Talk:List of mayors of Barnsley

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Use of bold in the article

Being "unusual" on WP is not a crime if there is a good reason for it. The list of the earliest mayors (List of mayors of the Municipal Borough of Barnsley) contains paragraphs about each, since their civic careers represent the early history of the corporation and of Barnsley itself. However, without the bold to differentiate them, the paragraphs distract visually from the names of the mayors themselves, and without bolding the names it is difficult to pick the names out easily, and it is difficult to spot quickly where they have been mayor several times. An alternative might have been to present the list as a set of sub-sections, with the mayors' names as subheadings, but that would look odd where they had been mayor twice - we would either have to see their names as subheading twice, or we would have to put their two mayorships together under one subheading, thus compromising the chronological list of dates. So unless you can think of a better way of presenting this list as a useful facility for the reader, please do not remove the bold. Thank you. Storye book (talk) 09:25, 14 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"I don't like it" generally isn't a good reason for doing something. See MOS:NOBOLD which says right at the start "Avoid using boldface for emphasis in article text." There is nothing in MOS:BOLD or MOS:BOLD#OTHER which supports its use here. Personally I would look at presenting that list in a single column, or even in a table. 10mmsocket (talk) 10:11, 14 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have not given "don't like it" as a reason for doing something. I had rather thought that you had done that by removing the bold without asking why it was there?
Rules should be used with commonsense, that is one of WP's rules. We cannot make rules for every eventuality, and for certain eventualities we have to use commonsense. I have explained the commonsense response above.
The bold is not used for emphasis. Emphasis in this context would mean that something was emboldened to make it look more important than the rest (or, if you like, to "shout" in social media parlance). But here is is used for differentiation, as explained above. Differentiation (or distinguishing between elements) is different from emphasis.
Presenting it in a single column would not resolve the problem of differentiating the names from the paragraphs, or of making it clear at a glance which mayors were in office twice or thrice.
A table would work, if (a) we could find one which had space for the paragraphs, without losing any of the information, and (b) if the names could be presented on their own in the left-hand column (then they would not need to be bold unless that were part of the table design). I would have used such a table, but could not find one for mayors, which would include the paragraphs. Is there such a table? Storye book (talk) 11:09, 14 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]