Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 135

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Application of MOS:COMMONALITY to the MOS page itself

Per MOS:COMMONALITY I changed the word "favor" (which is US spelling) to "prefer" throughout Wikipedia:Manual of Style. User:Noetica then reverted this stating: no improvement: "favor" is more accurate, and at least one substitution (in an example) is decidedly unidiomatic. I concede that perhaps a better word than "prefer" could perhaps have been used in some cases, but still think that the change was mostly an improvement. To me, "favor" seems at first glance to be a spelling mistake and therefore the text is not as easily readable as it should be. Surely MOS should practice what it preaches, and should adhere to the commonality guidelines. Bazonka (talk) 11:11, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Indeed it should conform to itself, Bazonka. But that does not mean it should use a less accurate word simply because the spelling of the better word looks odd to some people. "Favor" looks strange to me too, as an Australian; but WP:MOS happens to be written with US spelling, and with the US-preferred em dash. But your interest in MOS is appreciated, I'm sure. The more editors involved and contributing to its development, the better. ☺ NoeticaTea? 11:44, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I know that MOS is written in US spelling. However, the intention of MOS:COMMONALITY is not to stop articles from being written in one particular variety of English, but to reduce the impact of it. (You'll note that I did not attempt to change "color" to a common term, such as "hue", because this would obviously have been less clear.) But I fail to understand how "prefer" is less accurate than "favor"; Wiktionary defines Wikt:favor as "To look upon fondly; to prefer", and Wikt:prefer as "To be in the habit of choosing something rather than something else; to favor; to like better", so the two words seem to be synonymous.
The word favor appears four times in MOS:
  • "Wikipedia favors no national variety of English"
  • "...a practice favored in science writing"
  • "Some major American guides to style ... now deprecate U.S. and favor US"
  • "We should note that some critics have argued in favor of our proposal"
I can see no problem whatsoever in changing the first three of these to "prefers", "preferred" and "prefer". To me, the meaning stays exactly the same. Changing the fourth to "...argued in preference of our proposal" does seem a bit clumsier, but I think it still works. In any case, this one is just an example sentence and could be easily reworded to "...argued against our proposal" which would still demonstrate the inappropriate use of "our" in the sentence. Bazonka (talk) 12:40, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I think the meaning actually does shift a bit in the first two. "Favor" in the first case does not mean "prefer" it means "show favoritism toward", and that distinction is actually very important. In the second, the difference is one of agency; "favored in science writing" means that science writing leans in that direction; "preferred in science writing" implies that a written, formal preference has been established and published, which is not the case. The third example would work fine with "prefer", because style guides are in fact formal, established, published preferences. And of course the substitution would no work in the fourth case, even with a weird construction like "argued in preference to our proposal", or whatever. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:07, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
OK. The distinction must be a bit too suble for me, but I shall take your word for it. As alternatives, how about:
  • "Wikipedia does not follow any specific national variety of English"
  • "...a practice usually adopted by science writing", or "...usually followed in science writing"
The third sentence can use "prefer", and meaning of the fourth can change entirely because it's just an example of misuse of "we" and "our", so change "in favor of" to "against". Bazonka (talk) 22:39, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
  1. I'm not sure everyone will follow what is meant by "follow" here. :-) I would retain the existing language, for a good reason: I repeat that the word "favors" in "Wikipedia favors no national variety of English" does not mean "prefers", it means "shows favoritism toward", and that distinction is actually important. WP could easily not have an express preference for American English yet still favor it anyway. This was actually long the real-world case, due to the dominant percentage of editors being Americans, and is why that passage was added in the first place!
  2. We don't actually have any evidence that dotless abbreviations, aside from unit symbols and other special cases, are the dominant practice in science writing, so only saying "a common practice in science writing" is a viable replacement (and is actually more accurate than the "favored" version, which implies dominance almost as strongly as "prefered" or "usually adopted" does).
  3. "Some major American guides to style ... now deprecate U.S. and prefer US" is actually a correct statement and more accurate, because the guides are published preferences, not vaguely defined favoritism.
  4. The example text does in fact work just fine as "We should note that some critics have argued against our proposal".
    — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 02:47, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
I was interested to see this discussion as I was considering the wording of the very same passage. I, too, would prefer the word "prefer" to "favor" as it is more common and down to earth than the more literary "favor." I would also suggest a change from the formality of "Although Wikipedia favors no national variety of English..." to "While Wikipedia does not prefer any national variety of English..." which is the more usual way to put it. What do others think? Michael Glass (talk) 01:56, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
I think, honestly, that this is both a mountain-out-of-a-molehill nitpick, and an exercise near-pointless political correctness to mollify some British/Commonwealth readers who are unhappy that MOS was launched, and thus has stayed in, American English. Not to put too fine a point on it. >;-) That said, see above; I think that three of these cases can be changed in various ways with no harm done, and two will actually be clearer, but it's not just by willy-nilly swapping of "prefer" for "favor". — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 02:47, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
How very rude. I don't have any problem with what version of English the MOS is written in. MOS:COMMONALITY is not a procedure for scoring points against another version of English; it is a way of making articles more readable. People find it easier to read articles written in their own variety of English because they are not distracted by the spelling differences, etc. So from my selfish personal point of view, as a native BrE speaker, yes I would prefer it if all of Wikipedia was in BrE. But of course it's not all about me - there are readers of all backgrounds here, and we must try to find a balance for everyone. This is where COMMONALITY comes in. It's not about changing the language variety, but simply ironing out those unnecessary creases of language difference, and improving readability for everyone. I could have tried to change "color" to a common word "hue", but no I did not, because "color" is such a powerful word without any equally powerful synonyms - its use is not unnecessary. However "favor" is not so strong, and there are viable alternatives (though not as simple as I first thought). If the MOS was written in BrE I would similarly argue about moving away from the use of "favour" (although to be fair, I may not have picked up on it as I wouldn't have been distracted by the word when reading). If MOS doesn't follow MOS then we might as well all give up now. I am quite insulted that you think my raising of this point was an "exercise [of] near-pointless political correctness" because MOS is in AmE. That is just so wrong. Bazonka (talk) 19:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
WP:CIVIL doesn't require twee niceness or pretense that one thinks a pointless proposal is just fine. I moderate WP:CIVIL with WP:SPADE, as do many of us. I'm glad you are not proposing things like this just to push Briticisms, but I don't feel bad for making you aware that it was coming off that way. Color and hue are not synonyms (at least not in any field that regularly deals with color, such as art, printing, digital video mastering, etc., etc.). I already agreed with you that three of these four cases of "favor" could be changed with no problem; are you so upset that it's not all four that a rant is necessary?  :-) MOS is written to govern style in articles (and by extension output of templates that appears in articles). It's nice when WP's own internal projectpages can follow it, too, but it is not a requirement. WP guidelines regularly use contractions – lots of them – and articles do not, for example. I apologize for genuinely offending you; my goal was to suggest "you're being nit-picky and this comes off as simply anti-Americanism". — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 04:49, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm afraid my suggestion about wording got lost in a spat about favor and prefer. Personally, I'm untroubled by the US spelling "favor" but I do think that the wording could be made more user-friendly by a slight change in wording. At the moment, Mos reads
  • "Although Wikipedia favors no national variety of English..."
How about changing to this:
  • "While Wikipedia does not favor any national variety of English..."
The proposal is simply to use plain, common English at this point. Nitpicking, maybe, but getting rid of the nits is the way to make the writing clearer, cleaner and more attractive. Michael Glass (talk) 07:46, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
That seems better to me too. Bazonka (talk) 18:03, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
If there's no objection in the next 24 hours I'll go ahead and make this change. Michael Glass (talk) 01:41, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
No objection, though I find nothing wrong with the original wording. Maybe it's because I learned to read and write in England. I do recognize that it seems a bit "British" in style, despite the American spelling "favor". Really, it's kind of a WP:DGAF matter to me. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 10:20, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

At long last, WP:Manual of Style/Organisms

 – Pointer to relevant page elsewhere

I've been working on this, off and on, for over four years. I think it is ready for prime time now. I've researched this so much I feel like I could teach a class about it. I'm not proposing it formally yet, just asking for MOS regulars' input for now. When I formally propose it, it'll be advertised via WP:VP/P and WP:CENT, and the relevant projects invited to comment, of course. Please discuss suggested changes or any concerns/issues at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Organisms. I've covered things that have never been touched on in MOS before like how to handle hybrids, greges, landraces, natural breeds, etc., etc., etc. It's a one-stop shop for all scientific and vernacular naming questions, including animals, plants, bacteria and viruses. (And yes, it includes the MOS position that capitalizing bird common names is controversial, and why, but I've tried not to be inflammatory about it.) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 10:53, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

My first thought: "Hoo boy. What are we going to do about the species capitalization issue?" Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:22, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
It's addressed in there. The usual suspects are going to pitch the same fit as always. It will then be time for an ARBCOM case. Ten or so people from one wikiproject cannot be allowed to filibuster basic WP processes like consensus building on style guidelines for another eight years. If they would rather fight to the death to keep capitalizing in "their articles", they can cite WP:IAR, and I think most people will just leave them alone because of their well-earned reputation for intransigent tendentiousness and hostile browbeating. The rest of WP needs to move on. The parties in that project who are not really here to write an encyclopedia for general readers, but take out their professional frustration, at most journals not letting them capitalize this way, by forcing Wikipedians to do so, will eventually retire. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 10:28, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

ENGVAR examples

Discussion following several reverts today. I think Kevin McE and I are essentially making the same point, which Kevin McE explained well: "If it is not clear cut and unambiguous, and adhered to, it is not worth citing as an example". For the examples to be educationally useful, it should be possible for an editor to go to the article and find it tagged exactly as we say here in the example. Sure, it is true that "close national ties" indicates that Institutions of the European Union could theoretically be written in British or Irish English, but also we have to be consistent within the article. Evidently, British English was chosen and the article has been tagged accordingly. It's confusing to just say "(British or Irish English)" in the example without giving further explanation. (It could be done: we could separate out that example and say theoretically this could be either British or Irish, but British was chosen and now we stick to that.) With respect to Taj Mahal, I can't disagree with Dodger67's comment that the "Use British English" tag was wrong. However, I don't think it's helpful to say "(Indian English or British English)" in the example quoted here. Further, if we want to use it as an example for "Indian English", it would be helpful if the article were tagged "Use Indian English". – Wdchk (talk) 15:24, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

There is very little difference between Irish and British English, so an ambiguous description is probably good enough. And regarding Taj Mahal, WP:MOSIN states that Indian English should be used. Whilst this is largely the same as British English, it's not identical. Bazonka (talk) 18:01, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Institutions of the European Union: you are right, there is little difference between Irish and British English, but I think we need to remember this is an instruction manual. So, we could separate out that example and say theoretically this could be either British or Irish, there is little difference between Irish and British English, British was chosen and now we stick to that. But if we just say "(British or Irish English)" and leave it hanging, how does that help an editor who doesn't already know what we mean? • Taj Mahal: I agree, Indian English should be used in the article. So why do we say "(Indian English or British English)" here in the MOS? – Wdchk (talk) 12:36, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
"Indian English" alone should be preferred: Taj Mahal relates to India, not the UK. Institutions of the European Union relates equally to Ireland and the UK. SSR (talk) 07:33, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
(The Taj Mahal discussion appears to have separated, so I suggest we continue it at #Taj Mahal and British English.) – Wdchk (talk) 17:44, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Institutions of the European Union could have been written in either British or Irish English, but once an article exists with some degree of stability, it is no longer appropriate to say that it "should use" one of two variants. MOS:RETAIN clearly dictates that British English is now the only appropriate version for that article, as re-inforced by the presence of the Template:British English, and it is wrong for MoS to contradict that. Kevin McE (talk) 09:49, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Institutions of the European Union could also have been written in Maltese English. Just throwing that one out there... Bazonka (talk) 10:40, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
The EU is suprannational, so it has no strong national ties. Therefore it could even have been written in American English. Wasn't, but could have been. --Trovatore (talk) 10:43, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
The previous 3 paragraphs all contain very good points. So, to come back to my original question, is it appropriate to use Institutions of the European Union as an example in the MOS, stating "(British or Irish English)" without further explanation? Should we use it as an example of "no strong national ties", with added explanation? Or is it just a bad example, because of complexity, and we should remove it? (One editor already made a case for removal, but the removal was reverted, which is why we are discussing here.) – Wdchk (talk) 18:16, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
I'd lean towards "bad example". --Trovatore (talk) 18:23, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Kevin McE's point is perhaps the most salient, and I tend to think this may be too complicated an example. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 10:32, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Should ENGVAR extend to spinout articles?

ENGVAR currently calls for consistent usage within a given article. Over at Talk:Strained_yoghurt#Motion_to_start_an_RM:_Redux, the issue is essentially whether it should also apply to spinout articles of a given article. Since a spinout article is a virtual extension of its parent, this makes sense to me, but it's not what ENGVAR currently states. Is that intentional?

I think it's likely that nobody really considered this case when writing ENGVAR, because spinouts were simply overlooked, and they normally naturally follow the usage of their parents, since they are usually formed largely with copy/pasting from the parent. The practical impact of extending ENGVAR to apply to spinouts too would be very minimal, since the English variety is already consistent with the parent for almost all spinouts, and English variety is changed very rarely. But in the rare cases where consensus decides there is a good reason to change the English variety of an article, doesn't it make sense to make the same change in the spinouts of that article?

Does anyone know of any examples, outside of the yogurt "family" of articles, where the English variety of a spinout differs from its parent?

To clarify with an example, I'm not suggesting all articles that refer to "color" use color because Color is not at Colour - this is limited strictly to true spinouts (like Color blindness, which is a spinout of Color, but not Colours, standards and guidons, which is not a spinout of Color - there is no section in Color that links to Colours, standards and guidons).

I'm not suggesting a change to ENGVAR right now, as that would be inappropriate while this issue is being debated at that RM discussion, but thought folks following this page, with an interest in ENGVAR, might want to weigh in, here, at the RM, or both! Thanks! --Born2cycle (talk) 17:02, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

This is just another tool that Born2cycle can use to argue to try to get his way, improving title stability by moving articles. If you look at the particular spinoff in question, it has been pretty stable at Strained yoghurt since it started in 2007. It spun out from Yoghurt during a multi-year stable period that commenced after a lot of title thrashing in 2006 (much of it driven by B2C). If article families are to have consistency of ENGVAR (which many don't), why was this not brought up to resist B2C's efforts to change the ENGVAR of Yoghurt back to a vestigial pre-2006 original, after years of relative stability? A little more respect for WP:RETAIN would be in order if stability is actually valued. I have no attachment to either spelling, but I really don't like these disingenuous tactics that characterize B2C's campaign of "stability". Dicklyon (talk) 17:57, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Indeed, stability ultimately comes from consistency with unambiguous rules, and getting there ironically often requires change (as well as improving the rules by making them less ambiguous).

Suggesting that the goal of consistency in article families is a valid argument to oppose changing usage in a parent article, because that would make the main article inconsistent with usage in its spinouts, is like saying a title should not be changed because the article content uses the name that is the current title. Spinouts naturally follow the lead set by the main article, not the other way around.

WP:RETAIN deserves due respect, but not to the extent of using it to stonewall against any change no matter how strong the arguments in favor of change are. The last year of unprecedented stability and quiet at Yogurt/Talk:Yogurt confirms the strength of the many practical reasons cited for moving that article as we did, reasons that outweighed WP:RETAIN considerations. That done, it only makes sense to bring the title and usage in spinouts like Strained yoghurt in line with Yogurt. --Born2cycle (talk) 19:15, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I'd be interested in cross-article consistency. -Kai445 (talk) 03:41, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I can't see that the differences in spelling are worth fighting over. Salt has American spelling while Iodised salt has British spelling. I think we can live with that. However, I think we should give the alternative spelling where this is necessary. One interesting case came up in the article on English landscape gardens, where the first major contributor was American but the subject itself would appear to be essentially British. So which spelling convention should prevail? The discussion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:English_landscape_garden#Spelling_conventions apparently left the question up in the air, with a mixture of American and British spellings (center but modelled). So there are occasions when the guidelines clash, but with a bit of give and take, this shouldn't be too much of a problem. Michael Glass (talk) 03:57, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
  • My reading of the consensus application all along is that ENGVAR only applies to any given article. Consistency within a given article has always been the key driver. If an article is a genuine spin-off – ie that the content originated from within a 'parent' article – then it ought naturally to already possess the "correct" spelling variant. Clearly related articles, such as works created by a given author or musician, would adopt ENGVAR by virtue of WP:TIES. So I don't see any issue. -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 04:22, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment: I support the main article being titled yogurt and in fact I briefly participated in that discussion. But this proposal seems to raise all sorts of problems. Why is it, exactly, that strained yoghurt would become strained yogurt to achieve consistency rather than yogurt being changed (back?) to yoghurt to achieve consistency? Is it based on the relative age of the two articles or because of the perceived importance of the two subjects? What would happen in the future if the topic with the longer name was created before the topic with the shorter name?
It seems like to be consistent with ENGVAR that the rule would always have to be that whichever article was created first would prevail. But ferreting out, for example, all the different articles you deem sufficiently related to color – color blindness, but not True Colors, and who knows about true colors – to determine which was created first, or which was first expanded past stub form, seems like kind of an intense exercise for not much actual consistency benefit. AgnosticAphid talk 07:43, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Having pondered this for all of an additional five minutes, I'd like to say one more thing. It does seem appealing in the abstract to achieve consistency; encyclopedia brittanica certainly wouldn't have an article about yogurt and an article about a specific type of yoghurt. But really, it seems to me that the whole idea behind ENGVAR is that we're going to subsume encyclopedia-wide spelling consistency beneath other goals like, I guess, harmony, less pointless argument about mutually intelligible spelling differences in an ostensibly worldwide encyclopedia, and other goals that I can't think of off the top of my head because I'm no expert. Nobody is going to decide that all of the articles in the encyclopedia must use "yogurt" in article text because of this discussion, so why should we enforce consistency with the article titles themselves?
That's why I think that changing an ENGVAR-compliant article title (strained yoghurt) just to achieve arguable ENGVAR-consistency with a separate article (yogurt) seems a bit hostile to the idea behind ENGVAR. AgnosticAphid talk 08:04, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I think that each article should be considered individually. It should not have to match its parent or what people think its parent might be. For example, should "color blindness" be considered a spinout of "color" or of "blindness"? Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:51, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree with Darkfrog24. Every article should be considered individually. However, when one article links to another, then the spelling of the link (even if used in a Main template) doesn't need to match the spelling of the article, and a redirects can do the rest. Bazonka (talk) 18:00, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
  • In my opinion, treating each article individually is a far more consistent, simple, and uncontroversial approach. Trying to define "parents" and "spinouts" looks like a minefield. I'd favour keeping WP:ENGVAR ("Although Wikipedia favors no national variety of English, within a given article the conventions of one particular variety should be followed consistently.") and, more generally, WP:MOS ("Style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article, though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole.") as they currently exist, without exceptions. SSR (talk) 07:29, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
  • "Spinouts naturally follow the lead set by the main article, not the other way around." vs. "Trying to define "parents" and "spinouts" looks like a minefield." Both of these views have their points. Part of our difficulty here is that we're not thinking clearly about what really is a spinout (AmE: spinoff) article. It's completely absurd to consider Color blindness, an independently-created and edited medical article, to be a spinoff of Color, in any meaningful sense. One clear way to think about this, and the approach I would recommend, would be that a spinoff should retain the same ENGVAR as the parent article if it originated from a split (either per WP:SPLIT or WP:SUMMARY). If the article was independently created from scratch, it has its own separate WP:ENGVAR history. I'm not sure there's any other way to approach this, since if the spinoff article did originate via a split, it already has inherited ENGVAR history from when it was part of the overarching article. Obviously, when such a relationship exists, the spinoffs follow the main articles (when other ENGVAR concerns don't override this, e.g. Colour in the United Kingdom :-) but this relationship clearly does not always exist. A case can be made that if the main article changes style for some reason its genuine direct spinoffs should change to (again, except where this would create new ENGVAR problems), but it's a weak case. A case, no stronger, can also be made that it's perfectly reasonable for editors to conclude at a "kinda-spinoff" article that it, too, should be renamed and rewritten for consistency if it is more like a spinoff that an independed piece, but was coincidentally written independently. If Color were moved to Colour, a non-crazy case can be made that something like Colour wheel should be at a matching name, but I would not support a requested move of Color blindness to a conformant spelling. Don't let me get into cue sports examples, where this would really get complex. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 10:47, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

check out NOK

on disambiguation pages, is it necessary that the disambiguated term be used in the target article? an editor has been removing dab entries from NOK on the basis that "usage is not supported by the linked article". This is obviously nonsensical since it implies that, for example, Houston (disambiguation) would not include an entry for Houston Astros. Or am I mistaken? --NReTSa (talk) 02:44, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

I found the guideline: WP:DABABBREV. "Do not add articles to abbreviation or acronym disambiguation pages unless the target article defines the acronym or abbreviation ..." And I don't understand the Houston example. "Houston" isn't an abbreviation or acronym, and anyway the word "Houston" occurs once in the title "Houston Astros", and 118 times in the Houston Astros article. The article occasionally uses the word "Houston", without the word "Astros", as a shortened form of the name "Houston Astros". So a sports announcer mentioning "Houston" could mean the Astros. It turns out NOK can mean New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets, but the linked article doesn't say so. Art LaPella (talk) 03:19, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Art LaPella is right; we would not add something like the Hornets to the NOK disambiguation page without the article on the team mentioning this acronym. Houston Astros should be given in the "See also" section of Houston (disambiguation); standard operating procedure for items that begin with the character string being disambiguated. See WP:DAB and MOS:DAB for details on how disambiguation pages work. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 11:14, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

MOS issues in naming Pondicherry, Orissa

Move requests on these talk pages debating competing sections of the MOS. I tried adding a section a year or so ago on why we prefer Ganges over Ganga, despite ENGVAR, but the response was that it was too obvious to bother with. Well, it's back: Since Pondicherry is in India, the argument is we should use the local Indian English name regardless of what is the common name over all. Do we have a clear answer one way or the other? — kwami (talk) 04:03, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

The principles seem pretty clear to me and always have done, that we should be looking to: "The most common name for a subject ... as determined by its prevalence in reliable English-language sources". WP is a global encyclopedia and that means all such sources. We don't simply, necessarily, go with the local, "national" or official name. I get the point about local varieties of English and WP:ENGVAR, but I'm not sure how relevant it is. We are not talking about either spelling (eg favour vs favor) or different words for generic terms (eg pavement vs sidewalk) – where the different varieties of English have relatively fixed and clear rules and where ENGVAR clearly comes into play – but proper names. It seems doubtful whether one can say that there are "Indian English" versions of placenames in any real sense; especially with these changing ones, even if a majority of Indian English sources have started to use the new official form, other Indian sources will continue to use the former one. Until we have clear unanimity within Indian sources, I can't see that we have an ENGVAR issue to override COMMONNAME when global majority use genuinely remains at the old official name. N-HH talk/edits 15:00, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
That's always been my understanding. Can we add something explicit to that point to head off some of these chronic disputes? — kwami (talk) 03:10, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
N-HH, what happens when we do get clear unanimity within Indian sources on a spelling reform but British Australian and American sources continue to use the old spelling for another 5 years. Since this is what happened with e.g. Kolkata. What then? In ictu oculi (talk) 04:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I believe there's an old saying about a bridge relating to hypotheticals. Although, speaking hypothetically, I'm not sure one would ever be able to assert clear unanimity in this kind of circumstance and hence that something had become official "Indian English", such that to use the "old" form would now constitute an "error" as uncontested as, say, using the spelling "colour" in US English. It's still about preference and style within any one type of English, even if one preference is overwhelming and as near-unanimous as can ever be measured, rather than being part of the definition of that type. And on the specific point of Kolkata, I believe some Indian sources – not least the Calcutta Telegraph – do still use Calcutta, even in running text; or at least did until recently. N-HH talk/edits 12:16, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Do we need 5 new shortcuts into MOS:NDASH?

I've reverted this addition of many shortcuts pending discussion of why we would want them. The MOS and other pages are already overloaded with too many shortcuts, I think. Dicklyon (talk) 18:15, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

WP:Manual of Style #Anglo- anchor

Useful or not, but it is the target for redirects I currently use in discussions. Dicklyon, I hate your attitude to push the "undo" button when you see something which cannot promptly explain. Put my anchor back, please, I need it now. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 19:57, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

It's called WP:BRD. Is it such a bad process? If you really need an anchor, just put an anchor; but say why. Dicklyon (talk) 00:21, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
That's your fault, not Dicklyon's; you should have gotten consensus for a new shortcut before you started using it publicly. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 11:36, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
You relieved me from a large part of conversation with the perMOSser. I could make this unpleasant job alone, but thanks anyway. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 11:38, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
The {{shortcut|WP:ANGLO|WP:FRANCO|WP:SINO}} idea is helpful, though people may be overly tempted to expand it (Hispano-, Italio-, Hiberno-, Russo-, etc.). That could actually be resolved by ID'ing most that could ever come up and putting them in an {{anchors}} tag (invisible but works). The weird "WP:-" shortcut is not needed, and there are more than enough shortcuts there already. I have no objection to adding more {{anchors}} – I think every major piece of advice in MOS should have a mnemonic one to make it much easier to link directly to style matter instructions. I've "instinctively", as it were, been doing this myself at WP:Manual of Style/Organisms draft. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 11:21, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Do you mean WP:–? I use it extensively, because it is the natural choice. If Wikipedia has a guideline exactly about certain character, then where this character (in Wikipedia: space) should redirect to? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 11:38, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
The problem with WP:FRANCO is that the most well-known France guideline is WP:FRMOS, so someone might see or code WP:FRANCO (or MOS:#FRANCO) and expect WP:FRMOS. Similar for other countries. So one such link might be OK, but I wouldn't make a long list. Art LaPella (talk) 19:38, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I hope WP:ANGLO does not interfere with anything? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 20:04, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
WP:ANGLO looks good to me. Art LaPella (talk) 22:32, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Straw poll: How would you interpret "widely regarded" and "regarded by many"?

If a Wikipedia article gave an opinion as "widely regarded", how would you interpret that? That most of the world's commentators agree? Or only some but they are widely distributed? How about "regarded by many" or "regarded by some"? I am trying to phrase something which is held by roughly half the world's experts (anything from 25 to 75 percent, no one really knows and the WP authors disagree, but there's a good chance it's below 50%). (I don't want to give away what it's about because I want a neutral opinion, but if you're curious, check my edit history). Adpete (talk) 10:09, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Wrong forum here. This is not a manual of style issue. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:16, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I guess this specific query has moved elsewhere and will be sorted there, but I would say here more generally that, assuming the verifiability threshold is met, it does then become an issue of style in the wider sense – WP:WTA is part of MOS I believe – as well as a POV issue. You see the phrase all over the place in articles here but you'll always struggle to persuade the guardians of individual articles that there's a problem with it, especially in the context of music and film. Take two examples that could easily appear in a lead section and where the claim would be verifiable and technically true:
  • "The Beatles are widely regarded as one the best bands ever"
  • "The Earth is widely regarded to not be flat"
Obviously, the first is an attempt to smuggle in and highlight a subjective judgment by the back door while the second is an attempt to play down something that is objectively true; but given that they are uncontroversially true as statements on their own terms, editors will block any bid to deal with them. N-HH talk/edits 17:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

What multiple reliable sources explicitly say - continuing

Continuing from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 133#Three corrections, with permission from closing admin (User_talk:Nathan_Johnson#closure_of_rfc).

As I was saying, the IAU is the authority to be followed in comet names, it has prescribed hyphens, and a personal email has confirmed that they don't want dashes used as a replacement for hyphens. Waiting for a comment from Peter Coxhead. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:49, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

It seems to me that all of these punctuation/capitalization arguments for named things (comets, airports, works of art, trademarks) boil down to a choice among three possibilities:
A. Authoritative – As published by the naming authority, inventor, etc.
  • What if the authority is typographically unreliable, routinely using all-caps, inconsistent style, or doesn't seem to know that there's a difference between a dash and a hyphen? [unsigned comment]
B. WP:COMMONNAME – The way it is usually seen by the general public in print.
  • How do we filter out the sources that don't know the difference between a dash and a hyphen, or have inconsistent editing/styles (creeping into even the most well respected of pubs)? [unsigned comment]
C. Wikipedia style – According to WP:MOS, using "proper English grammar and punctuation", ignoring that it is a given name.
I'm pretty sure I don't like C, but the other two are problematic in their own ways, and I'm not sure there can be a one-fits-all rule for when they disagree or do not yield clear majorities after filtering (not that it even seems reasonable to do that much work in each case). I'm leaning towards B in the hope that reasonably typographically and editorially reliable sources still predominate. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 20:11, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
I've clarified C so that the straw man fallacy in it is important, and suggested alternative wording, in bold. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 06:08, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
For years A and B were the only options. When C was introduced last year it wrecked havoc, causing things to be very oddly named. Choosing between A and B is a constant theme at WP:RM, and there will never be any option of not doing so (William Jefferson Clinton vs. Bill Clinton). Apteva (talk) 21:01, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
No havoc was wreaked. Editors who disagree with the consensus disagree, and a small subset portray that disagreement in apocalyptic terms. -- JHunterJ (talk) 21:27, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
That is obviously disputed. Creating names that do not exist for hundreds of items is in my view clearly havoc. Apteva (talk) 01:50, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
It's not clear what you mean by "creating names that do not exist". Personally, when choosing styling for article titles, I follow the advice in MOS:TM, and choose from among styles used in reliable sources. I'm pretty sure that of all of the articles with en dashes that you have complained about and challenged, all are found with the same en dash styling in reliable sources. I'm not saying the MOS requires this (except for trademarks), just that I restrict my moves to such cases, to avoid controversy. I can't recall the last time anyone challenged such titles with sensible en dashes backed up by sources (besides you and now Enric who has joined you). I agree that "Creating names that do not exist for hundreds of items" might be a bad idea, but it's nothing like what's happening that you're bitching about. Your claim "This is obviously disputed" is just more whining. Cut it out. Dicklyon (talk) 07:38, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Exactly. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 05:15, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Also, this idea that styling of titles like text per the MOS is something that started last year is wrong. We've been doing that for all the years I've been at WP, at least since 2005 (like these hundreds on Sept. 30 2005), and I've seen some en dash titles go back to even earlier. Most do not provoke any controversy. Dicklyon (talk) 07:54, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
As far as I could tell, without checking them closely, all of those are pedantically correct, but annoying to anyone who does not like dashes in titles. But prior to 2008 there were technical restrictions on using dashes in titles anyway. None of those were proper nouns as far as I could tell. While it is annoying to me to see dashes used for something like the Michelson-Morley experiment - something that is rarely spelled with a dash, it is the proper nouns that are of more concern. But strictly speaking all should be named following common usage and not try to be pedantically correct. It is pretty easy to form an analogy between learning a little bit about something and then going out and applying that knowledge in areas that it no longer applies, which is exactly what was done. Show me one style guide that has an example of a bridge, war, airport, comet, or any other proper noun spelled with a dash. I can not find any in New Hart's Rules. I think we just made that up, and it just is not justifiable. Apteva (talk) 08:32, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
That's the crux of the matter: "anyone who does not like dashes in titles". That's a baldfaced WP:IDONTLIKEIT argument, and no basis for a change in MOS. There is probably no one on WP who can't think of something they don't like in MOS, but they deal with it and don't throw months-long, forum-shopping, disruptive hissy fits about it. And this "rarely spelled with a dash" crap is nonsense and you know it. It's been explained to you dozens of times that dashes are somewhat uncommon in news and other run-of-the-mill prose, simply for expediency reasons: keyboards don't have dash keys, and people on deadline won't bother to figure out how to insert one. You know this is true, but you just pretend you don't because it's inconvenient to your ridiculously tendentious argumentation. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 05:15, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
@ Alan: COMMONNAME governs names, the MOS the formatting of those names. Trying to follow COMMONNAME for stylistic choices and punctuation results in all sorts of inconsistencies, which is why print publishers drew up MOS's in the first place. — kwami (talk) 21:51, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
And we are not a print publisher. Apteva (talk) 08:32, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
This is not a WP:NOT#PAPER matter; as usual, you do not appear to have understood the policy you are making reference to. There is no conflict between what WP is doing and what a print encyclopedia would do on this issue. In actuality, WP needs an MoS even more than a print publisher would, because we have orders of magnitude more writer-editors and readers, facing orders of magnitude more subjects, the specialists in all of which would blissfully impose their own style on "their topic" and its articles, regardless of the effects this might have on non-specialists (and on specialists in other fields). Until you actually absorb and understand WP policies and guidelines better, you'd do well to steer clear of trying to cite them in arguments on which almost everyone is disagreeing with you (hint: you're probably making a mistake if this happens), especially ones you're already being RFC/U'd for. You should not even be squabbling here about this at all, unless your intent is to further convince people that your purpose here is to singlemindedly push this issue at all costs, until you get WP:ARBCOMed. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 04:49, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

B is often the worst of all possible choices, it seems to me. It will often lead to inconsistency and dispute, especially in an international encyclopaedia, since what is "common" in a topic area in one country is often not in another.

I strongly support following internationally recognized authorities whose remit is nomenclature, where these exist. Where they don't, Wikipedia is entitled to draw up its own guidance, but this must be based on consensus not the dictatorship of the majority.

If the IAU explicitly mandates hyphens rather than dashes in comet names, then this style should, of course, be followed. Peter coxhead (talk) 23:11, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

But they don't mandate anything about, or even recognize the existence of, en dashes. Enric didn't ask about en dashes, and the response didn't say; the guy interpreted the question about "dash" to be about the sentence punctuation dash, not the en dash, as his response makes clear: "Dashes are marks like semi-colons, commas, and periods, used grammatically in sentence structure. Hyphens link words together, not dashes." He thereby declared himself ignorant of the concept of an en dash, which is not so unusual. He did say "It is strictly not correct to write 'Comet Hale-Bopp'", which I assume applies also to the form with an en dash. But that's not so useful here, since Comet Hale–Bopp is what it's commonly called, and we use COMMONNAME (option B) for titles, not official designators (option A) like his suggestion "Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp)". Styling is a different matter. Option C is not an alternative to A or B, but goes along with either or both; perhaps better with B. On whether the IAU mandates, or even recommends, a typographical styling, one could ask them if Nature always gets it wrong; or Icarus; or Earth, Moon, and Planets. They probably won't understand the question, just as they didn't understand Enric's. Dicklyon (talk) 00:44, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
(I mean to respond to AlanM1, not Dicklyon, but couldn't figure out how to do so with the out-dent.) I don't really think it matters what the IAU thinks is the best name. Even leaving aside the possibility of a gramatically-ignorant official source – which seems to possibly be the case here – I nonetheless think that "C" is the best option of these. Are we really going to create a whole list of exceptions to the en-dash formatting rules for particular situations where "official" sources disagree with us? What if there are multiple competing "official" sources with different rules? Or what if common usage is ambiguous? Do we discount sources that appear not to distinguish between hyphens and dashes? Personally I think that the MOS' rules about dash use are confusing enough without a laundry list of particular exceptions for instances where the "official" or common name uses a hyphen rather than a dash. AgnosticAphid talk 01:05, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
How about another email, this time asking explicitly for en dashes?
@Agnosticaphid. In this case there is only only one naming authority and only one rule, just like the case of the cultivar names. --Enric Naval (talk) 13:19, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
I just meant that the MOS would have to say, "instead of an en dash to link these independent elements, comets use hyphens per the IAU," and then presumably there are other instances where the "official" source uses a hyphen, so we'd have to add whatever those things are, and to me it all seems a bit unmanageable and inconsistent with the purpose of the MOS which I think is to ensure stylistic consistency.AgnosticAphid talk 15:30, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, this is an encyclopedia, it should write hyphenated names with a hyphen. It shouldn't force dash usage to enforce stylistic consistency. I can't imagine Britannica or Merriam-Webster writing Hale-Bopp with a dash just to enforce some internal style rule. They write it with a hyphen.
The Chicago MOS 16 th edition defers to external naming authorities in several places:
  • 8.118. Scientific terms–additional resources. (...) The ultimate authorities are the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN), whose guidelines are followed in the botanical examples below, and the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) (see bibliog. 5). Note that some fields, such as virology, have slightly different rules. Writers and editors should try to follow the standards established within those fields.
  • "8.136. Astronomical terms–additional resources. The following paragraphs offer only the most general guidelines. Writers or editors working in astronomy or astrophysics should consult Scientific Style and Format (bibliog. 1.1) and the website of the International Astronomical Union."
  • "10.66 Naming Conventions for Chemical Elements. 'he International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is the recognized body that formally approves element names. (...)"
--Enric Naval (talk) 12:51, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
That's their option. Most of CMoS consists of points on which they do not defer to anyone, but insist on their own prescriptive rules. MOS happens to do this more than CMoS does on certain points (and less on others). Oh well; live with it and move on. You're also confusing names with how they are styled. This is like confusing the content of this page with the font styles in which you are viewing it (hint: they can vary from browser to browser, be modified by CSS, and even be inapplicable, e.g. in a screen reader for the visually impaired). Information on a topic is severable from the style in which that content is marked up, online or offline. Fighting over en dashes (being used as long hyphens, as pointed out below) is not like trying to contradict ICBN or ICZN on what the actual name of a species is. Again, see the logic in WP:SSF: A source being reliable on what the name or other underlying facts are about something in a particular field does not somehow make it a reliable source for how to punctuate English-language prose in a general-purpose encyclopedia. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 04:40, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Please focus. The only option under discussion is including C. A and B always exist, and are not the issue. Apteva (talk) 01:50, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

As I was saying, the opponents of the MOS dash guidelines (consensually derived in 2011 by 60 contributing editors, under ArbCom supervision) need to read something systematic and enlightened on the topic under dispute. Then, and only then, can they engage meaningfully in dialogue with editors who do know the theory behind these things, and do understand the difference between content and the styling of content.

I referred earlier to CGEL's chapter on punctuation. Any takers? Any interest? Or should we tightly restrict deliberations, so that off-the-cuff responses from such non-style "authorities" as IAU (to leading questions) will determine style on Wikipedia? Note, of course, that the vice-president of IAU evinces no acquaintance with the en dash at all. Contrast the major guides that inspire the best-practice guidelines consensually presented in MOS. Those major guides discuss naming of comets and the like also, remember.

Please: just let me know. I can help. But if editors prefer to remain beyond help, inform me so I can do something less futile – instead of attempting to engage people who are fanatically committed to ignoring how hyphens and en dashes actually work, in actual high-quality publication.

♥

NoeticaTea? 03:54, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Please do a careful read of the entire CGEL (Cambridge Grammar of the English Language ISBN 978-0521431460}, and tell me if there is an example of an airport, bridge, war, comet, or any other proper noun spelled with an endash anywhere in the entire book. I am pretty much up to speed on knowing how to correctly use endashes, emdashes, and hyphens in sentences, but see no reason to extend dashes to named items, which, by definition have a specific name. Apteva (talk) 08:06, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
But what difference could that make, Apteva? If I pointed out that nowhere in CGEL is there any support for your wild surmise that proper names never have an en dash, how would that move things along? If I did present such an example from CGEL, what difference would that hard evidence make? To you, I mean. Would it terminate or even shorten your ridiculous campaign?
Very well, let's see. From CGEL, p. 1762:

the Lewis–Jones Company

Nor is CGEL idiosyncratic in this. From The Penguin Dictionary of Proper Names (revised edition, 1991; my usual underlining for emphasis), on p. 230:

Hitler–Stalin Pact ("sometimes called the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact")

And on the very next page:

Hoare–Laval Pact

That dictionary of proper names does not apply distracting title case to its entries; there are plenty in which main words are in lower case, like "Hobson Memorial lectures" and "Odder–Neisse line". Not everyone thinks that every construction functioning as a proper name has its status marked by capitalisation. One more for good measure:

Panhard–Levassor ("French firm of car manufacturers")

So will you stop now, please? Can we all stop, in fact? The RFC has ended, remember. So have most of the other drawn-out diatribes over en dashes, in scattered theatres of conflict where editors' reserves of time and patience are squandered.
The community has spoken, as it did in 2011. Live with it – as we all must live with not getting our way in an imperfect world.
NoeticaTea? 11:34, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Noetica, welcome back! I'm glad you've got that fat book! Dicklyon (talk) 16:07, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, and it is correct that even if it had a list of all the comets in the world with endashes it would not change the fact that the preferred spelling is with a hyphen. And if it had no proper nouns with an endash that also would not change anything, but it does confirm that one book on grammar, not style, but grammar, does have some examples of using an endash in a proper noun. The acid test still is, is that the most common spelling of Panhard–Levassor, Hoare–Laval Pact, and Hitler–Stalin Pact, and is the official or most common spelling of Lewis–Jones Company (likely a made up example - there are lots of Lewis Jones Companies but they all use a space, and of course Mcgraw-Hill uses a hyphen). I will also note that CGEL does not attempt to be representative, but calls pronouns nouns, and explains the reasoning, though that falls on deaf ears of every teacher teaching grammar, and so should we turn a deaf ear. So no, it does not change anything, and no there is still not any consensus on hyphens and dashes, although it would be trivial to reach consensus if everyone was interested in finding out which areas there is consensus and which there is not. For example, it is pedantically correct to write Michelson–Morley experiment, but that is not the way most people write it, so that is out. No one writes comets or airports with an endash so that is out, and ditto for wars and bridges. And as to the places that dashes are correctly used - in sentences like this one, what is all the fuss about, the sentence does not change its meaning because of three missing pixels. Apteva (talk) 11:04, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
So why make this request at all:

"Tell me if there is an example of an airport, bridge, war, comet, or any other proper noun spelled with an endash anywhere in the entire book." – Apteva

Why did you waste my time, and everyone else's, yet again? I answered your challenge. But why did you make it?
If you are immune to evidence, don't ask for it. If you do not believe in rational dialogue that can change opinions, don't pretend to engage in it.
(Hence the RFC/U.)
NoeticaTea? 12:59, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
It was not a waste of time and I am appreciative of the effort it took. The question was did WP editors make this up or did any of them see it in a book somewhere. Clearly it is not a standard interpretation, as few books are published using an endash within a proper noun, and is not an appropriate interpretation for wikipedia. I knew that some books do but none of the style guides that I have access to suggest doing so. I have tried isolating the anomalies to publishers but have not done a rigorous analysis. It seems more random than anything else - for example the paper[1] that used endashes for everything, and a minus sign for a range. Apteva (talk) 05:21, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
One problem here may be that the words dash and hyphen are both used with different meanings.
  • On the one hand, we have the terminology (used, for instance, by the CGEL - and apparently by the IAU) where
    • dash is used to designate (syntactically) a punctuation mark that can be represented typographically by a spaced en rule or an unspaced em rule (for instance to indicate parenthetical information) and
    • hyphen is used to designate a mark that is used to connect two words and takes the typographic form of an (ordinary) hyphen or a long hyphen (represented by an en rule), depending on the relationship between the two words thus connected.
  • On the other hand we have the terminology - which may risk a conflation of the syntactic and typographic roles - where
    • dash is used for various types of horizontal rule, including
    • the "en dash" and
    • the "em dash".
--Boson (talk) 12:34, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
Good way to look at it. Apteva, Enric and Wikid: Wikipedia uses a normal (short) hyphen most of the time. When juxtaposing two separate entities (Mexican–American War, Seattle–Tacoma Airport) in a name or title, Wikipedia uses a longer hyphen, to distinguish such a case from the case of a two-part hyphenated name (Lord Baden-Powell. This longer hyphen incidentally uses the same glyph as the en-dash that is sometimes (when the unspaced em-dash is not used) used as a spaced indicator of a parenthetical. The long hyphen is a simple disambiguator. You are free to not bother with it; someone else will correct it if you use the short hyphen where MOS wants a longer one. Now please back away from the horse carcass and drop the bludgeon. Please get over your unreasonable and obsessive fits of rage about the matter. It doesn't really matter, and you need to internalize that fact. If you won't, then you are clearly not here to write an encyclopedia, but rather to push an agenda and engage in bitter argument for its own sake. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 04:25, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Many books do look at it that way. The glyph is known to many as the "en rule", and the function as "long hyphen". Others merge these into "en dash". Dicklyon (talk) 05:04, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
I propose we adopt this in MOS to reduce confusion and strife. Immediately. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 06:27, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Short version: Read WP:SSF. Summary: Reliable sources on astronomy are not reliable sources on English language usage, and on style matters do not trump our in-house style (likewise MOS doesn't dictate how people stylize and punctuate in astronomy textbooks and journals). PS: Atpeva, when you're being RFC/U'd for disruption and tendentiousness on this issue, it's probably not wise to bring it up yet again. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 01:27, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Let's point out please that that is your personal essay, not something that has consensus, though no doubt there are other MOS regulars who agree with it. --Trovatore (talk) 01:32, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
I never claimed it was anything but an essay. It's not whether it has a special tag on it declaring it a guideline, it's the fact that it has logic in it that no one has been able to refute. The argument that an astronomy source is automatically a reliable source on how Wikipedia should style English writing in a general purpose encyclopedia just because astronomy is involved is absurd on its face. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 01:37, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
The difference between an essay and a guideline (well, the difference relevant in this case, anyway) is not a tag; it's consensus. As for it being a matter of "logic", that's just not so. You have a normative view that there should be a centralized style; others have a normative view that style should follow the usage of the field of study. Each view has merits and demerits, but neither is a matter of logic. --Trovatore (talk) 01:42, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
I never asserted the essay had consensus; if it did, it would be a guideline. I'm not sure what point you think you're making, but it's not working. You keep basically rebutting the idea that WP:SSF has the force of a policy or guideline, but no one has made any such claim, and mistaking that as being the central issue means you are not understanding what WP:SSF is, why it exists or why what it says matters. You can keep telling yourself it's all just a matter of opinion, but the essay completely shreds the "follow the usage of the field of study" argument on logical grounds, demonstrating its numerous fallacies. The essay has its own talk page; feel free to take up any issues you have with it there. The short version of why it matters is that virtually every single specialty, vocational and avocational, in the world has stylistic nitpicks used within its own specialist publications that conflict with general English usage and even more directly conflict with in-field usage by specialists in other fields. Even aside from the fact that no one can be expected to remember the weird style bugbears of every field there is, the fact that they conflict with each other, and most importantly with normal English usage, logically means we cannot kowtow to every stylistic whim of specializations, but have to stick to general English usage, as we have codified it at MOS, or the encyclopedia's writing will have a confusing lack of consistency that makes it harder to read and understand, and even worse to edit. More detailed discussion of WP:SSF is rather off-topic at WT:MOS; it has its own talk page for a reason. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 04:09, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
You have not made any such claims explicitly. In my opinion it is — or at the very least, risks appearing &mdash disingenuous, to answer a question by giving a link that looks guideline-like, without mentioning that this thing is almost entirely your work and can be assumed to be mainly your personal opinion (though, as I say, there will of course be others who agree).
I completely disagree with you, of course, as to the success of the essay, at least the parts of it I've read (you do tend to go on a bit, frankly). My basic analysis is that you treat the argument of your opponents as identifying the use of reliable sources for content with copying their style, as though no distinction could be made between the two things. If that were the actual argument, it would still not be a mistake of logic, but it would be a pretty obvious mistake.
But almost no one, I think, takes that actual position. The strongest real position along that lines that your are likely to encounter is that it is not desirable to make such a distinction. That, clearly, cannot be refuted as matter of logic, though you might certainly attempt to refute it on other grounds.
It may be that people sometimes say that there is no distinction between using reliable sources for content, and copying their style. It is generally polite, when people say things they obviously cannot literally mean, to address what they probably meant, while pointing out gently that it isn't what they said. --Trovatore (talk) 05:06, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm not aware of anyone, major author of it or not, who prefaces or postscripts their links to any essay with something like "by the way, this is an essay not a guideline or policy". Editors can read, and the page clearly has an essay tag on it. I don't like to insult other editors' intelligence. I never tell people they have to do this or that based on WP:SSF; I ask them to see WP:SSF for why a particular argument is fallacious and unhelpful on WP. As for the substantive matter, I would love to be able to agree with you, but the fact of the matter is that most of the cases of SSF that arise are in fact people asserting that WP "must" do it the same way as journals or newsletters or whatever in field X simply because that's how they do it, that it is "wrong", not just undesirable, to separate content and style when it comes to their particular peccadillo. Proponents of SSF-inflected arguments usually cannot at all see any difference between citing facts from their favored sources and aping the style of those sources when it comes to those facts, and see the two as utterly non-severable. They do "take that actual position", and will sometimes defend it to the point of WP:DIVA threats to quit WP if they don't get their way. I wouldn't have needed to write WP:SSF otherwise. Apteva is doing this right now. He does not believe that how the name comet Hale–Bopp is styled can legitimately be done, in any publication of any kind, other than how the IAU does it in astronomy journals. He's fought half way to death over the issue, with no signs of letting up, despite the RFC/U. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 06:08, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Pretty much any specialty tends to capitalize their own important terms, and they tend to drop hyphens from compound modifiers that are familiar within their specialty (like the AMA guide that in recent years changed to recommend dropping the hyphen from small-cell carcinoma). Both of these specialist tendencies are contrary to what makes sense for a general readership, and contrary to what our MOS should recommend (in my opinion). Some of these ideas should propagate from the essay to the guidelines, I think. Dicklyon (talk) 04:18, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
I think you overestimate how much of the capitalization thing is about importance. Sometimes it serves some quite distinct function (as in American Robin versus American robin, to take an emotionally charged example). But in any case I am happy to agree that we should not slavishly copy every minuscule detail of style from specialist usage (though I think we owe a certain amount of deference to reasonably founded claims that some details serve a purpose). My beef here with SMcC is that he thinks he's identified a basic flaw of logic, and I say he has not, at least not with the serious arguments for following usage in the field. --Trovatore (talk) 05:11, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
More people than WP:BIRDS will admit simply don't buy that that this supposed American Robin vs. American robin distinction is actually special or linguistically necessary. "Importance" is probably the wrong word; "emphasis" is more accurate. People in all fields, from academics to hobbyists, like to use capitalization as a form of emphasis, and it's usually not questioned in their in-field publications. Most of them also have the sense to not try to port their field's stylistic quirks to more general publications. Even ornithologists know not to capitalize bird common names when writing for more general zoology or science journals. (It's a shame that around a dozen of them on WP don't and refuse to acknowledge this.) Capitalizing "American Robin" to distinguish it from "American robins", in the "robins of the Americas" (or of the US or of North America, whatever) sense, is also simply a form of emphasis, whether birders want to admit it or not. The proof is in the fact that you can simply word more precisely: "The American robin is easily confused with several other species of robins found in North America", for example, in place of the bollocksy "The American robin should not be confused with other American robins" pseudo-example that birders like to trot out as why they "need" capitalization, when in reality no one but a moron would write that. Virtually no other field of zoology or botany has relied on such a lame excuse, and they all do just fine without capitalizing common names of species.

As I've pointed out before, the birders' solidarity on this issue (aside from being illusory - most members of WP:BIRDS simply don't care and refuse to participate in such arguments) is based on a misunderstanding of the factual history of the issue to begin with. Birdwatching field guides do not capitalize bird species common names because this is an ornithological standard. They do it for blatant emphasis. Virtually all field guides about everything do it, from wildflowers to amphibians, because it makes it easier to quickly scan species names in the prose when you are in the field trying to ID something. They've been doing this since at least the 19th century, long before the IOU came up with an academic standard calling for capitalization. It's pure coincidence.

Regardless, MOS says do not use capitalization as a form of emphasis. WP is not a field guide or an academic journal. MOS actually gives a lot of deference to specialist styles, from how measures and units are written to how royal and noble styles are presented to how mathematics are represented – as long as it doesn't conflict with basic expectations about English grammar and usage. If it would produce a "WTF? I should fix that typo..." reaction in the average editor, MOS deprecates it. I'm not going to debate WP:SSF in any detail here. (And, yes, it is too rambling.)

— SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 06:12, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure how this turned into yet another discussion of the merits or otherwise of capitalizing common names (it might suggest that SMcCandlish is as obsessed with this issue as he claims his opponents are). However, it's a bit off the point. If anyone has claimed that the styles which happen to be used in specialist sources should be copied in articles concerned with that specialism solely because they are used in specialist sources, then they have put forward a weak argument (if not necessarily an illogical one). However, if an authoritative body explicitly specifies preferred styles for its specialist area, then there is nothing illogical about choosing to follow these styles. If the IAU explicitly recommended the use of hyphens rather than en-dashes in the names of comets, then it would be no more illogical to adopt this style than it is to italicize the scientific names of organisms at the genus level or below (but not above) based on the IC(B)N or the ICZN. (As it happens, the evidence that the IAU does this is at present not very convincing.) Peter coxhead (talk) 01:34, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
Trovatore brought up the birds, not me. And it was germane anyway, since we were talking about WP:SSF, which was written largely in response to the birds debate (though has proven applicable to many, many others, clearly including this "must use a hyphen because my preferred sources use one, and I am making wild assumptions about why, yet insisting my interpretation is righteously correct and going on a holy war about it" case). Capitalizing the common names of species just because journals in a particular field mostly do so is, for better or worse, the establishing and "canonical" example of the specialist style fallacy on Wikipedia. I already acknowledged the sub-thread was off the point, and have twice pointed to WT:SSF as where to talk about it. Any other things you want to whack me for that I didn't actually do or which aren't my fault? The (very) weak argument you point to, that the style from a type of specialist source "must" be used in WP articles on the same topic because of its use in those specialist sources, demonstrably is put forth by proponents of SSF arguments; that's the entire point of that essay existing. WP:SSF is not a mischaracterizing straw man, it's based on direct, long-term observation of the irrational arguments made by those advocating specialist style fallacies, which are always based in a faulting understanding of "follow the sources", and contingent upon browbeating, incessant assertion that because reliable sources in that field/on that topic use style quirk X, WP must follow suit. It is this argument that makes it the SS fallacy to begin with. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:47, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

O, this goes on and on! How can it be? There was an RFC; it was closed. And then the discussion rises with new heads like the Hydra. We need to decide: do RFCs settle matters here, or not?

About IAU:

  • They are unaware of the existence of en dashes, let alone the use of en dashes to serve as substitutes for an ordinary hyphen when certain semantic distinctions are to be made (the "long hyphen" function, which Dicklyon and Boson have mentioned on this page following CGEL, and which SMcCandlish has enthusiastically embraced).
  • Other respected style authorities flatly disagree with IAU's style-ignorant rulings. NHR and its associated publications – like Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors (ODSWE), to say nothing of OED – give style-aware rulings, for general publication for ordinary real readers. Like ours. They do distinguish ordinary hyphen and its variant: the "long hyphen", realised by en dash and frequently referred to by that name. And they rule differently from IAU.
  • Our style choices are nearly always based on NHR, CMOS, OED, and such best-practice, industry-standard, widely subscribed and reliable sources.
  • If nothing else will decide the matter, we are entitled to spurn IAU's blinkered ways when we see that they want the hyphen removed [sic] from the double-barreled surname of a discoverer of a comet. However well that works for the comet-spotting community, it blends like oil in water on Wikipedia. It does not accord with any other MOS recommendations; and it is bound to confuse our readers.

I propose that we drop this topic for the new year. An RFC has run its long winding course; another, similarly long, has snaked to a similar hole of oblivion at the Village Pump; the community has dismissed the alternative view at several polemical and time-consuming RMs; MOS editors who care and who worked tirelessly to settle all of this in 2011 are all but pilloried for continuing to defend a consensus that proves its robustness again and again; and we are waiting on a formal conclusion to a decisive RFC/U for the editor who did most to make clear waters turbid yet again.

Drop it. Next topic, please?

NoeticaTea? 04:39, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I submit that it is more likely to confuse Wikipedia's readers when the Wikipedia MOS mandates spellings that aren't found in the vast majority of our sources. It puts Wikipedia in the position of promoting idiosyncratic spellings not favored by most reliable sources. It astounds me that people simultaneously hold that most Wikipedia readers are completely blind to the distinction between hyphens and dashes and yet at the same time stridently maintain that failure to strictly hew to a very complex and intricate set of dash rules will cause endless and widespread confusion. Logically there's no way that both of these things can be true, but I've seen this argument made here over and over again. I don't think there's any evidence that hyphens in place of dashes cause any confusion in actual practice. I do think there's ample evidence that en-dashes are strongly preferred for some uncontroversial uses such as date and numeric ranges. Quale (talk) 05:34, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
What the heck are you going on about? Where does the MOS have anything to say about spelling? Only in MOS:ENGVAR, MOS:QUOTES, and MOS:FOREIGN. None of these mandate unusual spellings. And who are you talking about that holds that "most Wikipedia readers are completely blind to the distinction between hyphens and dashes" and/or that "maintain that failure to strictly hew to a very complex and intricate set of dash rules will cause endless and widespread confusion". I haven't seen either of those positions espoused here. The MOS is flexible in what it allows from editors, and makes no real mandates. It does provide guidance toward what would be considered an improvement, however, and we wouldn't bother if we thought nobody would notice. Dicklyon (talk) 05:50, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
Quale, I do wonder sometimes. Did you read what I wrote about those appeals to conform with the style-blind content experts at IAU? They actually want to remove the hyphen from the surname of a comet-discoverer, contorting it to fit with their strange rules. You come here with a claim that MOS is against common, readable forms? "Most reliable sources", of which you speak, style their productions in all sorts of weird ways. The role of WP:MOS and its subpages is to sort that out in the interests of the general reader. Do you really think IAU does a better job? Note, for a start: IAU never set out to meet the needs of the general reader. NHR, OED, CMOS, and the other genuine authorities on language and style do set out with that purpose. So does Wikipedia; and therefore, MOS adopts and adapts the best guidance chosen from them. And from high-quality publishers, who typically follow one or other of them. The decisions here are made consensually. I'm sure most editors here fervently hope that will continue. (Most, not all.) We have a firm consensus about use of en dashes. It has lasted well. Accept it, or challenge it as not a genuine consensus, because consensus has changed since it was tested in mid-2011, somehow. Do not challenge it with spurious arguments that have been traversed again and again, and that bring even the responsible editors here into disrepute when we resist die-hard partisans who will not drop the stick.
Guilt by association is grossly unfair; and we have a right to be fed up with it.
Time to close this thread. It will get us nowhere.
NoeticaTea? 07:21, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
Strange rules? You mean IAU's prerogative to spell and capitalize names in whatever manner they find adequate? Oh, you have no idea....:
--Enric Naval (talk) 00:15, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
What do you mean by "you have no idea"? Since you seem determined to stop this thread getting archived by replying to me four days later, I will respond: IAU, as consenting adults, can do what they damn well like. But then so can OED, NHR, ODSWE, and WP:MOS. Get it, and move on. Some scholarly sources speak of "Comet Singer Brewster", some of "Comet Singer-Brewster" – a comet discovered, after all, by Stephen Singer-Brewster. The major style guides that have heard of en dashes generally use them, enabling preservation of the universally accepted styling of the discoverer's name. WP:MOS is that sort of major style guide. Biggest, most comprehensive, most nuanced on the web, yet with consensually developed guidelines. Now can we stop? NoeticaTea? 00:55, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I hadn't noticed this was 4 days old. I just wanted to point out the glaring error in your argument: Wikipedia doesn't follow style guides or grammar rules when naming comets and minor planets. Instead, Wikipedia follows IAU's "strange rules":
There are even weirder names, all of them following IAU's rules. Except, of course, 79360 Sila–Nunam. And all comets with multiple discoverers. And all because some people think that astronomical names need to follow English grammar rules in order to be correct. (Why not read "10 Weird Rules That Control How We Name the Planets" and its helpful advice: "do not question the IAU about its rules" in all caps.) --Enric Naval (talk) 03:07, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Which argument are you talking about? And how have you pointed out a "glaring error" in it? Wait, let me preempt you so we can just wrap this up, OK?
Wikipedia articles have all sorts of irregular and inconsistent titles. Some conform to the consensual guidelines at WP:MOS (the central source of Wikipedian style recommendations, which trumps all others when there is a conflict). You cite this, from an external source that has no authority over Wikipedia and no assent in any consensus here: "do not question the IAU about its rules". O yeah? Sorry, Wikipedia will question what it damn well wants to question. IAU can do what they like. Publishers inclined to follow them are free to do so. Some do, some do not. Wikipedia's style guidelines do not. Live with it.
Now can we stop?
NoeticaTea? 03:38, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Your argument is that WP:MOS regulates comet and minor planet names in wikipedia. But the truth is that they are regulated by IAU's "strange rules". Wikipedia writes Singer Brewster without a hyphen because the IAU says so, and the MOS doesn't have any say on it. --Enric Naval (talk) 04:08, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
So WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS—so what? That the MOS guidelines have not been followed in some cases is no indication, in itself, that they should not be. (BTW I don't see what minor-planet names have to do with the current discussion). FWIW I think that where articles are named in accordance with the MOS, and differ from the forms preferred by technical, specialized sources, the ‘official’ name should appear prominently in the lead. That way, even if no redirects have been made, a search will readily find the wanted article.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 04:26, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
In the article's context, "DO NOT QUESTION THE IAU ABOUT ITS RULES" was of course a joke. Art LaPella (talk) 04:16, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Enric, no. My argument is that MOS can be applied in the styling of article titles, any time. That is part of its role. But do not take this as an opportunity to continue your old dispute about that, yet again. MOS is applied to the article Comet Hale–Bopp, according to strong consensus recognised by ArbCom. MOS has not yet been applied to all such titles, but it could be. WP:MOS, as I have said, is recognised as the main style resource, and in cases of dispute we default to its recommendations. Again, this not an invitation to recycle your dissent from consensus and ArbCom's view on that topic, either.
  • Art, yes. It's a joke here too. Who could take it seriously? (That's a rhetorical question. Can we stop now?)
NoeticaTea? 05:00, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Ah, the vague assertions that MOS applies to all articles, even in articles where it clearly doesn't, like Singer Brewster.... OK, no point in continuing this. I'll end up thinking of an email for the IAU, and I'll post their reply. Who knows, maybe they will tell me that en dashes are acceptable, I have no idea. --Enric Naval (talk) 05:24, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
The IAU guy has no idea what an en dash is. When we use one where they use a hyphen, it does not introduce any ambiguity, and clarifies the relationship for normal English readers who are not aware of the IAU convention to use a hyphen. If we were to put a hyphen into 105P/Singer Brewster, there would be a bit of problem, however, for those readers familiar with the IAU conventions, who might interpret it as referring to two people. For normal English readers it would refer to a person Singer-Brewster, unless they didn't know that we use en dashes for two names, in which case it would again be ambiguous. Just like the hyphen in Hale-Bopp would make it ambiguous to some readers, and wrong to others, depending on what conventions they think are in use. The only way to keep Hale–Bopp unambiguous is to stick with the typographical convention we use elsewhere for pairs of names. There is no way to keep Comet Singer Brewster unambiguous, since most people are unaware of the IAU's odd conventions, and doing it normally would make it wrong for the astronomers. Yes, the IAU has made a mess; but that's not a reason to mess up Hale–Bopp. And if we decide by consensus to say "Comet Singer-Brewster", that won't be a disaster either; but for now, we don't do that, we just style the hyphen in Hale–Bopp as a "long hyphen" or en dash. Dicklyon (talk) 05:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I though that Style guide discouraged the hyphenation of proper nouns that have a space on it? As I see it, when the IAU named the comet, they created a new proper noun that is independent from the name of the discoverer (if the discoverer decided to change his surname, the comet would retain its original name). --Enric Naval (talk) 12:09, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Dicklyon, that interpretation of WP:NAMINGCRITERIA was already discussed and rejected. Title only need to be recognizable to "someone familiar with (though not necessarily expert in) the topic." We don't need to alter the names so someone completely unfamiliar with the topic won't get the wrong idea from a simple glance to the title. We don't need to spoon-feed readers. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:43, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Can we dial this back? There is no question this section could be improved—there is always room for improvement—but there is no point in continuing until the current pattern of disruptions has been resolved. WP:Requests for comment/Apteva has been going since Nov. 30, with endorsement from 18 editors (in addition to the two editors who initiated it) and a motion to close has been endorsed by 28 editors. Yet, the editor who is the subject of this RFC/U is still on this MOS page, inserting the same remarks. Neotarf (talk) 09:14, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

No, we cannot "dial this back". Enough is enough. Of course the provision under "discussion" here could be improved! Every section could be improved; and I have just negotiated with Peter Coxhead that we should consider a fresh draft of one portion, for clarification. But this campaign from Enric Naval and Apteva is not about improvement (that is, moving closer to consensus). It is about overturning decisions for which consensus has not changed (at least, there is no evidence that it has changed). For reasons that have no force here on Wikipedia.
Apteva is the subject of that RFC/U mentioned above, where "18 editors" + 2 misrepresents the strong consensus regarding his conduct, by the way. (Look again at the opinions of almost all 36 who contributed there.) Apteva and Enric Naval persist no matter what evidence is presented, what arguments are produced, what broad consensus is shown, what pointy RM discussions they initiate and fail at, or what sprawling RFCs (initiated in several forums) bring disrepute on all editors associated with MOS, and then fail anyway. We saw all this in the past, when admin Sandstein tried to clobber everyone with blocks and bans at WP:AN because banned sock-puppeteer and anti-MOS activist PMAnderson got everyone tarred with the same brush, and we're seeing it again now. Learn from history, and let's say now: enough is enough.
Time for genuine and definite decisions, without the niceties, caveats, and qualifications that are appropriate in civil collegial dialogues, in the normal and productive business of this talkpage.
Time to close this thread. It will get us nowhere.
NoeticaTea? 11:09, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I concur. Also, for the record, the disruptive, will-not-drop-it-until-they-die editors on this topic are a triumvirate, not a duo: Apteva, Enric Naval, and Wikid77. On at least some points they also have support from Blueboar, which kind of surprises me, and LittleBen, which does not, since he has been WP:AN/I'd for similar patterns of disruption before, blocked for it, and eventually topic-banned for it, on diacritics. A grand total of five editors whose heads asplode when they encounter dashes is certainly not enough to produce some kind of sea change in consensus. I'm beginning to see that these things tend to run in threes; the main "warrior" on such a topic will seek out two sidekicks, as just enough voices to convince some onlookers that there may be some real issue, instead of just a crank making noise. LittleBen did this, too, recruiting the aid of two other editors in his failed campaign against diacritics in article titles and text. KimvdLinde was also aided principally by two like-minded "warriors" in her WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT-based, unsuccessful campaign to change MOS to actively endorse capitalization of bird common names, in which AN/I found that she had canvassed to disrupt a poll on the matte. Like LittleBen and Apteva, KimvdLinde also forum-shopped her pet issue all over the place, even highjacking WP:DRN for that purpose. And so on. Other random people may chime in favoring the (inaccurately described) non-majority side of any given style "war" (as KimvdLinde termed it), but it seems to require three dedicated partisans to be genuinely disruptive about it on a large scale. I wouldn't be surprised if some of PMAnderson's quixotic quests show a similar triadic pattern. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 23:35, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Why the exception?

It's well established that the first and last words of names should be capitalised - be it those of books, films, songs, plays, paintings, whatever. But - and apologies of this is the wrong place to ask this - why are band names considered the odd ones out? It seems that a lowercase "the" is preferred, even if it's indisputably part of the band name, and I've never read a good reason why this should be. Even if it's historical, there must have been some sort of consensus to keep it up here on Wikipedia. This is a genuine question. It just seems rather arbitrary an exception to have become the norm. 86.4.242.105 (talk) 19:39, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

It's not just band names. The New York Times refers to itself with an italic capital 'T' in the "The", and the same capital 'T' is in the company's trademark, but the Chicago Manual of Style says to write it in running prose as "the New York Times", the initial word written without italics and without caps. Similarly, the Beatles are given the same style guideline. Binksternet (talk) 20:03, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, that's fair enough - though it seems that The Times (of London) and The Daily Telegraph (for instance) don't adhere to that same style. It could also be argued that the "The" is being dropped from the name in your example all together, so any article (definite or indefinite) that's subsequently added belongs to the prose rather than the title (if you see what I mean). But the question remains: why these exceptions? It seems arbitrary, and is something I've never heard properly explained. 86.4.242.105 (talk) 23:43, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
It is also customary to lowercase the with political entities (the Phillipines, the United Kingdom, the European Union) with conventional exceptions (The Hague, The Gambia). --Boson (talk) 00:03, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
True, but we're no nearer to answering the question of why bands follow different capitalisation rules from songs, films, books, plays, paintings, poems... Doesn't it seem arbitrary to anybody else? When the Wikipedia MOS was drawn up, there must have been some reason for this - or was it simply because other style guides take this route (in which case it's a chicken/egg situation)? Does it perhaps go back to the days when "the" was rarely the first word in the name of the act, as in Buddy Holly and the Crickets or Cliff Richard and the Shadows (in which case it's an anachronism)? Anyone? 86.4.242.105 (talk) 01:02, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
I don't see why you expect band names to follow the rules for titles of works, rather than names of other organizations. --Boson (talk) 01:50, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm not really expecting anything - I'm just trying to find out why the rules of capitalisation have these exceptions (and by extension, whether they ought to or not). As far as I'm concerned, a name is a name, and first and last words should be capitalised. If the first word is the definite (or indefinite) article and indisputably part of that name, I can see no good reason for it to be in lower case - can anyone provide me with one? Many thanks in advance. 86.4.242.105 (talk) 19:13, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
Your "a name is a name" assumption is the source of the confusion. Names of organizations, including bands, are handled differently from titles of published works. The Lord of the Rings is always The Lord of the Rings, even in mid-sentence or when preceded by a possessive ("J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings"), but not so with orgs, incl. bands ("Best and Sutcliffe's Beatles had a more bluesy, less poppy sound than the later 'Fab Four' we're more familiar with"). — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 06:24, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, I'd make the case that you could describe a Tolkienesque piece of hackwork as "a Lord of the Rings rip-off" - no definite article, even though it's indisputably part of the name. Of course, it would be better to refer to it as "a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings", but never "a The Lord of the Rings rip-off". By the same token, the sentence you quoted would more properly start with something like "The Best and Sutcliffe incarnation of (t/T)he Beatles...", but never "Best and Sutcliffe's (t/T)he Beatles..." Very similar. So should there be a difference if the definite article is indisputably part of the name of an organisation or band? Or does it depend on the band in question? Try your example (with suitable alterations so that it makes sense, of course) with (t/T)he Who or (t/T)he Knack - do band names which aren't plurals require different rules?
The way to avoid the problem with the Tolkien example, where some might feel that "a The Lord of the Rings rip-off" seem awkward, would be to reword: "a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings", just as you did with that Beatles example, though it's less important to do something like that with that example, because "The Beatles" isn't the title of a published work, and it's normal to drop the article in mid-sentence (as I did when I wrote "that Beatles example"). I would say generally, no, there is not a special difference if the article is part of the official band name (which is the case with The Beatles), but as with everything in every guideline, there are always exceptions. The The pretty much always has to be written as such, because it's just too confusing otherwise. You can't really get away with "the critical reception of the third The album". — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 23:46, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
Just for the avoidance of doubt, is it your opinion that a definite article at the start (and indisputably part) of a band name should indeed be capitalised in running prose, but also dropped altogether if context dictates? That's the impression I got from your last reply - please correct me if I am wrong. 86.4.242.105 (talk) 19:22, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
On a slight tangent, since you brought up books, are both of these correct? (Note the capitalisation of the definite article):
- The first book in the series is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
- The first book in the Harry Potter series is The Philosopher's Stone. 86.4.242.105 (talk) 23:57, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
No; the second is a misstatement of fact. It is common to truncate titles like this after the first instance, but the way to do that would be Philosopher's Stone, I would say, because it's not a subtitle, but part of a longer unitary title: Harry's age in Philosopher's Stone was..." Contrast Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is often shortened to The Next Generation or TNG; it's a self-complete subtitle. It's such fine hair-splitting that an editwar would be incredibly WP:LAME. However, you still wouldn't write "the first book in the Harry Potter series is Philosopher's Stone", because that's still a misstatement of fact, not being the actual title. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 23:39, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
Well, yes, but that's rather ducking the issue - people often misstate facts in everyday speech. If, for example, you had exceptionally good reason to quote someone as having said precisely the following words, how would you capitalise (and italicise) it?:
"my favourite harry potter book is the chamber of secrets." 86.4.242.105 (talk) 19:22, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Foreign-language quotations

MOS:QUOTE currently says that foreign-language quotations should appear in translation. It's not clear to me how this should work in practice. Who should do the translation? What I suggest is:

  • If a reliable source has published an English translation of the foreign quotation, then we can use it.
  • If the quotation is only published in its original (or other foreign) language, then we must not directly quote it, but we can explain what was said outside of quotes. So Pierre a dit "J'aime le fromage" could be written as Pierre said that he liked cheese but not as Pierre said "I like cheese".
  • We must not use Google Translate (or similar) to create a quotable English-language translation. These automatic translators are not usually accurate enough.
  • I'm not sure whether we can allow Wikipedians who fluently speak both English and the quoted language to produce their own quotable translations.

Does this seem sensible? What do you think about the fourth point? Thanks, Bazonka (talk) 10:32, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

  • In practice the fourth point is often used, as we shouldn't expect every foreign-language quote to have been translated in a secondary source. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:45, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
As for how it can stay reliable and not OR: provide the original as well, as a footnote. See, for example, the FAs Sudirman and Albertus Soegijapranata. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:47, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
That's fine, but sometimes the third point is used instead, which is often dreadful. I think the guidelines about this need to be clarified. Bazonka (talk) 11:14, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I am in favour of permiting "Pierre said "J'aime le fromage" [I like Cheese] where apppropriate. Martinvl (talk) 11:30, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I think in that case the quoted foreign text would need to be very short, and also in the language that was actually used. Bazonka (talk) 11:41, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree. How about this Afrikaans phrase "Ek het met my neef samm geloop" ["I walked alongside my cousin/nephew"] - the Afrikaans word "neef" can mean either "male cousin" or "nephew". Martinvl (talk) 11:53, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Wouldn't it have to be clear from context in that case? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:23, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
There's a possible conflict between our desire to use sourced translations and our desire to respect the translator's copyright. Also, when the original is under copyright, I believe translation is a separate issue from quotation, and I have no idea whether the same fair-use guidelines apply to both. I don't remember any WP guidelines on these subjects—which isn't to say that I've looked everywhere. Despite the fourth point above, I've felt free to translate myself and to improve others' translations where I'm confident (and to let improvements to my translations stand). I've put the original in a footnote, as Crisco 1492 mentions. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 16:42, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I don't see how copyright is a problem. As long as we reference the translation, then it's no different from quoting any other English-language text. Or if a Wikipedian has done the translation, then Creative Commons applies. Bazonka (talk) 17:18, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
No, it wouldn't, because the translation is a derivative work. You can't impose CC or GPL on a work derived from another work not subject to such a license. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:02, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
But an English-language quotation can often be included per WP:FUC, as long as it is properly referenced. So surely a translation can also be included as long as we reference a) the source we have taken the translated text from, or b) the source of the original untranslated text that we have ourselves translated. Bazonka (talk) 22:12, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
After looking into this a bit further... it would seem that fair use does apply to derivative works. So if we can include a quote (under fair use), then we can include a translation of the quote. Bazonka (talk) 22:22, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, of course. I was just addressing the legal issue; you can't translate something, like a non-English song, subject to someone else's all-rights-reserved copyright, then publish that derivative work under CC or GFDL. Material quoted (translated or not) per fair use is not problematic in a WP article covered by CC/GFDL, since it's just a small portion and isn't independent of the article; i.e., it's not a stand-alone derived work, just fair use of a portion of a work for "criticism and commentary", etc. Overquotation of large swaths of a work is forbidden on WP because it would not qualify as fair use. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:26, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
Hmm, I'm not a lawyer, but my guess would be that you can apply CC or GFDL to such a derivative work, and the license would then bind whatever copyright interest you have in the derivative work, but would not of course encumber that of the original copyright holder. So if someone makes a second derivative work from yours, and distributes it subject to the terms of your free license, he is protected against any action on your part, but will still have to gain permission from the original copyright holder, or argue fair use, or hope not to be sued, or.... But as I say I'm not a lawyer. --Trovatore (talk) 22:32, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
You can't legally publish a derivative work without the original copyright holder's permission at all, generally, so you would not be able to release your derivative under a CCL (GFDL, whatever) unless the original copyright holder agreed (which is tantamount to them changing their own license to you to a CCL). There are always fair use exceptions for reproducing portions of works, or even entireties of very short works, and the music industry has carved out its own extralegal "sample clearances" system, and so forth – real life is usually more complicated than any generality. But if I publish a poem, all rights reserved, and you adapt it into a song and then publish that, even with credit, I could sue you for copyright infringement, regardless what license you slapped on your derivative adaptation. Hope that's clearer. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 02:25, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
You can "legally" publish it and see if you get sued. If you don't get sued, it's not illegal. (Not clear that it's "illegal" in any event — the copyright holder may have a cause of action against you, but that's not quite the same thing.) Caveat: There is theoretically such a thing as criminal copyright infringement, but it doesn't seem to come up much and I doubt it's relevant here. --Trovatore (talk) 02:10, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
This is getting rather off-topic for MOS, I guess, so I won't go into more detail after this. Getting away with it doesn't make it legal or lawful, it just means you didn't get caught or sued. Note also that the copyright holder has plenty of time to bring suit. If your garage band puts out a self-produced CD and folds a year later, you probably would not get sued for adapting someone's poem into a song, because the cost of the suit would probably outweigh any damages that could actually be collected in real life. If your single was a huge hit, you'd almost certainly be sued, for all the profits from it and for punitive damages. You're correct that it's not a matter of being illegal in the case of a civil suit; the term is unlawful. Criminal copyright is not "theoretical" at all, comes up quite a lot with regards to digital media, and is relevant. It's simply unlikely that a prosecutor would actually take action on a trivial case like this, vs. going after something like ThePirateBay.org in response to entertainment industry pressure. (PS: I am also not a lawyer, but I have a professional level of experience with intellectual property law and policy. I was a digital IP and civil liberties policy analyst, among other roles, for nine years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit law firm and public-interest advocacy organization, specializing in Internet and digital media law. While that doesn't magically make me correct about everything that wanders into that topic-space, I'm not guessing or making assumptions of any kind here. I'm writing from direct knowledge of this field from having worked sided-by-side with, and interpreted for public consumption the output of, some of the best legal minds in this area – ones whose specific focus, to boot, was maximizing the "you can do this" not "you can't do this" interpretation of the relevant laws.) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 02:25, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Moving on from the copyright question, which I think is really just a side-issue, I propose the following replacement for the current foreign-language quotations text:

Foreign-language quotations

Quotations of words originally written or spoken in a foreign language should normally appear translated into English. Where a reliable source is available that contains such a translation (and it was not first published within Wikipedia), it should be cited, with an indication of the original language (if that is not clear from the context).

Where no translation is already available, a Wikipedian who is fluent in both English and the foreign language may translate the text, and include this translation with a reference to the original wording (which may also be included in a footnote), indicating the original language.

Short foreign-language passages or statements can be included, followed by the English translation in square brackets.

It is not appropriate to directly quote translations created by automatic translation software (such as Google Translate) because these are often inaccurate or not of adequate quality. Similarly, quoting a translation of a translation should be avoided. In these cases, if it is not possible to give a professional translation, indirect quotations could be used, paraphrasing the wording without using quotation marks. For example, Pierre a dit, "J'aime le fromage" can be given as Pierre said that he liked cheese.

What do you think? Bazonka (talk) 20:54, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm a little wary on this. The appropriate degree of caution is dependent on context. "Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!" for example can be readily translated by people fluent in neither English nor Russian, and also by google. Some years ago I had to work with a paper written in French - my French is terrible, but I translated it well, because I knew the subject matter. Rich Farmbrough, 04:25, 3 January 2013 (UTC).
I've had similar experiences, and given enough time can handle almost any Germanic or Romanance language. E.g., I translated the article Five-pins from its Italian equivalent, and even went directly to the Italian and Spanish sources for more material to improve the article beyond the translation; I've never studied Italian at all. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 04:33, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
I share Rich Farmbrough's concern, and would add one: We need not mandate order and formatting. Sometimes it makes more sense to give the English first, the foreign later. Many, including linguists, prefer to use 'single quotes' for glosses, and even aside from that there is no reason to mandate square brackets in particular. Maybe give them as an example of one way to format a gloss, but give single quotes, too, which is the standard in linguistics as I've mentioned here before. MOS needs to at least explicitly permit it if not recommend it outright. For large blocks, I wouldn't use either, I'd simply use blockquote and introduced each paragraph, e.g. "In Dante's original period Italian:...", and "A liberal English translation renders this:[1]..." — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 04:33, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
What would a sample good format look like? Here is a real life example: [2] This edit is not correct, and I will have to do something with it, because a "whiskería" is literally an establishment that serves whiskey; they don't call it a brothel because brothels are illegal in Argentina, hence the euphemism.

The search was given another lead when the alleged madame of a whiskería (a term used to describe undercover brothels), called Lidia Medina, was heard to say, "Those fools are looking for her, and she's in Spain."

I don't want to do a simple revert, because it's evident from the edit that the current wording can be misunderstood. Neither do I want to make it so wordy that it disrupts the flow of the text. (This is my own translation, based on information from an Argentinian native speaker.) Brackets, yes, and they will need some kind of special markup, yes? Are there a couple of sample formats, to see how others have handled this?
Neotarf (talk) 06:18, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Here are some formats I have used. For text within the article:

The Telefé series Vidas Robadas ("Stolen Lives") was inspired by this case.

For a translation of one of the foreign language references:

"Marita Verón, a 10 años de su secuestro y desaparición", TN, Martes 3 de Abril del 2012 [Translation: Marita Veron, at 10 years after her kidnapping and disappearance, April 3, 2012]

Neotarf (talk) 06:40, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
As far as the wording about "indicating the original language", if the entire article is a translation, the original language would appear on the talk page.
Neotarf (talk) 06:54, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
I'd leave out "Translation" in the reference above.
I don't agree with Bazonka that the copyright is a side issue. Long copyrighted translations are clearly a violation of our copyright policy, so the MOS can't reflect them. Short copyrighted translations seem to be accepted as fair use under the current policy—there could be an interesting argument about that somewhere else.
I'd say there are two questions here: how foreign-language quotations should be presented, and if translations are used, whether they should be sourced or made here (or both). The first is appropriate for the MOS; I'm not sure the second is, but others here will know the answer to that.
Here's a possible revision of Bazonka's proposal:
Foreign-language quotations
Quotations of words originally written or spoken in a foreign language should normally appear translated into English. They may be followed by the original in the text or in a footnote or in square brackets inside the quotation marks. For instance,
According to Suetonius, when Augustus heard the news he cried, "Quintilius Varus, give back the legions! [Quintili Vare, legiones redde!]"
When the original is in a script other than the Roman alphabet, a romanized version should usually be given in addition or instead. The original of Biblical quotations is seldom given unless the quotation is the subject of discussion.
Short foreign-language passages or statements can be included, followed by the English translation, possibly in square brackets or parentheses (round brackets). One might want to use this method if the original is known to many English speakers, or if the article discusses some feature of it that doesn't appear in the translation (such as wordplay), among other reasons. In linguistics, the translation is usually given in single quotation marks.
Foreign words and phrases in English-language quotations should usually be left as they are. Unless they're very well known to English speakers, they should be translated immediately afterwards in square brackets. Any explanation may be added in the brackets or a footnote.
When words in a third language appear in foreign quotations, they should be treated the same way. For instance,
In Spain every traveler who does not lug around samples of calico or silk passes for an Englishman, Inglesito. It is the same in the East. At Chalcis I have had the honor of being introduced as a Μιλόρδος Φραντζέσος [Milordos Frantzesos, a French 'milord']." (Prosper Mérimée, "Carmen", translated by Louise Guiney.)
The original of this is probably too long to be given in the text but might appear in a footnote.
As always, an editor thinking of including a quotation must decide whether to replace it with a paraphrase. If the fact that the quotation is in a foreign language introduces many complications and causes difficulties for readers, that is a reason to prefer a paraphrase.
I'm not sure what to say when the original contains an English word or phrase. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 18:47, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
I don't think I could support this "in square brackets inside the quotation marks" business. That's just weird. Just about any other option would be fine though, and I see no compelling reason for MOS to dictate style here, because we don't have any evidence of widespread disputes about this. There are many ways to present this, and which one is best depends on the context and is a matter for editorial discretion at the article in question, as I've already said, and which no one has refuted. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 10:17, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Someone should distill this into a few examples:

en vino veritas 'in wine there is truth'

en vino veritas [in wine there is truth]

en vino veritas *Latin: "In wine there is truth"*

or whatever is being recommended. I remember consulting this page before I started a translation and finding no help at all. If you can see what several approved possibilities look like, instead of finding a bunch of verbiage, it is easier to choose something appropriate to the situation. —Neotarf (talk) 05:56, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Ligatures (in English, outside quotations)

The MOS mentions that "disused [...] ligatures" are routinely replaced by other works (not WP), as part of its justification of WP's cautiously replacing ampersands in quotations. I continually see editors work in the other direction, however, adding ligatures, not just into quotations but into articles, as here, here and here. Should a sentence be added to the MOS to clarify whether such edits are OK or not, and more generally whether articles should use such ligatures or not? If this has been discussed before, I apologise that I was unable to find the past discussion. (If there was a past consensus, I still think it would be useful to mention it in the MOS: "Ligatures like "mediæval" are discouraged..." or "Ligatures like "mediæval" are allowed..." or "There is no consensus on whether to use ligatures like "mediæval" in articles.") -sche (talk) 11:02, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

A good question. The spirit of MOS has been against the use of those old ligatures, but the particular provision was edited out at some stage. At the section called "Typographic conformity", these changes within quotations are explicitly mentioned: "Normalizing archaic glyphs and ligatures, when doing so will not change or obscure the meaning or intent of the text. Examples include æ→ae, œ→oe, ſ→s, and ye→the." It is reasonable to read this as a recommendation against introducing such ligatures in article text. Otherwise, what sense do we make of "normalizing"? The whole section is about making text in quotations conform, in accord with all publishing practice, with the house style used in the surrounding article.
So I would support a change, to state this positively. There are good reasons for avoiding these characters, similar for those for straight apostrophes and against curly ones.
Important exceptions that used to be mentioned in MOS, I think:
  • æ in Anglo-Saxon names and text (but not in such modern words as "mediæval", "encyclopædia"). It was a distinct letter in Anglo-Saxon, but not in later English or in Medieval Latin.
  • œ in French words used as French text, such as quoted French text that include such words as "œuf" and "sœur" (but not the British spellings "œsophagus" and "manœuvre"; use "oe" in those).
Those are standard principles in major guides.
Other thoughts?
NoeticaTea? 11:25, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree that both of those are necessary exceptions, though I wonder if it would make sense to subsume them into—or make examples of—a general rule that ligatures are acceptable in any languages in which they are standard, hence Old English, French, Icelandic, Norwegian, Faroese...but not English.
In your experience, how much must the MOS spell out, and how much can be left up to common sense? I guess the fact that I see people changing "medieval" to "mediæval" answers that question to some extent!
What do you think of wording like:
  • Ligatures should be used in languages in which they are standard, hence The meaning of Moreau's last words, clin d'œil, is disputed. is preferable to The meaning of Moreau's last words, clin d'oeil, is disputed.. Ligatures should not be used in English outside of names, hence Æthelstan was a pre-mediaeval king, not Æthelstan was a pre-mediæval king.
-sche (talk) 04:51, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
I like that, as far as it goes. Ligatures and other special characters which are often given in alternative plain-Latin-alphabet form in their native language should be used in that form in the English Wikipedia. Thus d'œil in French is legitimately given as d'oeil on en.wiki, and we should use Strasse and ueber not Straße and über in German passages. There is no compelling rationale in such cases to use the unfamiliar "extra-foreign for the heck of it" orthography. For European languages using (as a base) the Latin alphabet, I'd be okay with a medi[a]eval-and-older exception: Preserve ligatures and special characters in Middle English, e.g. Chaucer, Middle French, Middle High German, etc., and earlier.
Ligatures in Modern English, like those in "mediæval" and "fœtus", should simply be deprecated, as should diacritics in words that have been assimilated into current English without them (use "résumé" and "finacée", but "role" not "rôle"). I've actually addressed a lot more stuff like this at WP:MODENG, much of which I think should be imported into MOS. It's been stable for several years.
— SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 11:07, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Hm, do you think the ligature is appropriate in "Moreau's last words, clin d'œil"? If so, we're in agreement and I'll add the sentences I suggested to the MOS. If not, can you suggest a better example of when to use a French/Icelandic/etc ligature? -sche (talk) 05:58, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Late to the party: I'd change "outside of names" to "except in proper nouns". -- JHunterJ (talk) 21:15, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Article openings / ledes for political parties

On a political party article I've been working on, some editors insist on including words like "far right" and "radical" in the opening sentence, as well as the infobox. What is the correct MOS for including loaded, and subjective terms like these? The editors I'm contesting with are relying on news articles from other countries, but what a journalist or political says in a slam piece is hardly objective or neutral from an encyclopedic point of view. My question also applies to the BIO for the party leader, which editors are pushing he be called "far right" as a matter of verifiable fact (ie. like calling Obama a socialist or Bush a fascist, IMO).

Is political spectrum supposed to be included? Are loaded terms allowed? Does it have to be defined as "far" or just broadly between left or right?--Львівське (говорити) 17:41, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

If there is a reliable, and ideally unbiased, source that defines the party as far right or whatever, then you should be able to include this descriptor in the lead, as long as it is clear that it is the source's description of the party, not Wikipedia's. Of course if there are multiple sources and there is no doubt as to the political stance (as would be the case with the Nazi Party for example) then you needn't be so careful. Bazonka (talk) 20:12, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
"no doubt" except among actual far rightists, who often argue that National Socialists have more in common with the left. Art LaPella (talk) 23:02, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
In this case, there are some good sources saying they are far right or radical, but these descriptions tend to get dated fast since, in this case, the party has noticeably been more and more center every year. I'm currently in a revert war with others putting "radical" in the opening sentence despite the party being coalition with a center-right party...which is just flatly contradictory.--Львівське (говорити) 00:04, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Important RFC at WT:TITLE

Editors will be interested in this RFC at Wikipedia talk:Article titles, to confirm the roles of WP:TITLE and MOS in determining article titles. The question affects the smooth running of many discussions on Wikipedia, including RMs. The more participation, the better.

NoeticaTea? 07:07, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Parenthetical comma usage with place names

According to Comma#In geographical names, the second element in a place name such as Dallas, Texas, should be treated as parenthetical, requiring two commas. Could something be added to WP:MOS#Commas to explain this? --JFHutson (talk) 15:31, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

The same principle applies to dates also. (See WP:DATEFORMAT.)
  • John Smith was born in London, England, on January 1, 1900.
  • John Smith was born on January 1, 1900, in London, England.
—Wavelength (talk) 17:21, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
When I add a comma after something like "Dallas, Texas", I mention WP:COPYEDIT#Parenthetical comma in my edit summary. Art LaPella (talk) 23:47, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Here are other examples, where the comma(s) in question will less likely be construed as serving another purpose.
  • John Smith performed in London, England, and Paris, France.
  • John Smith performed on January 1, 1900, and February 1, 1901.
—Wavelength (talk) 23:50, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Taj Mahal and British English

On a related point to the above .. maybe I'm being thick, but I don't quite see why British English would be an equal option to Indian English for a page about a Mughal monument in India? The example was included I think with both options listed and now we have the British option being reinserted after it was removed. N-HH talk/edits 15:13, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Maybe OhConfucius' edit was because Talk:Taj Mahal doesn't actually have the tag/banner. To me it would seem like a no brainer, but maybe there's something in the archive? In ictu oculi (talk) 04:48, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree. The British didn't build the Taj Mahal. The "strong national tie" to the Taj Mahal is India's tie. Otherwise, you might as well put British English as an option on the American Civil War (civil war in a former British colony) and Vancouver B.C. (named for an English officer, and it's even British Columbia, right?). -- JHunterJ (talk) 15:23, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Would use of Indian rather than British English actually make much difference in the Taj Mahal article other than use of Indian-style numbering (i.e. Lakhs and Crores) which would have to be appropriately linked and or explained anyway?Nigel Ish (talk) 15:57, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Not sure it would really in practice – I'm not an expert on the differences and peculiarities (other than a slightly odd, to these eyes, use of the word "mishap" on occasion in such a way that it understates the gravity of an event) but I'm not aware of such wide-ranging and obvious differences as there are between, say, US and British English in terms of words, spelling etc. Either way though, the assertion of equivalence matters as an issue of principle here surely, if nothing else. N-HH talk/edits 16:06, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Little or no difference in Taj Mahal (few if any textual changes), big difference in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (one is right and the other is wrong). -- JHunterJ (talk) 16:23, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
In that case, is it appropriate as an example to use in MOS - shouldn't we use examples where using different variants of English will make a difference?Nigel Ish (talk) 16:30, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Different varieties of English will make a difference at Taj Mahal. I suspect it would read differently using American English, Australian English, or Jamaican English. But I have no objection to replacing it with a different example of an article that should use Indian English. -- JHunterJ (talk) 17:32, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
I think Taj Mahal is as good an example as any. The only problem for me is where we suggest it could be written in British English or Indian English, which goes against WP:CONSISTENCY. Also, let's remember we're not discussing the Taj Mahal article. The discussion is whether Taj Mahal should be used as an example in the MOS of which variety of English to use. As a MOS example, we need to make an unambiguous statement. – Wdchk (talk) 17:58, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
I think Taj Mahal is unambiguous. It's in India, built by Indians, owned by Indians. Nothing British at all. But another example could be used if necessary. And whilst there aren't many practical differences between British and Indian English, there are some differences, so it is not correct to conflate the two. Bazonka (talk) 18:06, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Clarification about my use of the word "unambiguous": what I am saying is it's ambiguous to continue to say "(Indian English or British English)". Based on the discussion here, I'm fine with saying "Taj Mahal (Indian English)". – Wdchk (talk) 18:22, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Apologies btw for opening up this semi-duplicate thread; I hadn't noticed it was already part of the wider ENGVAR thread a couple of sections up, and only started it in response to the main page edit noted in my opening comment. Anyway, between the two discussions, we seem to be fairly much in agreement that the Taj Mahal would work as an example for India and nonetheless nearly 100% in agreement that it should say "Indian English" not – as it does currently following the edit in question – "British or Indian English". Even if the argument is that they are more or less the same, and that there isn't a substantively distinct thing as "Indian English", then we have tautology as well as a confused point being made. N-HH talk/edits 18:26, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Does anyone disagree that this needs an Indian English example? In ictu oculi (talk) 23:50, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

  • I disagree that we need to have any examples of Indian English. The MOS has up to now emphasised style and national variety of spelling. It is apparent from this above discussion that there are insufficient differences between Indian English as it ought to be employed here and International English (or American or British English). Continued and further emphasis on national varieties rides quite contrary to WP:COMMONALITY, and should be discouraged as being too polarising and divisive. -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 00:37, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Four copy-editors killed

Breaking news. Tony (talk) 09:50, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

  • Poor passerby. Poor average Wikipedians. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:35, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Ucapan selamat!
Poor analogy; poor political sniping occasioned by a light-highted infusion of humour; poor form.
♥
NoeticaTea? 11:49, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
The analogy went over my head ... oh well, I'm content to be average. Tony (talk) 11:54, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Well, it could be worse. It could have been philosophers. They would have spent three weeks debating what death is before taking another five to find out if those shot were dead or not. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:18, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
PS, as editors will know, our featured content processes follow the Manual of style carefully. In this week's Signpost, Crisco's "Featured content" page—as usual of significant interest and pictorial beauty—provides a brief summary of the featured content processes in 2012. I shouldn't say this, because publication isn't until tomorrow at the earliest. Tony (talk) 12:27, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

So is it "...there is nothing but questions" or "... there are nothing but questions"? —Neotarf (talk) 14:05, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

The response to this piece of humour (the spoof article made me laugh out loud, which is rare for written material) denigrates those who edit the MOS. The joke is directed at those who take differences of opinion about styles far too seriously, which is something which is rightly subjected to ridicule. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:04, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Exactly, Peter. And to Neotarf (assuming your question is less than 100% rhetorical) some sentence rearranging often helps. We get: "Nothing (no thing) is there, but questions." No thing is the subject, and it is singular. OTOH, it sounds weird. Find another way of phrasing it. Rumiton (talk) 15:13, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Hey, don't get me wrong in all this. I am the one who sent Tony the link! And of course we can see the humour – though I do find it alarming when Americans automatically turn to violent death for humour, in a country where gun-toting schoolkids seems to be the next bizarre fix to a spiralling problem. What I object to primarily is the reflex anti-MOS use of the joke, here on the development page for MOS. NoeticaTea? 21:49, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Odd how you considered my reply "anti-MOS". We need it, it's important. But for the average Wikipedian, what's there is enough, and the downright nasty atmosphere can (for some) be surprising. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 08:37, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
  • I think all posts here have an element of humour. We should not take ourselves so seriously, anyway. Tony (talk) 14:29, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Hyphens vs endashes in numeric dates

I've just come across an article where an editor has recently replaced hyphens in numeric dates by ndashes (e.g. 2007-11-13 --> 2007–11–13). This seems wrong to me, but I can't actually find anything in the MoS that says so. Any comments? Colonies Chris (talk) 11:19, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Hyphens should be used, I believe. MOSDASH says, as do the key stylistic authorities in the language, that dashes are for numerical ranges. These are simply components of a date—components that can't be said to be parallel, either. Tony (talk) 11:28, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, MOSNUM only allows the following formats: 16 July 2012 (dmy), July 16, 2012 (mdy), and 2012-07-16 (I call it ISO, which uses only the hyphen). The edit you came across seems to have been a case of misformatted dates to begin with. It's to be expected when editors out there add dates that are so out of line with our MOS! Not only do dates such as "Retrieved 07-16-12" generate confusion, they accidentally cause the dashes script to treat them like scores (and similar numerical strings), which seems to be what happened. -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 06:01, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
I think 2012-07-06 causes confusion too, because people write it differently, so whenever I'm faced with a ref written that way, and where the date matters, I have to check the source to see whether it's July 6 or June 7. A large percentage of the time I find it has been written wrongly. SlimVirgin (talk) 01:44, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
There are ways of addressing that: 2012-Jul-06, 2012-VII-06, etc., but basically whenever people use a number for the month, someone's going to mess it up. — kwami (talk) 02:15, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
I thought the MoS advised against numbers only for that very reason, but I may be misremembering. SlimVirgin (talk) 03:01, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Are there any date formats that use year-day-month? Never heard of that. Dicklyon (talk) 03:13, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Agree with SV. And I recollect that last time this came up at MOSNUM, in an RfC or straw poll possibly about a year ago, slightly more than half of the editors wanted to dump the phone-number date formats; but there were loud complaints from fans of the phone numbers. Me, I have to dwell on them every time I encounter them, to remember which element is month and which is day. It's made worse for readers who might think they are phone numbers, or who assume the wrong formula. The latter is very easy to do, since the mdy/dmy difference is alive and well in the everyday formats—across the Atlantic, and even between US military and non-military usage. Tony (talk) 03:42, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
I generally write out the month, too, like whenever I sign and date a paper. But if one wants to use numbers, the YEAR-MO-DA format is the one, and only one, that's unambiguous. Dicklyon (talk) 03:52, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
The guideline is WP:DATESNO: "Year-initial numerical (YYYY-MM-DD) dates (e.g. 1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used within sentences. However, they may be useful in long lists and tables for conciseness. ... Do not use customized variations of the YYYY-MM-DD format. E.g., do not replace hyphen characters ("-") with any other character; do not change the order of year, month, or day." I remember seeing YYYY-MM-DD only as the accessdate parameter of a citation. Art LaPella (talk) 04:45, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Indian English

I'd like to point out, without prejudice, that the inclusion of Taj Mahal is sanctifying "Indian English" as an acceptable English language variant on Wikipedia [3], [4] though I see no prior consensus for this acceptance. Given that there is no reference, reliable or unreliable, available for what Indian English is and how it differs from other variants of the English language, I think this merits more careful thought. I'm removing the Taj Mahal example for now and suggest that we explicitly discuss the acceptability of Indian English first. --regentspark (comment) 16:56, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I found that Indian English can be very hard going. One of the articles I am reviewing at the moment used this source which has sentences like "Second Hooghly Bridge known as Vidyasangar Setu undoubtedly an engineering marvel and symbol of technical excellence of the city of Calcutta", a sentence which if it were British or American English would be considered highly ungrammatical. I think Indian English as a concept needs more thought, whether through the commonality principle, or some separation of grammar and spelling, or both. Not all sources have proved that difficult to me as a British reader, so their is clearly some significant variation. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 17:06, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm a little concerned about this move. Are you arguing a) that Indian English isn't a specific dialect or definable group of dialects and so shouldn't be used on WP; b) that it is definable but shouldn't be used on WP; c) something else? Andrew Gray (talk) 17:16, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm not saying Indian English isn't a specific dialect. Rather, if we intend to accept its usage as a variation of the written form of English, then we need to be sure that there are referable standards (dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars) for what is or is not correct. If we don't have that, we'll have no way of knowing whether a claim is correct or not. There is also the larger question as to whether Indian English is recognizable outside India and is appropriate for a global encyclopedia in the first place but first we need to know whether we, as editors, can recognize Indian English when we see it. --regentspark (comment) 17:54, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Any article written in Indian English should also consider MOS:COMMONALITY which would eliminate most of the problematic differences. In effect the article may look not much different from a British English article. I am no expert, but perhaps the Hooghly Bridge example above isn't true Indian English, but poor English written by an Indian who is not entirely fluent. Is this the sort of language that would be used in an English-language Indian newspaper? Bazonka (talk) 17:20, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
In the various discussions above, despite some scepticism I'd taken it as read, for the sake of those debates, that there is something discrete and identifiable as "Indian English". I'm no linguistics or language expert so didn't want to come down against the whole concept (and we do have a page here on the idea, for what that's worth), but a quick scout around the web just now does reveal some support for its existence, at least in the broadest sense, eg here and here. However, that doesn't really answer the question, since we surely need to be wary of the distinction between slang/informal and more formal written forms of language – evidence that specific idioms, slang words or pronunciations are used in India does not mean necessarily that there is a codified formal "Indian English", with distinct rules (which in other examples usually come down to little more than a few spelling differences, plus very occasionally different words and very minor grammar variations), appropriate for use in an encyclopedia as a discrete style of English in the same way that there the different forms of formal, written British or US English are acknowledged. We can talk about "Cockney English", for example, with its rhyming slang and use of "she ain't doing that" etc, but we wouldn't call for its use on the jellied eels page. As for the example above, I'd tend to agree that it is just bad writing; the issue there is one of general style, not a question of it conforming with specific "Indian" rules, or not conforming with specific British or whatever rules. N-HH talk/edits 17:37, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
The area where this has cropped up in the past is in the names of places in India. The official name changes and is first used in reliable sources in India before their wider usage in other dialects of English. -- PBS (talk) 18:19, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Please have a look at Indian English before you suggest that Indian English isn't an acceptable English language variant. The fifth edition of Advanced learner's dictionary included a decent supplement on Indian English which was discontinued in later editions. I wish I had saved that dictionary for this day. Not that there aren't other good books on Indian English.

are three other good books on this topic. OTOH most Indian articles on Wikipedia don't use Indian English at all and don't need to be evaluated by IE syntax. However, WP:MOS should have examples from Indian English whenever possible. Correct Knowledge«৳alk» 19:10, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I suggest we restore Taj Mahal or any other suitable example. Please also note, I am going to inform WT:IN about this discussion. Of late, some Indian editors have shown great displeasure at being excluded out of discussions relevant or related to India. Correct Knowledge«৳alk» 19:16, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I think it is better not to restore any examples until we have some consensus here. (Why is Taj Mahal an example anyway? Are there other ways of referring to that building in other variants of English?) A note on WT:IN is a good idea (should have thought of it myself but am just coming back after a lazy vacation!). --regentspark (comment) 19:20, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Sorry, I was so busy defending Indian English that I didn't give much thought to the example. Correct Knowledge«৳alk» 19:23, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
The point re Taj Mahal is not about the name/title but about the style of English used in the text (as noted in previous discussions, I don't think the concept of "Indian English" applies to the myriad naming issues – which people have tried to use as the basis for saying that ENGVAR trumps COMMONNAME, where there's a conflict – since Indian sources vary as much within themselves). As to the issue of Indian English as a broader style point, no one's denying such a thing exists I think, especially in terms of slang or dialect, but are genuinely asking what, if any, firm rules and reference tools are out there for formal, written Indian English: eg what are the equivalent points to -ise vs -ize, colour vs color and apartment vs flat, pavement vs sidewalk etc. Further and wider input would of course help. Nor was or is there any attempt to actively exclude anyone from the discussion. N-HH talk/edits 19:30, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
It's worth noting that Kolkata, which has been chosen as a Featured article, is written in Indian English. If the language variant was good enough to meet the fairly stringent requirements for featured article status, and it survived the featured article review, what on earth are we arguing about? Skinsmoke (talk) 19:46, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
In view of N-HH's comment above, I look forward to him resisting using the argument that New York Harbor is written in American English when someone proposes moving it to New York Harbour, on the basis that this is the spelling preferred outside the United States, and is even used by Britannica. Skinsmoke (talk) 19:55, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Where is the Indian English in Kolkata? Just because it is tagged as IE does not mean it is IE. Articles are often tagged using the default position that {{Indian English}} is not merely for items written in English but for items that are Indian in focus, regardless of how they are written. INdian English is, if anything, usually evidenced as a pidgin form of archaic British English. - Sitush (talk) 23:24, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
"Why is Taj Mahal an example anyway? Are there other ways of referring to that building in other variants of English?" Why is Vancouver, B.C. an example? It's not a list of articles with titles that would vary with English variety, it's a list of articles with text that should use a particular variety of English because of the strong tie of Taj Mahal to India. -- JHunterJ (talk) 20:40, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I hope it's obvious that Indian English spans a range of dialects, some of which are more easily understood by British or American speakers. Single examples, whilst they show that the tag "Indian English" isn't in itself a problem, but what we may still need is some specific guidance on what to look out for in Indian English, and how the principles of commonality might be applied. Kolkata, for instance, does not appear to have any grammatical features that differ from British or American English. But I've read dozens of articles where there are differences like that, that make them heavy going from a British or American perspective. It's not something that has historically affected American or British articles in regard to vice-versa. Skinsmoke, I urge you not to take this as an attack on Indian English per se: it's about how Indian English can best be accommodated into the existing framework we have going on WP. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 19:58, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Indeed – this is a request for clarification, not an argument or a bid to deny the existence of Indian English. I also agree with the response re Kolkata, since from skimming the featured article promotion and review, it doesn't seem that the question of Indian English, or variations in English styles, came up in those discussions. As to the naming issues, that's another debate (which probably is a bit more contentious at times; and @Skinsmoke, your comment above about New York Harbor suggests you've missed my point on that score). N-HH talk/edits 20:07, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
The Kolkata article brought up by skinsmoke is a good example. It would be helpful to see where it differs from British or American English so that we can identify examples of what is Indian English (other than the title where the arguments in the various move discussions tended to focus more on common name). --regentspark (comment) 20:16, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
That article looks like good British English to me, and also good American English with the exception of a few spellings like "centre". If there are more Indian-specific things in it, besides the new city name spelling, which is still not so common except in India, I'd like to see them; or in Taj Mahal if that's where differences show up. It does seem to me that Indian English as a major ENGVAR for WP purposes is problematic, or ill defined. The article on Indian English suggests that it's rather variable, and does not have much in the way of "native speakers", being a second language for most of its users. Where would we get into issues if we used British English as the nominal variety for articles with a strong tie to India? Examples? Dicklyon (talk) 20:30, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
As I understand it (no expert), good Indian English is very similar to British English. There are undoubtedly a few minor differences though which should be used, and then there's the whole issue of crores which look fairly horrible to non-Indians, but probably should be used (with "translation") if we are to do things properly (see South Asian numbering system). However, for non-experts, I would suggest aiming for BrE as a starting point. Bazonka (talk) 20:36, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Good Indian English is still different from British English and considerable research work has gone into understanding how IE speakers differ from BE speakers. A few quick examples of how Indian English differs from British English and American English: past tense— AE (leaned, burned), BE (leant, burnt), IE (leaned, burnt); singularization of plurals— pant, scissor, a good news etc.; pluralization of uncountable terms— furnitures, feedbacks; lakh/crore numbering instead of million/billion; greater usage of noun–cum–noun compounds as opposed to noun–noun compounds— exhibition–cum–sale; using transitive verbs intransitively; forming questions without changing subject and auxiliary terms— Where you would like to eat?; should instead of to; would where BE/AE speakers use will etc. I am not sure if Kolkata is really a good example of IE. Correct Knowledge«৳alk» 20:44, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Interesting. So do we want to maintain articles in that variant? I agree with others that the Indian system of numbers is really not acceptable for world-wide encyclopedia. The minor changes of past tenses are not an issue (do Brits really say leant?). And it's going to be hard to convince random editors in an improvement mode to leave Indian constructs like scissor and furnitures, I bet. Is that what you're suggesting we should try to do by endorsing IE as a defined variant for WP? Dicklyon (talk) 21:04, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for those examples. But would they be acceptable in formal, written "Indian English"? British English also has spoken variations, often regional, that are acceptable in context but technically wrong in formal writing such as in an encyclopedia. I'd be very hesitant to accept a sentence here, for the sake of debate, that said "where you would like to eat?" just as I would not "I ain't doing that", regardless of whether they can be classified as Indian or British English respectively. N-HH talk/edits 21:10, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Indian editors for most part do not seem inclined to use Indian English. Kolkata looks like BE + some Indian terms at best. Maybe using IE would increase the number of Indian editors here, but that's beside the point. My only submission here is that Wikipedia should retain its flexibility in allowing users to write in IE if they choose to. In practice, Indian editors will continue to write in BE (for reasons I would not like to go into here), use a few Indian terms and get their articles copy-edited by British/American editors. And that is perfectly alright. Correct Knowledge«৳alk» 21:18, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
The book by Pingali Sailaja that you cited says those non-inverted questions and transitive verbs used intransitively are non-standard in IE, which I take to mean they're not encyclopedic style. It does mention that standard IE uses "will" in certain places where BrE and AmE speakers use "would", such as "He said he will attend classes" where AmE and BrE have "He said he would attend classes," as well as those past tenses. Also, it says that verbs such as "present", "supply", and "gift" can be ditransitive in standard IE: "...the FCI is not supplying us the foodgrain..." There's probably disagreement about standard and non-standard in IE just as there in other dialects. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 21:11, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
The second book probably does a better analysis of what is standard and what is not by using Indian English journalistic sources for data mining. Even though common IE deviates substantially from journalistic IE, the latter can probably be considered to be the standard version. Correct Knowledge«৳alk» 21:22, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I really think there are separate issues here. I don't think many editors would "correct" most of the specific examples above (except the pant, scissor, furnitures maybe), since they seem like reasonable variants. However, most of the articles I run into have much bigger problems, like missing articles, tense, conjugation, punctuation, spelling, MOS issues, etc. As someone else said, these may just be poor writing. Unfortunately, it seems to be more common in articles related to central Asia (generally not just India, but Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc.). Much of it looks so similar that it's easily recognized and one might reasonably wonder if it is some sort of standardized dialect. I know I've considered banning myself from related articles for a while because of the frustration I feel every time I run into such an article that hasn't been well-edited.

It's clear that this is a subject about which people feel strongly, based on the amount of traffic in such a short time (does someone have a tool to measure this?). A detailed examination seems in order. Maybe we can pick apart a couple of example paragraphs? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 22:42, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I know the kind of writing you're talking about, and judging from the Pingali Sailaja book that's been mentioned and what Correct Knowledge has said, that kind of English isn't "some sort of standardized dialect". Probably most of it is produced by non-native speakers of English who want to share their knowledge and interests (and sometimes POV) with the English-speaking world and may be hoping someone will put their English into a more standard form. The similar features are due to similar features of languages of the Indian subcontinent and to features of English that often present problems to learners, such as articles. There's disagreement about whether some features are standard—and I must say that if we were talking about American English, I wouldn't look to journalism for the standard, as Correct Knowledge suggests, but the situation may be different for India—but there's a clear idea that not all English written by Indians is in standard IE.
The conclusion I'm coming to from this is that if I see an article with sentences like "Second Hooghly Bridge known as Vidyasangar Setu undoubtedly an engineering marvel and symbol of technical excellence of the city of Calcutta" and succumb to the temptation of putting it into standard American English with "Britishised" spelling, it will end up much closer to standard Indian English than the way it started. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 00:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

1RR restriction

Editors, please remember the tight 1RR restriction on editing WT:MOS and WP:MOS (as a unit), notified at the top of this talkpage. It is set to expire on 15 January. ♥

I have noted RegentsPark's violation of the restriction at RegentsPark's talkpage.

NoeticaTea? 23:39, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

  • The Indian variety of English practically doesn't matter on Wikipedia. For the articles that matter (i.e. of high importance or with high frequency of editors and readers or which are to be featured on main page), non-Indian editors edit them and change the style to British/American. And for article that don't matter, why worry even if they written in Chinese English? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 04:41, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
    • Don't all articles matter? Tony (talk) 05:31, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
They would matter if they are not Britishized or Americanized. Pick up a random FA review of Indian article and majority of the comments in it lead to such conversion. "Blah blah word is not normally used in American English", "most readers wont understand it", "we simply should write Tamil film and not Tamil-language film" (We write it that way because Americans don't know that Tamil is a language and not some Bollywood genre). If the final grand aim is to convert all articles, how is this discussion fruitful? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 07:33, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
I think if we concentrate on writing good, clear English we won't go too far wrong. In the few cases where there is a problem, a simple gloss should remedy the situation. For example if an article wanted to refer to lifts in the pylons of a bridge, it might be in order to include a gloss like this: "lifts (elevators) inside the pylons" or (quoting the article on Indian railways) "Sleepers (ties) are made up of prestressed concrete" . Michael Glass (talk) 08:17, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
  • The spirit of "Opportunities for commonality" is wide comprehensibility for the majority of readers, and minimal interruptions in the flow of the text that arise from distinctive local variations. The use of trouser is a problem for most first- and second-language readers of English; so is the use of the 10,000 unit, the lakh/crore, which I've always changed to the universal system in the language when I've encountered it. These changes do not affect the comprehensibility of en.WP to readers in India; and they avoid patterns that most readers of the language are unused to. Similarly, Ghanian English—even the local acrolect—will introduce patterns with which almost everyone outside Ghana will be unfamiliar; so unless the Ghanian dialects themselves are explicitly being exemplified, or local lexical items with unique and useful meanings are at issue (glossed, of course), I can't see why the text shouldn't be internationalised for all our benefit. Tony (talk) 08:48, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
  • (edit conflict)@MG: That's sensible, and is largely what goes on unnoticed in reality. OK for your example, perhaps, but I don't really see the practical advantage of glossing when WP:COMMONALITY tells you to prefer terms that are universally comprehensible, yet articles about Indian subjects seems to tolerate in abundance concepts like Lakh and Crore when there are commonly accepted units like thousand, million and billion. -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 08:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
  • There appear to be at least two issues: Is Indian English an ENGVAR in Wikipedia terms? and If Indian English is used for WP articles, how should it be best written? The spelling variations appear to line up largely with British English. And when Indian-English–specific terms are used, clarity can be lost (perhaps more easily than clarity is lost when American- or British-English–specific terms are used). So, for example, in an article using Indian English, a large number might be written using lakhs/crores first, with the millions/billions equivalent given in parentheses, while in a British English article only the millions/billions number would have been used. "Tamil" might be used without "-language", and readers unfamiliar with it can either remain so or click through to the linked language article. Many of the colloquialisms listed at Indian English would be avoided even in Indian English articles, for commonality. But we should still list an example Indian English article. -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:14, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
  • I have not seen any examples of words, expressions or punctuation that would be correct Indian English where both the equivalent British English and Amercian English would be incorrect. I am looking for examples such as color/colour rather than the South African example of a "braai" (see Regional variations of barbecue) - the use of "color" is wrong in British English just as the use of "colour" is wrong in American English; on the other hand the word "barbecue" is acceptable in South Africa, but is seldom used. Do we have any examples of Indian English (other than crore and lakh which are dealt with in WP:MOSNUM)? Martinvl (talk) 12:35, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
    OTOH, I have not seen any examples of words, expressions or punctuation that would be correct in British English where both the equivalent Indian English and American English would be incorrect. I do not think this is the standard to be used. -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:44, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
I have one: "Devanagari is composed of 47 alphabets." I see that all the time. It is wrong in both British and American English, but is apparently perfectly acceptable Indian English. Indeed, "47 letters" would be incorrect, as a letter is a message on paper, not a mark on the paper – witness the number of people who repeatedly correct "letters" to "alphabets". (I just reverted s.o. who did that to English alphabet.) — kwami (talk) 10:23, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

A question on hyphen

"Third-smallest" or "third smallest"—which is a better use?--Dwaipayan (talk) 06:19, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

More likely to be hyphenated before the noun than after: the third-smallest island off Africa, it is the third smallest of them. I think there's a little variation in usage, but it should be consistent within the article. I'd personally favour the hyphens in both instances, but others might do differently. Tony (talk) 06:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Tony for the prompt answer. I understand the difference in sense in your two examples. So, I did this edit to use hyphens. Regards.--Dwaipayan (talk) 06:37, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, just confirming: With hyphen as a premodifier; spaced in other uses. This accords with WP:MOS, which in this case accords with The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), which follows a very standard line though it is now much tougher on hyphenation generally. The examples in CMOS16 at 7.85 (in the category "number, ordinal, + superlative"): "a second-best decision", "third-largest town", "fourth-to-last contestant"; but "he arrived fourth to last". And their note: "Hyphenated before a noun, otherwise open."
NoeticaTea? 06:38, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
This is just a consequence of the usual rule to hyphenate modifiers that could be misread. The "third tallest pope" was the third pope who was taller than all of his predecessors; the "third-tallest pope" is the pope who is shorter than two other popes. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:37, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Two-country article names: order of names

Could we standardize the order of country names for articles (categories, ...) who are named like "Country A — Country B"? Examples include borders (Mexico–United States border, Category:Mexico–United States border) and bilateral relations (Estonia–Latvia relations). Alphabetical order seems to be easy, unambiguous and also overwhelmingly common in practice, but I don't find it explicitly mentioned anywhere. Contrariwise, Finland–Norway border was recently moved to Norway–Finland border, citing "west-east order" as the reason. In general this would create a whole mess, since countries can be north-south of each other, or northeast-southwest, one surrounding the other (Italy—San Marino) or in various configurations. — Alphabetical order was clearly preferred in Talk:Mexico–United States border#Requested_move.2FDiscussion_about_title. --Jmk (talk) 18:44, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

I suggest a slight modification of the idea: first, see if the two are routinely listed in a given order by a significant majority of sources... a) if so we follow the sources... b) if not, then we apply our own arbitrary set order (don't really care what it is). Blueboar (talk) 18:57, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Alphabetical is the only sensible order, unless it is a special case where the other order is more common. Geographical order doesn't seem to be a sensible or consistent approach. Bazonka (talk) 19:07, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
But does it really matter? As long as a redirect is in place that links one order to the opposite... is this really a problem? Bazonka (talk) 19:14, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
It matters when many such articles are grouped together. Alphabetical ordering keeps things nice and tidy in e.g. Category:Borders of Mali or Category:Borders of China. It would be more difficult to search such lists if the names varied randomly. --Jmk (talk) 19:20, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
When I saw the section heading on my watchlist, I immediately thought of alphabetical order as a practical solution, and I am not aware of a convincing reason not to use it.
—Wavelength (talk) 20:38, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Alphabetical order would seem to offer the least opportunity for people to have big arguments about it... one would imagine. Any other method would surely leave room for difficulty. Bretonbanquet (talk) 20:42, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

COMMONNAME would have its own problems: if inhabitants of one country are more likely to write in English, or if there are more of them and therefore more pubs, you might tend to get their country listed first. But that would reflect a local convention, and wouldn't be necessarily appropriate for a WP.

I don't think this is an issue for the MOS, since it's not a question of style. Within an article about Mali, I might expect Mali to come either first or last in all combinations. There is also the general discourse pattern of putting heavier material later, so we might get an order of short–long for better flow when reading. IMO that's too amorphous to address at the MOS. Titles, however, are a different matter, since they don't have the context of a particular country. AFAIK, this has been addressed at TITLE or one of its discussion pages, and alph order was agreed to. Personally, if we're going to open this up again, I think we should convert to adjectival format as being much more natural in English (Mexican–American border). (BTW, I'm one of those people who insists that "America" includes Chile, but COMMONNAME is pretty clear here, and I don't have a problem with it.) — kwami (talk) 21:34, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

If it is already addressed at TITLE, fine, but I couldn't find it. I did find WP:AND, which addresses a slightly different issue. (A border is not "two related concepts [that] are most sensibly covered by a single article", like Promotion and relegation, but one object whose name or description commonly refers to two states.) --Jmk (talk) 11:33, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
While the specific issue isn't spelled out at TITLE... it does tell you how to resolve the issue... Look to see if there is a WP:COMMONNAME. Do a significant majority of sources written in the English language use a particular variant. If the sources use "Chinese-Afghan border", then we should use "Chinese-Afghan border"... if they use "Afghanistan-China border", then so do we. If the sources are mixed, then we can choose which ever version or variation we think is best (if necessary, just flip a coin). Blueboar (talk) 01:59, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Italics for article titles, the terms that are put in WP:BOLDFACE at the beginning of articles

I came across an editor -- Wikipedian77 -- who was putting article titles, the boldface terms that are at the beginning of the leads of articles, in italics. Since I don't see this often practiced on Wikipedia, except for in the cases of books, plays, films and name brands, I felt that I should present the editor with the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Italics guideline and the Wikipedia:ITALICTITLE#Italics and other formatting policy (the policy is mostly about the naming of articles, however). I also stated that for instances like this, where it's not the boldfaced article title terms, I'm sure that it's fine to use italics or quotation marks. Wikipedian77 stated: OK. I won't edit anymore until I get a feel for how they should be. I figured it would be OK to use italics when it's a term being discussed. (Compare "Lesbian is a term that . . ." to "A lesbian is a . . .")

The discussion is seen here, and I informed the editor that I would be asking about this matter at this talk page. We need some comments from those who are experts on Wikipedia formatting. Flyer22 (talk) 02:43, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

MOS:BOLDTITLE is the guideline to follow. Only things that would normally be italicised per MOS:ITALIC should be italicised in the lead section. --Rob Sinden (talk) 14:34, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, Robsinden. I suppose that from there...it depends on what a person considers to be "things that would normally be italicized." Flyer22 (talk) 23:00, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Use of div code for horizonal scrol in a semi-wide wikitable?

We are a couple of editors who recently wondered how we should interpretate the MOS:SCROLL and Help:Scrolling list policy. We all agree on the content and size for our current wikitable in the article (which will be showed in full without being rendered by all 4:3 screens on 17" -or bigger- with normal text fond). For the sake of improving the layout and scrolling function for smaller screens the <div style="overflow:auto"> code was for trial basis however implemented into the wikitable (see here). Another editor citing WP:ACCESSIBLE however argued the use of the <div> code would render a part of the table inaccesible by certain small screens or small devices where the code wont work. Is this true? Or should the policy note just be understood in the way, that when the <div> code do not work in some small devices, it will only mean that the code will simply not be activated (without turning the material into an inaccesible state; meaning it could still be browsed by the "standard way to browse" on the device)? I can see the Help:Scrolling list already allow for the scroll function to be activated in "wide templates", and this is why I suspect that "wont work" simply means that the code "will not get activated - while content remains accessible". If the latter is indeed the case, I will obviously request your permission to implement the code into the wikitable per the argument that it provides a better layout/functionality for most small screen devices (while not being activated and having no negative impact on all screens above 15" where everything is visible in standard mode). As none of the engaged editors in the debate have specific test experience with small devices where the <div> code do not work, we would highly appreciate for your respond on this matter. Obviously we only want to select the best solution for the wikitable. Thanks in advance. Best regards, Danish Expert (talk) 15:24, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Full point

I notice that recent edits have replaced full stop with full point (dot). I'm not typographic expert, but it seems to me that:

  • If full point is a generally accepted term, why do we need to put (dot) after it so often?
  • For anything not obvious to the casual reader, I would expect that the term should be wiki-linked on first usage, but
  • Full point is a redirect to Full stop and the latter does not mention full point at all - rather suggesting to me that we should use full stop, that apparently being the most common term.

If full point is different to full stop, I suggest that:

  • Full point should have a separate article, and we should link to it
  • It ought not be "explained" or "qualified" with (dot).

Mitch Ames (talk) 09:35, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

That was me, based on discussions here. Feel free to invoke WP:BRD, of course. "Full point" is a principally British term. There is no formal American English term for this character when not used to end a sentence. "Period" is the most commonly used, but it is factually incorrect. "Dot" is familiar to everyone, since the Internet became popular more than 20 years ago (hard to believe it's been that long; I'm feeling old!). I may have over-used it. "Full point" certainly should have an article, or at least a section at Full stop, but many things should have articles that do not. MOS should not give incorrect and confusing advice due to lack of an article. A full stop and a full point are not the same thing. A full stop is a period; it ends a sentence. The full point (there's a "something-else point" name for the comma, I forget) is the glyph (character) used for the period/full stop, as well as for the dots used in abbreviations and decimals. It need not be explained/qualified with "(dot)" more than once in the same section, but should be on first occurrence is each section, since they are frequently linked to independently, and "full point" means nothing to North American readers. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 11:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
"Full point" means nothing to British readers either. We use "full stop". I've never heard anyone use "full point" ever. Bazonka (talk) 12:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
"Full point" seems to be an archaic term of indeterminate country of origin. To the British "." is a full stop, whether it's used at the end of a sentence or indeed anywhere else, with the sole exception of web addresses. I would find "dot" in any other context confusing. If "." is not "a period" to Americans unless used at the end of the sentence, this might take some careful wording, but if I were writing it for British readers, I'd be using "full stop" throughout. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 16:55, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Pretty much agree entirely re British usage and terminology with both of the above. N-HH talk/edits 17:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I think the claim is that the period at the end of a U.S. abbreviation should be called a dot in some language known only to linguists. But how do we explain that to editors who speak U.S. English, and might think a dot could be something like  · ? Art LaPella (talk) 20:04, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
When I saw "full point" on WP recently, I thought it was someone mistakenly combining the terms "full stop" and "decimal point". Sources for it? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 20:32, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
APA 6, MHRA 2.3 and Chicago 16 all use period and do not mention full stop or full point. --— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 20:57, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
OED.com gives:

18. full stop n.
a. The end of a sentence; the single point or dot used to mark this; a period, full point.

This gives as its earliest citation

1600 Shakespeare Merchant of Venice iii. i. 15 Salari. Come, the full stop.

LeadSongDog come howl! 20:15, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

There are many variations and subtle adjectival qualificatons; but the essential distinction between the terms full point or dot (for the actual typographical mark) and full stop or period (for one functional implementation of that mark, in text) is long established. But the distinction is not usually made, because of confusion or ignorance concerning the available terms, and because in most contexts of use it doesn't matter much. It certainly does matter for any well-organised manual of style, and WP:MOS is one of those.

It is important to cite relevantly and accurately (see "OED.COM", just above). OED uses the term "full point" at many entries, and connects full point and full stop at its entry "point, n.1":

16. A dot or other small mark used in writing.
a. A full stop (in full full point); (hence) any terminal punctuation mark, as an exclamation mark or question mark.

Its clearest and most recent citation to clarify the sense:

1995 Lit. & Ling. Computing 10 83/1 There is no full point after Dr, Mrs, Ms, or Mr.

See also results from a Google book search. Note results even from the 19th century. These include compositor's usage, very relevantly for us ("To place a full point and em quadrat in the same situation as the semicolon referred to, with a full point after the last ..."); and the pre-eminent American lexicographer Noah Webster ("The period or full point marks a completion of the sense, a cadence of the voice, and the longest pause used between ... The full point is used also after initials when used alone; as, after N. S. for New Style; and after abbreviations; as, Croc."; An improved grammar of the English language, 1843).

As for MHRA, mentioned above as not using the term, on the contrary. It does use it, very systematically: "4.4 USE OF FULL POINT A contracted form of a word that ends with the same letter as the full form, including plural -s, is not followed by a full point: Dr, Jr, Mme, Mr, Mrs, St, vols ..." (see a relevant page image). MRHA allows its MRHA Style Guide to be downloaded as a PDF; the term is definitely in robust use there, especially in discussing abbreviations.

CMOS16 does not use full point, as has been noted. But the British equivalents, current NHR and current BCE certainly do. In the face of these hard facts, Eric Partridge's predication about full point being "obsolescent" was inaccurate (see [5], read from the marked text, and see TOC entry and even this famous work's famous title), except as prefiguring a greater confusion between marks and their roles.

Given such widespread conceptual uncertainty and confusion (some of which is evident in this thread), it is especially important to maintain clarity in MOS. I strongly support use of full point, glossed as often as necessary with dot; and a distinction between that mark and its application variously as full stop (period) and as fulfiller of other roles. ☺

NoeticaTea? 00:54, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Correct MHRA— I missed that somehow. Point to you. --— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 13:37, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
At http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf, Unicode uses "FULL STOP" as the primary name of the glyph, and "period", "dot", and "decimal point" as secondary names. (I have previously considered proposing that Wikipedia adopt the primary name used by Unicode for each character, and use it even for the title of the article about the glyph. Unicode is already an international standard.)
—Wavelength (talk) 02:03, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Clarity in MoS is not actually served by dropping terminology that is actually in use, though. If someone wants to know how to use this character, they'll look in the MoS for "full stop" or "period", the names they are mostly likely to think of it by (as evinced by the discussion above). If they don't find it, they'll probably give up rather than assume it's covered under an obscure but technically correct name. Who actually benefits from this move? Andrew Gray (talk) 13:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
So let's define and connect such terms, once and for all in one suitable location. We do that with other marks, like en dashes, em dashes, and ellipses. These moves can clear away a lot of confusion, and keep MOS the high-quality, major style resource that it has grown to be. NoeticaTea? 13:24, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm not convinced. This feels to me like hairsplitting - like opening up another version of the long and fundamentally pointless hyphen/dash debates that have wasted so much time and energy here and elsewhere on the wiki. There are ten years of archived discussions about the MoS, where the term "full point" appears all of three times (two of them in quotes and once incidental); it seems reasonable to conclude that almost every contributor to Wikipedia treats "the punctuation mark for abbreviation or ending a sentence" and "that little black dot" as the same thing, and usually agrees that it's called one of two or three things.
Fundamentally, I feel that the MoS should not be used to be needlessly prescriptive over incredibly minor details that are not reflected in our writing. It doesn't help anyone; it creates confusion rather than resolving it; and it increases the likelihood of people viewing the MoS as an ivory-tower document they do not want to engage with. Reading "full point" here feels as archaic and exclusionary to non-specialists as though we were to give guidance on "Marks of interrogation". Andrew Gray (talk) 13:44, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
It's my understanding that "full point" is a typographical term here in the UK. At the end of a sentence we use a full stop, and in the middle of a number we may find a decimal point on the baseline - but the same symbol used on both occasions is a full point. Another example would be after an abbreviation, which is neither technically a full stop nor a decimal point, but is still the same symbol. That said, I've never heard it used outside of a printing/publishing context, and it most certainly isn't common amongst the general population. 86.4.242.105 (talk) 19:47, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
SMcC said, above, "There is no formal American English term for this character when not used to end a sentence. "Period" is the most commonly used, but it is factually incorrect." I'm no grammarian, but I find this to sound like something Apteva would say ("using a dash here is factually incorrect!"). If "period" is the term used by everyone in the US to refer to what you call a "full point," and there is no "formal" substitute, then how is it unfair or "factually incorrect" to say that "period" in AmE encompasses both "full stop" and "full point"? It is not as though the combination of the letters p-e-r-i-o-d have some inherent meaning that necessarily does not (or does) mean "full point". Maybe Noah Webster used the term full point in 1843, but he also thought that thumb should be spelled thum. I support not using full stop to mean full point, because that really is factually incorrect, but I find that the word "dot" is amateurish and unencyclopedic and would greatly prefer something like "(also called a period in the U.S.)" or "'period' is used to refer to both a full stop and a full point in AmE". AgnosticAphid talk 21:33, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Experiment! I showed my wife WP:ABBR#Full points, and timed how long it took her to understand it. After about a minute, she said "No, I would just give up. I have no idea what a full point is." despite the word "period" that occurs buried in that section. After another half a minute, she said again, "No, I give up. Is it about a period?" Bingo! But in real life, few readers would have given it a minute and a half. I suggest that the current version be sent to a museum, where it can win awards from linguists. But if we want to influence Wikipedia's punctuation, the version here needs to more prominently feature the word "period" (while recoginizing the ENGVAR problem). "Dot" just isn't enough. Art LaPella (talk) 00:17, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
P.S.: I don't think she ever saw the word "period". She said the only reason she guessed "period" is because "U.S." had periods. Art LaPella (talk) 00:28, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Strongly concur with AA's last statement that the use of "dot" is amateurish and unencyclopedic. Its only general use for what some of us call a period derives from Internet (not just WWW!) domain names, such as "dot com" (which is probably the sole basis that Unicode references "dot"). That is hardly what could be called a typographical use; its main benefit being only one syllable rather than three.
I would point out "full stop" refers to the stopping (end of) a sentence, which (per Noetica's OED definition; thanks) could be "any terminal punctuation mark, as an exclamation mark or question mark." But despite Noetica's other fine examples I would say that "full point" seems obsolescent. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:22, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Points in response:
  • I make no claim for the way "full point" is introduced at WP:ABBR#Full points. I did not write it, and I think it is far from optimal. I also think it is in the wrong place. Distinguish a good idea from its implementation.
  • The reason "en dash" and "long hyphen" have hardly ever been distinguished in these talkpages reflects the situation with discourse on punctuation "out there". "En dash" conventionally names a mark, according to its size and shape; "long hyphen" names a functional role (a variation on the simple undifferentiated "hyphen" role), served by the mark called "en dash" in high-quality publishing. Similarly, "full point" and "dot", whatever their merits or success, are at least intended as intrinsic descriptions of a certain mark; and "full stop" and "period" as names for one dominant functional role served by that mark. Now, such distinctions are rigorous and useful, but they are inconvenient. They are neglected in many of the most careful guides to punctuation, and their omission perpetuates confusion. It always will, I fear.
  • I have said to at least one editor that these distinctions are typically too subtle for MOS. It seems I was right! I think I could craft an excellent, theoretically well-founded treatment of all this for inclusion in WP:MOS, but the effort to sell it would be too much. I therefore never thought to do so, and still will not.
  • I retract my support for "full point", even before proposing any better treatment of it. The clarity it can bring would be lost here. So we ought to seek not to do better than most guides in this respect (though we do far better than most in many other respects). I continue to work on these conceptual issues off Wikipedia, instead.
NoeticaTea? 00:53, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
I recommend the expression "baseline dot" as a name for a dot sitting or lying on the baseline. This expression refers to the glyph, regardless of its function. The noun adjunct "baseline" identifies its position, distinguishing it from the interpunct and from various diacritic dots. The word "dot" identifies its shape, and distinguishes it from the comma. Incidentally, in some usages, the interpunct has been used as a decimal mark, and a baseline dot has been used as a multiplication sign. Please see http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/files/scienceeditor/v31n2p042-043.pdf, for more information and for actual use of the expression "baseline dot".
—Wavelength (talk) 01:00, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
I like "baseline dot." Dot is here to stay, and baseline tells us where it goes. Rumiton (talk) 03:14, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
"Baseline dot" is, if anything, even worse for comprehensibility. Please can we just go back to using "full stop (period)" or "period (full stop)", terms actually understood by our users? Andrew Gray (talk) 10:23, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Understood? Perhaps; but I would rather say misunderstood. The whole point [sic] is that the distinction in question is a little abstract and a little difficult. No offence, Andrew: but you have just glossed over it entirely. I stick with my opinion: the distinction between marks and their roles is ontologically too subtle for this manual of style, as it has been for almost all the others. It's all right! We should live with that, as everyone else does – apart from those with an interest in the "linguistics" of punctuation (see the punctuation chapter of CGEL, for a taste). NoeticaTea? 10:53, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Glossing over a distinction apparently only known or significant to a tiny circle of typesetting specialists was entirely my intention. It's simply not appropriate to give this level of detail such prominence and emphasis in a working reference document for a general audience; the MoS should be giving people functional answers, not implicitly chastising them for failing to be aware of an arcane shibboleth.
(I also think you might want to reconsider that first remark - claiming that the vast majority of users of the language "misunderstand" its punctuation reads much worse than I am sure you intended.) Andrew Gray (talk) 11:22, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
No, I see no reason to amend anything. My remarks were carefully considered. We agree: it's too subtle a matter for a manual of style, even this one (which is far more nuanced than most). I've said all that. But compare the situation of linguists versus ordinary users of language (virtuoso ones, even). We "gloss over" the features distinguished by linguists if we pretend that they don't exist, or have no practical application. That is far from the case. Why have linguists at all, if it were the case? Why even have so-called applied linguists? Or engineers, or physicists, to mention others with specialist knowledge of the world we all inhabit? Again though, we agree about such notions and terms in MOS.
As for that first remark, I certainly stand by it. I spoke about the distinction between a mark and its functions, right? People use punctuation, but most have only the vaguest grasp of how the system works. They therefore rely on rules of thumb, and useful misconceptions. As we all do with other technical matters. Like driving a car without being a mechanic. And therefore, even many superb writers defer to specialist editors, to get things tuned. And the more competent specialists, at least, are aware of the abstractions that we have discussed here. Some can express that awareness well, others cannot.
NoeticaTea? 11:49, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

If someone wants to write about full points, half points, or shortenings, they should define these terms and/or give examples. It seems this could easily be confused with typography, as in "12 points to the pica" or "12-point Helvetica". "Baseline already means something in sports: "baseline pitch". Rather than invent words, why not just write in plain English. American English uses "period" for the symbol at the end of an abbreviation or a sentence. A "dot" is the mark above a lower case letter i. Numbers have "decimal points". "Dot" is also used in pronouncing internet addresses "www(DOT)google(DOT)com". I think I saw fairly recently that MOS is written in AmEng, if so, this section needs some work. —Neotarf (talk) 05:04, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there is that potential confusion too. NoeticaTea? 10:53, 9 January 2013 (UTC)7
Comment. The word "colon" has a meaning in the study of anatomy, but we still use the word "colon" for its meaning in typography. I still recommend the expression "baseline dot" for a dot on the baseline. You can find other ambiguous terms at http://www.fontshop.com/glossary/. See also "Typeface anatomy".
–Wavelength (talk) 17:59, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

The term "full point" (or "baseline [something]") is unintelligible to 99% of readers, and, if for no other reason, I feel it should be avoided. The MoS is not a freestanding style guide; it's a guide to help people edit Wikipedia consistently. Confusing people would be entirely against that purpose. There are no shortage of style guides to use "full stop" in the context of abbreviations: The Economist, Oxford Dictionaries, University of Oxford, another British University, another British University. (One British university, York, uses "full stop" and "full point" to mean the same thing in abbreviations in the same guide!) Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 11:54, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Agree with much of what Andrew Gray, Grandiose and others are saying above on the specific point of terminology here. More generally, the MOS, despite the congratulations often rained on it by its own contributors, is often obscure, needlessly petty and complicated – and often internally contradictory – with people constantly seeming to wish to make it more so. This talk page itself is at serious risk of disappearing into its own navel (or up its backside). Regular contributors here really need to keep reminding themselves that this is a general use encyclopedia, with 1000s of amateur editors. I've rarely seen professional style guides – which do a perfectly good job for professional publishers of ensuring decent writing and consistency of style and formatting – that are either as complex as the MOS here or that suffer with quite such convoluted and exponential meta-debate about the contents of the style guide as WP now has. Most editors I know in the real world just wouldn't take all these arcane debates quite so seriously. N-HH talk/edits 12:02, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Um, have you read New Hart's Rules (Oxford) or CMOS? And the latter disobeys its own advice, often. Tony (talk) 12:56, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
No I haven't actually (never needed to), but I am aware that they are hefty pieces of work, and quite probably internally inconsistent at times. My point is precisely that we should not be aspiring to anything like that – WP's MOS is, or should be, a) focused guidance aimed at broad rules for one single, specific publication, ie WP, not a general and quasi-academic guide to all style eventualities and to the English language as a whole; and b) aimed at amateur, volunteer writers and editors, not professionals. N-HH talk/edits 23:33, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
For sure, this MOS is a guide for this publication (WP), and needs to be geared for amateur editors. And for sure, most editors don't know, generally don't care, and (most importantly!) should not have to care about these arcane, esoteric points. But! We (the present discussants) should care. There are many ways the MOS, and its concepts and terminology, can be crafted. The deeper we go in resolving inconsistencies, whether internal or with other style practices, the better our chances of achieving a clear, fundamentally robust guide. The MOS does not have to explain why certain terms or practices are recommended (unless as a footnote for those interested), but in making those choices we should strive for a deep understanding of why as well as what. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:17, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
Sorry, but as with the previous response above, that surely misses the point; in fact, it merely highlights and confirms the fundamental nature of the problem here (and similar points are being made in the section below "When should we set the MOS to one side?"). It's the overanalysis, self-importance and sense that this is somehow some kind of divine and incredibly important mission to prescribe and proscribe. "The deeper we go" ... "craft[ing]" an MOS ... "deep understanding of why" etc? Come on (or have I missed the sarcasm?). If people here want an esoteric forum to discuss CMOS, New Hart's Rules, linguistics and the philosophy of the style guide, please start one. But people who want those discussions shouldn't necessarily acquire the right to set site-wide rules of such mind-bending complexity here based on such discussions. And the suggestion that, "Others might not care, but we do, so let us get on with it. They can get involved if they have views to offer" misses the key point - most people may well not participate because they don't want such complex rules at all and are not interested in getting involved in such arcane debates, not because they're happy to let others get on and decide for them on what that complexity should consist of precisely. N-HH talk/edits 23:42, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
I think you have misunderstood my point. Note that I am not saying we should have complex rules. I do prefer simplifying the rules as far as possible. But complex topics can be simplified in many ways. What I am saying is that we should strive to select simplifications that are as consistent as possible, both internally and with standard practice. And especially we should avoid misusing terms, or using obscure terms. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:43, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for clarifying, but your point did need clarifying: I didn't understand you as saying any of that, because you didn't say anything about avoiding obscure terms or keeping the MOS simple. You said ordinary editors might not, or don't have to, worry about it all at that level, but then said – prefaced with a "But!" – that the MOS and its regulars should nonetheless "go deeper" and care about arcane and esoteric points. This section of course started with a discussion about the term "full point" and people are now talking about "baseline dots" (which I picked up as an example of a wider problem here). Such terms should neither be in the MOS nor do they need to be discussed at such navel-gazing length behind the scenes. For all the intellectualising, style and formatting is actually a pretty basic, functional and arbitrary issue. N-HH talk/edits 10:26, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
N-HH, you write:
"For all the intellectualising, style and formatting is actually a pretty basic, functional and arbitrary issue."
I disagree. Not all who can speak can write competently; not all writers write well; not all good writers can edit well; not all who can edit for style, even well, can conceptualise the principles of style well – but that is a prerequisite for analysing, critiquing, writing, and maintaining a system of style guidelines. An auto mechanic is not a mechanical engineer, but someone had better be. A mechanical engineer is not a physicist, but someone had better be. A wine-maker is not a botanist, a plant physiologist, a microbiologist, a geneticist, an organic chemist, a chemical engineer, or an agricultural scientist – but there had better be those specialists, for a wine-maker to make excellent wines affordably and safely. So with writing, editing, and making guidelines for editing. WP:MOS is one of the most subtle and sophisticated manuals of its kind, practical for web use and for collaborative writing and editing. (I challenge people constantly to show us a better one, to learn from.) Yet anyone can edit it! And they do, subject to everyone else's scrutiny. And they come to WT:MOS to discuss, and they are always welcome. Discuss, I said: not belittle the effort that others put in, or hold forth on what is "correct" and therefore must at all costs replace what is in MOS, or claim that anything goes or that it's all easy anyway, so the effort is pointless.
I note your opinions: "intellectualising", "arcane and esoteric points", "navel-gazing". Do you post like that at talkpages concerned with geology, cell biology, or neuroscience? You must be qualified to pass judgement on their uselessness in everyday life. After all, you live on the surface of Earth, are made of cells, and have a nervous system. And you're doing all right!
NoeticaTea? 11:46, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Remember that if we wanted the public to help us with geology, the instructions would start with "Geology is the study of rocks", not this article. Also, to many of us, the Manual of Style is more like astrology than geology, and the main goal is just to keep everyone away from each others' throats. Art LaPella (talk) 00:47, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree that having central guidance from the MOS does often serve to keep editors away from each others' throats, by pointing out to them which of several choices is preferred, even where those preferences sound a bit arbitrary to some. But that's not really its main goal, and if if was, some of those choices might come out different due to that different motivation. I think the main goal is to help the encyclopedia have a consistent professional-looking style. Some think this goal too lofty for a volunteer project, but personally I think it's a good goal and is working pretty well, overall. I do agree that our MOS could do a better job of encouraging more accessible lead sentences than "Geology (from the Greek γῆ, gê, "earth" and λόγος, logos, "study") is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change." Dicklyon (talk) 01:03, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
Right, where "professional" is defined as "having the same quirks as others use who waste far too much time on this stuff". Oh well, at least it's quieter than it used to be. Art LaPella (talk) 02:55, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
Art, of course an article about geology should start simply and helpfully. And MOS should be like that throughout, of course. But, instructively and very much to the point here, geology is not "the study of rocks" as you say it is! That's petrology; the WP article begins like this: "Petrology (from the Greek πέτρα, petra, 'rock' and λόγος, logos, 'study') is the branch of geology that studies the origin, composition, distribution and structure of rocks." Now, you don't have to be a geologist or a petrologist to assist at either Geology or Petrology (in fact, I want to fix something in the Greek at both articles. ☺). It takes experts with specialised knowledge to fine-tune things, so that the simple exposition will be right and relevant. Myself, I am not committed to using specialised terms of art in MOS. I think we should remove any that are not helpful, and gloss those that are to make them more helpful. Behind that effort lies a great deal of linguistic knowledge; and expertise in many, many more areas that converge on developing an excellent manual of style. Making guidelines is a hybrid art and a complex science; behind the scenes, we must deal in matters that would appear arcane if they showed up in MOS itself.
NoeticaTea? 03:03, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

To reply to Noetica's initial response to me above, I'll just say that, yet again, the response confirms the problem re the elevated status being given to style issues by some and the overanalysis that goes into MOS questions. Of course I don't think substantive content on complex topics should gloss over or omit details. The details there really do matter, and I've never said otherwise. But the point is precisely that style issues are not equivalent – they are not about substantive content; an MOS is just about how that content is presented, often in pretty marginal areas. The questions as to whether you hyphenate or not, use a hyphen or endash in compound terms, or capitalise certain words or not, are all ultimately pretty trivial ones. You may as well toss a coin over each of those choices (which is what I meant by arbitrary; I agree that one should aim for consistency once one has made that decision) rather than debate the deep, deep meaning inherent in any of them. Whether we write Smith-Jones theorem or Smith–Jones theorem is really not as important or as informative to the average reader – even if they do understand the distinction anyway – and not worth as much agonising over as how the substance of the theorem itself is explained. And even when it comes to substantive content, while, as I say, content and debate about content does need to get more involved than it does for style, I'd agree with others that we still need to bear in mind that WP is a generalist work; even there we do not need to go too far. And as for showing you a better MOS than what we have, like I say, my opinion (I've never claimed it to be any more than that) is that a shorter, simpler and more focused one, with less pretension towards being a universal style treatise, would be a start. Not least because it would almost certainly help get more buy-in and therefore get WP closer to the goal of broad consistency (or at least consistency in its inevitable inconsistency, as WP:ENGVAR). The complexity and obscure terminology some people seem to want to keep pushing is ultimately, if nothing else, self-defeating. N-HH talk/edits 10:37, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like Wikipedia:Simplified Manual of Style. Art LaPella (talk) 22:39, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

...and break

  • After all the discussion above, is there significant support for keeping the use of "full point", or shall we return to the previous consensus "full stop (period)" terminology? Andrew Gray (talk) 11:42, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
  • I'd be fairly confident there's consensus to return to as it was and avoid the use of "full point" and I'd reiterate my support for that position here (apologies for getting carried away with discussion of more general issues; that was my fault but it was something that I thought needed to be said, even if saying diverted from the basic issue and also made me look a little hypocritical for complaining about MOS discussions disappearing up the fundament). N-HH talk/edits 12:12, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
    • ...no-one else commenting? I'm involved here, but there seems to be a fairly clear lack of consensus to support last week's change discussed above, & I don't think we should just leave it there through inertia! I'll revert it back later today unless someone else wants to wade in. Andrew Gray (talk) 10:27, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree that it should be changed back. AgnosticAphid talk 11:02, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
...and done. It's not a straight revert - I've left in some of SMC's other incidental changes - but the "full stop" etc terminology should be back where it was beforehand. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:42, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
Good. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:10, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
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