This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:Manual of Style. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
(I split the above section because B specifically asked that we not start a long discussion there. Feel free to revert if you're unhappy 146.90.43.8 (talk) 14:52, 14 October 2012 (UTC))
I have restored the order of the comments to indicate which comment was responding to which, and also the chronological order, per WP:REFACTOR. The above comment about lengthy posts refers specifically to justifications for edit warring, not long comments in general; however I have left in an arbitrary break. --Neotarf (talk) 23:02, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Well, it seems to me that if an RfC on changing MoS, by adding a weird caveat/disclaimer, failed to come to resolution, then MoS reverts back to its original wording. That's not editwarring, it's just standard operating procedure. The roundabout proposal to add wording to the effect that inter-article consistency goes out with the bathwater clearly failed. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.12:34, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Except that the RfC was deceptively worded, to make it look like the disputed wording was already in the text. In fact, the proposal was to add the wording, not remove it, but somehow all the protests against the deceptive wording kept getting hidden--by resetting the archiving bot, by collapsing discussions -- so new people coming into the discussion could not see the facts. Nathan's close did not say anything about consensus, it is very possible that it is as obvious to him as to everyone else that there is no consensus, but his closing summary just repeated the deceptive language of the RFC, that is, it appears he believed that the proposal was to remove the wording and not to add it. --Neotarf (talk) 13:18, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The text was added to the guideline in November 2008 in a rewrite[1], and it was removed in August 2011[2] as "repetition and redundancy". I don't think that there was any discussion for the inclusion, and certainly there was no discussion for the removal, as pointed out by Quiddity[3].
Rather than argue if this is a restoring or a new addition, we should argue if the sentence is useful (obviously, I think that it is). --Enric Naval (talk) 13:32, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
We had an RfC. The consensus [5] was that the article should contain the words "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" . Noetica and two or three others have reverted any attempt to add those words to the article. Those words should be in the article. If Noetica or anyone else is still unhappy, then he should start another RfC. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 14:17, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
BTDT. We already failed to come to a consensus that it is, and the idea has more opposition than support. If a proposed change to a page fails to gain consensus, it goes back to the way it was. This is just an drawn-out case of WP:BRD. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.14:29, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
(EC) I don't really understand what you're saying. There was an RfC to determine consensus. The consensus [6] among all who took part in the RfC was that phrase should be included. Now, a small minority of those who took part in the RfC are preventing the phrase from being added.. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 14:45, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Well, the offending "as a whole" passage appears to be absent from the extant text anyway, so I'm mollified. It should not be added back in. ((em|The entire point of MoS}} is consistency between articles. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.14:35, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
There has been some argument over whether the RfC resulted in consensus or not. The last time I counted, it was about seventeen to thirteen people in favor of reinserting the contested wording, and in my opinion there was more evidence cited in favor of doing so as well.
There is a difference of opinion regarding whether the discussion resulted in consensus or not. Uninvolved non-admin editor Nathan Johnson found that it did. Admin Kwami found that it did not. Admin RegentsPark confirmed that Nathan Johnson's decision was procedurally valid. 14:37, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Half of the entire point of MoS is consistency between articles. If all we wanted was consistency within each article, it would all just be a matter of local consensus at each article's talk page; let's not be silly. Let's also not beat around the bush: The passage in question was added by people (do I see any birdwatchers in the bushes, perhaps?) who want to advance a topical "standard" through a wikiproject, or just their own personal editing habits, that conflicts with MoS, plain and simple. The way to change consensus about a point of grammar, spelling, punctuation or orthography on Wikipedia is to put forth a clear case to change that consensus, at the talk page of the guideline in question. It isn't to sneak in a clause that effectively says "ignore this guideline except inside the same article"; that is what is colloquially known as "a load of crap". If someone wants to propose such a thing, let them do it in another RfC: "Should MoS be limited to only applying within the same article, and it's rules/advice considered null and void for inter-article consistency?" I predict about a 97% outcry against that, especially if it's advertised though WP:VPP and WP:CD. A finding this way or that with regard to the results of an RfC can't ignore basic WP:COMMONSENSE. A vote headcount is now how RfCs or other consensus-determination processes work. You feel the arguments for the passage were stronger, but I sure don't. Most of them appear to be logically invalid to me, because they fail to understand what MoS's obvious purpose is (among other errors). Again, just put the real, underlying question – limit MoS to intra-article authority or not? – to the test. Trying to get at this question by nipping at its heel is disingenuous nonsense. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.14:51, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
No, SMC, the purpose of the MoS is not inter-article consistency. It is 1. the promotion of correct and intelligible English on the English Wikipedia and 2. intra-article consistency where more than one correct option exists.
I didn't say arguments. I said evidence. More people cited actual problems that that had observed that they believed were attributable to the absence of the contested wording than cited problems attributable to its presence. That's what I mean by evidence; observed events rather than hypothetical events or logical arguments. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:58, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
I can read. I disagree with most of them and with your summary of them as supposed observations rather than opinional positions (i.e. arguments) about their observations. And "No, Darkfrog", the purpose of MoS is not "correct" English. MoS makes no pretense whatsoever that it has identified and is promoting "correct" English, since there is no such thing. MoS, for internal Wikipedia use, promotes, yes, intelligible English for the benefit of the widest readership, and this by definition means between not just within each article in a vacuum. Basic logic dictates that promotion of intelligible English – as prescribed by MoS – on the English Wikipedia necessarily means across articles, not just in one article here and one article there, willy-nilly. It would be "reader-hateful" to have one article "consistently" using one set of terminology, capitalization, hyphenation, spelling, units, abbreviation, punctuation, etc., etc., while permitting, even encouraging other articles to "consistently" within their insular selves use completely different sets of these things. The no. 1 role of MoS is to set a baseline of standard writing practice here. The no. 2 role is to see that it is used consistently *between* articles, or there was no point in doing no. 1 to begin with. The KISS principle and principle of least astonishment are legitimate and important MoS goals. MoS promote intra-article consistency where more than one correct option exists, but only in the relatively uncommon case that MoS has not already selected one of these options as the preferred Wikipedian way. Furthermore, Nathan Johnson should recuse himself from any further admin closures on this and related issues. His closure rationale includes his own pro/con statement that not adding the clause back in would "increase arguing over what was meant in the MoS", which makes him a belated party to the debate, not a neutral party, and his statement that opponents of the phrase were advocating that consistency across articles be required is a straw man – no one in this debate has done so, and doing so wouldn't make sense, since MoS doesn't really require anything. In actuality, opponents of this phrase being added take the much more reasonable position that inter-article consistency is desirable and is a valid goal when achieving it is reasonably possible. I therefore dispute the validity of Johnson's closure, as both by an involved party and fundamentally misrepresenting/misunderstanding half of the debate. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.15:21, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
What is and isn't correct English can change over time (and sometimes with place), but the idea that there's no such thing as correct English is not true. If I spell "cat" "khup," then that is wrong. If I capitalize a t mid-sentence, that is wrong. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:40, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Again, see Linguistic description, esp. vs. prescriptive grammar. If it became commonplace to spell cat as khup instead, then then would be how to spell cat henceforth. "Wrong" is a value judgement and doesn't make sense with relation to language. Khup right now is simply unintelligible, which accurately describes it linguistically without pretending there is some kind of Platonic Truth involved. [Aside: Interestingly, almost the same transition you are talking about has already been transpiring; the other way around. Ketchup (derived from various cognate Southeast Asian terms in Malay, Indonesian and Chinese, like ke chiap, meaning 'fish sauce' or 'soy sauce') has been mutating over the last couple of generations into catsup. That doesn't wouldn't make catsup "wrong", even the day it first appeared, just odd at the time, and now routine.] — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.03:03, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
Yes, the language could change to make "khup" the accepted spelling. But right now, it isn't. That's what I mean by "wrong." At any given time and place, there are correct spellings and usages and incorrect spellings and usages.
There's no point in arguing about when the words were added and when they were removed. This seems to be just another way to filibuster (as in, "you didn't describe the entire sequence of events going back four years 100 percent accurately, therefore you were trying to mislead us, therefore you are a liar, therefore the RfC isn't valid, therefore we're not really edit warring"). The point is: should the words "though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole" be in the sentence in question, and the RfC consensus was yes.
In addition, SMcCandlish, it isn't correct that the entire point of the MoS is consistency between articles. Editors have opposed that idea for as long as I recall. We aim for local consensus and internal consistency, and we have an MoS to offer guidance as to how to local consensus is usually shaped. But a lot of style issues devolve to the first major contributor, the idea of regional differences, changing consensus on talk pages, and who is actually doing the writing. The only thing we require is internal consistency so that articles aren't a mishmash. SlimVirgin(talk)23:46, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Wow, that is so opposite to my understanding. First of all, there was clearly NOT a consensus to re-add this old line in the RFC. And it to re-add it without the other part, that said "Therefore, even where the Manual of Style permits alternative usages, be consistent within an article," makes it seem as if it's giving permission to ignore the MOS and develop wholly independent local styles, which is the way of chaos. Dicklyon (talk) 00:07, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
1. Dicklyon, speaking for myself, I have no objection to "Therefore ...within an article" and would support its reinsertion. I think it's a bit redundant, but hey.
2. When I last checked, seventeen people favored reinsertion and thirteen opposed. Yes, this isn't a vote. But, as Nathan Johnson pointed out, the people who opposed fell into two very different groups: A good chunk of the people who opposed reinsertion said, "Because it's obvious that inter-article consistency is not the purpose of the MoS and unnecessary to repeat it." If we consider that most of the rest of the people who objected believe that the MoS either does or should require inter-article consistency, then this assumption can be proven false. If we either assume that these people would switch their votes or that they wouldn't vote at all, then that put it closer to twentysomething to eight or nine. (And yes, if we wanted to be sure what they'd do, we'd have to ask them.) Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:29, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
SV, I've already moderated my statement. I didn't literally mean "entire", and was using it hyperbolically, but at least you and one other didn't pick up on that, so I used <ins>...</ins> to fix it. Consistency between articles, however, is still a top-level goal of the MoS, otherwise we wouldn't really need one. WikiProjects would just set topical standards, to the extent anyone cared, and that would be that; we'd have a really messy encyclopedia, but that would be our norm. The consensus in this latest RfC wasn't "yes", add it. An admin who badly mischaracterized half the respondents and himself offered a strong opinion on the matter said the consensus was "yes". These are very different things. Even without those issues, others have disputed the "consensus" finding anyway. It's pretty much moot. A finding of alleged consensus that immediately results in a huge many-party, multi-day argument about whether there was consensus or not obviously misread the level of consensus, as the argument demonstrates that there is in fact no consensus. When have I ever suggested that first-major-contributor isn't the rule of thumb when MoS fails to offer a pre-set WP-wide preference? I've never said such a thing. MOS does, however, offer pre-set preferences on many, many, many things, and does so equally for inter- as well as intra-article consistency reasons. Both GAN and especially FAC treat MoS as a set of inter-article consistency rules, no doubt about that at all. I think you're mistaking my argument and running with it off into the distance. Observing that MOS is firmly intended and used for inter-article consistency does not mean that one opposes or is oblivious to principles like consensus on the article talk page among active editors of an article, or the principle of first major contributor, or that in various ways WP has decided not to have some kinds of inter-article consistency (WP:ENGVAR, etc.) – namely places/aspects that MOS itself has failed or declined to set a site-wide rule. Per WP:LOCALCONSENSUS making up local rules when MOS does provide a site-wide rule is, at least, problematic and contraindicated unless the need is so strong it legitimately triggers WP:IAR. If MOS were not intended and continually used for inter-article consistency, an edit summary of something like "style fix per MOS" would signal an edit that should be immediately reverted, by anyone/everyone, as borderline vandalism or PoV pushing, since such an edit's basis would be fallacious. It isn't and it doesn't, however, as we all know. QED: MoS is provably an inter- as well as intra-article consistency guideline. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.03:03, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
Speaking of consistency, to me the highest priority is fixing the inconsistencies between the various MOS pages, and removing the notice of using this page instead of another if there is a disagreement. In particular, there are two "disputed" tags at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations and it would be helpful to remove both as quickly as possible. Apteva (talk) 02:20, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
It is actually just one dispute, that the list of acronyms is arbitrary. My recommendation is instead of pretending that those are the only acronyms, present the list as examples. Apteva (talk) 03:18, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
The meaning of consensus
The process of consensus building is crucial to the success of Wikipedia. Consensus does not always bring the result any particular editor or group of editors desires, nor is it necessary that a 'consensus' that has been found is necessarily correct. But, as long as it is determined by an independent editor, we should go with it. If we don't, then the process becomes useless. My suggestion is that, if you don't like this consensus, you take this to some other venue - arbcom if you will. But, don't subvert the process. I also direct everyones attention to the following text from WP:CONSENSUS: The continuous, aggressive pursuit of an editorial goal is considered disruptive, and should be avoided. Editors should listen, respond, and cooperate to build a better article. Editors who refuse to allow any consensus except the one they insist on, and who filibuster indefinitely to attain that goal, risk damaging the consensus process. Any further reverts to the RfC will be disruptive and subject to blocks. And, I won't hesitate to protect the page as well. There is a lot to do on Wikipedia that is more important than arguing disruptively over a sentence in MOS. --regentspark (comment) 15:18, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Correct. My suggestion is, count to ten, and then some, and when it is appropriate, bring up the topic again. First as discussion, and if not enough editors are participating, or if no consensus can be reached, as an RfC, or go to moderation, etc. Everyone has a reason for their viewpoint, and ignorance is just as valid a reason as any other. When the reason for the viewpoint is discovered it is easier to figure out which side to take - which is why at WP:RM (one of my frequent haunts) votes are not as helpful as reasons for the vote. It occurs to me that some of the editors here would like a WP:RS for Requested Style. But note that no RM discussions take place at RM - WP:RM is only a listing of the RM discussions. Apteva (talk) 16:42, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
That's an interesting point, that "ignorance is just as valid a reason as any other". It does explain a lot about your recent behavior, where by rejecting responses from others you keep yourself ignorant to try to keep your veiwpoint valid. Wouldn't it be better to consider such viewpoints based on ignorance as not "just as valid", but rather as transient states to be gotten through? Dicklyon (talk) 17:17, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Plesase revert the WP:POINTedly insertion of "some" into "and in some proper names such as Trois-Rivières and Wilkes-Barre".[7] What it implies is that Trois-Rivières and Wilkes-Barre are two of the extremely few proper names that use a hyphen, when no one has been able too find even one proper name that does use anything but a hyphen. If you think about what the sentence actually says, it is easier to understand without the examples - "Hyphenation is also used in some proper names." As in not all proper names have a hyphen - for example, Washington and Sun are not commonly spelled with a hyphen, but Mexican-American War and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are spelled with a hyphen. The intent of the edit was to point out that Mexican-American War is spelled with something other than a hyphen, even though 97.2% of books do use a hyphen, which clearly refutes that idea. Walmart was correctly spelled with a star or a stylized asterisk in the middle of the word, but using some just because of that exception is pointless. All guidelines and policies have exceptions. This is not a place that adding some is warranted, and only confuses the meaning of the sentence. Apteva (talk) 18:10, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
If the page had not been protected, I would have reverted that edit myself, because it's off-topic and too obvious to bother with: It's a simple statement that hyphens are used, equivalent to saying that apostrophes are used in proper names like O'Hara. But you illustrate exactly why it was added: people have been abusing that passage to argue for something else entirely. I don't know whether this is a willful misreading or not, but it very obviously has nothing to do with the hyphen–dash question, any more than it means that O'Hara needs to be spelled "O-Hara". As long as we are able to acknowledge that, I would support removing the added word. If we're not able to acknowledge that, then this extraneous wording would unfortunately appear to be necessary to prevent such misuse. Significant portions of the MOS have already been reworded to head off gaming the guideline in cases like this. — kwami (talk) 18:39, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
That is my point exactly. But adding significant portions of the MOS to head off gaming the guideline is itself a miss-interpretation of what a guideline is. If someone does not want to follow it no amount of specificity is going to help. Apteva (talk) 19:50, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Mexican–American War would use a dash, not a hyphen. It wasn't a war of Mexican-Americans vs. someone else, but between Mexico and the United States of America. Juxtaposition of two independent entities. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.02:33, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
Sure. But his argument is that since the MOS says hyphens are used in proper names, dashes cannot be used in proper names. Which is the opposite of what it says, of course, but he's been repeating that argument over and over. I think the "pointy" addition of 'some' into the MOS was intended to make it more obvious that that argument is specious. — kwami (talk) 02:48, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
But as pointed out adding "some" does not say what it was intended to say. And it can not say that all proper names use a hyphen because Sun does not use a hyphen, and it can not say that no proper names use a hyphen because Wilkes-Barre does. As far as I can see 2.8% of books use an endash for Mexican American War. A second study using only page images may raise that percentage. Adding some does not in any way affect what our article is going to use. The article has been bouncing around half a dozen times from a hyphen to an endash. Adding some will not change whether it uses an endash or a hyphen. Does some mean that where an endash or a hyphen could be used a hyphen is used some of the time? Or does it mean that for all proper names, some of them are hyphenated? If an endash is ever correctly used in a proper name it does not matter in the least how many times that happens, so some, most, all, none, few, many are meaningless. Use the correct punctuation. All the time. It is also a fact that I am not aware of any examples of an endash being correct in a proper name, but certainly it should be trivial to find an exception. And if there is one? What good does adding "some" do? We already say that the guideline has exceptions. Do we have to say that in every sentence? Apteva (talk) 05:22, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
Yes, if you would bother educating yourself about what grammar guides say, or about the en dash discussions, you'd know that in some styles the role of the en dashed is filled by the hyphen – like in styles based on typewriters, and some others. There's probably no en dash role that actually appears as en dash in a majority of sources – not even in page ranges or date ranges. It's not that the hyphen is "wrong", but that in styles that recognize the distinction between hyphen and en dash, the en dash should be used when it signals the intended relationship better than the hyphen does. Proper names have nothing to do with it, except that some proper names, such as person names that have been derived from two parent names, or city names that have been compounded from two names, where the two distinct person or entities are not being distingushed, the hyphen in used. When the two are distinguished, as in Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, the en dash is used. Have you tried consulting grammar guides about this? None of them have anything resembling your theory. The "some" that I added was to blunt your erroneous interpretation of a sentence that nobody had misinterpreted before; I'm not sure why people are calling it pointy. Only very few proper names include a hyphen, so the "some" makes perfect sense. Dicklyon (talk) 05:48, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
I agree that the wording is awkward. If no-one were using that sentence to claim that the MOS says that we need to use hyphens instead of dashes in proper names, then I would remove it. There are, however, several other places in the MOS which are awkwardly written because of repeated misinterpretation of more straightforward or elegant wording. — kwami (talk) 06:11, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
I have looked at some style guides. No where near as many as were consulted in developing the MOS, but Seattle-Tacoma Intl is not a particularly good example, because the vast majority of sources spell it with a hyphen. Adding some does not change what I think the sentence says. I think the some was added to try to change the meaning of the sentence, but it has no affect on the sentence other than to mislead. Some implies how many, 1 out of 4, 3 out of 4? One out of a hundred? Nine out of ten? Lets say that there are 100 proper nouns and 2 use a hyphen and 3 use an endash. Does saying some help to know which is which? Lets say there are none that use an endash. Does saying some use a hyphen help to add an endash? What I am saying is that adding the word some was intended to mean that some names use an endash, but it does not say that. It says, and I quote, "Hyphenation also occurs in bird names such as Great Black-backed Gull, and in some proper names such as Trois-Rivières and Wilkes-Barre." How by any stretch of the imagination does that help add an endash to any words? That is why I am saying that it was added just to make a point. Apteva (talk) 07:07, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
I'll be the first to agree that it doesn't change the meaning, and wasn't intended to. But it was intended to keep you from claiming that the meaning is that proper name cannot have en dashes, which it never said. As long as we agree, I don't really care if we remove "some". Dicklyon (talk) 07:19, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
Excellent. I am certain that some kind admin will be happy to do that - for exactly that reason - "as long as we agree"! Edit protected can never be used to perform an edit that has not gained consensus. Apteva (talk) 07:32, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
So we agree now? Above where you said "Even I am wrong sometimes, I freely admit that, like when I think that I am wrong." you weren't just kidding as you implied? You're admitting now that you were wrong in your interpretation of the MOS as saying the proper names can't have en dashes? Dicklyon (talk) 07:40, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
I was saying that in my personal experience I have yet to find a title that has come through WP:RM that seemed to indicate, based on common usage, that it should use an endash in a proper noun That had nothing to do with the MOS, but only to do with personal experience. But that is a tiny microcosm. I searched through as much of the dictionary that time and google would allow and hoped to find one to no avail - so far. I have not given up, and hope to find some in the comets perhaps. Normally exceptions to anything are trivial to find. But moving on, while reading New Hart's Rules, it says that it is Brit speak to use post-World War I with a hyphen and Am speak to use an endash. Based on what I am finding in the google book search for hyphens and commas in for example male-female I am wondering if perhaps we should have a grey area where either a hyphen or an endash is acceptable? 1914-18 pretty universally used an endash, Bose-Einstein we can ignore because those are scientists and what do they know about punctuation? I am being a little bit facetious but only a little. Male-female surprised me. Apteva (talk) 07:53, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
New Arbitration Enforcement Remedy
This page and its talk page are currently subject to active arbitration enforcement remedies:
Clear vandalism of whatever origin may be reverted without restriction.
Editors who otherwise violate this 1RR restriction may be blocked without warning by any uninvolved administrator, even on a first offense.
If you are a new editor, or an editor unfamiliar with the situation, please follow the above guidelines. If you are unsure if your edit is appropriate, discuss it here on this talk page first. When in doubt, don't revert!
That is, the various instances or forms of a work are always parenthesized. I argue that "(adaptations)" is a superclass of instances of a work on Wikipedia, rather than an extant subject to which the works themselves are subservient.
Yet somehow a creeping, "standard" has been put forth, and is being acted upon en masse, solely by User:NeelixContributions. Discuss? --Lexein (talk) 16:40, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
Modifier-last is used when the "correct" title cannot be used. In this case, an article listing adaptations of The Thing could not be correctly titled "The Thing", so Adaptations of The Thing (or List of adaptations of The Thing) would be correct. An article on the 1987 album would be titled "The Thing", except that it's not the primary topic for that title, so a parenthetical qualifier is tacked on to the title. -- JHunterJ (talk) 17:06, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
The farther I dig into the history of "don't imply subsidiary articles" or words to that effect, the less I find. It started out as partially a technical issue (old server software would literally create subpages if a slash was in the title). Over time, the explanation and rationale has been trimmed, and its application expanded to include parentheticals, to the point that it's a nearly empty imperative, without rationale. It's depressing. At some point, I had hoped to see discussion, consensus, or precedent mentioned, but nothing so far, using Wikiblame. In case anyone wondered, that's what I've been doing in spare moments, all day.
And yes, I'm starting to think that policies and guidelines should also have inline citations, linking to their origin discussion & consensus, precedent in other encyclopedias, or to an external manual of style, just to prevent the kind of endless spelunking I'm now forced into, just because a policy doesn't seem to make prima facie sense.--Lexein (talk) 04:52, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
I see no reason for documenting changes other than is already available from the history. The basic principle of WP is that it does not matter who or why or when someone adds something as long as it is correct. In article space everything needs a reliable source, and because of the need for verifiability, needs a reference. In WP space everything only needs to make sense, and if not, that is what talk pages are for. Adding references is helpful in some cases, but in most cases they are not needed. That is what articles are for. Apteva (talk) 07:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
No one's forcing you into spelunking. The distinction given above between titles and their qualifiers makes prima facie sense. -- JHunterJ (talk) 10:53, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
So when I see a policy that makes no sense, and has no historical rationale whatsoever, I should just shut up? I do not think that is the purpose of policies, in general, nor should it be, here. --Lexein (talk) 18:25, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Agreed. It is a detriment to the project to use parenthetical disambiguators to distinguish articles from their parent articles, both because parenthetical disambiguators have a well-established, disparate purpose and because subtopics by definition represent only a portion of the scope of the term indicated thereby. Neelix (talk) 14:42, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Neelix: sorry, "just because" isn't good enough. How can this be discussed in a way that does not result in you resorting to circular logic?
Apteva: "The basic principle of WP is that it does not matter who or why or when someone adds something as long as it is correct." In WP space, by what standard of "correctness"? Every article requires multiple support in independent reliable sources, but our policies require no substantiation of any sort? Ridiculous. That's a very good reason for academics to openly mock the work done here.
Question everything. If no one knows why it says something and no one objects, change the policy or guideline. But the authority is not a reference, although in some cases there is an authority, and in those cases it is appropriate to use an external link, the authority is actually the one or more editors who put it there, and their signature is already in the page history. Right now I am working on comet names, and there are guidelines that the IAU uses in specifying comet names, but even that does not really need to be referenced, because we are not the ones who choose comet names, they are the ones who are the final authority, but do we really need to know what spelling rules they used? The purpose of this discussion page is to discuss changes to this page, and it is archived so that it is possible to figure out what the reasoning was, if any discussion took place. That should be sufficient documentation. Apteva (talk) 02:51, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
Article titles
This sentence
"The Manual of Style applies to all parts of an article, including the title. See especially punctuation, below. (The policy page Wikipedia:Article titles does not determine punctuation.)"
is, to put it mildly, absurd. Policies always trump guidelines, but policies do not specify everything, that is what guidelines and common sense are for, but to say that a guideline determines punctuation of an article title is not possible, and has created the absurdity of thinking that Mexican-American War should be called "Mexican–American War" (with an endash instead of a hyphen) just because if it was not a proper noun it would be spelled with an endash. Well it is a proper noun and it is spelled with a hyphen. But really, the idea that a guideline can say that a policy does not apply is completely absurd. Which is anyone going to follow, the policy or the guideline? The policy every time. Now if it was the other way around, if a policy felt a need to say, but please ignore such and such a guideline, never mind how absurd that is, that would work, because the policy gets precedence over the guideline. Just my two cents worth. I recommend deleting the entire sentence as absurd. Apteva (talk) 02:23, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
I lost you between "policies do not specify everything, that is what guidelines and common sense are for" and "to say that a guideline determines punctuation of an article title is not possible ... Which is anyone going to follow, the policy or the guideline? The policy every time." Distinction without a difference? Art LaPella (talk) 03:40, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
The only word between those two quotes is "but", an unusual place to get lost. I am having a hard time figuring out what is being asked. The only question at hand is, should the above sentence be removed? Arguments for or against need to be couched not on the clarity or lack thereof of my summary of the issue, but on the merits of the sentence being in the MOS. Apteva (talk) 03:57, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
I meant that what comes before "but" seems to contradict what comes after "but". If you recognize that policies do not specify everything, then why isn't title punctuation an example of something a policy wasn't intended to specify? Art LaPella (talk) 05:24, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
The point is that the MOS does not over ride the policy. If someone finds a policy reason for using punctuation in a certain manner, that is what will be used regardless of what the MOS says, but I have not found any examples of that being the case, hence clearly no reason for the sentence even being in the MOS. I think it is there because someone wants a ridiculous justification for the ridiculous conclusion that Mexican-American War should be spelled with an endash, even though no one does. It is nothing more than trying to make a WP:POINT, and a waste of all of our time. Apteva (talk) 06:47, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
The bureaucratic answer is, in your own words, "policies do not specify everything". For example, if you read MOS:ITALICS (admittedly a guideline, but the same IAR logic applies) you might think Kyrie should be in quotes as a song, but WP:MUSIC says it's "generic" (at least the words aren't; the only words you can sing to Kyrie are "Kyrie ..." or a translation). OK, so only the music guideline covers that detail.
The practical answer is that laughing off the Mexican–American War debate, one of the biggest debates we have ever had, is completely inconsistent with complaining about wasting time. Art LaPella (talk) 18:49, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
The fact that WP:TITLE is a policy and WP:MOS a guideline shouldn't be given too much weight, as it's a bit of historical anomaly. Not much of what is in WP:TITLE can really be called policy, as it's most full of guidelines. Nevertheless, if there's a conflict between them, point it out and let's talk about it. Dicklyon (talk) 04:16, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
I find the words guideline and policy to be carefully chosen and uniformly applied - and not just an accident. A great deal of discussion goes into which items should be a policy and which should be a guideline. Apteva (talk) 06:47, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
They are more carefully chosen now than they used to be. Early on there were few debates (as most did not consider it an important distinction) for example WP:V was turned from a guideline into a policy with this edit (I suspect with no debate on the appropriate talk page) back in April 2005. Likewise what is now Article Title received its banner in 2005 with this edit but it had been in the "Category:Wikipedia official policy" since 2004 after being "One of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines" before that. Of course since then there have been intermittent debates on whether the central MOS page and AT should be a policies or guidelines and each time the status quo has been kept. To understand the reason for the sentence you have picked out you will have to read the talk page archives, and who was in favour of what. Personally as I have stated before (in April this year) that I am in favour of removing this sentence for similar reasons to those you have given. -- PBS (talk) 16:48, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
This appears to be part of a campaign being carried out in multiple threads and multiple forums to reopen the n-dash wars that were settled in 2011. For example, see here [8] --Neotarf (talk) 20:02, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
I stayed away from the hypen/en dash thing, but given that it's being discussed here, I also find the en dash usage odd-looking. It's often at odds with what I would write and with what I see written elsewhere. I have no examples to hand as I've not collected any. But I do wonder about the origin (the sources) of the rules we adopted. SlimVirgin(talk)23:04, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
It is not the rules that are being questioned, but some of the examples used that do not follow those rules. The correct use of a hyphen, endash, and emdash is relatively subtle, but I think what we have is mostly correct - other than in at least three of the examples, and in at a minimum dozens of articles that were moved in 2011 to follow the "Mexican-American War" misspelling by using an endash. According to "New Hart's Rules", style guides only address issues where more than one style is perfectly acceptable in writing, such as using "co-operate" or "cooperate", both of which are implied as valid, but the book also uses the word "bemade" to mean "be made".
"No appeal need be made to stylistic conventions or record kept of them where text is incorrect". That would apply to names, of which it only says that names use hyphens. I think that point has been missed by the advocates of "Mexican-American War" spelled instead with an endash.
On hyphens is says "If an author has consistently applied a scheme of hyphenation, an editor need not alter it, although a text littered with hyphens can look fussy and dated. Editors can find the dominant form of a particular compound in a suitable current dictionary such as the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors."
There are examples where either a hyphen or an endash could be used: "Note that in US style an en rule is used to connect a prefix and a compound (the post–World War I period)." Implying that others would use "the post-World War I period" (with a hyphen instead of an endash). Apteva (talk) 00:41, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Slim, the sources of the rules were discussed at great length in the deliberations of 2011. We even had tables of abbreviations (like CMOS for Chicago Manual of Style) to make it easier to compare and contrast the style guidance of dozens of different guides. Feel free to look into it, so you won't have to just wonder about it. As for "odd-looking", I'm not sure what you mean. To me, it's odd to the see the tight binding of a hyphen where the relationship of parallel items is what is intended. Many people never learned about the typography to signal that, since it wasn't in the realm of the typewriter, or of Microsoft Word, to get that right. Mac users had a better chance, since Steve was inspired by typography and had both en dash and em dash on the keyboard from day one, but many people still didn't learn it, since having it available was not enough. People who make docs with TeX and LaTeX are more likely to have learned about en dash, since you have to get past it (--) to make an em dash (---). Dicklyon (talk) 20:46, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for the explanation. I avoided that whole discussion and I'm afraid I still don't understand it. Could you explain briefly why Mexican-American War is wrong? It seems correct to me, and using an en dash doesn't. It would matter less in the text, but bolded in the title does look odd (odd as in devoid of meaning, unusual, perhaps just unnecessary or perhaps an error). SlimVirgin(talk)20:59, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
There's several aspects to this debate of course, starting with the broader issue of whether WP should employ a hyphen/en-dash distinction at all when it comes to compounds and prefixes. Many, possibly even most if you exclude book publishing, online and print publishers don't bother and simply rely on the hyphen for the whole range of such links (and it's not simply because they are "wrong" or not sufficiently sophisticated). I still don't understand why a general-use website like WP, where the editing system makes it difficult to add en-dashes anyway, decided to make the switch at some point to start bothering about it. It makes editing more complicated and leads to endless disputes on the secondary issue, as here, on how to apply the distinction in specific cases, such as the ones under debate now. We have incredibly complicated and detailed rules, formulated after months of haggling, and we still don't have any clarity – in the Mexican-American/Mexican–American war case, we have people citing real-world examples/practice and title policy and/or their interpretation of the rules here to back up each alternative, with equally valid arguments; when at the end of the day the average reader doesn't give a toss, were they even to notice the difference. N-HHtalk/edits22:43, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Slim, it's not that the hyphen is "wrong", but that we have adopted the style of recognizing the type of distinction that the en dash versus hyphen signals. That the distinction is meaningful can be illustrated with this particular example, though. The hyphen is used when a compound noun is used as an adjective. When the the compound noun Mexican American is used as an adjective, as in a Mexican-American neighborhood, or Category:Mexican-American culture, or Mexican-American Studies, the hyphen is used to signal that those are about Mexican Americans. If we had a war against or involving primarily Mexican Americans, we'd probably call it the Mexican-American War. To signal a different interpretation, a relation between parallels, in this case a "versus" or "against" relationship, we use the en dash in Mexican–American War. As N-HH points out, many authors and editors and styles don't bother to try to send such signals to their readers, and many readers don't notice. But for those who notice, and sometimes even for those who don't, the looser coupling of the longer dash helps to get the right message across. That's why so many many guides recommend the en dash for such roles. The fact that styles and guides vary meant that we had to work to hammer out the right compromise for WP. Dicklyon (talk) 05:32, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
I agree. The hyphen used in an adjective or noun subordinates the first item to the second. So an X living in country Y would be X-Y while a Y living in country X would be Y-X. The second part of the hyphen is the main part, and the first the qualifier. But this convention means we can't link two nouns in an "equal" fashion, as is required for a construct such as the "Mexican–American war." That is where the en-dash comes in. Apteva is not disagreeing with this; Apteva's claim is that in a proper noun: Mexican-American War, which is what a title is, the convention is to use a hyphen and not an en-dash, against the convention when the phrase is not a proper noun. I would like to see some sources cited for the claim. Churn and change (talk) 05:48, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
I can provide a small list of names that are similar to this. My source is 1) do they appear in a dictionary 2) how do they appear in books and 3) how do they appear in other sources. I really do not think that I am at all out of line in thinking that the vast majority of editors have been applying the same convention. Use a hyphen in a proper name. Use endash otherwise using the endash rules. Apteva (talk) 06:34, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Hi, that wasn't a rhetorical question objecting to your suggestion; it was a real question. I went and checked. Online, the en-dash is, in general, absent in both content and titles. That is not surprising because most keyboards don't have one. The Chicago manual does not provide an explicit exemption for titles (proper nouns) for its en-dash rule. However that doesn't mean it requires en-dashes in proper noun titles. It does require the use of en-dash in constructs such as the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but that is mentioned as an exception. It requires a hyphen, not an en-dash, for abbreviation compounds such as U.S.-Canadian relations (The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. 2003. 6.85 and 6.86 pp. 262–263). The APA manual mentions it in passing for equal-weight compound adjectives, but that is it. The MLA doesn't mention the en-dash at all, using just the dash (two hyphens, often an em-dash) and the hyphen. I would say we leave the current guideline wherever it is at now, assuming there is a guideline. Churn and change (talk) 21:05, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Following on from that, why won't we allow article titles to use a hyphen in titles like Mexican-American war? Most keyboards don't have an en dash, most publishers and style guides don't recommend one for that usage, so why did Wikipedia get locked into using one to signal a distinction of no consequence? SlimVirgin(talk)21:14, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
Well, I would say it is unclear what style guides recommend. Note that manuscripts (the focus of APA and MLA) and books (the focus of Chicago House) don't have "article titles"; they have book titles, chapter headings and so on. As to your specific questions, I don't know the history of why the WP:MOS guideline says all sections and their headings should follow same punctuation rules; I notice somebody has proposed taking that out. WP:AT#Special characters, the policy, allows it and requires a redirect from keyboard-friendly titles. I would say the rules for Article Titles should be in WP:AT, the policy, since administrators effectively decide it by ruling on contested moves (NACs are disallowed there), and, in general, administrators do not enforce guidelines. I would also say article titles should contain only characters people can type, because otherwise they will mostly come in via redirects. However, I suspect this has been discussed to death before. Churn and change (talk) 22:44, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
@Apteva: You are mistaken. See WP:POLICY (and its section WP:GUIDES) and WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY. The only difference between WP:AT as a policy and its earlier WP:NC version as a guideline is that now one should have a stronger reason for citing WP:IAR and ignoring it when necessary, because the editorship at large takes it more seriously now. That doesn't mean that a small group of tendentious editors can form a "local consensus" at WP:AT to magically sweep away a much larger and longer-lasting community-wide consensus at MOS (despite the fact that you personally are trying to pull of exactly this as we speak, pushing for recognizing of birds as some kind of exception to capitalization rules). WP:AT and all its NC subpages derive their style advice from MOS and its subpages, and always have. Otherwise we'd have sheer chaos, with article titles radically differing from usage within the article text. Do not mistake WP policies for wikilaws with wikicops and wikijudges running around enforcing them against "mere" guidelines. WP doesn't work that way. There are some policies, including WP:BLP, WP:COPYRIGHT and WP:OFFICE that do have the force of real-world law behind parts of them, but they are special cases, not general ones. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.12:28, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Digressions from the topic
Discussion of hyphen examples
[After Apteva's refactoring; my next post here responds to one by Churn and change, above.–NoeticaTea?08:05, 12 October 2012 (UTC)]
Good, Churn. As an avid collector and analyst of style guides, I would be most surprised if a source could be found for Apteva's odd claim. The editor appears to be working from something in WP:ENDASH that is pretty well unrelated:
By default, follow the dominant convention that a hyphen is used in compounded proper names of single entities, not an en dash.
Guinea-Bissau; Bissau is the capital, and this distinguishes the country from neighboring Guinea
McGraw-Hill, a publishing house
That provision started off restricted to place names, like Guinea-Bissau and Alsace-Lorraine. Those cases are clear enough, and each has a hyphen for its own distinct reason; but many place names whose components refer to entities that are more easily separable are treated more variably. "Poland~Lithuania" for example has been a difficult case, resolved on Wikipedia with the disambiguation page Poland-Lithuania (and a redirect from Poland–Lithuania). That fits with the provision in MOS.
Later, A di M generalised this provision to cover cases like McGraw-Hill, because like the geographical examples it is utterly fixed in usage with a hyphen. That is what I call a "fossilised proper name". It is never analysed in terms of separate entities "McGraw" and "Hill".
The qualifier "by default" is crucial. It stands prominently at the start of this provision, which has nothing to do with those proper names having the quite different structure "X~Y Z", where "X~Y" is understood in the way Dicklyon and Churn explain above. This is all perfectly standard, and in accord with the style resources that extensive discussion in 2011 determined would be followed on Wikipedia. But I am reluctant to enter into debate about any of that while Apteva wages several connected campaigns at several scattered locations. He or she is initiating RM discussions and the like for pointy "political" purposes, in a most disruptive way. When all that has settled down, it will be possible to consider any problems with WP:ENDASH calmly and reasonably here. But let's bear in mind that most of it has been thoroughly talked through last year anyway. ♫♪
I have not checked all of the examples in endash, but I do know of at least three that are incorrect and need to be removed or repaired. Comet Hale-Bopp is either not capitalized or spelled with a hyphen. Uganda-Tanzania War is either spelled with a hyphen or an endash and war is not capitalized. Roman-Syrian War is definitely spelled with a hyphen. There are also some cases where it should be more clear that either a hyphen or an endash can be used, but consistency within an article for that word combination should be used - post-World War I can either use a hyphen or an endash. The whole focus on the MOS should be in helping editors, not forcing them to change everything. The vast majority of our editors and readers neither know nor care what a hyphen or endash is, and could not care less if the mark on the screen is a few micrometers longer or shorter. New Hart's Rules says that consistency locally is more important than consistency globally "It is, of course, vital to make sure that individual forms are used consistently within a single text or range of texts. If an author has consistently applied a scheme of hyphenation, an editor need not alter it, although a text littered with hyphens can look fussy and dated. Editors can find the dominant form of a particular compound in a suitable current dictionary such as the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors." (emphasis added) Apteva (talk) 06:56, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
The fact that you're forcing a choice between capitalization and the dash shows you haven't quite got the concept. The dash shows a union of two distinct entities, as for example in a war. Capitalization is irrelevant. In fact, when combining people's names, there is a strong tendency to go with the dash, even in sources which otherwise don't bother with it much, to distinguish cases of a single person with a hyphenated name. So, one entity: hyphen, two entities: dash, and being a proper name is not a factor. — kwami (talk) 07:15, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Trust me, I understand that part. I also understand why 10,000 books use a hyphen for Mexican-American War - because the style guide says to use a hyphen in Mexican-American War. But it is not an "odd claim" that names such as Mexican-American War use a hyphen. It is an "odd claim" that they do not use a hyphen, and the examples in print of an endash are few and very far between, and not anything that can be taken seriously as representing common use. What I am saying is the research is good, but if the conclusion makes no sense it is time to try to figure out what went wrong, and I think it comes down to only one sentence. Names use hyphens. Apply that and you end up with 10,000 books that spell Mexican-American War with a hyphen, 10,000 bird name articles with a hyphen, and who knows how many airports, wars, and towns in Wikipedia with a hyphen. Apteva (talk) 07:28, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
There is no such rule, AFAIK. Many sources simply don't bother with dashes. (Probably the majority of sources use hyphens for date and page ranges as well.) But for those which do, being a name is irrelevant. It would also be a problem with the many mathematical and scientific theorems/theories, where people are more careful to use the dash. — kwami (talk) 07:38, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
It is very true that many sources only use hyphens, but in books it is far more common to see endashes and emdashes used instead of hyphens, but hyphens for every name within that book, even though it liberally uses endashes and emdashes in the same way that our MOS uses them. Their style guide says the same thing ours does - names use hyphens. They just follow that advice. Apteva (talk) 07:54, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Hyphenation also occurs in bird names such as Great Black-backed Gull, and in proper names such as Trois-Rivières and Wilkes-Barre.
New Hart's Rules:
Use a hyphen in newly coined or rare combinations with -like, and with names, but more established forms, particularly if short, are set solid: tortoise-like, Paris-like, ladylike, catlike, deathless, husbandless
Apteva, I'm not at all an enthusiast for the current MOS guidance on hyphens versus dashes. (I waste far too much of my time "correcting" entries at List of botanists by author abbreviation; new editors to this page almost never notice the two uses of en-dash as opposed to hyphen in each entry.) But you aren't properly addressing the MOS; the issue isn't names per se but distinctness of entities.
Kwami has expressed the underlying principle very succinctly: "one entity: hyphen, two entities: dash, and being a proper name is not a factor". Your examples above show nothing about names. "Black-backed" as an compound adjective has a hyphen regardless of whether it is part of the name of a species of bird. "Trois-Rivières" is a combination of a number and a noun; it's analogous to "one-woman" in "he's a one-woman man", which would only ever be hyphenated. The fact that it's a name is irrelevant.
The real problem is different: when does a compound which began life by referring to two entities become a reference to a single entity? "McGraw-Hill" obviously once referred to "McGraw" and "Hill", but as these now don't have independent resonance it is argued that the compound refers to a single entity and so should be hyphenated. "French–British rivalry" refers to rivalry between the French and the British, i.e. to two distinct entities, and so should have an en-dash according to the MOS. "Mexican–American wars" referring to more than one such war between Mexicans and Americans again obviously refers to two distinct entities and should have an en-dash. But, from what I see as your perspective (perhaps wrongly), it could be argued that if the noun phrase "Mexican~American war" refers to one single war (whether or not "war" is capitalized) then a single entity is meant and a hyphen should be used. (To be clear I don't see this as a valid argument but it does test the principle.)
As another problematic example for the principle, consider double-barrelled names. If such a name is of "long standing" then it is hyphenated as it refers to a single person. But if two people with surnames "Smith" and "Jones" get married and decide to call themselves "Smith~Jones", should this novel combination, which still clearly refers to two entities, have a hyphen or an en-dash? Convention rather than the principle rules here, I guess. (But then why rule out convention(s) in other cases?)
In summary, the principle "one entity: hyphen; two entities: dash" is a semantic test and is not easy to apply in practice. If it is to continue to form the basis of MOS guidance it needs some further clarification, if this is possible. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:35, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Yes, the 'name' thing misses the point entirely. Apteva, your MOS and Hart's examples have nothing to do with dashes.
As Peter said, there is a point where a dash becomes a hyphen. Austria~Hungary is a case in point: you could even see that as a political statement, with a dash indicating a union of two constituent states, and a hyphen indicating a single state named after two ancestral states. And indeed the perception of the degree of unification may have changed over time. You get essentially the same thing with people's names: a dash in a theorem named after two people, because it's a union of their work, but a hyphen for a child named after two parents, because even though a child is a product of that union, no-one presents them as half mom, half dad. The publishing house would originally have been McGraw–Hill, but we're now long past the point where both McGraw and Hill are dead, and no-one remembers who they were, so now it's simply a company with a double-barreled name, like the child. The Mexican-American War, with a hyphen, would be a war of Mexican Americans, just as the Russian-American Company was a company for Russian America. There will be cases which are indeterminate, just as there are when a city or country changes its name and we debate which name is better for the title, but such cases are relatively rare. — kwami (talk) 12:30, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Right. There will always be indeterminate cases, as with many other deployments of the limited resources of punctuation against the far more rich and subtle semantic nuances in the language itself. Just like the limited resources of an alphabet, pitted against the subtly varying sounds of any natural language. Problem cases do not count as refutations of anything, in these domains; solutions are expected to be optimal, not perfect. Kwami has given a good account of the McGraw-Hill-type cases. Now, another way to think about double-barrelled surnames: just as a parent-teacher has a hyphen, because the same person is both parent and teacher, so in a way Mary Smith-Jones is both a Smith and a Jones! She might equally have been called a Smith after one parent, or a Jones after the other. She is called both, like the parent-teacher. It all makes a good sort of sense; that is why the guidelines in MOS are in good accord with best practice, as captured in many other major style resources. [Posted from an iPad; apologies for any typos.] NoeticaTea?12:54, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
The problem with Peter's and Kwami's theory is that McGraw-Hill has always been written with a hyphen, see google books from 1880 to 1917, a period where both founders were still alive.
For "American-Mexican War", as Peter pointed out, some people take Mexican-American as a compound adjective for "War", with the same role as "Spanish" in "Spanish Civil War". --Enric Naval (talk) 13:41, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
From the summary above, or below, it is possible that some editors, in the extreme minority, prefer to use an endash in Mexican American War, and no editors prefer to use an endash in Julia Louis-Dreyfus and in Wilkes-Barre. There is a small, but statistically significant difference between 97% and 100% - but certainly not enough to say that all editors follow the preference of what 2.8% follow. Some books both randomly capitalize words in American Mexican War and randomly even in the same paragraph use endash and hyphen. That is not a style that WP should emulate. Apteva (talk) 16:21, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
But no. That account of McGraw-Hill doesn't have to be taken literally. It gives a schematic way of thinking about the name for such an entity. People need to understand: the theoretical foundations of punctuation are underdeveloped. The linguistic literature on it is extremely sparse, for example. Nunberg did famous pioneering work a couple of decades ago, and it's been rather stagnant since then. Again, don't expect perfection: and don't be so dogmatic! It is not computer programming: these are "naturally" developing sets of conventions, sometimes in competition, all aiming at effective communication of what needs highlighting in written language beyond what mere letters can achieve. Wikipedia has chosen a high-quality, best-practice set from the competing alternatives. Any change would affect 4,000,000 articles, and is not to be entertained lightly. Or approached with the certainty that is born of ignorance. NoeticaTea?14:08, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
When opposing the hyphens in airport names, the account of McGraw-Hill was a posited as an example of how compounded proper names started having a dash and eventually changed into having a hyphen. If McGraw-Hill was never written with a dash, then the whole point of the account becomes moot, independently of whether it's literal or not. --Enric Naval (talk) 15:49, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
I think Noetica raises a valid point that comes up in many of these MOS-related debates that have been going on for years. There are some cases where there is no consistency across the English language. In some cases, it's an WP:ENGVAR issue, and as such our convention is to keep British subjects in British English, Australian subjects in Australian English, etc. Other times, however, the inconsistency isn't dialect-dependent. It's just that there is no universal, accepted standard across all sources (I'm also thinking of the currently running dispute of The Beatles vs. the Beatles which is occupying such a large proportion of the Wikipedia servers now). In cases like this, where there is clearly no agreement between reliable sources, or widespread agreement on usage, the more important issue is consistency across the project. We need to establish a set of common-sense and easy to follow rules which is supported by enough well-respected style guides to be supportable, but we're never going to be able to reach a universal agreement with all reliable sources because they don't agree with each other. So since it doesn't matter which convention we pick, but we do need to pick one and make it the site-wide standard. And then just be done with it, and not keep revisiting it every six months because someone comes along and decides that just because they're personal favorite style guide disagrees with our usage, it's got to be overhauled yet again. Perfect agreement is impossible, so we should stop looking for it. Set a rule, stick to it, and be done with it. --Jayron3214:17, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
But a lot of the discussion here is not so much about what rules to have or whether to change them in any substantive sense (although that broader debate does exist, all the way to whether to have the hyphen/en-dash distinction at all; my preference FWIW), but how to apply the rules we do have to specific cases and groups of cases, such as airport names, Mexican-American War etc. The point is that even with these complex rules, we very definitely do not have best practice, clarity or a rule that we can stick with - because people have different views of what the rule means, as the above thread and countless past arguments demonstrate. N-HHtalk/edits14:29, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
N-HH, I'm unsure of some of your meanings. Andreas, I agree with much of what you say, particularly the point that style typically varies in sources, no matter how much the most authoritative style guides on both sides of the Atlantic might huff and puff about various issues. Often, experts and those used to seeing a stylistic usage every day (e.g. ignore hyphen as unnecessary) forget that their text needs to be easily read by semi- and non-experts too—people who don't see these items every day. WP writes for a broader range of readers than just experts. Every reputable publisher, including en.WP, has its house rules, and I must say that there's sometimes tension in those publishers between stylistic disharmony within the expert fields to which they contribute publications, and from one chapter/article to another within their portfolio. It's not an easy task, sometimes. So WP faces calls to be inconsistent in its use of the dash to link parallel items (mandated by many authorities), because the sources are inconsistent, either between (or within) themselves, or against the major styleguides. My feeling is that we've reached a good compromise in many cases, and that Mexican–American is the right call here, given the large body of examples we have of analogous items with a dash. Tony(talk) 14:50, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
I agree that the correct punctuation of Mexican–American wars to refer to multiple wars between the US and Mexico is correct with an endash, and that French–British rivalry is correct with an endash. I also agree that probably 99% of the people with an Apple computer with all three hyphens or dashes on the keyboard have never had a clue what the other two were for. I can certainly remember experimenting with them to see what they looked like and trying to pick the one that looked right. The MOS is not a top down organization where you put into the MOS that every third letter has to be red and all of a sudden 4 million articles are affected. It is bottom up. People write articles and a MOS is written so that new articles look sort of like the ones that already exist. In cases where something new comes along, like an endash that as late as 2007 was banned from FA titles, and was only used in 1% of the cases where it should have been used, I found it annoying to have a copy editor who clearly knew nothing about the subject come along and change a hyphen to an endash - even though the change was correct, such as Bose–Einstein statistics. The advice from New Hart's Rules would be that if an article or group of articles are consistently spelling Bose-Einstein statistics with a hyphen, leave it, as local consistency is more important than global consistency. I have no objection, though, as we are running out of articles to add and running out of content to add (or are we?) to go back and spend time bringing the 1% that use an endash up to 80%, but what I object to is spilling over into articles like Mexican-American War that use a hyphen, and what I object to is even discussing whether it should have an endash. Of course it uses a hyphen. There are though, actual situations where two words and two punctuations are equally valid and that also applies to hyphens and endashes, and I would recommend treating those as British English and American English (it is Brit speak to use a hyphen in post-World War I and Am speak to use an endash). The status right now is that of the spillage into names like "Spanish-American War", relatively few have been tainted with an endash, so the collateral is relatively small, but needs to be corrected. As to where we are on the 1% to 80% spectrum of text that really should use an endash, I have no guess - it could be 2%, it could be 79%. I doubt it is 99%. We had an editor embark recently on changing emdash to nbsp space emdash space, for example. But no, changes to the MOS do not make changes to 4,000,000 articles. It is the other way around - changes to 4,000,000 articles bring changes to the MOS, so that the 4,000,001st article looks like the rest. And yes, avoiding titles with an endash is preferable. Is it really going to kill anyone to use California (1840-1847) in the title and California (1840–1847) in the text? It certainly avoids a lot of redirects, and do three pixels really make that much difference? Apteva (talk) 18:28, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Break 1 (Article titles)
I looked for MoS compliance on dashes by clicking "Random article", and searching for dashes or hyphens that should be dashes according to MoS. This almost always means ranges (pp. 56–58 or date ranges) or list punctuation, the most common places for dashes or hyphens that should be dashes. Out of 20 such articles, 11 used dashes, 6 used hyphens, and 3 used both. As for whether we should use dashes, I tend to sympathize with Hyphen Luddites but the last time we had an RfC, nobody like that showed up at all, so it's hard to claim a silent consensus. And if you want to avoid redirects for better performance, you need to argue with these people and these people first. Art LaPella (talk) 19:57, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
However, when I first encountered the dash rules, compliance was non-existent. Art LaPella (talk) 20:02, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
But counting like that tells only part of the story. 3 of the 20 did not apply a consistent style, so they are beyond the pale entirely. Of the 17 that did apply a consistent style, 11 complied with the MOS guideline. That's roughly 65%; roughly two out of every three, in that small sample. NoeticaTea?23:04, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Noetica, I don't think you can simply discount the inconsistent cases. Counting editors is more relevant in my view than counting articles, and the 3 articles with inconsistent styles may have had them because different editors consistently applied their usual practice without noticing the inconsistency within the article and/or without being aware of what the MOS says. As I've noted above, my experience at the List of botanists by author abbreviation pages is that a significant proportion of new editors to these pages don't use en-dashes correctly (I've never tried to estimate the exact proportion). Fortunately in this case the guidance is easy to explain to them: always use spaced en-dashes, not spaced hyphens; always use en-dash in the year range. The problem with hyphens versus en-dashes within compound words is that it's not easy to explain what the MOS says. I believe I understand it but I'm not confident that I can explain it simply, and the discussions here reinforce my view (no names, but some of those contributing here clearly hadn't understood what the MOS was trying to convey).
I can only repeat my view that if this part of the MOS cannot be made clearer, then it does not meet your description of it above as "high quality": the quality of a manual of style does not consist only in the content of rules it recommends but also in whether reasonable writers are able to apply those rules. With regard to en-dashes within words I remain doubtful that this is the case. "Too long; didn't read" applies here: if a principle requires a long explanation it's not suitable for a collaborative enterprise like Wikipedia. Peter coxhead (talk) 01:20, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
Should the sentence including article titles in the scope of MOS be deleted?
Back to the main question, are there any objections to deleting the sentence "The Manual of Style applies to all parts of an article, including the title. See especially punctuation, below. (The policy page Wikipedia:Article titles does not determine punctuation.)"? If not, it will be deleted. Apteva (talk) 05:54, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
That is not the issue, but in fact there are reasons for title style to deviate from the text, for example for technical reasons an underscore can not appear in the title but can appear in the text. Chinese characters can not appear in the title but can appear in the text. It is also probably better to use a hyphen in the title even though endash would be used in the text. The basic folly though is guidelines never tell policies what to do. Policies tell guidelines what to do, and both policies and guidelines must be consistent with each other, so the sentence is both unnecessary and absurd. Apteva (talk) 03:02, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Absolutely. I object most strongly. When you settle down to discuss one question at a time in an orderly way, and only at the appropriate location (which is indeed here, for the present question), I will give my reasons. ♫♪ NoeticaTea?06:32, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
The way to fix that, though is not to try to make a guideline tell a policy what to do (which is highly questionable), but to fix the examples here so that they are in compliance with policy. While our guideline here can be toned down to avoid must should and not do quite as much, it basically has sound advice - but needs to be consistent with policy, not the other way around. Apteva (talk) 15:02, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Talk pages
It was mentioned above that a lot of discussion on this talk page is about how to apply the MOS. That is like going to an article and discussing the subject of the article instead of the content of an article. For example, it is not appropriate to go to the talk page of Abortion to discuss whether abortion should be legal, but it is appropriate to go there to discuss whether the article should say that in some places they are legal, and the article should say that is legalized murder, or that is not legalized murder (both are oxymorons by the way, and neither are appropriate). Ideally the place for all discussions on the application of the MOS would be on the article talk page that is being discussed or at the help desk, and not here for the same reason. And if it turns out that the MOS is FUBAR, bring it up here. Apteva (talk) 20:25, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
If you want to discuss whether abortion should be legal, you go to a blog, not Wikipedia. Assuming you don't want MoS applications to be driven off Wikipedia completely, I don't think that analogy works at all. So where should we discuss whether a specific article conforms to MoS? If everybody agrees what MoS is saying on some specific issue, then I suppose the article talk page is appropriate. If not, then I suppose we come here to discuss what it really means – especially if the same issue applies to multiple articles. I hope we don't need another rule on the subject; we have way too many rules as it is. Art LaPella (talk) 22:26, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
Discussion takes place on the talk page of the page to be changed. If the meaning of the MOS is unclear, that is not a discussion of how to apply it but a discussion on how to change the MOS. When an issue applies to multiple articles there is normally a wikiproject where the correct interpretation can be discussed. But questions about whether to use an endash or a hyphen within an article do not belong here, they belong at that article or at the help desk. Questions on whether endash should be used in titles belong at the talk page for Wikipedia:Article titles, which says nothing about endash, or at the article talk page. Questions about whether Mexican-American War is spelled with an endash or a hyphen belong at Talk:Mexican-American War, not here. Questions about whether the MOS is correct do belong here. Talk page guidelines are at Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines. If too many people are asking style questions here the banner at the top of that pages talk page can be added here - {{metatalk}}Apteva (talk) 04:53, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
If discussion takes place on the talk page of the page to be changed, then removing dashes from titles changes the MoS, which rightly or wrongly claims to regulate title punctuation. According to the Arbitration Committee, questions about dashes including the Mexican–American War were settled here. The talk page guidelines say to avoid off-topic posts; is that your point? If so, it's circular reasoning to assume it doesn't belong at the MoS to prove it doesn't belong at the MoS. The actual Mexican–American War debate took place on several pages, with no attempt to exclude anyone who was interested. That sounds better than having some nobility class decide who gets to discuss something. Editors often agree to centralize a discussion, but only when everyone has been notified if they are likely to be interested. Art LaPella (talk) 07:53, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
Questions about how to use the MoS are relatively rare and almost always resolved quickly. They don't get in the way. If it isn't broken, why fix it? 1. Where would these users go if not here? 2. It's kind of nice for all the people who work on the MoS to see proof that people care about using it correctly. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:05, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Where would they go? To the help desk, like for any other how to question. Here is what I propose:
change
Any issues relating to style guidance can be discussed on the MoS talk page.
to
Any issues relating to style guidance can be discussed at the Wikipedia:Help desk.
(talk pages are for discussing changes, not the subject, and help desk editors especially need to be able to correctly answer MOS questions) Apteva (talk) 15:04, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
What for? Everyone uses the MOS and every experienced editor should be able to answer most questions. Did every physics teacher call up Einstein every time a student asked a question? Apteva (talk) 02:15, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Most questions (posted 02:15, 16 October) or Any issues (posted 15:04, 15 October)? They certainly can't authoritatively answer questions when even we can't agree on them. Judging by how little MoS regulars know about their own document, help desk editors surely know even less. Art LaPella (talk) 04:37, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
The MOS currently says "Any issues relating to style guidance can be discussed on the MoS talk page." All I changed was where they should ask them. I did not change any to most. Not all questions have answers, but is still okay to ask them. The point that if "we" can not agree on the answer indicates that we are not the best ones to ask. Apteva (talk) 03:05, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
"most" comes from this quote and "any" comes from this quote. Most MoS outsiders don't debate style, but when they do, they're usually more impervious to any kind of evidence or consensus, not less, and obviously they are less aware of MoS text. Art LaPella (talk) 04:12, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
Abuse of hidden template
Lately I've seen several examples of articles including large amounts of non-encyclopedic cruft by including it inside hidden sections (using either the {{Hidden}} or {{Hidden begin}}/{{Hidden end}} templates). For example, the Gangnam Style article recently included 3 hidden sections: A list of celebrity tweets related to the song, a list of quotations from various media, and a regular section of article prose about the spread of the song outside Korea. This brings up 2 questions:
Should regular sections of article prose ever be hidden by default?
Can editors ignore WP:NOT by hiding lists of trivia rather than deleting them or integrating them into the article prose?
The reason for this is we look like a fool if we want articles to maintain a consistent style and we do not even maintain consistency in the MOS. If there are inconsistencies I recommend fixing them like yesterday, but certainly not pretending that one page is more correct than another. Are there any inconsistencies that anyone knows of? There are 71 pages in the MOS. Apteva (talk) 05:08, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
It would be best to actually find and fix discrepancies on a case-by-case basis, rather than make a blanket statement like this. --Jayron3205:21, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
The sentence puts the editors of subpages on notice that they should not incorporate guidance that conflicts with the MOS, and gives editors license to remove any such conflicting guidance from the subpages. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:53, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Oppose. I added the sentence about page precedence at 04:45, 21 July 2012. It does not make us look like fools, but it simply acknowledges that there may be inconsistencies, and it provides guidance to editors who find them. Resolving them might involve long, convoluted discussions, but in the meantime editors can apply what has precedence.
The problem though, is that editors are going to use common sense, not what the sentence says - anyone can change either page to say anything at all, and there is no greater likelihood that this page is the better of the two to use. Fixing discrepancies is what is needed, not advice on which to use. If it said "if you find a discrepancy correct it", that would be appropriate, and would not pretend to know which was correct. Possible wording could be, "There are many pages to the MOS, and conflicting or confusing information should be corrected or discussed on the relevant talk page." But that should be in a side note, not within the text. In looking through most of our policies, guidelines and essays, many are brilliantly written, at the level of professionalism of our best Featured Articles. This MOS would not even qualify as a GA in its present form, and frankly sets a poor example of what to do. Apteva (talk) 19:55, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Common sense is subjective. Saying that editors will ignore a meta-guideline (and therefore discarding the meta-guideline) is like saying that people will ignore advice to avoid exceeding the speed limit, avoid abusing drugs, or avoid participating in extramarital sexual intercourse (and therefore wasting appropriate opportunities to give such advice). Even if a guideline on a page with precedence needs to be revised later, there is value in having order instead of a free-for-all.
Please see Terms of Use: 17. Other Terms, paragraph 6 of 7: "These Terms of Use were written in English (U.S.). While we hope that translations of these Terms of Use are accurate, in the event of any differences in meaning between the original English version and a translation, the original English version takes precedence." For many examples of similar wording, you can search on the Internet for english version takes precedence and english version prevail.
Not a good example. Any document that is translated is liable to be horribly translated, and in the case of discrepancies it is obvious to refer to the original. Had the original been in Russian it would have said that in case of discrepancies the Russian version takes precedence. In the case of the MOS, I have no idea if or where any discrepancies occur or how they got there, but it is clearly equally possible that WP:MOS is the one with the error, for example if it said, just as an example, to spell Mexican-American War or Comet Hale-Bopp with an endash, and if a subpage said to spell it with a hyphen, clearly the subpage is correct and should be followed, not WP:MOS. Apteva (talk) 01:20, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
As to the comet and the war. If the MOS specialists here decided to use a hyphen, no one at any time would question that decision. Recommend an endash, and it both will and has been questioned. Until it is changed. Apteva (talk) 03:22, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
Oppose deletion. There are going to be some discrepancies no matter what, and this tells editors what to do about them. If anyone wants to organize a discrepancy-resolving task force, I'd be interested, though. Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:28, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Both in the article and on this talk page, needs to stop right now. I've done half the job for you by protecting the page for a few days. Please reference the Arbitration Committee notice at the top of this page for information on what happens if this recurs after the protection expires or there are continued inappropriate edits or edit warring on this talk page. Please do not bother to post any long replies here justifying your actions, any of you. Just don't edit war, ever, anywhere. It's a pretty much a hard and fast rule and liberally handing out blocks to everyone involved is another option that could already have justifiably been taken. Beeblebrox (talk) 03:48, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
"An WP:EW war occurs when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other's contributions, rather than trying to resolve the disagreement by discussion." Beeblebrox, that is not what has been happening here. There has been copious discussion. An RfC ran for over a month and was legitimately closed. The closure was reverted within a few minutes by Noetica. An ANI thread ran for two days, at the end of which RegentsPark made a change to the talk page, with the consensus of ANI. That change was reverted within minutes, by Noetica. What you have done is freeze the process in favour of Noetica's position. A result he is determined to have, by hook or by crook. Please reconsider your decision. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 10:44, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
You confuse issues, whoever you are. And you distort the facts and the history, as you do at the ANI discussion – which you re-opened after it had been closed! Such impropriety ☺. Confine your assertions on that topic to one forum, please. The relevant one for this matter: ANI. Soon it will be ArbCom, I fear. I will not refute your assertions here. NoeticaTea?11:42, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Facts, not assertions. There is only one person edit-warring here, and that is you.
Nathan's closure of a month-long RfC: [9]. Your edit warring [10][11]
RegentsPark's restoration of Nathan's closure after a 2-day ani discussion : [12]. Your edit warring: 1 2 3
The 3RR rule applies to reverts that are made without discussion. The reverts were about the summary text. I've started a discussion about what the summary text should say under "Time to respect the admin's decision." The admin has changed the summary text. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:36, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
as usual, the wrong version has been protected...Just so we are clear, I have no position as to which version is right or wrong. The combination of the edits to the page itself and this page did constitute an edit war and the protection was applied solely to stop it, it is not an endorsement of any version of the page. Also, for the record, having consensus on your side does not shield you from responsibility for taking part in an edit war. The only exemption to WP:ER is the reversion of blatant vandalism, which is clearly not the case here. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:36, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
So how come RegentsPark, an admin who was a principal in the dispute, gets to choose to change to the other wrong version now? Dicklyon (talk) 05:57, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
Disruption versus personalization
Apteva has filed an arbitration enforcement action against me and against Neotarf, for our attempts to deal with his disruption on this page: here, in case anyone here cares. Dicklyon (talk) 07:48, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
The fact that sanctions are requested for violating the ARB sanction are not important. Each individual user has already been notified. Apteva (talk) 15:10, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
I have removed the tag that user Apteva placed at the top of this section. Notifications of actions and discussions that affect this page are entirely appropriate and appear here frequently. --Neotarf (talk) 20:32, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
There's only one closed section on the revision of the page you linked, and none of Apteva's edits seem to be to that section. Did you provide the wrong link? – NULL‹talk› ‹edits›00:37, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
I am pretty sure there is one section there that I inserted a blank line before the next section so that when it gets archived it will be easier to read. The normal procedure on sections is they end with a blank line, and after the == section heading they optionally have a blank line - but always have a blank line before the section heading. Apteva (talk) 02:32, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
I provided the correct link. Apteva modified the content of the sub-subsection "I'm going to add the text back into the article, per the RfC", which is a sub-subsection of the section "RfC: Internal consistency versus consistency across articles". That modification included the removal of one blank line and the insertion of a wikitable with items "Mexican=American War" [sic] and "Comet Hale-Bopp" [sic] and "comet Hale-Bopp" [sic]. As a sub-subsection of the closed section "RfC: Internal consistency versus consistency across articles", the sub-subsection "I'm going to add the text back into the article, per the RfC" was closed. [Apteva also modified the section "WP:Manual of Style (British Isles-related articles)" by removing 2 blank lines.] The entire edit summary is add, and no mention of any section or subsection or sub-subsection or sub-sub-subsection is visible, because Apteva revised the page as a whole. Here is a link to the version of 16:56, 17 October 2012.
You've misread the diff. The wikitable was added to the top-level section 12 "Hyphen examples", not the closed subsection you indicated. The only line in his diff that was within a closed section was removing a double-newline, a code change that has no effect on the display of the discussion whatsoever. In fact, some editing tools do this for you automatically. – NULL‹talk› ‹edits›21:49, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
You are right and I was wrong. I was misled by the fact that Apteva edited the page as a whole, and the difference page caused the sub-subheading "I'm going to add the text back into the article, per the RfC" to appear above and near the added wikitable, whereas actually it was and is far above it on the displayed page. This illustrates that a variety of revisions made simultaneously to a page as a whole and spread over different parts of the page can complicate the task of reviewing the page history, just as missing or uninformative edit summaries can complicate that task. I hope to review page histories more carefully in the future.
Agreed, small section-based edits make it easier to review. I had trouble getting drilled into my head to make many small commits instead of few large ones when I was doing team software development, but I certainly understand why it's preferred. The diff page could stand to have some small visual improvements to make it clearer too, it's easy to skim the line numbers without noticing a big jump. – NULL‹talk› ‹edits›00:02, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Maths styling and readability
I want to make a case for including, as a style guideline, that all math using symbols other then the basic arithmetic symbols, be 'transcripted' into ordinary language. I don't mean that the math be replaced by ordinary language descriptions, but that displayed math have accompanying text that reads as if the math were being spoken. The case is very simple:
1) There is a huge problem of innumeracy in the general public, even among very intelligent people.
2) Part of this problem has nothing to do with the difficulty of understanding relations of quantity and so forth, but a simple inability to *read* math. Often people's eyes glaze over at the appearance of math because they simply cannot associate any sounds or meanings to the symbols.
3) I realize that the meaning and often the pronunciation of various symbols is covered in specific entries about the symbols but...
a) This is not universally the case. There are symbols without specific entries, and those that have them require either the symbol itself or its name to be found.
b) Math symbols are often displayed as graphic images, thus the symbols cannot be individually selected, linked or searched unless one already knows the name of the symbol.
c) People are reluctant to search lists and read about symbols when they just want to grasp the basic concept the math is expressing. Instead, they go away thinking, "this is not for me..."
4) An alternate possible solution would be to include a list of every symbol used on a page with a link to the specific entry for each, perhaps in a sidebar. But this solution is inferior because:
a) Symbols often have context dependent readings. For example '—>' may read 'implies' or it may read 'goes to' or 'maps to' etc. Disambiguation has to occur in context.
b) Even in the same context different mathematicians will sometimes read expressions differently. There is no one canonically correct reading for many math expressions.
c) It requires people to leave the page and come back, perhaps without the information they sought.
d) It is a little like telling people, "learn the math before reading this". But in some cases that is exactly why they are here... trying to learn the math!
5) The problems of reading math expressions and understanding them are related but separate problems. In some cases one does need to "learn the math" before understanding, but there are numerous cases where simply being able to read the expression conveys sufficient information to result in a satisfactory understanding of the article, including the unfamiliar math.
6) For the same reason we don't encourage highly technical articles laced with specialist jargon. The function of an encyclopedia is to transfer specialized knowledge to a general audience. We don't allow foreign language quotations to go untranslated. We oughtn't allow math expressions to remain impenetrable.
I think that means that at Maxwell's equations#Equations (SI units), for example, becomes something like (this is surely wrong; I didn't bother to look anything up because the details don't matter) the dot product of the electric field with the infinitesimal change in the surface, integrated over an infinitesimal change in the volume, is equal to the electric charge of the volume divided by the electrical constant. If that is your idea, I think that is harder to understand than the equation. The article's preceding paragraphs explain the equations to some extent. The Simple English equivalent is harder to understand, not easier (perhaps because my editing over there is frustrated by the "science not babytalk" faction) because it "simplified" mainly by omitting the verbal explanation. So how would you write that? And do you really think editors would even read any further nagging about readability?Art LaPella (talk) 20:33, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
Yes! I think that's much more useful. Let me stress again that I am not advocating this as a replacement for the equation. I can at least look up "the dot product" and I know what an infinitesimal change is and what an electric field is (and could look them up if I didn't). I can't even look up a circle with two kind-of-extended "f"s (or perhaps "s"s) drawn vertically through it and two greek subscripts that I may or may not be able to name. Looking at the equation only, I don't even know that infinitesimals are involved. But perhaps you are trying too hard to deliver the meaning of the equation. That is labor the reader must undertake. I notice your code uses the term 'partial omega' for the subscript, and if I look up "dot product" the wiki page nowhere has the circle with two function signs drawn through it. So this must be "<something>subscript partial omega". What I am asking for is what you would say if you were reading the text aloud to a companion who's comprehension of the meaning of the math was not an issue. How do you read it to yourself? Do you just say to yourself, "oh, Maxwell's equation" and then substitute your understanding of the meaning without ever referring to the symbols themselves? The explanation of the meaning must be something else again, and stand apart. For instance, I might read a differential as, "dxdt" or as "dx over dt" or as "delta x delta t". There is not one "right way" to do it. I might be reduced to "d times x divided by d times t..." and I may have no clue what it means, but at least it can be read. I am looking for analogues of readings like, "the definite integral from a to b of y with respect to x...", or "take the integral from t-nought to t...".
As for the problems of getting consensus and editor resistance or push back... those are real problems I don't want to minimize. I think it is a matter of lobbying for the usefulness of it. Along with reminders of the purpose of an encyclopedia.. it is not to glory in one's superiority or have conversations with one's peers. I agree with the no babytalk guideline. I am not suggesting talking down to anyone. Merely providing additional verbal information that some (I think many) people would find useful. If done properly, it should not interfere with readability, but enhance it for most people. Those who see it as an unnecessary crutch can skip over it. That is not ideal, but it is, I think, preferable to skipping over the math itself, which many people currently do. In any event, thank you for entertaining the idea. Obviously it will not be an easy sell to math editors, who are the least likely to perceive a need for it, and who have much invested in their own math competency, unless they are also zealous educators. Baon (talk) 23:42, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
P.S. I looked at the SI units page you link to above. It is very good; very clean. The table provided on the symbols and notation is great! But consider a simple example: Is this "the dot product of the divergence operator and" or "the divergence of" or "divergence times..." All the above? None of the above? Uneducated, I read "the funny down pointing triangle that is the divergence operator, not delta followed by a dot that probably means multiplication". I want to know how it is commonly read. Then I can worry about its function in the equation. We have difficulty associating meaning to symbols we can't name, I think. Baon (talk) 00:36, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
I agree that Wikipedian editors are more driven by vanity than helpfulness, but there is no easy solution without paying them. If readers don't at least recognize that the surface integral symbol (I found the explanation in the table) is some kind of integral, then are we really doing them a favor by inviting them to look up dot product, divergence etc.? This is a physics article. We have other articles that describe multi-variable calculus. So if we're leading them into a trap they won't understand, then isn't "learn the math before reading this" more helpful? And even if a verbal description does more good than harm in this case, is that true of every case, such as the much simpler quadratic formula for instance? Or should we let editors use their discretion for individual articles? And even if we should have such verbal descriptions for all articles, what will another guideline accomplish that WP:JARGON isn't doing already, besides the familiar dangers of WP:CREEP? Most Wikipedians won't read it, and the ones who do will use it for edit wars as in the thread immediately after this one. Art LaPella (talk) 04:52, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks again for engaging with me on this matter. I am coming around to your point of view. I have spent more time looking over the symbol lookup table, and I see that there is a column in the table for "reads as", which is pretty much what I was asking for. I can see the duplication of effort that would be entailed in making that part of every article. I guess my problem reduces to individual cases where a symbol is used that is not in the table... I started this train of thought after trying to read something on the "Affine transformations" page. I have looked at the source.. The symbol is 'varphi' and I was able to look it up. I found the page on phi discusses this. It is a varient font form of phi, found mostly in older fonts, and is deprecated for mathematics. I am content to address this on the Affine transformations page, and take it as an isolated instance. I may add it to the symbol table with a note, so others will at least have a chance of seeing it there, if I can figure out how to do it. I still think there is a problem with symbol lookup... a kind of catch 22 where you need to know the name of the symbol in order to be able to look it up efficiently. And most users won't go to the page source to read the markup. (I didn't think of it myself, initially.) But I can see my suggestion is not really a good fix to those problems. Baon (talk) 16:11, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Just a note here — Baon appears to have misinterpreted a remark in the phi article. There is nothing "deprecated" about . It is a perfectly normal mathematical symbol and is used quite regularly. --Trovatore (talk) 22:02, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
If you visit the Unicode code chart index at Code Charts, and scroll down to the heading "Symbols and Punctuation", and find the subheading "Mathematical Symbols", you can select thereunder a sub-subheading or a sub-sub-subheading. For example, you can select "Supplemental Mathematical Operators", which is linked to http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2A00.pdf.
There, below the table with a width of 16 cells, the symbols are listed, preceded by their respective hexadecimal encodings and followed by their respective official Unicode names. For example, the symbol ⨀ is encoded hexadecimally as 2A00 (⨀ produces ⨀) and has the name "N-ARY CIRCLED DOT OPERATOR".
By reference to the names of symbols in these pages, at least in theory a person can read a mathematical formula without necessarily understanding what they mean. In some respects, the process is similar to reading a passage orally, and spelling orally an unfamiliar word whose pronunciation one does not know or can not articulate.
To remain within the honored traditions of this page, we cannot discuss "Maths styling" without first duking it out in a long, to-the-death debate about the title of the debate itself. Should it Maths styling or Math styling? I'm sorry to introduce a discontinuity, but critical points must be integrated in such differentiations, though it's a slippery slope. EEng (talk) 05:22, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
This is not the place to make individual decisions. Maths is probably British English, and Math American English. Apteva (talk) 06:38, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
This talk page is for serious-minded people communicating in seriousness about serious matters. Joking here belittles the importance of those matters. Some or all of us try to avoid misinterpretations and disagreements, but they occur anyway. Joking here about misinterpretations or about disagreements belittles the efforts of editors who try to communicate effectively in spite of them.
I have to admit, my short experience here a couple sections below has left me with the impression that while the people who are here are serious-minded, there's very little in the way of communication occurring here; it mostly appears to be people screaming and yelling past each other. A bit of lightening the mood here would do everyone a lot of good, as would focusing on issues our readers might actually notice. Hall of Jade (お話しになります) 21:05, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
Lightening the mood does not need to involve comedy. Entertainment relieves drudgery. Encouragement relieves discouragement. Entertainment is inadequate as a substitute for encouragement. Lightening the mood can involve avoiding rudeness in communication. Many web pages discuss how to disagree without being disagreeable. Here is one of them.
I would like to recommend restoring the text used before, with the exception of moving the anchor to below the section heading:
For example:
==Evolutionary implications==<!--Linked from [[Richard Dawkins]] and [[Daniel Dennett]]-->
As well, consider a preemptive measure to minimize link corruption when the text of a heading changes by inserting an {{anchor}} with the old name with which to link to that heading section. For example:
==New section name==<!-- Linked from [[Richard Dawkins]] and [[Daniel Dennett]] -->
{{anchor | Evolutionary implications}}
The reason it was changed was so that the edit summary would show the section that was being edited better, but I do not see this as at all important - when someone clicks the edit link at the top, for example, which is actually what I often do, there is no section heading. The tone of the language is better too, "for example" instead of "do not". No one likes being told what to do and what not to do. Also, "this section" can be removed, so it just says "linked from", as shown. Apteva (talk) 07:05, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
The ANI is a discussion related to disruptions here, and Neotarf's note is (I assume) one of courtesy notification of a related action. -- JHunterJ (talk) 00:27, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
Without commenting on the validity of it, the ANI discussion is about behaviour that has little to no bearing on the content of the MOS. There's no benefit in notifying WT:MOS of this. – NULL‹talk› ‹edits›00:33, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
I understand there's been some politics and drama here recently and I'm not unsympathetic to the frustration involved on all sides, but perpetuating it with notices like this is exactly the wrong direction to be taking to get things back on track. Apteva shouldn't have removed the thread above, and neither the thread above nor this one should have been posted here to begin with. WP:TPG applies, this page is for discussing the MOS. I think both these threads should be hatted. – NULL‹talk› ‹edits›00:51, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
I see no reason to keep this secret, especially since it involves MOS. Editors who are interested in MOS may also wish to comment on the ANI forum. --Neotarf (talk) 01:14, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
It doesn't involve the MOS, this page was simply the site where an alleged behavioural problem occurred. Apteva himself is certainly heavily involved in the MOS at the moment, but his AE and ANI threads have no relevance to here, they're both behavioural. – NULL‹talk› ‹edits›01:17, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
Stay on topic: Talk pages are for discussing the article, not for general conversation about the article's subject (much less other subjects). Keep discussions focused on how to improve the article. Comments that are plainly irrelevant are subject to archival or removal.
The relevance is in Apteva's continuing outrageous behavior here. When I sought input on how to deal with his disruption, he removed it, he hid it, he took me to Arbcom enforcement, he removed and then hid my notice of that, and then he sought to punish the admin who tried to stop him. It's all too much. He suggests we take him to RFC/U instead, but I don't have time for that. I'm on vacation -- in Hawaii -- had a great helicopter tour today. There, now that's something off-topic to chide me about. Dicklyon (talk) 05:42, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
You know better than that, Dick. This is not the venue to discuss behavioural issues, which Apteva's complaint against you is, nor to rally support from Apteva's detractors. Use his or your talk page, use the AE or ANI pages. If it has nothing to do with the improvement of the MOS (and it doesn't), don't bring it here. It doesn't concern anyone except the people involved. – NULL‹talk› ‹edits›21:57, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
In this case, I tend to side with Dick. Apteva's actions have clearly been disruptive, sockpuppeteering, even trolling, in every available forum where his/her capitalization and hyphenation bugaboos can be raised, and the user is now gaming the system to personally assault (at AN/I and ARE) opponents encountered at WT:MOS in particular. The "charges" are absurd and nothing needs to be said about them (there isn't anything to discuss in userspace, because the AN/I and Arb enforcement filings do not seem to have been in good faith, but are just part of the game). For prevention of further disruption of MOS, NCFauna, NCCaps, MOSCAPS, RM, RfD, etc., it's important for us to see the actual disruption pattern as it unfolds. — SMcCandlishTalk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib.22:02, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
Kwami, I removed the sentence you just inserted in place of the long-standing advice. Can it be discussed here first, please? Tony(talk) 23:35, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
It has been discussed. It's been up for several days. We just aren't getting much feedback. Given the general lack of interest, your preferences are probably fine, and the MOS is fine the way it is (after your reversal), since there's no longer any actual contradiction. — kwami (talk) 00:55, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
Punctuation and footnotes
I would very much like to add the following to this section:
- - - - -
In contrast to scientific articles, ref tags are not placed immediately following the name of a scientist, but following the content that is referenced.
Example: Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers stated that the individual needed an environment that provided them with acceptance, empathy, and approval.[11]
- - - - -
The reason is that in more and more articles (anyway, the ones that I see) the ref tags are put immediately behind the name, just as in scientific articles. The problem is that is becomes unclear where the referenced content finishes and the unreferenced content starts.
For instance, "Rogers[11] stated that the individual needed love. Love is the most important need for a human being. Without love, people can get depressed."
In this case, there is no way to know where Rogers statements finish, and the editor's opinion starts. I would like to point this out to some editors and be able to refer to the manual of style. So that's why I wrote this extra example. Lova Falktalk08:03, 29 September 2012 (UTC)
Too specific, and ambiguous. My impression is that by "scientific articles" you mean "articles in scientific journals, as opposed to articles in wikipedia", many of which are scientific articles. Just say references follow the facts they are referencing. If a specific editor is violating that you can {{welcome}} (subst:welcome) them and point that out. Apteva (talk) 18:22, 29 September 2012 (UTC)
I agree with WhatamIdoing. Suppose the Harvard style is being used. Then you would get something like "Rogers (2009) stated that the individual needed love. Love is the most important need for a human being. Without love, people can get depressed" (where "Rogers (2009)" would be linked). This style is perfectly acceptable in Wikipedia, but doesn't correspond to the advice that "references follow the facts they are referencing". Peter coxhead (talk) 10:56, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
But how would we know where Rogers' statement finishes? If it is Rogers who thinks that people can get depressed or an editor who thinks so???? Lova Falktalk17:25, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
Which is why that style is rarely used - but as pointed out it is still a valid reference style. I am guessing that someone could find an FA that uses it - throughout. Apteva (talk) 07:05, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
It may or may not be the case that the Harvard style is "rarely used" in Wikipedia; I've never counted. It is, however, almost the norm in some academic disciplines. The trailing raised number style has precisely the reverse problem: it's not clear where the sourced material starts. If I read a paragraph with one raised number reference at the very end, does this apply to the whole paragraph, just the last sentence or what? No referencing style is perfect in this respect. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:01, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
A certain well-intentioned user named Hydrargyrum keeps replacing unspaced em dashes in hundreds of Wikipedia articles with spaced em dashes (preceded by a non-breaking space). This is contrary to WP:DASH; still, Hydrargyrum maintains that his is the correct way because he has "completed a typing course". I recognise that there is no single way of using em dashes: The Chicago Manual of Style and the Oxford Guide to Style, for example, recommend unspaced em dashes while AP Stylebook and a few others propose that these be spaced. However, WP:Manual of Style has expressly stipulated that em dashes should not be spaced on Wikipedia. The above user argues that "the information at WP:DASH was developed by incompetent individuals operating in an information vacuum, who apparently never took a course in typing, nor are they familiar with how line wraps are handled in browsers and other software" (User_talk:Hydrargyrum#Em_dashes). What, if any, action should now be taken – either with regard to restraining Hydrargyrum or allowing other styles in WP:MOS? Thanks. kashmiri22:48, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, good read, I posted the link, let's see. Little optimism remains: Hydrargyrum has been asked to stop changing dashes his way already several times in the last few months – to no effect. kashmiri00:14, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Remember to advise a user (as I've done in this case) if you are going to discuss their behavior somewhere. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 04:30, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
As often when it comes to style discussions, they seem rather overconfident that they are "right" and that everyone else, or any different punctuation style, is "wrong". The reality of course, as appears to have been pointed out to them, is that there are alternatives, which are simply a matter of choice - and that the most commonly seen and used alternatives in the real world for dashes in running prose are the unspaced emdash and the spaced endash. MOS happily allows either. Common sense and the MOS would both suggest an editor shouldn't be making mass changes between the two of them - let alone changing either to the rarely seen spaced emdash. Nor do I think there's much need to change the MOS to add that third option (and even if we did, changing to that format in individual cases from one of the other two would still be utterly pointless). N-HHtalk/edits09:28, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
This is related to the internal consistency RfC in this same page. Some people take upon themselves to change hundreds of articles between two accepted styles in order to ensure consistency, and they refuse to take hints. The MOS needs to make really clear that this is not acceptable. If the MOS doesn't say this clearly then editors can't use the MOS to stop this sort of behaviour. --Enric Naval (talk) 09:39, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
I also find spaced emdashes preferable for setting off parentheticals. Unspaced emdashes give an unwarranted sense of connection between the two words they join; parentheticals, almost by definition, should more tightly group the words contained within them than to the words outside. Endashes, on the other hand, do not seem appropriate for parentheticals at all. I think if the MoS does not permit spaced emdashes for parentheticals, this should be changed. --Trovatore (talk) 03:39, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
The editor appears to still be changing dashes in violation of the MoS, even though several editors have asked him to stop. I have given him a warning on his talk page. Let me know if I need to follow up on it. Cheers. Kaldari (talk) 20:58, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps a modification of the guidelines in the MOS for use of the hyphen, en dash and em dash should be considered. There are technical reasons for doing so. By default, most browsers and text editors break text automatically after a hyphen (ASCII 45, HTML code -); I have never encountered one that doesn't, unless it is forced to display in "no-wrap" mode. This is not true of the en dash and em dash characters, however. Over the years I've encountered some software that breaks lines after these characters, but most don't. Instead, what one most often sees is a break before the en dash or em dash if it is unspaced, putting the dash in the first column of the next line. Although you will no doubt find examples in print publications where this occurs, this is generally considered bad practice in typography and typesetting. It slows down reading and comprehension. How wo uld it feel if type -setters interru ted text at random places within words and used hyphens in rando -m fashion? It would make reading such text much more time consuming, would it not? By forcing the hyphen or dash to be the last visible character before a line break, it prepares the reader's brain for what is to follow, requiring less mental effort on the reader's part.
Since we don't have any control over what browser software a visitor to Wikipedia will use, we cannot predict how that browser will handle all types of dash characters. Moreover, we don't know what type of display equipment a visitor will be using; it could range from sub-VGA to XVGA, so we can't predict where lines will end within the browser window. Moreover, not all users run their browsers maximized, so even on an XVGA display, they may be viewing Web content in a sub-VGA window. That being the case, how would you go about providing the best reading experience for the site visitor?
Since Wikipedia isn't a typesetting system, we have limited options in controlling where characters will appear in a given line of text. One way that we can control the position of en dashes and em dashes is to precede them with a non-breaking space ( or  ) and follow them with an normal space (ASCII 32, HTML code  ). This guarantees that a line break will not put those characters in in the first column of the following line. Another way of doing it is with zero-width spaces. There is a zero-width non-breaking Unicode character (⁠) and also a zero-width Unicode space character (​) that would allow en dashes and em dashes to appear unspaced, yet retain the desired control of where the line breaks.
Some have presented the argument that it doesn't matter whether one uses an en dash or an em dash. Indeed, one may find pathological examples in print where the typesetter has used en dashes in place of em dashes, particularly when text is arranged in narrow columns and an em dash might appear disproportionately wide. It's not good policy, however to do so in Web content. The technical reason for this again, we cannot predict what kind of hardware and software a Wikipedia visitor will be using. The reader may be using the default screen font, or due to "accessibility" requirements may be using a substitute font, something that one can do with most modern browsers. The hyphen, en dash and em dash can look confusingly similar, depending on the screen font. Hyphens are generally not offset by spaces, and when one uses an unspaced en dash or em dash in such a situation, it can lead to ambiguous interpretation of a line of text: Was the writer pausing and interjecting an incidental thought, or is that some strange compound word? By offsetting an en dash or em dash with spaces, it leaves no doubt in the reader's mind what the writer intended to convey.
If you enjoy abusing your readers, go ahead and insist that the present MOS must be followed without question. If, on the other hand, you care about your readers, consider what I've written here. — QuicksilverT@23:26, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for presenting your case on the proper page for it, not throughout Wikipedia. I have verified that a line break can occur before an unspaced em dash, and those who write rules here (not me; note that some people here write style manuals as their real life job, not (ahem!) as a lesser part of some other job) haven't discussed that issue, to my knowledge. And yes, an unspaced em dash could look like an unspaced hyphen depending on the font. Art LaPella (talk) 01:13, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
The identified problem is not unique to the em dash. The problem is that browsers use a widow/orphan control scheme (also called text flow control) which responds poorly to the user's preferences for font size, window size and for image placement. Putting a non-breaking space in front of the em dash does not fix the problem. The problem is virtually the same for unspaced em dashes, spaced em dashes, unspaced en dashes, spaced en dashes, and every sort of hyphen. People here must get past the world of print and settle for the imperfect world of browsers where your writing is going to display in ways over which you have no control. Hydragyrum is tilting at windmills; there is nothing anybody can do to make the em dash work consistently online. The problem is not limited to Safari or Chrome or Mozilla or Internet Explorer—it is all-pervasive. Wikipedia's established em dash style is fine as it is. Binksternet (talk) 04:29, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
Your statement about putting a non-breaking space in front of the em dash (or en dash) not fixing the problem can easily be shown to be untrue, at least with the Mozilla family of browsers and with Opera. Moreover, if a non-breaking space didn't do what it's supposed to do, it wouldn't even exist in HTML. — QuicksilverT@06:18, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
These comparisons of "- n – m —" in various 12-point fonts illustrate the typical relationship of lengths of dashes relative to the hyphen. In some fonts, the en dash (–) is not much longer than the hyphen, and in Lucida Grande the en dash is actually shorter than the hyphen, making this default Safari browser font typographically nonstandard and confusing.
The statement that the em dash can be confused with hyphen or en dash is also demonstrably false. I copied this image (and its caption) from Dash to illustrate. As for spaces, there is no case where spaced em dash is correct; but spaced en dash is an acceptable alternative to unspaced em dash. Dicklyon (talk) 06:44, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
I agree they are confusing in monospace fonts, for example, the editing interface. Hopefully the upcoming Visual Editor will alleviate some of the confusion. Kaldari (talk) 22:11, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Maybe, since they look essentially the same, we should all just use the dash that's on the keyboard? That seems most logical to me. --Nouniquenames00:47, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
I don't know about PCs, but on Macs the en dash and em dash have been on the keyboard since the orignal 1984 introduction, at option-hyphen and option-shift-hyphen, respectively. Steve cared about typography, so made it easy. Bill didn't so much. Dicklyon (talk) 23:32, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
Sure, as a long-time Mac user those are automatic for me. (Particularly since I’m in the pre-press trade, originally hired as a compositor.) But I understood “on the keyboard” to mean printed on the keys, without considering OS- or app-specific shortcuts or input methods for extended character sets.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 05:29, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
Well, what was your basis for altering it? As I pointed out in my edit sumary, what constitutes a "major" currency is subjective. The Chinese yuan, as the most "used" currency and with China as the world's second largest economy would probably count as a major currency, but its use in major international transactions is fairly limited i.e. OPEC prices oil using dollars. Reserve currencies are arguably the most neutral definition we have of a "major currency", since by definition banks have reserves of the currencies most used in international transactions. Betty Logan (talk) 03:43, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
My basis for removing "reserve" is that it's totally outdated. Please take a good look at the article Reserve currency. Which ones are reserve currencies, then? If that is a fuzzy concept, I can see no reason for doubling up with "major" currencies. And are there any minor reserve currencies? You might have thought about this before reverting. Now I await your response. Tony(talk) 10:41, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
The fact that almost 90% of the world's financial reserves comprise of just two currencies speaks for itself, but this isn't really the point. The issue at hand is what currencies we should use for conversion in articles: an article like List of countries in Europe by monthly average wage has figures sourced in different currencies, and in that example I would say that the euro would probably be the best unit since it would mean less than half the figures would need to be converted, but the US dollar is still a good catch-all in this case. However, your alteration would mean that the figures could be presented in Chinese yuan, or even Canadian dollars (a currency I would class as a minor reserve currency), which I don't see the logic of. The value of the yuan is somewhat artificial since it isn't traded, and the value of the Canadian dollar is mostly dictated by the value of the US dollar, so clearly the US dollar and euro are much better choices which the current wording encourages. Betty Logan (talk) 18:52, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
There may be a historical argument for using the British pound for pre-WW2 figures, but personally I wouldn't have a problem with the MOS specifying US dollars and euros for modern day conversions. Betty Logan (talk) 06:27, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
I think that would be best, and it would be more compatible with the rest of the MOS, where there is no "such as":
In articles that are not specific to a country, express amounts of money in United States dollars, euros, or pounds sterling.
In country-specific articles, use the currency of the country. On first occurrence, consider including conversion to a major reserve currency such as US dollars, euros, or pounds sterling.
That was an inconsistency I noticed earlier, but I hadn't wanted to make too many changes.
As for reducing to just $ or €, or to just $, that would impact a huge number of articles, so I think we'd need to post a broader invitation to discuss if we decide we want to go that way. — kwami (talk) 06:31, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
I've reverted this edit of Dicklyon's, as it seems to push the disputed paragraph in the direction of all edits having to be MoS-compliant. We would need consensus for any change in that direction, especially coming right after an RfC.
The current lead paragraph says:
An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article, though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole. Where more than one style is acceptable, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a substantial reason. Revert-warring over optional styles is unacceptable. If discussion cannot determine which style to use in an article, defer to the style used by the first major contributor.
The words "optional" and "acceptable" need not refer to optional or acceptable in MoS terms, but in terms of style guides generally. Local consensus is not allowed to decide not to be neutral, or not to use sources, but a local consensus of editors is allowed to choose how to write citations, no matter what CITE says, and is allowed to ignore the MoS, so long as their style choices are internally consistent (and somewhat consistent with advice that might be found in external style guides, i.e. it shouldn't be too strange).
Dicklyon's addition -- "Therefore, even where the Manual of Style permits alternative usages, be consistent within an article." -- changed the emphasis to suggest that only MoS-permitted usage is ever allowed, which seems to promote the MoS to policy. SlimVirgin(talk)00:01, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
It means no such thing. It is as semantically empty as the wording you added. And regardless, this is being said in a guideline, and however we word it it's still a guideline. I don't understand this attempt to find some conspiratorial meaning behind the words, on either side. We should simply say what we mean. — kwami (talk) 01:41, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
I agree with Kwami: it changes nothing, so why all this angst about it? I don't care if it stays or goes—it has no affect on the status of the style guides at en.WP. Tony(talk) 02:36, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article, [though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia as a whole]. [[Therefore, even where the Manual of Style permits alternative usages, be consistent within an article.]] Where more than one style is acceptable, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a substantial reason. Revert-warring over optional styles is unacceptable.
I'm not sure it makes much difference which of the three versions we use. The context is clearly that of internal consistency regarding selection of MOS-acceptable styles. All that any of the three versions means is that, for example, we shouldn't mix US and UK spelling within an article, even though we mix them on WP as a whole. Stylistically, the more concise the better, but adding the redundant bits in brackets makes no real difference. People have expressed the concern that the first redundant bit will be used to claim that the MOS need not be applied to all articles, but I don't see how it even implies that. The surrounding statements (intro and conclusion of the paragraph) clearly summarize the intent of this section: style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article: Revert-warring over optional styles is unacceptable. Everything in between is filler, so the irregular RfC (add non-consensual wording and then require consensus to remove it), while a mockery of normal MOS process, makes no practical difference in this case other than setting a bad precedent. — kwami (talk) 00:08, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
I'd appreciate it if you would stop misrepresenting the RfC, and in particular would not imply that I was in any way dishonest, as you did on another talk page. I've had enough of the assumptions of bad faith on this page. The RfC was held to decide whether people wanted those words in the MoS. Whether they were being added or restored made no difference to people's responses. SlimVirgin(talk)00:15, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Bias doesn't make you dishonest, of course, and I don't believe I've said that you're dishonest. My point is that this is not a meaningful change, so it doesn't really matter to the MOS. If in the future you are willing hold yourself to the same standard you hold others to (per the edit summary of your last edit to the MOS: rv, pls gain consensus for this first), that is, if you're willing to follow BOLD in the future, then I doubt we'll have a problem. — kwami (talk) 01:26, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
(end merge)
Ah, but I see that pushing this unsupported reading is exactly what you're now trying to do. Please read WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. You can't use an irregular RfC to add semantically empty verbiage to a guideline and then claim that this overrides an established policy. The MOS is a guideline. As such it is no more required than any other guideline. The words you added make absolutely no difference in this regard. They quite obviously do not mean what you are claiming they mean, and even if they did, they would be negated by WP policy. — kwami (talk) 01:33, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
The version before the change recognized the need to be consistent on style matters where style guides in general call for consistency, even if the MOS is silent on a particular usage, and also recognizes that an established style should not be replaced by another acceptable style, even if the MOS is silent on the particular usage. So by mentioning the MOS, there is a new implication that consistency is only required on matters spelled out in the MOS. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:40, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
(not clear which version or which change you're referring to. — kwami (talk))
The problem with implication is that not everyone will understand it the same way. If we mean to say something, then we should say it. If we don't say it, it's not legitimate to claim we mean it. If we can't say it directly, because of opposition, and so are reduced to trying to reword the MOS in such a way that we can later claim there's meaning between the lines, then obviously we didn't have the consensus to actually say it, and the claim is therefore void. The MOS is (obviously) an in-house style guide to be applied to all of Wikipedia. If people don't like that, then the solution is to have a community-wide discussion on voiding the MOS. With a change of that magnitude, we should probably advertize it at the top of every editor's page, the way we advertize Arbcom elections. — kwami (talk) 01:51, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Guidelines are not exactly "voided" but they are guidelines and everyone expects that there will be exceptions. One thing I noticed is that we say consistent three times, so in the lead I would recommend deleting "; this is especially important within an article" as it is duplicated in the sentence: - "An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article." (How many times do we have to say something?)
Obviously I may find disagreements with the following, but I would like to delete "house style" as "house" refers to a publishing house, and not a term that is very well known, but more importantly WP is far too eclectic to pretend that there is any such thing as a monolithic style that is used by everyone. So the wording that I suggest, instead of "The MoS presents Wikipedia's house style, to help editors produce articles with consistent, clear, and precise language, layout, and formatting." is "The MoS is a recommendation of best practices. It is neither inclusive nor exclusive, yet serves to help editors produce articles with consistent, clear, and precise language, layout, and formatting." There is a place in Article titles where we say "The following points are critical:" and in my opinion that can simply be removed, because, in fact, all points are important. Apteva (talk) 04:28, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
If the sentence adds nothing meaningful, it's better to remove it - lean, simple language is less likely to be misunderstood. If it does add meaning, such as by implying the guidance only applies in MOS situations or by implying the MOS is more important than it actually is, then that does seem like something that should be discussed before adding it.
My perspective is in common with the authors of the Chicago MOS, which ours is heavily based on. On numerous occasions the CMOS authors have pointed out that style guides are exactly that - guides - and that they exist to help bring consistency to the actual purpose of the document, which is its content. In any conflict between content and style, the authors say content should always take precedence. I personally would go one step further and suggest that if 'enforcement' of our MOS is interfering with or distracting editors from providing and improving content in any serious way, content should take higher priority. – NULL‹talk› ‹edits›04:46, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
The added sentence was not mine. I just restored the rest of the bit that SlimVirgin had restored. I agree it's not a great piece; the idea that the MOS "permits" or "forbids" or "requires" anything is an idea that I have argued against in the past. It suggests. And it does so for the sake of consistency, which is why I'm puzzled as to why people wanted to add that bit that seems to say it doesn't. As for "house style", that's not just for publishers. See these books about the concept: [13], [14], [15], among others. Dicklyon (talk) 07:39, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Which say "many firms have adopted a 'house style'". Firms are monolithic, WP is not. "Many companies have a 'house style'." Companies are monolithic, WP is not. The third one does mention organizations "Apart from general styles and the styles peculiar to the media or specific documents are the style issues internal to every organization." However, in that regard, about the only styles that we have that are a house style are the use of sentence capitalization and avoiding all caps other than in acronyms, and in the layout of the articles, but no, the words house style do not add anything, and are a detractor. Much of the MOS is not a "house style" but is more related to hints on good writing, e.g. from The Elements of Style. Apteva (talk) 15:00, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
I agree that it's ultra vires for the MoS to attempt to define what is or isn't permitted. Alternative uses are permitted everywhere, regardless of what the MoS says. I support the removal of the sentence. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 21:16, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Just as well anon contributions here are not taken seriously. Why don't you log in??? You misunderstand the role of the style guide and the meaning of this sentence people are fighting over (which is zip). Tony(talk) 02:43, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
Why don't you confine yourself to the subject, instead of making provocative posts, which raise the temperature of the discussion but add nothing to it? 146.90.43.8 (talk) 09:43, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
While anon contributions are critical to WP, it's unusual for an editor to weigh in continually at a major styleguide or policy page without logging in, since a higher level of collaboration, collegiality, and trust, is associated with discussions on those pages. I wonder whether you're willing to log on, and if not, whether there's a solid reason for this. Tony(talk) 10:35, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
Tony, if I log on you won't know me. I remember your name from when I used to contribute with a user name, but we didn't interact. Your name and SlimVirgin's are the only ones I recognize here. I'm not Apteva. I'm not PMAnderson. I'm not a regular contributor here. If I log on, I'm obliged to sport an unpleasant epithet which was tattooed on my forehead by a revengeful admin under the nose of ArbCom. I left the project but can't help wandering back from time to time, as now, inhabiting the pleasant pastures of Ipsville. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 11:25, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
Adding that I'm not really "weighing in continuously". I see this as a corollary to the RfC, which was a call for all editors to come along and participate, even ips, who you say you don't usually take seriously here. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 11:38, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
We can refer to the MoS as a guideline all we want, but because people can be punished for disobeying it, it is entirely accurate to say that it "permits" and "requires" certain things. Maybe Wikipedia shouldn't work that way, but it does. Let Dicklyon reinsert the wording. "What is acceptable" and "What the MoS" permits are the same thing on Wikipedia. Just try doing something that the MoS does not permit and you'll see for yourself. But that's not exactly Dicklyon or SlimV's point. We could say that the MoS endorses multiple options rather than that it permits/requires them, if that would be less contentious. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:06, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
"people can be punished for disobeying it"? Hardly. What it does is mandate the fixing up of things like hyphens - used like that - but no one's going to be spoken to for not using dashes. Is this statement designed to turn people against centralised guidance, DF? Tony(talk) 02:40, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
You're right that people can't be punished for "disobeying" it. You're wrong that it can mandate anything. It's an optional guide. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 09:43, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
I'm not convinced that we need to be tinkering with it at all. There is clearly a lot of tension surrounding it. It polarises opinion, yet the current version seems to have achieved some kind of precarious equilibrium. Should we not leave it be? 146.90.43.8 (talk) 09:43, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
They most certainly can be punished and censured for disobeying it. It happened to me. I found out exactly how "optional" the MoS was. The words "permit" and "require" are accurate here. However, the word "endorse" is also accurate, and it seems to be something that even the "The MoS is only a guideline" crowd could get behind. How do you feel about it?
As I've shown in previous discussions, I greatly prefer a centralized to a decentralized MoS. Let people have one page where they can find any rule they need.
And 146anon? Just create a login ID. You've been questioned for being an anon twice now that I've seen. Solve the problem. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:21, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
Well, you can be punished for just about anything on WP, depending on which admin you run across. Whether or not you should be punished is another matter. I'd be interested to see a link to your punishment.
I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum to most people posting here. For example, I'd like to see it made plain that if an editor wants to use a professionally written style guide and not refer to MoS at all, that is perfectly fine. I don't want to see the new sentence added with endorse or permit. "Therefore even where the Mos endorses/permits alternative uses..." reads as "Therefore even [in those unusual cases] where...".It's moving the tone towards prescriptivism. As I said above, we seem to have a working version that nobody is completely happy with, but which just about everyone can live with. I think we should just let it be. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 11:21, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
Nonsense. You were not "punished" for not following the MOS. In fact, you were not punished at all. You were chided for tendentious editing. If I went around converting all CE dates to AD, or vice versa, I'd be brought up too, but that doesn't mean I can't use whichever format I like when I edit an article. Please show us a single instance when anyone was punished for not following the MOS. — kwami (talk) 23:48, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
There was no tendentious editing. I went into articles and gnomed them. I'd been doing it for years. Just to be clear: I was going into articles that already used American punctuation and changed the strays so that each whole article was internally consistent, always while making other improvements. I also went into articles that used British English and changed strays so that each whole article used British punctuation consistently.
Bringing someone up on AN/I for censure is a punishment. The relevance to this discussion is that I used the MoS as "just a guideline" subject to my own judgment, and that turned out not to be how things really work. I read it and figured that internal consistency and correct punctuation were both more important than WP:LQ, and I got in trouble for it. Anon148 said "If someone wants to use a professionally written style guide and not refer to the MoS at all, then that is perfectly fine," but that's what I did! It's not fine!
We have to remember that any rule that goes into the MoS can be cited chapter-and-verse to admins. We should not put anything into the MoS that we don't believe should be treated as an absolute rule, so if Dicklyon thinks we need to spell out exactly what we mean with a few extra words, we should pick some words out and do it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:00, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, I didn't understand the situation. I agree that you should not be punished for applying an aspect of the MOS in good faith. As for using an external style guide, that would be fine if you were writing your own material. The problem would only come in if you were trying to convert WP to that style guide, when we've already decided on a set of WP-wide conventions. People do get annoyed when they spend time cleaning up an article, only to have someone revert them. In that case it would be better to come here, present the guide, and explain why it's preferable to what we have. — kwami (talk) 01:03, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
I don't really see the MoS-relevant distinction between, say, adding a paragraph to an article and correcting one that's already there, but you're not the first person I've seen draw it.
To use another example, what if the guys over at WP:Birds wanted to use a style guide made for ornithology journals? The MoS regulars keep going on about how common names shouldn't be capitalized because those are general English rules and they keep going on about how they should because that's how the pro bird publications do it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:23, 24 October 2012 (UTC)\
If you were to add info, it wouldn't matter which you used. But if you went on a crusade to convert all of WP to your POV, then unless you had consensus for that POV it would be considered disruptive. The MOS encapsulates that consensus. Again, no-one would care if I used CE, AD, or ISO dates when writing, but they'd object if I went around changing others' contributions to my preference. The same with UK vs US spelling. In fact, I tend to mix the two within a single sentence: for some words like grey, draught, and judgement I use UK spelling even though I mostly use US (where I went to school), and occasionally I almost randomly switch back and forth, esp. if I'm reading s.t. in UK orthography, and no-one has *ever* complained about it. (I think maybe once I got a puzzled query.) You're in the perhaps unusual position of making articles self-consistent, but in a way that turns out to be dispreferred by the MOS. Assuming that's all you did (I haven't been following), IMO you did nothing wrong, and we were perhaps lacking in assuming good faith. If this kind of thing happens significantly with other wikignomes, then we should address it so there's some guidance on how to handle future conflicts like this. We certainly don't want to discourage people like you from fixing up WP (god knows some of the writing and formatting is atrocious), but neither do we want two sets of wikignomes going around undoing each other's work. — kwami (talk) 03:17, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
Who's "we"? Ilkali brought me up on AN/I, Finell and LaserB made off-topic comments, and admin Sarek put down a decision. As far as I can tell, you had nothing to do with it.
I would be surprised if this specific issue has come up with more than a few other users. The point is that this kind of thing can happen; people can be brought up on AN/I for violating parts of the MoS that no one but us enthusiasts care about (example: see cat picture caption). The point that I'm making is no, the MoS is not a guideline that people have the option of not following when they believe they have a good reason, not even the parts of the MoS that are in direct conflict with the majority of reputable sources. The whole thing is enforceable, and we've got to take that into account when deciding what it should say. Darkfrog24 (talk) 05:12, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
Search for "Darkfrog's flouting of the MoS." The issue was raised, but I wouldn't call it a discussion. More like the "BURN HER! SHE'S A WITCH!" scene from Monty Python except without the duck (or it being a fair cop). Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:37, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
You might have been blocked, and it's entirely possible the blocking admin might have cited wp:Tendentious editing, even though that is an essay. You might not have been blocked. You might have been blocked and unblocked, depending upon who happened to be passing ani. You might have ended up at Arbcom. Arbcom might have created a "principle" out of thin air and then disciplined you for being in violation of it. So you might have voted in a new Arbcom. HR(ceremonial)H might have unceremoniously vetoed the new Arbcom. *Anything* is possible here. But let's pretend it's not. Let's pretend WP works roughly along the lines that any sane person would expect.
In that case, I would point out to you that you were not punished or censured at ANI. In fact, nobody even threatened to punish or censure you. It's not correct that "Bringing someone up on AN/I for censure is a punishment", in fact it's often the case that the person who opens an ANI/I thread is the one who ends up with a damn good mopping. What happened is that you said that nobody had asked you to stop, so somebody asked you to stop, and then you agreed to stop. What you should have done, then as now, is stick to your guns. You were right in your initial belief that you are allowed to edit according to any professional style manual. You should be arguing to have that made explicit in the MoS. Rather perversely, you seem to be arguing precisely the opposite. Of course, it is true that you would have a difficult time getting that into the MoS, just as it's true that you would likely have had a rough ride at AN/I had you persisted. That's because the people who hang out at talk:mos are heavily invested in the MoS, and quite understandably the local consensus here can and often does differ significantly from the broader WP consensus, as was seen in the recent RfC.
Anyhoo, you must do as you see fit, and I'm sure you will. I keep trying to drop off this thread. I want blast off from Planet Wiki and head back to the Blue Planet. That will be very good for me, and it will mean that good denizens of wp:mos no longer have their air polluted by no steenkin eye pee. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 10:49, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
How is it not a punishment? It's humiliating. Let's drag someone to the front of the classroom for a spanking. And let's remember that my conduct on Wikipedia was restricted. I'm not allowed to gnome AmE articles using correct punctuation any more.
I often wish that I had stuck to my guns, but I got railroaded.
I have repeatedly argued that WP:LQ should be changed. As a matter of fact, that is probably why Ilkali started this AN/I, because there was an ongoing debate on this talk page about that very issue. The answer is always the same. A preponderance of MoS regulars would rather have their own preferences in the MoS than things that can be backed up with sources. If someone else brings it up again, I'll support it again, but I don't think I should raise the issue unless something new comes up, like a study showing that AmE punct. improves reading comprehension or something.
Which recent RfC are you referring to? What evidence is there that any differ from broad WP consensus? If you hit random article or even featured article, you'll see that WP:LQ has low compliance, but there's not much evidence for the wider community's opinion of internal consistency one way or the other. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:37, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
Comment. - Agree with Darkfrog24. A less ambiguous Wikipedia MoS would/could minimise/reduce the duration of style based disputes, which are typically low-quality ones that drain resources. We can speak here metaphysically about what a style guide is, but we should be asking ourselves: "What do we want the Wikipedia MoS to accomplish?" The CMOS doesn't have talk pages, or GA, or FAC, etcetera. Perhaps our MoS should be made more clear on what it "permits" and "requires" so as to save content editors countless hours debating minutiae that is often little more than a difference of opinion. ~ GabeMc(talk|contribs)02:27, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps more importantly, neither the CMoS or Hart, Butcher or Fowler are attempting to mediate disagreements between publishing houses or writers. So while they are offering advice only, they do not have the burden of dealing with disputes between parties, making them a poor comparison to what the Wikipedia MoS needs to accomplish in that regard. Send a clear and unambiguous message and editors will abide, or they will decide to attempt to affect change, at the MoS not on an article by article basis. I realise that the Wikipedia MoS is not an instrument of dispute resolution, but at the very least, it should seek to reduce or minimise contradiction and ambiguity, reducing the workload at DRN overall. Barring a decent IAR situation, an editor who knowingly and blatantly alters an article so that it does not comply with the Wikipedia MoS, should be considered a vandal. Editors need guidance, and the CMoS has paid grammarians so that their writers do not have to waste precious time debating matters of style and formatting on a per article basis. ~ GabeMc(talk|contribs)05:29, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
I think our guidelines and policies are clear that no-one needs to follow the MOS, any more than they need to use metric units or spell correctly, but of course anyone going around undoing other people's clean-up work—whether it's spelling, MOS, linking, unit conversion, etc—would be considered possible vandals. Do we need, or want, to spell that out in the MOS? — kwami (talk) 06:30, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
I think everyone realises that a discussion about spelling that out would go nuclear within about half a day. I'm sure you don't want that. I know I don't. 146.90.43.8 (talk) 09:43, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
I don't think we should "spell it out" in the MoS, I think we should make the MoS read more prescriptive, rather than suggestive. MoS compliance is required for FA status, so while kwami is correct to say "no-one needs to follow the MOS" (emphasis added), the highest-quality Wikipedia articles are in fact, MoS compliant. ~ GabeMc(talk|contribs)01:34, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
Just a point of information -- although the FA criteria page mentions the MoS, articles don't really need to be MoS compliant. If non-compliance were the only problem, and if otherwise everything was well-sourced, well-written, internally consistent and tidy looking, I think an article would not be deprived of FA status just because of the MoS. SlimVirgin(talk)00:51, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
Bureaucratically, the MoS is defined as a guideline, which in turn is defined by: "Guidelines are sets of best practices that are supported by consensus. Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply." That's where we "spell it out". If "Editors should attempt to follow guidelines" is too prescriptive, then once again, I wish people would either revoke the guideline status or redefine guidelines. I don't think the perennial confusion of guidelines with WP:ESSAYs solves our eternal arguments; I think it's more likely to add another argument. Of course, if the MoS is just a suggestion like hundreds of other websites about style, then we should all go find something more productive to do. Art LaPella (talk) 15:51, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
That's how it should work, Art, but it's not how it does work. If we want people to be able to do something, we need to come out and say that they are allowed to do it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:07, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
If that means that the WP:GUIDES policy should be restated in some way at the MoS, that's probably a good idea, assuming consistency is maintained. Art LaPella (talk) 17:30, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
If that is something that there is consensus to permit. In that case, though, it would be better to say that it is permitted to replace spaced hyphens with en dashes and make no mention of how it is done. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:04, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
In my experience, "It's just a guideline and you may use your own judgment" is what doesn't work. If we don't want people brought up on AN/I for this or that specific action, then we need to say that this or that specific action is allowed. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:02, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
Frivolous ANI charges are made all the time. I might take you to ANI because I find the number 24 an implied threat on my life. Unless people are actually being sanctioned for this kind of thing, I don't think it's anything we need to address. — kwami (talk) 20:43, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
We now have in the lead an "overriding principle" that has flopped back and forth a few times between quite different concepts of what the consistency principle is about, and with a very split opinion of which is better. Can we at least stop calling it an "overriding principle"? What does it override? Dicklyon (talk) 19:11, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
At WP:HYPHEN(3), bullet 3, an example of hyphenation of proper nouns/names is given as "Trois-Rivières". I believe this is a poor example because French names are customarily hyphenated in more situations than their English equivalents. Additionally, this name, in particular, is not a compound of proper names ("3 Rivers"), and would not be hyphenated if it were in English. To put it another way, "Trois-Rivières" is hyphenated because it's French, not because it's composed of two proper nouns/names (which it isn't anyway).
I believe a different example should be used. There maybe should also be a note about the additional instances of hyphenation in French (and maybe German?) placenames (not that we want to rewrite their punctuation rules here, but advice to follow sources carefully).
Apologies if this is misplaced or was hashed out somewhere above – it's pretty hard for someone that hasn't been a part of the discussion to get through the massive volume of it. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 08:11, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
To me the entire sentence doesn't fit where it is:
Many compounds that are hyphenated when used attributively (before the noun they qualify: a light-blue handbag), are not hyphenated when used predicatively (separated from the noun: the handbag was light blue). Hyphenation also occurs in bird names such as Great Black-backed Gull, and in proper names such as Trois-Rivières and Wilkes-Barre. Where otherwise there would be a loss of clarity, the hyphen may be used in the predicative case as well (hand-fed turkeys, the turkeys were hand-fed).
The first and third sentences are about attributive vs. predicative uses. The middle sentence just introduces issues not relevant to the point. Great Black-backed Gull is a attributive use, no different from any other use of black-backed; the fact that it occurs in the name of a bird is immaterial. Trois-Rivières is an example of French or French-Canadian punctuation. Wilkes-Barre relates to the punctuation of compound English surnames. I would remove the second sentence entirely, and add other points to deal with:
Cases where common names of organisms use hyphens which would not otherwise occur. Thus the Botanical Society of the British Isles issues a standard list of common names for plants which requires the use of hyphens in a principled way (and also the use of capitals, but don't let's go there!). Thus Parietaria judaica has the common name "Pellitory-of-the-wall".
The use of hyphens in names taken from other languages: I guess the general rule should be to follow a reliable source in that language.
The use of hyphens in compound names of a single person as opposed to compounds of the names of multiple people.
Eliminating the second sentence would remove one of the most common cases where hyphens are used - in names. There are no known cases where endashes instead of hyphens do/do not appear in names, of course, but if there were some, they could be mentioned - at least if there were a lot of them. Walmart used to be spelled with an asterisk, Wal*mart (WAL★MART), but there is no reason for adding the only exception known to a guideline. The reason I added Wilkes-Barre as an example was because Trois-Rivières was a good example, because hyphenation is often used in French names, but it is my guess that Three Rivers would not be hyphenated if it was a city name - but to show that there are also English names that use a hyphen. And of course I would recommend adding Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, or Aspen-Pitkin County Airport, or Dillant-Hopkins Airport as the second example. But Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a much more well recognized example. I am not aware of any name choosing a hyphen because of the parts of speech involved - noun phrases and adjective phrases alike end up with hyphens in names. Hyphenated flowers appear so rarely that they do not need to be included. Birds yes, because we have four thousand examples of hyphenated bird names. There are maybe a few hundred each airports and comets that are hyphenated, and I am not sure that an example from such a small group needs to be included. How many wars are there that are hyphenated? A dozen? Less than a hundred?
How about moving the second sentence to after the third, and replacing it with "Hyphens are also used in bird names such as Great Black-backed Gull, and in proper names such as Trois-Rivières and Wilkes-Barre, or in Julia Louis-Dreyfus." Apteva (talk) 14:23, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Please look again at what I actually wrote. My suggestion is to remove the second sentence from that particular bullet point because it has nothing to do with the purpose of the bullet point and just confuses it. Wilkes-Barre and Trois-Rivières have nothing to do with attributive vs. predicative usages. I'm suggesting that the issues raised by the three examples in the second sentence get their own separate bullet points. I can only repeat (for at least the third time) that it is totally irrelevant that Black-backed Gull is a bird name, as the compound adjective "black-backed" would usually be hyphenated anyway. If there is a bird name example like Pellitory-of-the-wall, i.e. where as a name it is hyphenated but would not be if the phrase were not used as a name, then I agree that this would be a better example for a new bullet point. I don't know one but then I'm not a "birder". Peter coxhead (talk) 17:15, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Peter is correct here. We don't need to delete those examples, but they are off-topic and should be moved to their own bullet point. A bullet about attributive hyphenation should give examples of attributive hyphenation, and contrast with predicative non-hyphenation. Words hyphenated for other reasons should appear under other bullet points. That's simply a matter of being coherent.
The original wording made sense. It was:
Many compound adjectives that are hyphenated when used attributively (before the noun they qualify: a light-blue handbag), are not hyphenated when used predicatively (after the noun: the handbag was light blue); this attributive hyphenation also occurs in proper names, such as Great Black-backed Gull. Where there would be a loss of clarity, the hyphen may be used in the predicative case too (hand-fed turkeys, the turkeys were hand-fed).
Except of course that 'Great Black-backed Gull' is not a proper name, it's just a capitalized name, which is why it was changed: [17] Unfortunately, rather than simply addressing the point of capitalized name ≠ proper name, irrelevant info was added. (Why in the world would we single out bird names? Later edit summaries suggest this was collateral damage from a dispute about bird names being or not being proper names, which had nothing to do with hyphenation.) I suggest we (1) revert to the original wording but change 'proper' to 'capitalized', (2) delete the example altogether, or (3) find an actual proper name that includes attributive hyphenation. I would favor (1) as being the minimal change. — kwami (talk) 18:14, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Sounds good to me, too. The hyphenated person-name should still appear in an example someplace, but carefully so that nobody will in the future confuse it with saying that en dashes don't also have a role in some proper names. Dicklyon (talk) 05:04, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
I too strongly support Kwami's ideas. If it's thought that it's too large a change to delete the bird name example, I suggest the neutral "... this attributive hyphenation also occurs in the common names of species, such as Great Black-backed Gull." This is then correct regardless of whether it is capitalized; capitalization is irrelevant and so should not be mentioned. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:16, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
But species has nothing to do with it either. Yes, there's no rational reason not to remove the example, but this isn't about reason. If I remember correctly, there was a big fight over hyphenating capitalized names like this: because the MOS didn't specifically say we *can* hyphenate them, that means we can't, so we added this example to counter that argument. Idiotic, of course, but much of the MOS has been written in response to idiotic objections. — kwami (talk) 23:59, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
I agree that species has nothing to do with it either. But if you leave the example there and explicitly say "capitalized" then you will stir up the whole issue of capitalizing species names. By "neutral" I only meant that my wording avoids both the arguments about species names being proper names and the arguments about capitalizing species names. Changing from "proper" to "capitalized" just replaces one problem by another. Peter coxhead (talk) 00:53, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
I don't think that's a problem, because this is not a section on capitalization. Some sources capitalize species names. We're merely pointing out that that has nothing to do with hyphenation. If you have some other example that would work better, we could try that. Or maybe we could just delete it altogether and hope that doesn't invite the argument back. — kwami (talk) 01:59, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
But if the MOS explicitly mentions capitalizing species names here, this will be read (or so I believe) by some of those on both sides of the argument as endorsing capitalization of species names. Cf. your point above about countering idiotic objections. My suggestion: let's delete it for now. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:07, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
Ok, I've now used this example. I've also added a short sentence elsewhere on hyphenation in other languages using the "Trois-Rivières" example which was otherwise lost. I've also put back the "Wilkes-Barre" example as a bullet point on hyphenated personal names – otherwise this use only occurs negatively in the en-dash section. I think that all the important material in the original confused bullet point is now there but better organized. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:51, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
Removed the sp. example, which has now become a distraction. We could just as easily add a sentence about purses, or automobiles, all equally pointless but implying there's a point.
As the city was named after Mssrs. Wilkes and Barre, our normal hyphenation/dashing rules would dictate an en-dash, but by convention the city's name is hyphenated. It seems like this ought to be mentioned somewhere, either as an explicit exception or with an accompanying rule to explain the seeming contradiction. PowersT13:46, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
No, ENDASH would dictate a hyphen, because it's not a union of two cities like Minneapolis–Saint Paul. Wilkes-Barre is no different than a person named after their two parents: double-barrelled names take a hyphen because they name single individuals.
Comets names are a very bad example because they don't follow English compound rules, they follow IAU's naming guidelines. That's why we have "Singer Brewster" named after "Singer-Brewster". Or "Bally-Clayton" named after Bally-Urban and Clayton. There are no rules in English compound construction that could possibly result in such names. See #Comet_Hale-Bopp for examples and quotes. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:38, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
But the fact that so many books and journals use en dash in Hale–Bopp (and sometimes hyphen in 105P/Singer-Brewster is good evidence that the IAU has not succeeding in taking over the typographic style guidance of even the astronomy field, much less the general press. Dicklyon (talk) 17:38, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
That token of 105P/Singer-Brewster might be a simple error. But using an en dash requires special effort. — kwami (talk) 17:17, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
Dicklyon, please don't use isolated examples to make broad inaccurate statements about a field...... In the section above I provided several RS about IAU being the sole naming authority, dictating not just the name, but also the spelling and the transliteration. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:34, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
In Kwami's example, I suggest "combination" or "conurbation" or "group" or some other word rather than "union", which might be read as implying that the cities have merged. --142.205.241.254 (talk) 23:02, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Since this subsection is now about proper names, rather than just place names, I think we should repeat our example for people:
John Lennard-Jones, an individual named after two parents
Not done That change could be controversial; please get consensus first. --Rschen7754 05:20, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
becomes something like (this is surely wrong; I didn't bother to look anything up because the details don't matter) the dot product of the electric field with the infinitesimal change in the surface, integrated over an infinitesimal change in the volume, is equal to the electric charge of the volume divided by the electrical constant. If that is your idea, I think that is harder to understand than the equation. The article's preceding paragraphs explain the equations to some extent. The Simple English equivalent is harder to understand, not easier (perhaps because my editing over there is frustrated by the "science not babytalk" faction) because it "simplified" mainly by omitting the verbal explanation. So how would you write that? And do you really think editors would even read any further nagging about readability?Art LaPella (talk) 20:33, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
