Wikipedia:Update/1/General style changes during September 2008

Feel free to edit, but please keep discussions about changes to a page on that page's talk page. Use quotation marks to show which sentences and phrases people can search for to find the changes you list; quotation marks are also useful for giving verbatim changes whose consequences may not be clear, yet. Notice of some changes may be deferred a month if there's evidence that the changes may not last.

• WP:Explain jargon
  • The blanket prescription to explain all jargon was replaced with more nuanced advice: avoid jargon if other words are just as clear but will reach a wider audience, don't explain every term if that makes the text too cluttered, use wikilinks for jargon if there are relevant articles available, and consider linking to Wiktionary if not. Other sections deemed not relevant to the subject were deleted or moved.
• WP:Lead section.
  • Removed "Footnotes, quote boxes, or separate sections can be used rather than parenthesis for long encyclopedic dictionary-like information. See the Ethics article for an example."
• WP:Manual of Style
  • Removed the advice to use a non-linebreaking space ( ) in front of spaced en dashes.
  • Now, "The use of diacritics (accent marks) on foreign words is neither encouraged nor discouraged", and "If the foreign phrase or word appears rarely in English, avoid using it", in place of the old advice to keep foreign words and their foreign diacritics.
  • Images typically needing more than the default size now include images with extreme aspect ratios, and images "in which a small region is relevant, but cropping to that region would reduce the coherence of the image".
• WP:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)
  • Use figures rather than words for "Time of day".
  • No "leading zeros" in dates.
  • In "the night of 30/31 May 1942", the "30/31" format is now fine instead of appearing only "rarely".
  • The "YYYY-MM-DD" format looks like the ISO 8601 standard, which requires Gregorian dates; so when using this format, make sure the date is according to the modern, that is, the Gregorian calendar. (Some countries adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1583, some switched much later.)
  • "In certain subject areas the customary [date] format may differ from the usual national one: for example, articles on the modern U.S. military often use day before month".
  • Unicode symbols for fractions are no longer mentioned as an option.
  • Adopted stronger wording against using "IEC" byte prefixes.
  • There's a new section on the proper use of "geographical coordinates".
• WP:Manual of Style (spelling)
  • Australian spellings added.
• WP:Wikimedia sister projects
  • The entire "Guidelines" section is now disputed and under discussion.