers: "The theory makes many testable predictions". I'm not a psychologist, but I love popularized evolutionary psychology for exactly that reason: it comes off as a lot of handwaving at first, but then you realize that if various statements were wrong, they'd be easy to disprove, and they're damned hard to disprove. There's a lesson somewhere in there for WP:MOS, which I'll discuss down at #Stability. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 19:17, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Not yet. (Bloody exams...) But I watch a lot of documentaries. :-) Waltham, The Duke of 05:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Convergent evolution? Has His Grace been reading Geoffrey Miller's book by any chance? TONY (talk) 08:12, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- The example I am giving is from French. In any case, what you say is interesting. Perhaps there could be such a thing as convergent evolution in linguistics? Few optimum forms? Waltham, The Duke of 06:53, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- It might be of interest to you that this relic of French, namely nouns preceding adjectives, is an integral part of blazon, the jargon in which coats of arms are recorded. The strange writing style and obscure terminology ensure an exotic result that barely reminds one of English. :-) Waltham, The Duke of 04:17, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Usage of diacritics
See the new proposal Wikipedia:Usage of diacritics.
"For a placename or person that is well known in the English-speaking world, i.e. is widely mentioned in English-language sources: ... " and then goes on to lay down rules. This seems to be at variance with WP:MOS#Foreign terms --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 19:09, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- Why is a page about diacritics trying to address non-diacritic characters like Ə? Strad (talk) 23:23, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
Question on "acting" titles
From the MOS, it would be "Governor Smith" or "Smith was the governor of someplace". How does it work with "Acting Governor Smith"? "Acting-Governor Smith"? "acting-Governor Smith"? "acting Governor Smith"? I'm trying to finish up Uriel Sebree and it was pointed out in the FA process how horribly inconsistent I was being.JRP (talk) 22:56, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
- I can't see any reason to hyphenate. As for capitalisation of acting, it would have to be capitalised if it is part of a title, even if the title Acting Governor isn't formalised in the sense that Governor is. A good example is when parliamentarians address the Speaker of the House. When addressing the holder of that office, they say "Mister Speaker" (or "Madam Speaker"); when addressing the deputy, they say "Mister Deputy Speaker"; when addressing a ring-in, it's "Mister Acting Deputy Speaker". To write it as "Mister acting Deputy Speaker" would be hideous. Hesperian 01:51, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
English language variations
How did other variations of the English language get introduced into Wikipedia if it was founded in the United States? Wouldn't the American origin have confined it to American English? Emperor001 (talk) 01:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- They put it on the Internet. We have the Internet outside the USA. JIMp talk·cont 01:34, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- Do you seriously find it hard to understand why articles such as Marmite and Farnley, West Yorkshire are not written in American English?
- By the way, as another American with a strong interest in European nobility, fiction and the number combination 00, would you happen to be related to User:Emperor00? --Hans Adler (talk) 02:09, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- I'm not saying it's hard to believe that British topics are in British English. It's just that when something originates in a country, it usually sticks to that country's version of English. For example, most books I'ver read by British authors but published in the U.S. were still British English. I very seldom see someone take the time to change the spelling. On the second comment. I have no clue who Emperor00 is. For all I know, someone ripped off my Username or maybe I coincidently chose a name similiar to his/hers. I just checked, that User is blocked. Emperor001 (talk) 02:59, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- A Wikipedia article doesn't originate from the US in the same way that a book does. The articles in the English language Wikipedia are originated and edited all over the world by editors of various backgrounds, very much unlike a book, which is usually written in one specific version of English. Wikipedia's founders could have mandated that all articles conform to American English, perhaps, but that would have been at odds with the intended culture of the project, I think. —Kevin Myers 03:41, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
It's not so much where Wikipedia originates from as who a particular article originates from. JIMp talk·cont 03:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks. That's all I needed to know. Emperor001 (talk) 04:05, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) Perhaps the source of the doubt is that Wikipedia originates in the United States, and that country speaks English, but think about the other versions: should the German Wikipedia be restricted to Germany and exclude Austrian German? Should the Greek Wikipedia leave Cyprus out? Here we deal with languages, not countries.
- PS: The Harry Potter books certainly haven't stuck to their native language. Even books can be adapted for other variants of the same language. Waltham, The Duke of 04:10, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- It's like standing around looking at a motor-vehicle accident: some Americans don't seem to realise that they're not sole owners of the language. TONY (talk) 04:19, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- Outrageous, especially since everybody knows the sole owners of the language are self-appointed Australians. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- It's like standing around looking at a motor-vehicle accident: some Americans don't seem to realise that they're not sole owners of the language. TONY (talk) 04:19, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
I appologize if I've offended anyone. I was just asking a question. Emperor001 (talk) 02:05, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- Anderson, who else? I thought I was the only one. CMOS certainly doesn't own the language, that's for sure. I've corrected your "ourageous". TONY (talk) 05:38, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
Desperately unimportant question
Speaking of opening cans of worms, could someone please point out where in MoS &c. one might find a citeable guideline on whether we should be calling England "England" or "England, UK". Am I just being blind? Ta. almost-instinct 10:29, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- I could find it anywhere but I'd go with "England" since it's well known. JIMp talk·cont 14:39, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- I believe the most relevant project is [[WP:UKGEO]. They have a guideline WP:UKTOWNS, and in WP:UKTOWNS#Lead* and examples they only describe the location up to the constituent country of the UK, but without mentioning the UK itself. To me this suggests not to use "England, UK" in other situations either. This would also apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; for these it could be more problematic because some people will think that Northern Ireland is the northern part of the Republic of Ireland. On the other hand, if it's wikilinked it shouldn't be a big problem. --Hans Adler (talk) 15:10, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
MoS and citation template conformance
The Template:Cite journal produces markup that appears not to follow the manual of style - for instance adding a title produces "title". and if the journal article itself ends in a question mark it produces "title?". The MLA style which seems to be the only major format that uses quotations places the quotes after the punctuation. One would expect to obtain formatting that conforms to the MoS by filling in citation templates. Shyamal (talk) 13:09, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
Ellipses
So why exactly is "first text...another text" forbidden? No reason is given; nor is any citation given for any of this. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:25, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- This is a possibility, although we don't follow it exactly as it requests spaces between each period: Editing Quotations. Three ellipsis points (periods with a single space before, between, and after each period) indicate material has been omitted within a sentence or at the end of a sentence. (CMS 2003, 459). --Laser brain (talk) 20:34, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- This is sufficient reason not to deprecate "first text . . . another text"; thank you. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:23, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- Well, bear in mind that's a print convention. I'm sure the CMS didn't have wikis in mind. The likelihood of me or anyone typing all those non-breaking spaces while writing an article is about zero. --Laser brain (talk) 21:36, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- That may be, although a sufficiently determined editor will type anything; I typed those. But at present we deprecate "first text . . . another text"; why do so? (why bother, if nobody will use it?) And above all, why forbid the opposite? A rational style guide would either say nothing, or present the case for and against each; we do neither. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:42, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- If we're talking about the ellipsis used in the sense of a dash, rather than omission, which is the sense I get from "first text...another text", then it's the same issue as with dashes. Publishers have used special characters for a long time; we're now in the age where people read and write much more democratically; people tend to type what they see on their QWERTY keyboards. This guarantees 3 things: 1. Older readers and writers (guilty) and readers and writers who have more of an academic bent or are using books for sources tend to expect dashes rather than "..." (although I kind of like the "...", always have); 2. Each year, you see more and more typographical characters being replaced by keyboard characters; and 3. There is often little standardization in the way keyboard characters are substituted for typographic characters, since it's a bottom-up phenomenon. Some people always put spaces around "..." when used in the sense of a dash, some people never do. I don't mind revisiting orthography issues every year, but I sure don't want to revisit them every week. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 21:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- That may be, although a sufficiently determined editor will type anything; I typed those. But at present we deprecate "first text . . . another text"; why do so? (why bother, if nobody will use it?) And above all, why forbid the opposite? A rational style guide would either say nothing, or present the case for and against each; we do neither. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:42, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- Well, bear in mind that's a print convention. I'm sure the CMS didn't have wikis in mind. The likelihood of me or anyone typing all those non-breaking spaces while writing an article is about zero. --Laser brain (talk) 21:36, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- This is sufficient reason not to deprecate "first text . . . another text"; thank you. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:23, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- I meant the sense of omission, especially since I foresee much hysteria at the thought of another variety of dash. But does it make a difference?
- The easiest way to avoid revisisting orthography is to say, once and for all, that there are many ways of punctuating English, most of them are questions of taste, and articles should decide among them by consensus on the individual article. Editors who felt that a given method was squashy or ornate would then be free to eschew it themselves, and persuade others to do so too. Let's do it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:49, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
- Anderson would have us kow-tow to CMOS on every occasion. Why? It's not bad in some respects, but crap in others. It's for dead-tree text, not online text. It has a very conservative (petrified, some might say) editorial policy that resists change with the times. Get over it and move on. TONY (talk) 04:39, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- I do wish Tony would take the novel approach of reading what I actually said. I don't think we should kowtow to CMOS; I think we should take the same approach as WP:NPOV: acknowledge all points of view, discuss them (in MOS, this would be mentioning their advantages and disadvantages) and let our editors decide on that basis. In particular, we should acknowledge and permit what any major style guide recommends, because some editors will use that style; just as we acknowledge and permit all national dialects. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:51, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I was so hoping that Chicago would represent a consensus among publishers, journalists and academics that Wikipedia could bootstrap off of, but Tony is right. Chicago is a horse designed by a committee; sometimes Chicago recommends things that are just goofy, and sometimes it goes on forever in a way that is just burdensome and inappropriate for Wikipedia. No one should be required to memorize Chicago's capitalization rules, or even follow them. But the good news is that, so far, I'm happy with the match between Wikipedian practices and the two manuals US journalists use the most, The NY Times Manual of Style and Usage and AP Stylebook. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:08, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
Dispute tags
Someone—Anderson, I suspect, although I can't be bothered at this stage to investigate—has been littering MOS with dispute tags. He's just put another on the ellipsis section. Now, most of these tags refer to the talk page, but the relevant talk is stale and has been archived. We need to remove these dispute tags unless there's an ongoing dispute on the talk page. TONY (talk) 04:46, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- I see that Tony has forgotten the point of the tag: That this, like the other reference to MOSNUM, should either say what MOSNUM says (it doesn't) or - preferably - be a single paragraph in summary style and a link to the relevant section on MOSNUM: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Numbers_as_figures_or_words. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:07, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- Comments on which? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:47, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- MOSNUM? Are we still referring to it thus? I thought it had been renamed to The MOS Page Which Must Not Be Named. :-D
- Seriously, though, I've heard that the situation there is quite bad, and since my idea about splitting the page has not even been commented on before its archiving, we might want to try something else, less drastic but equally effective. The situation must be tolerated no longer. Waltham, The Duke of 05:08, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
date autoformatting is optional
I'd like to remind users that for some time now, the autoformatting of dates has not been required.
There are four advantages in not linking dates:
- Inconsistent raw formatting within an article is obvious to editors and thus less likely to escape our attention. (The autoformatting mechanism conceals the inconsistencies from us, the very people who are most likely to enforce consistency, but the raw formats are displayed in bright blue to almost all readers, who are not registered and logged in. The rules for the choice of format in an article are in MOSNUM, here); they are easily summarised as (a) be consistent within an article; (b) take account of national ties to a topic; and (c) retain the existing format unless there's a good reason not to.
- There are fewer bright-blue splotches in the text, which makes it slightly easier to read and improves its appearance.
- The following issues concerning the dysfunctional aspects of the autoformatting mechanism do not arise:
- piped links to date elements (
[[20 June|20]]
,[[20 June]] [[1997 in South African sport|1997]]
) (several forms of piped links break the date formatting function); - links to date ranges in the same calendar month e.g. December 13–17 or the night of 30/31 May – the autoformatting mechanism will damage such dates (30/May 31);
- links to date elements on disambiguation pages;
- links to date elements in article and section headings; and
- links to date elements in quotations (unless the original text was wikilinked).
- piped links to date elements (
- As a minor advantage, edit windows are slightly easier to read and edit.
It may be that WikiMedia can be persuaded to invest resources in revamping the mechanism to avoid or mitigate these problems, but this is unlikely to occur in the short to medium terms. TONY (talk) 14:00, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- I agree with all the points, and would have no problem seeing the auto-formatting go, but I am not very optimistic about the outcome of any new discussion on the subject, given the results (or lack thereof) of the previous ones, held not long ago and in equally, if not more, public places. Anyway, one thing should be as clear as the optionality of date links: consistency within articles. Either use auto-formatting on all dates, or use it on none, and the more popular solution under the status quo would seem to be the former, knowing how deeply ingrained the practice is in Wikipedians' minds. Unless the system changes, I cannot easily see any change of mentality. Waltham, The Duke of 16:49, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- I agree on both points; if we had said to begin with that there are various means of presenting dates and different editors will use different ones, we would never have had autoformatting in the first place. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:53, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- What is "more popular" is totally irrelevant; I'm pointing out something that I believe many editors do not realise. TONY (talk) 17:37, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- Popularity is an inevitable aspect of a system based on consensus; the less popular will have a very hard time being consensus. But Tony's earthshaking announcement here will be read by the dozen of us - and most of us agree with it; I certainly do. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:46, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
Intuition
The word “counterintuitively” should be deleted from
- It's is the short form of it is or it has; counterintuitively, the possessive its has no apostrophe.
We don't need some party of editors declaring their intuition to be the intuition. As to my intuition, I would note that pronouns in general do not have apostrophes in their possessives:
- “his”, not “hi's”
- “her” and “hers”, not “her's”
- “your” “yours”, not “your's”
- “its” not “it's”
—SlamDiego←T 23:40, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
- The fewer 18-letter words in WP:MOS, the better. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:07, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Could the point be rephrased in such a way as not to appear to be making assumptions on what is and what is not intuitive? We're better off being objective about it, what we can say for close enough to certain it is a common mistake. JIMp talk·cont 18:18, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- How about "the possessive its, just like the possessive his and hers, has no apostrophe"? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:50, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- No need for "just", but a good idea. It may be clearer to use the substantive possessives. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:01, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- How about "the possessive its, just like the possessive his and hers, has no apostrophe"? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 18:50, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Could the point be rephrased in such a way as not to appear to be making assumptions on what is and what is not intuitive? We're better off being objective about it, what we can say for close enough to certain it is a common mistake. JIMp talk·cont 18:18, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Changed my mind: "its" is an analogue with the predicative "his" and "hers" and "theirs", but the mistake is more likely to occur when it's attributive: not "the food is its", but "this is its food". So I think we have to lose the "like his and hers" phrase, since the attributive analogues are "his" and "heR". TONY (talk) 06:11, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- I've seen it most often instead of "Its food is..." by confusion with sentence-initial It's, But wny bother to amend for detail? Both forms are possesives, and the analogy may still persuade somebody to comply with idiom. Few people capable of distinguishing attributes from predicates will make the blunder, so whom does more detail communicate with? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:04, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
I would definitely delete counterintuitively. My intuition was never that it should have an apostrophe. Why should it? Just because the two-words short form it's is pronounced the same way. Is it then also counterintuitive that there is written without apostrophe? One of the first things I realized when I started learning English was that there are many ways in which one pronunciation might be spelled. BTW, that sucks about this language ;-) Anyway, my point is that for me, personally, it was never the intuition and I am quite proud that it wasn't. If you have this intuition it only shows that you do not see the strikingly difference in those terms (semantically and grammatically). So, when we use counterintuitively in the MOS, we do not only impose on others what a common-sense intuition would be, which I find already a little bit insulting. Moreover, we exhibit that our intuition with respect to understanding this language is under-developed. Tomeasytalk 17:27, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Stability
Looking through the history for the main page I was astonished to discover how many edits—eg. over thirty in the last fortnight—are made to MoS. Its absurd that such a key set of WP guidelines be so unstable. Most editors have a hard enough time as it is keeping tabs on the various WP rules and guidelines—this endless chopping and changing is absurd. Do you expect every editor to check MoS every couple of days or so? I'll repeat that word: absurd. Yes things need to be discussed, but the frequency with which the main page is edited is, IMO, unacceptable, and makes a mockery of the concept of MoS. I write this in the full expectation that opposing parties will exploit replying to this as an opportunity continue to score points. That's fine—but stop letting it spill over onto the guidelines. Frankly, I think the page is verging on needing protecting almost-instinct 00:17, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- My suggestion is to make a big push to get everyone to slug it out, and then leave it alone for a while. Tony thinks it won't work, and he's right about most things, but if so, that's really a shame. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 01:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Considering the number of reverts, I'd say that simply counting edits is wrong, at least (or, some might say, especially) in the Manual of Style. If you will check the style updates, once a month, you will see that the actual changes are relatively few, and you can monitor them through said updates. Waltham, The Duke of 05:29, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Precisely: His Grace, as often, hits the nail on the head. Many day-to-day edits are reverted or subsumed in subsequent edits. It's surprising how little actually does change. That's my experience not only in perusing monthly diffs at MOS main page, but most other style-guide and policy pages. TONY (talk) 09:07, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- More accurately, it is stable because most editors know nothing about it, or have more sense than to care what it says; those who do care arrive individually, and are successfully reverted by the handful who have assumed ownership of the page, contrary to policy. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:59, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
I see the consensus is that I'm wrong so I withdraw my comments ;-)
But seriously its difficult for new editors to come to terms with the MoS—it seems so huge at first—and we worry about getting shot down for going outside the guidelines ... it just can feel like the ground is shifting beneath our feet ... almost-instinct 13:06, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- I do not think you are wrong. There are two issues:
- Edit frequency
- Rate of change of policy
- If edit frequency is low, then it is easy to conclude that policy is stable. If edit frequency is high, more effort is required to see what has changed. The effort involved in checking the net effect of rapid changes at wp:mosnum recently was one reason (amongst many) why I stopped being involved in a major debate. Lightmouse (talk) 14:15, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Reply to Almost-Instinct: I take your objection seriously, AI, and you come across on your userpage as intelligent and thoughtful, but I'm not qualified to respond to it because I'm North American, and so my instincts will be sufficiently off from yours that we will misunderstand each other in some ways. You say that you don't want to bring any articles through the GA/FA process. Certainly it can be daunting, but what you get back from having a lot of good writers look over your stuff can be more than worth the hassle. Can you give me an example of some of your work that you feel is made more difficult by either WP:MOS or by requirements at WP:GAN or WP:FAC? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:38, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Reply to Lightmouse: after I did the categorization work of "general style guidelines" vs "style/editing/policy guidelines" vs "specific guidelines", I decided to sit back for a while and watch. Everything I've seen makes me think I got it right. The thing that makes WP:MOSNUM so frustrating for a lot of us is that a lot of it concerns very targeted information, targeted to a specific set of articles and editors, but it's mixed in together with material that draws a very wide audience, things needed in most articles, such as how to deal with dates. I think the Duke was exactly right when he suggested we should pull some of this material apart; I wouldn't mind transferring the well-tread material to WP:MOS. It's the two different sets of editors rubbing elbows that causes the friction, which is why I didn't put WP:MOSNUM in CAT:GEN; it seems to function more as a "specific" guideline to me. Other than WP:LAYOUT (which I think I'm about to take out of CAT:GEN), and WP:MOS, the other 19 pages in CAT:GEN tend to be very collegial and stable, and also widely useful. I think WP:MOS and WP:LAYOUT could become more collegial and stable after a few issues are worked out. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:53, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Stability and WP:CONSENSUS
Okay, let's tackle the issue of stability. The folks at WP:CONSENSUS and WP:VPP know very well what "consensus" means, and I'm going to go point them to this conversation, so if this is wrong, I'll get an earful in a hurry. Let's take the latest addition to WP:MOS, from User:Betswiki (a new editor, or at least a new account, so I'll go leave a message on their talk page, and please don't BITE):
An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is the omission of material from quoted text or some other omission, perhaps the absence of the end of a sentence, deliberately left out by the author, often used in the representation of conversation in print. The ellipsis is represented by ellipsis points, a series of dots (three dots within a sentence, four dots at the end of a sentence). In traditional publishing the dots are separated by spaces and are separated from the surrounding text by spaces.
Not that bad, but not quite right, which makes it a good example for my point. There's an infobox at the top of every guideline and policy page that says, "Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus." So I have to curb my impulse to yank the edit just because I don't like it. I'm also not allowed to yank it on the grounds that the editor may not have followed that policy when they edited; that doesn't give anyone a "right" to revert. But there are lots of reasons to believe that most of this edit doesn't represent consensus and should be reverted. The first is precedence: new users get pointed to WP:MOS, it's the most commonly visited style guideline page, and its recommendations are argued constantly at WP:FAC. WP:SILENCE counts reading something and not taking action as indicative of consensus, and I don't see any history in the WT:MOS archives of argumentation over any of the things discussed in the new edit, so the previous text (before the last few days) represents at least the approximate consensus of thousands of people. That means that it doesn't matter if someone has a new clever argument, or knows that Chicago does it differently; that's not sufficient to change the page. WP:BRD does permit people to "act first, answer questions later", even on a guideline page, but anyone who has a habit of making changes without having their reasons handy is in line for a trip to WP:ANI for violation of "6. Attempting to ... impose one's own view of 'standards to apply' rather than those of the community" from WP:POINT. On a guideline page, your argument needs to be, not why you personally think it was an improvement, but why you believe that everything you've read on Wikipedia tells you that you changed it from something that didn't have consensus to something that did. (See WP:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_44#Using a policy page as a scratchpad to develop a proposal for Kim's discussion and links.)
If WP:MOS doesn't reflect consensus, that's easy to show. Regulars at WP:FAC and WP:GAN can search their memory of what people said when the issue came up. If the issue can be identified by keywords, the last database dump of en.wikipedia or page-specific Google searches would pull up evidence of disgruntlement if it exists. If there's no disgruntlement, then it has consensus. Anyone can start a new discussion on this talk page, and that discussion might lead to a new consensus, but three guys and a lot of handwaving can't overturn the apparent consensus of thousands of people. Three guys arguing about what they've seen at WP:FAC, WP:GAN, the WT:MOS archives, etc, can be persuasive, in my view, as long as they're being honest and accurate, of course.
So: is there anything in the new edit concerning ellipses that people believe already has consensus? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 20:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- Oh come on now; thousands of people have read and approved "An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is a series of three dots. It marks the omission of material from quoted text." Yeah, right. Is there any evidence that any user has ever noticed this bland truism, much less considered the alternatives? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:50, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
As for the matter at issue, I italicise the parts which seem to me mere statements of fact:
- An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is the omission of material from quoted text or some other omission, perhaps the absence of the end of a sentence, deliberately left out by the author, [and] often used in the representation of conversation in print. The ellipsis is represented by ellipsis points, a series of dots (three dots within a sentence, four dots at the end of a sentence). In traditional publishing the dots are separated by spaces and are separated from the surrounding text by spaces.
I do not claim any of the text is the best possible phrasing; but it shares that with the text it replaced and with the rest of the section.
The last sentence is vague on dating; for certain values of "traditional" I believe both claims made are true. But do we need a history of typography here? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:11, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- >Is there any evidence that any user has ever noticed
- Not knowing the finer points of WP:SILENCE is exactly why I invited the folks from WP:CONSENSUS and WP:VPP. WP:MOS was viewed 68,000 times in May; isn't that at least a suggestion that at least a hundred people read about ellipses? WT:MOS has around 120 archives, including rare comments about ellipses, and comments about things on either side of that section of WP:MOS; did everyone skip that part? People preparing articles for WP:GAN are strongly encouraged, and at WP:FAC are required, to read WP:MOS; are they all faking it? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 23:33, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
- I think that editors, in general, do not learn MOS by referencing it. They learn by being corrected. I know I didn't learn most things from Chicago Manual or from my corporate MOS because I was curious or just thought to look something up. I learned it because I got marked-up text back from my editor. My point is that you shouldn't take page views as an indication of how many people are actually learning things from the MOS. --Laser brain (talk) 03:42, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Indeed, much of the Manual is learnt indirectly, not least because:
- It's too large to learn by heart unless one is very interested
- Parts of it are simply hard to understand for some people, no matter how much they are explained
- Many people are simply too bored to look (and that also applies on policy and how-to pages and all other documentation)
- A great (possibly the greatest) part of the Manual is not really necessary to an editor due to specialisation; however, straying out of the usual field is rather difficult to predict
- Etc., etc.
- In all things there are those people who understand them better and can comfortably explain them to others; it is often a matter of how something is presented to one. Waltham, The Duke of 05:23, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Indeed, much of the Manual is learnt indirectly, not least because:
Experience shows that relatively few FA nominations are reviewed for MOS issues; on the other hand, most of those that are are reviewed with mechanical incompetence. Experience also shows that this often genuinely comes as a surprise, and justifiably so, to the nominator; the "rules" that are enforced are rarely sound English; sometimes they are mere recommendations here, often they ought to be, and quite often they ought not to be even recommendations, since the article is in sound English, or one of the variations which can be sound English. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 12:48, 23 June 2008 (UTC) ←What a total surprise that Anderson should take this opportunity to trumpet his anti-MOS agenda again. TONY (talk) 14:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Opening sentence in lists
I'm not sure if this is more relevant at Wikipedia talk:Lead section, but I think this page gets more activity... Most lists open with "This is a list of <Repeat the article title>", or "This is a complete list of <repeat the article title>", or "comprehensive" or any other similar words. A discussion was started a while ago at Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates/Archive 3#Straight repetitions of the title in the opening sentence regarding this, as WP:FLC is obviously the place where this sort of thing is seen frequently. Regarding FLs, if a list is featured, then it should already be complete and comprehensive, and shouldn't need stating as such. But it's also not a very good way of engaging the reader to the article. We know it's a list of cats (or whatever) from the title. Articles don't begin this way. Today's Main Page article Blue Iguana doesn't begin with "This is an article about Blue Iguanas. The Blue Iguana is a critically endangered species of lizard". Can we please state a "ban" on WP:MOS from introducing list articles in this way? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:14, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- It's a ridiculous habit, and it's disappointing that FL reviewers haven't been cracking down on it. (Usually, it's a contravention of Cr. 2.) I think it's difficult to legislate against; what about inserting something explicit into the FL criteria, in terms of "should be avoided unless there is a good reason"? TONY (talk) 07:23, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Well, it's not just a problem at FL. It's mostly all lists. Of course things filter down, so if a FL does it a "start-class list" will copy, but then if you try to fix it you come up against a wall. If WP:LS#Establish context or WP:LS#Bold title mentioned something, it could be linked to in edit summaries when being fixed and referred to in FLCs. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:33, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- That works! Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:55, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Theoretical note: I agree with the concerns of the honourable colleagues, but I think we should concede that, while articles should never be self-referential, in lists this is more forgiveable. It is in the nature of these pages: as lists are more "artificial" collections of information than articles, which are basically prose, and various notes and explanations are often given about the organisation and inclusion criteria of the data, self-referencing is, in many occasions, unavoidable. Waltham, The Duke of 07:58, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Theoretical note: It is really boring to read a long "List of ..." article title and then to have to read it again immediately, on the line below. This is just where the lead should be describing the context of the list, not irritating the reader by senseless repetition. TONY (talk) 08:11, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- That was a practical note. :-) And not necessarily one incompatible with what I said. There are different forms of self-referencing. See List of largest United Kingdom settlements by population for a heavily self-referencing list; even the first sentence is rather excusable, as it introduces further analysis of the population figures. Waltham, The Duke of 08:44, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- I take issue with His Grace: the first sentence is tedious. See my fix, to prove the point that straight repetitions of "List of ..." titles are a way of turning off potential readers. TONY (talk) 09:01, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- I see that Tony disagrees with the general prescription that titles of articles shall be repeated in bold; he should defend this wish for stylistic inconsistency at WT:LEAD. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 13:37, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Titles of articles should be repeated in bold. The exceptions listed at Wikipedia:Lead_section#Bold_title are inappropriate. If article originator concludes that the topic of an article has no commonly accepted name, then either they are not looking hard enough or they are structuring an article for which the topic is not well thought out. As for the title being simply descriptive, that is subjective and not a viable guideline. In short, if the title of the article does not work well being repeated in bold in the first sentence, then someting is wrong with the title or the topic. That is why the title in bold rule was created - to force article originators to think before creating an article name or topic. THe exceptions to Wikipedia:Lead_section#Bold_title are merely a lazy way to get around thinking before creating an article name or topic. Bebestbe (talk) 15:19, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
←Anderson, it's the topic, isn't it, not the title. In any case, at FLC there's general consensus, including the two directors, that this has turned into a lazy way for authors to open their "list" articles. The practice is particularly problematic given the length of many "list" titles. Have a look for yourself, except that reviewers (mostly others apart from me) have been insisting on a recasting in nominations; easier to find in the list of existing FLs. TONY (talk) 13:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- It may not be laziness, but a lack of knowledge of what to do. I usually write as the first sentence something like "List aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa is a compilation of xxxxxxxxxxx.", where xxxxxxxxxxx explains the list contents using words other than contained in the name of the list. This uses the name of the article/list at the very beginning of the first sentence (like all Wikipedia articles should) and offers more information than provided by the name of the list. Please feel free to post this technique as a suggestion in the List MoS. Bebestbe (talk) 15:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- No, it's almost always better not to repeat verbatim the title wording. Take it straight on to give the reader new information. See my link above. TONY (talk) 15:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- I regret to say, Tony, that I do not approve of your change to the lead in the slightest. Yes, the first sentence repeats the title, but the title is the subject of the page, and that subject should always be introduced in the article, and more specifically in the first sentence. Blue Iguana may not start with "This is an article about Blue Iguanas", but this is because articles should not refer to themselves, which is practically never true for lists; the article still has "Blue Iguana" in the first sentence, most prominent in its bold typeface. I should agree with a change not saying "this is a list of..." as long as it still introduces the subject, but your edit simply removed the introduction. The list as it stands now makes no sense without the title, a situation which should be avoided in all mainspace pages; the title is not any more integral a part of the prose than headings are. Waltham, The Duke of 21:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- No, it's almost always better not to repeat verbatim the title wording. Take it straight on to give the reader new information. See my link above. TONY (talk) 15:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
En dashes in page names
Why was the following removed as "nonsense"?
When naming an article, a hyphen is not used as a substitute for an en dash that properly belongs in the title, for example in Eye–hand span. However, editors should provide a redirect page to such an article, using a hyphen in place of the en dash (e.g., Eye-hand span), to allow the name to be typed easily when searching Wikipedia. See also Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision). The associated talk page name should match the page name exactly.
Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:36, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Well, I think the better question would be why it was ever included to begin with. : - ) Using en and em dashes in page titles ruins everyday page linking and needlessly creates redirects. A standard hyphen is surely sufficient, and balances the need for a dash with the need to be able to link to a page easily (most keyboards don't have an en dash key). Is there any reason for the MoS to prescribe that en dashes be used? --MZMcBride (talk) 07:46, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Only if the title is acutally an en dash. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:53, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Certainly. But that's a rare case. Mexican-American War does not require the use of an en dash, and nothing is lost by using a standard hyphen. It's certainly easier to link Mexican-American War than it is to link Mexican–American War or Mexican—American War.
I went crawling through the page history and isolated the diff that changed this rule from being merely a suggestion to being the law of the land. (See here.) There doesn't appear to be any consensus or discussion behind the move, and as such, I propose changing the language back to being a suggestion, rather than being a requirement. Thoughts? --MZMcBride (talk) 08:02, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Certainly. But that's a rare case. Mexican-American War does not require the use of an en dash, and nothing is lost by using a standard hyphen. It's certainly easier to link Mexican-American War than it is to link Mexican–American War or Mexican—American War.
- Only if the title is acutally an en dash. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 07:53, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- [multiple edit conflicts]v Where were you two when this gained clear consensus, ages ago? McBride, do not make substantial changes to MOS without raising them here first. I haven't heard of the inclusion of em dashes in article titles (can't imagine why that would occur), but en dashes have a quite different meaning to hyphens; the main text in such articles needs to follow the MOS guideline, so why should the title of the article clash with this? Who wants internal inconsistency (may as well use British spelling in the title and US spelling in the opening sentence)? The need for redirects is there anyway, whether en dashes or the erroneous hyphens are used; redirects are just a fact of life in an efficiently run site. And no, "Mexican–American War" certainly does require an en dash, despite the renegade reversions of the change back to hyphen that I've heard about. That issue is going to have to be dealt with sooner or later. Now, if you're really foxed about how to produce an en dash on your keyboard, see this. I'll pipe the link in the MOS section now (it's unpiped to the whole dash article at the moment). TONY (talk) 08:06, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- PS Why are you presenting erroneous red links in an attempt to bolster your position? An em dash is totally wrong in that context. TONY (talk) 08:08, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- (even more edit conflicts) I am afraid that the honourable colleague focuses exclusively upon the technical side of the matter, and in so doing forgets the work-arounds which have been devised in order to address an equally, if more, important issue: accuracy. This is an encyclopaedia, ladies and gentlemen, and it is of paramount importance to say things as they are. En dashes improve legibility and often show fine differences in meaning or indicate important technical details. Discontinuing their usage while it creates no disruption (What's wrong with redirects? And why can't links use en dashes?) is at least counter-productive. (PS: Em dashes are wrong in pretty much all contexts in titles; I have yet to see an exception, even though I guess there must be one somewhere.) Waltham, The Duke of 08:10, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
(ec) Look, the linking thing is a red herring; there's no problem with using a redirect as a link. Similarly for navigation--just type the name with the hyphen into the search box and you'll get to the right place. So the only question is, which form do we want to see at the top of the page? In the case of Mexican–American War I have no strong feelings, but I suppose there's some utility to the endash to make it clear that it wasn't (or at least not especially) a war about Mexican-Americans, but rather between Mexicans and Americans. Similarly the Michelson−Morely experiment wasn't performed by a single physicist named Michelson-Morely. --Trovatore (talk) 08:12, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
The issue is that people should be able to type the title without the use of redirects. And now that people have taken to using automated tools to attempt to change thousands of page titles, this becomes a larger issue quite quickly. Tony: I see no consensus (as I tried to demonstrate with that diff) to make the MoS require en dashes. In fact, for years, it was merely optional – a suggestion, really. And the claim that the need for redirects is there anyway is a bit silly. I doubt many people are searching using en dashes, eh? So I really don't understand why the bit about page titles can't go back to being a suggestion rather than a mandate. --MZMcBride (talk) 08:18, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- The use of en dashes has been well established on WP for some time. Go take a look at the FAC room. If you really don't understand the important difference in meaning, the improvement in the reader's comprehension of the relevant compound items (even if they don't quite understand the formal set of rules), and the improved visual appearance, I'm very willing to give you free private lessons. It's really not hard, and serious WPian writers/editors (particularly those preparing featured content) seem to have no problem in grasping the concept and the keystrokes. More broadly, most good styleguides (for hard-copy text) insist on the use of en dashes; on-screen, where the display is often rather small, hyphens are often difficult to discern when not merely joining two words, but signifying apposition or opposition between them, as in the title of the unfortunate war, and in ranges. TONY (talk) 08:27, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Apart from the other things that I have mentioned above, Mr McBride seems to ignore the speed with which events unfold on Wikipedia. Two years can make the place largely unrecognisable; the whole site has reached this point in seven. I daresay that we are driving fast (although not necessarily fast enough) towards professionalism in many aspects of article-writing, and that many of the old guidelines have had to be modified along the way to conform to our changing demands for quality. Inline citations used to be an unknown concept, and look at them now; is it hard to believe that this can also happen with dashes? Waltham, The Duke of 08:36, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- The difference there was that inline citations were a good idea. This change made no sense to begin with, and has no consensus support anywhere. Look, I really don't care what sort of dash you use in articles. However, until you convince computer manufacturers to put the en dash on conventional keyboards, this does not belong in article titles. It's ludicrous to create a situation where our readers can't physically access thousands of articles without the assistance of redirects due to the concern of a tiny handful of users about the proper length of a line. It badly interferes with the usability of project for its readers for absolutely no good reason. People generally overlook these issues because they generally don't matter, but this is one thing that you're going to actually need to establish a consensus to do if you don't want every move to be vigorously opposed. I dare you - take this to the village pump or any communal discussion space that isn't solely frequently by the MOS fanatics and see if this proposal lasts five minutes. There was no consensus when this was put in place, there's no consensus here, and there's sure as hell no consensus on the broader project for this. Rebecca (talk) 10:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Right. Consensus is only what Rebecca from Adelaide thinks. The fact that you "don't care what sort of dash" is used in articles kind of excludes you from the discussion, doesn't it? En and em dashes are on keyboards, and genius is not required to use them. Do you want a private lesson in it? I'll willing give you one. But no one else on WP requires that. What kind of keyboard do you have that makes it incomprehensible? TONY (talk) 11:20, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- No, consensus is demonstrated support among a decent sized group of people, rather than the support of a very vocal group of three people with not insignificant opposition. And no, you don't get to exclude me from the conversation because I'm not going to get rabidly worked up about the length of a line except where some buffoon tries to force the project to use a character that isn't on keyboards in article titles instead of a perfectly usable one that is. I think the fact that you suggest a lesson is needed to find out how in hades one uses one of these precious extra-special lines is telling: the fact it isn't actually marked on the keyboard suggests that the vast majority of our readers ain't getting it either. Rebecca (talk) 11:55, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Right. Consensus is only what Rebecca from Adelaide thinks. The fact that you "don't care what sort of dash" is used in articles kind of excludes you from the discussion, doesn't it? En and em dashes are on keyboards, and genius is not required to use them. Do you want a private lesson in it? I'll willing give you one. But no one else on WP requires that. What kind of keyboard do you have that makes it incomprehensible? TONY (talk) 11:20, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- The difference there was that inline citations were a good idea. This change made no sense to begin with, and has no consensus support anywhere. Look, I really don't care what sort of dash you use in articles. However, until you convince computer manufacturers to put the en dash on conventional keyboards, this does not belong in article titles. It's ludicrous to create a situation where our readers can't physically access thousands of articles without the assistance of redirects due to the concern of a tiny handful of users about the proper length of a line. It badly interferes with the usability of project for its readers for absolutely no good reason. People generally overlook these issues because they generally don't matter, but this is one thing that you're going to actually need to establish a consensus to do if you don't want every move to be vigorously opposed. I dare you - take this to the village pump or any communal discussion space that isn't solely frequently by the MOS fanatics and see if this proposal lasts five minutes. There was no consensus when this was put in place, there's no consensus here, and there's sure as hell no consensus on the broader project for this. Rebecca (talk) 10:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Apart from the other things that I have mentioned above, Mr McBride seems to ignore the speed with which events unfold on Wikipedia. Two years can make the place largely unrecognisable; the whole site has reached this point in seven. I daresay that we are driving fast (although not necessarily fast enough) towards professionalism in many aspects of article-writing, and that many of the old guidelines have had to be modified along the way to conform to our changing demands for quality. Inline citations used to be an unknown concept, and look at them now; is it hard to believe that this can also happen with dashes? Waltham, The Duke of 08:36, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Talking about consensus: Can we at least agree that, in the prose, the repeatedly cited Mexican–American War uses an en dash and not a hyphen when the correct type setting is applied? Trovatore has nicely pointed out that in this specific case the en dash is in deed required to produce the intended meaning. It would be a good starting point if Rebecca and McBride could make clear that we are not arguing about the necessity of the en dash for this example in the prose.
- Assuming agreement on the above point, I would then conclude that it is the correct type setting for the title of the article, if this was not an online encyclopedia. Remains the objection about functionality or usability of the Wikipedia. I agree that (almost!) nobody would type an en dash in a search window. Therefore, if we use the en dash in the title we must create a re-direct using a hyphen. OK, is there a way out of this compulsory re-direct? Can we use the hyphen in the article title—thereby introducing a typesetting mistake which is considered minor by many? The claim is that everybody would easily find the article even without re-direct. I hope I understood the argumentation correctly. Otherwise, corrections will be most welcome.
- Well, I disagree that a re-direct can thus be avoided. Why? Don't forget that some people use copy paste plus search box to search for new articles and the copy function will likely (if used on a good quality article) collect the America–Mexican War spelled with an en dash.
- For this case a solution is also necessary. I think it is clear from this argumentation that one re-direct is needed anyways. So, I think that the MoS should suggest to use the correct type setting also in the article and declares the creation of a re-direct as mandatory. Tomeasytalk 12:08, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- As I said above, I have no particular concern either way which dash should be used in the text, or which would be used in a hypothetical non-online encyclopedia. My sole concern here is the functionality issues created by moving thousands of articles to titles that cannot be accessed by most people without redirects. It looks ugly as hell to consistently have to see the redirect warning on every single page a reader goes to with a dash in the title, and there's no good reason to have to do that.
- What I'm challenging here is the need for the compulsory redirect: we can have a technically very minor typesetting mistake that makes no difference to the functionality of the encyclopedia, at least until computer manufacturers decide to stick the en dash on their keyboards. I am not fussed at the prospect of having a redirect from the en-dash, but it would seem like a lot of work considering virtually no one is going to go to that title directly. Rebecca (talk) 12:31, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Forgive my technical ignorance, but is a redirect obvious to the visitor? I'd have thought it seamlessly led to the right destination. Isn't it the type of thing that the creator of an article (or someone who comes along after, or a bot) can do in ten seconds? I don't see the problem. And yes, Mexican–American War should be fixed so it has an en dash. Trovatore points out above the very reason the correct punctuation should be observed. TONY (talk) 12:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Yes. Whenever you've been redirected from a page, you have a notice in largeish font at the top of the page informing you of the page you've been redirected from. It's a helpful thing in the vast majority of cases, but it becomes a downright nuisance when it starts appearing on every single page with a dash in the title. It's one time when it would be really helpful for you folks to suck it up and say "okay, it's not 100% technically perfect, but it does interfere with the usability of the pages and there's no other alternative, so we'll let it slide." Rebecca (talk) 13:03, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) I congratulate Tony on his use of irony, in the classical sense; but of course redirects are obvious to the visitor; there's this tag, right under the title, saying (Redirected from Mexican–American War). As Tony knows, from the last time (or was it the time before?), some editors find this a visual defect. I don't care so much myself.
- Should we mandate this? Will we listened to? Does this reflect consensus? I find it at least suggestive that fewer than a hundred articles link to Mexican–American War, and over 1500 to Mexican-American War.
- I am not fully persuaded by Trovatore's semantic argument, although it is infinitely better than the WP:IDONTLIKEIT all too common on this page. The compounds in question are Mexican-American War and Mexican-American population, which latter is customarily abbreviated Mexican-Americans. These are compounds of the same type, and fundamentally of the same meaning: "From both sides of the boundary between Mexico and the United States". Septentrionalis PMAnderson 13:16, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Rebecca, I understand what you're saying. But the problem then arises that we have a hyphen in the title and thenceforth an en dash in the very same compound item throughou the main text. This was one of the most frustrating aspects of the don't-care regime until about a year ago when the proscription against en dashes in titles was, thank god, ended. And I think folks here should be most unwilling to allow a technological deficiency at WikiMedia (yes, another one) dictate a downward slide in our formatting standards. Let the redirect issue stand, I say, so that when we finally persuade WP and Wikimedia to overhaul their program, this will be dealt with. It's a small price to pay. Anderson, I'm not as well-read as you are, nor as versed in classical knowledge, so you can't expect me to understand what "classical irony" means. And ... um ... the grammar of your last clause needs a good look. TONY (talk) 13:27, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- See, why is having a hyphen in the title and an en dash in the text going to be a problem? It's something that isn't going to be noticed by 99% of users, and those who do notice are generally going to know why it is the way it is. The problem here isn't with the Wikimedia software - it's just that it isn't (and can't be) designed to have forty thousand redirects from to make up for the fact that computer manufacturers don't put the en dash on their keyboards. It's a slight thing that for once I really wish you might consider overlooking, Tony. Rebecca (talk) 13:36, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
←Rebecca, by "computer manufacturers don't put the en dash on their keyboards", I presume you mean that they don't allocate this function to a single keystroke, as they do the hyphen. Do I see a show of support for not using the degree symbol just because it requires two fingers simultaneously, not one? Or parentheses? And while we're at it, no more superscript please; and those monstrous non-breaking spaces are out – they require SIX keystrokes. Really, we're all aspiring to a professional standard of writing and formatting, aren't we? TONY (talk) 13:44, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- As far as I understand, it has been appreciated that in any case we need a re-direct, no matter whether the article is name with an en dash or a hyphen.
- So, comes the new objection that the re-direction message is ugly. Personally, I am not fuzzed about this message whenever it appears. I think it is even informative for the reader, as they may find out that who the compounded word is correctly type set, if they are interested in the re-direct message. If they aren't, then I do not see why they would bother about this message, but just read over it.
- What worries me a bit in this discussion is that some do not even acknowledge that it is for good that wikipedia discriminates hyphens and dashes. From my point of view, n terms of style, this is a simple pre-requisit of any high-quality reference. Tomeasytalk 13:44, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- I think it is important to have correct punctuation in article titles. I find the small and grayish redirect message nearly imperceptible, but if people really find it annoying, perhaps someone can design a stylesheet that makes it even grayer and smaller, moves it somewhere else, or hides it outright. --Itub (talk) 14:52, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Or ask the developers to make hyphens in the search box go to en dashes automatically (without even a redirect), like initial lower-case letters currently go to capitals.--Kotniski (talk) 14:58, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- On the principle that we should devote time to important things in preference to unimportant things, I'm not going to get worked up about this. No one is going to be shocked, shocked to see a hyphen where they were expecting an en-dash and vice versa; Wikipedia has bigger problems than this. There are good reasons both ways, and since people are doing more and more of their own publishing these days, the general trend is in the direction of hyphens, but we haven't arrived there yet. A few relevant facts:
- Or ask the developers to make hyphens in the search box go to en dashes automatically (without even a redirect), like initial lower-case letters currently go to capitals.--Kotniski (talk) 14:58, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- I think it is important to have correct punctuation in article titles. I find the small and grayish redirect message nearly imperceptible, but if people really find it annoying, perhaps someone can design a stylesheet that makes it even grayer and smaller, moves it somewhere else, or hides it outright. --Itub (talk) 14:52, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- AP Stylebook has given up on recommending that en-dashes ever be used to link two words; there's no mention of this use in the long sections on hyphens and en-dashes.
- Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which is one of the most commonly-used dictionaries in the US, uses a hyphen in its own name in a place where current WP:MOS guidelines say to use an en-dash.
- Chicago does mention a variety of uses for en-dashes as links, but they give exactly one example below that supports our recommendation of en-dashes to link words (London–Paris train) and one that contradicts it (U.S.-Canadian relations), in a long list of other uses for the en-dash (principally, to connect numbers, and to connect with a phrase instead of a word):
Her college years, 1998–2002, were the happiest in her life. For documentation and indexing, see chapters 16–18. In Genesis 6:13–22 we find God’s instructions to Noah. Join us on Thursday, 11:30 a.m.–4:00 p.m., to celebrate the New Year. The London–Paris train leaves at two o’clock. I have blocked out December 2002–March 2003 to complete my manuscript. Her articles appeared in Postwar Journal (3 November 1945–4 February 1946). Green Bay beat Denver 31–24. The legislature voted 101–13 to adopt the resolution. Professor Plato’s survey (1999–) will cover the subject in the final volume. Jane Doe (1950–); or Jane Doe (b. 1950) the post–World War II years a hospital–nursing home connection a nursing home–home care policy a quasi-public–quasi-judicial body (or, better, a judicial body that is quasi-public and quasi-judicial) but non-English-speaking peoples a wheelchair-user-designed environment (or, better, an environment designed for wheelchair users) (Abbreviations for compounds are treated as single words, so a hyphen, not an en dash, is used in such phrases as “U.S.-Canadian relations.”) the University of Wisconsin–Madison the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
I suggest that we acknowledge that there's a large, pre-existing base of GAs and FAs that follow the long-standing WP:MOS guideline, that this guideline is and was based both on a nice simplicity (hyphen for "and", en-dash for "or" and "between"), and on a solid foundation of the way things were done in the publishing world for a long time, that this issue is not all that important, and that we revisit it from time to time as journalists move gradually in the direction of converting to hyphens. I'll be happy to discuss it in January, but I'm not going to discuss it every month. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:39, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hah! I notice that <pre> completely mangled that, representing hyphens and en-dashes as being the same length. More evidence, if needed, that people are paying less and less attention. Let's try again. It's all en-dashes, except for:
- the post–World War II years
- a hospital–nursing home connection
- a nursing home–home care policy
- a quasi-public–quasi-judicial body (or, better, a judicial body that is quasi-public and quasi-judicial)
- but
- non-English-speaking peoples
- a wheelchair-user-designed environment (or, better, an environment designed for wheelchair users)
- (Abbreviations for compounds are treated as single words, so a hyphen, not an en dash, is used in such phrases as “U.S.-Canadian relations.”) - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:46, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- One more thing. This dash issue is brought up from time to time as evidence that the people that wrote the long-standing rules are out-of-touch rules fascists. Even though my personal position is somewhere in the middle, what I take away from the discussions I've read is exactly the opposite. Although things are gradually becoming simpler, rules for dashes have traditionally been very difficult. A variety of intelligent people talked about it and decided that, even though it's a little bit of an over-simplification, the rules could be simplified down to "hyphen, and, en-dash, or and between", and that would come very close to representing traditional publishing practice and be a hell of a lot easier to explain. Encyclopedic writing also is much better when it doesn't use a lot of extra words to represent a simple concept, and en-dashes are great for representing a simple concept in a simple way. The rules were designed for ease of use and to benefit a crisp encyclopedic style, and not for any other reason, that I can see. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 16:02, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- There could be many worse recommendations, and if these were phrased and treated as recommendations, I could nearly agree with Dank's argument; for one thing, that would include acknowledgement that there are other legitimate methods of doing things. But look how WP:DASH is treated in FA reviews, and you will see demands for unthinking compliance with these rules, at least nine times out of ten. (That, of course, is in the minority of cases it is cited at all; whether mindless control of punctuation is worse than no review at all is a matter of taste, but we should aim for a middle ground.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:14, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Many issues in MOS require a lot of explaining, and the challenge is just to do it as simply and briefly as possible. I can't imagine Capital letters tossed off in a sentences. TONY (talk) 16:06, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- We could try for as clearly and accurately as possible, but there seems to be consensus against that...Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:14, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- One more thing. This dash issue is brought up from time to time as evidence that the people that wrote the long-standing rules are out-of-touch rules fascists. Even though my personal position is somewhere in the middle, what I take away from the discussions I've read is exactly the opposite. Although things are gradually becoming simpler, rules for dashes have traditionally been very difficult. A variety of intelligent people talked about it and decided that, even though it's a little bit of an over-simplification, the rules could be simplified down to "hyphen, and, en-dash, or and between", and that would come very close to representing traditional publishing practice and be a hell of a lot easier to explain. Encyclopedic writing also is much better when it doesn't use a lot of extra words to represent a simple concept, and en-dashes are great for representing a simple concept in a simple way. The rules were designed for ease of use and to benefit a crisp encyclopedic style, and not for any other reason, that I can see. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 16:02, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Why are you all ignoring the fact that the naming conventions, which are policy, dictate that en-dashes are to be used in article names? And have done so for over a year? This conversation should be happening there. In any case, my argument has been iterated many times above: They look better, redirects are not even remotely a big deal, etc. There is no accessibility issue. Also Mexican-American war was moved to the hyphen version because of a technical restriction. Not because of any of the issues opposers on this page have brought up.--Dycedarg ж 17:16, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- What technical restriction? If there is a technical restriction, we should document it.
- What WP:NC (which is the only naming convention to be policy) says is: For use of hyphens, dashes and hair spaces in page names, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes), which redirects here. If the policy is to be discussed, this is where to do it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:22, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- It says that, and when you look here it gives the instances in which en-dashes are to be used. Explicit statement on that page that that's what it means, when such is obvious, shouldn't be necessary. The technical restriction hasn't existed in over a year; what I was saying is that the specific example of Mexican-American War is moot because it was moved back for technical reasons, not because any consensus existed at the time that the current name was more correct.--Dycedarg ж 18:29, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hmmm. so I assume that this clause in the naming conventions policy gives MOS policy status on the issue of dashes. TONY (talk) 17:28, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Not really, even for page names. WP:NC refers to its own subpages in the same manner, and they are, like this page, guidelines. Only assertions specifically made on that page are policy. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:34, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm wholly in favour of using the correct en dash where it should be used by proper style in article titles. With redirects, there's no reason not to do it. —Nightstallion 21:25, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- Using the correct en dash where it should be used by proper style in article titles verges on a tautology. Where is that? For example, is Merriam-Webster a good source for proper style in its own name? Nothing in NS's post answers that. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:35, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- But it only verges because it ignores Rebecca's arguments. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:35, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
__FORCETOC
I didn't see anything about __FORCETOC__ in the article. I think it should be included because almost all Articles use FORCETOC — Preceding unsigned comment added by Condalence (talk • contribs)
- I wouldn't call 401 out of 2.4 million "almost all". If you use the "Random article" link, you can easily verify that more than half of our articles don't have a table of contents. --Hans Adler (talk) 10:56, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- On the other hand, if we documented the possibility, it might be used more often. Whether this would serve any great purpose, since FORCETOC should only be used when the position provided by the software is unacceptable, is another question. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 12:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Proposal relating to Leading off first sentences with qualifiers
PROPOSAL: - OK, this has been bothering me. Lately I've been seeing a lot of scientific articles beginning with the format "In xxx, xxxxx is ..." as in "In computing, phishing is ..." An article I created recently was change to this format. What this is saying is that all information about the topic is limited to relating to the qualifier. Phishing only is used in computing and no where else. Subpersonality only is used in transpersonal psychology and no where else. If this were true, then the articles should be titled Phishing (computing) and Subpersonality (transpersonal psychology). However, it is not true that every sentence and every of bit of information in the Phishing article relates to computing. Every sentence in Subpersonality does not relate to transpersonal psychology and subpersonality certainly is not limited to the field of transpersonal psychology. Most telling, Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#First_sentences states "If the topic of the article may be unfamiliar to some readers, establish a context." I agree with establishing context, but do not agree with establishing context by beginning the article with "In xxx,". The MoS example given results in qualifying trusted third party, entity, and the two parties to being cryptography elements. However, only "entity" is cryptography element. The two parties, e.g., Bob and Alice, are humans and certainly not only cryptography element. The example given in the MoS incorrectly approves limiting trusted third party, entity, and the two parties to cryptography. The Trusted third party article also addresses "outside cryptography". How can it do that if the article is limited to cryptography by the lead sentence to the article? If this "In xxxx,"-qualifier lead technique is acceptable, then the lead sentence to Trusted third party should read "In cryptography, a trusted third party (TTP) is ... ." In law, a trusted third party is ..." This makes the articles look more like disambiguous pages rather than an article. I proposed that Manual of Style should explicitly reject the use of "In xxx," as an acceptable way to provide context in the first sentence of an article. If you agree, disagree, or have a different observation/solution, please post below. Bebestbe (talk) 14:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- We should certainly not prohibit the usage; consider, for example, Abelian group, which begins "In mathematics..." and the implication seen here is quite correct. How much caution is warranted? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- I agree with the examples that were given here by both above contributors. I think that Bebestbe has made clear that the "In xxx,"-start of the lead can be a bad choice. However, we've also seen that it can be a good start. So, IMHO a strict prohibition is not appropriate, but you have my support in the specific cases that you've shown. Tomeasytalk 16:46, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
- The tradeoff here is speed for accuracy, and there's no way around that. Some things in the lead section will not be precise, and will only be qualified and explained later, because the lead section has a function of selling people, of drawing them in. I wouldn't mind saying in the guideline that people should at least think twice before over-simplifying in the lead section, and I wouldn't mind a recommendation that over-simplification should be remedied as quickly as possible, preferably in the first section. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:24, 23 June 2008 (UTC)