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An historic

Where is the MoS advice on use of an before h e.g. "an historic", "an honourary", etc. etc.? Is this ENGVAR? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:59, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

  • This is a matter of different usage, both in British and American English. A history is the correct form, because the h is hard and the first syllable is stressed. For historical, both forms are considered correct, although A is nowadays more common. The argument for An, which as it happens I was taught at school, is that the second syllable is stressed, and hence the h isn't so hard (indeed barely pronounced in some accents) and An historical is easier to say. This An before an unstressed h was considered the correct usage historically in British English (in times when such h's were rarely pronounced), but is now on the decline. If a policy were considered necessary, I expect the consensus would head towards A, but meanwhile An should be accepted IMHO, particularly in British English articles MapReader (talk) 16:18, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
  • I don't think there's any specific guidance on this – we leave it up to the editors involved. I invariably use "a", due in part to my North American upbringing and in part because I think "an historic" is a pointless imitation of the French "silent h", as in histoire, that was popular in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.  White Whirlwind  咨  16:24, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
  • The words historic, humble, hotel have undergone H-insertion since entering the English language from Old French sometime after 1066. Originally the "h" would not have been pronounced, so "an hotel" would sound like "an 'otel" which is natural; such pronunciation can though be "stigmatized and perceived as a sign of careless or uneducated speech" (per H-dropping lead). If you pronounce the "h", and you insist on saying "an hotel", it sounds awful to me; I much prefer "a hotel". Batternut (talk) 16:24, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    Or, if you seem to say the word "ahistoric" when you meant to say "an historic", you sound confused?  :) Ngrams shows only about 3:1 preference for "a historic" recently in American English, and only a 9:5 preference recently in British English. Because American style guides have been trending towards regularizing irregular usages, I suspect they will recommend "a historic", but both usages are well represented in actual usage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:46, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    I have never come across An hotel, because the first syllable is stressed in hotel and therefore it clearly carried an A. My distant recollection from grammar lessons at a British school in the 1960s is that h-words need at least three syllables to carry an An. MapReader (talk) 19:00, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    My grandmother (born 1904, and very much brought up in Edwardian elegance) always talked of "an hôtel", pronouncing the word as a French loan-word without sounding the initial 'h'. And she lived until 2004, so it's certainly been current (at least in some circles) a bit more recently than 1066. The rest of us always found it rather extraordinary though. But there may still be some people who still talk about a "round of goff", a usage my Physics teacher thought ended with the coming of Special Relativity in 1905. Jheald (talk) 19:33, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    herbs :) --Izno (talk) 19:23, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    yuge ones ? Jheald (talk) 19:35, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
  • An historic with silent h is perfectly natural. An historic with sounded h is an American affectation that lingered for a while but has mostly died out. But Wikipedia is a print medium, so in most cases you can't tell the difference. Therefore there is no need for MoS guidance (even assuming that it would be worthwhile to give guidance against the affected form, if you could tell the difference). --Trovatore (talk) 19:30, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    You're saying there are different conventions for the spoken and the written word? And that one need not influence the other? I'm surprised that, on this basis, you think guidance unnecessary. I thought that Wikipedia generally took great pains to provide correct pronunciation guidance. And that, at least for some articles, there were spoken versions? Martinevans123 (talk) 19:39, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    Not exactly. I'm saying that the correct spelling depends on how the author intends the word to be pronounced. Since we can't tell how the author intends the word to be pronounced, there is no useful guidance to give. --Trovatore (talk) 19:43, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    Fair point. I was just hoping for some easy Engvar guidance to avoid pointless edit warring. Seems it's not that simple. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:47, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    @Trovatore: You're right that both are correct in their own circumstances, but those circumstances (silent h vs. sounded h) are, I'm pretty sure everyone here agrees, an ENGVAR issue, which means internal consistency in this or that article (except in cases of TIES, where it's internal consistency in favour of one over all others) is the governing principle), so in a given article one is right and the other wrong (or possibly just archaic -- "lingered for a while but has mostly died out" as you said it). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:17, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
    Well, actually no, I don't agree with that. I'm an American and quite capable of saying an historic with silent h, at least in fast speech. It's not an affectation; it just comes out quite naturally. The affectation is using "an" together with sounded h, but we don't need to worry about that one, because the reader can't tell whether the h is pronounced. --Trovatore (talk) 03:21, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
    I'm an American and quite capable of saying an historic with silent h Well, I'm pretty sure you're in the minority there. I don't pronounce my final -ts in ʃ-ish manner, which sets me apart from my mother and ash least two of my siblings (bush nosh my father), and a glottal stop (I think? not a linguist...) comes quishe naturally to me, but thash doesn't mean the former is nosh a feature of Hiberno-English. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:14, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
    "An historic" is only half 1/3 as frequent recently in the American English corpus of Google Ngrams, so rumours of its demise may be exaggerated. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:36, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    But how can you tell whether the author intends the h to be silent? I don't always pronounce the h in historic (and I would never spell it rumour). --Trovatore (talk) 19:40, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    You can't tell, of course. I also corrected my numbers after looking up Ngrams again. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:42, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
  • In northern (specifically, Yorkshire) English, which I speak, it is generally—but not solely—'an historic' with a silent 'h'. I agree that this is not something to be covering in the MoS, other than perhaps to advise editors not to change it either way, unless for consistency. With the whole debate, it is a matter of dialect. I would not like to see wikipedia taking a stance over which dialect is 'better' than others. 'An hotel' ('an 'otel'), 'an hospital' ('an 'ospital'), etc, are not only spoken in some regional versions of English, but written, too. –Sb2001 19:54, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
    Especially in Scouse? Martinevans123 (talk) 19:57, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
Don't get me started on the north-west ... can that even be called 'English'? And yes—I am bitter.–Sb2001 00:18, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
As I said above, that was how I was taught in school. Historic has a stressed second syllable, therefore the h is weak and it takes An. MapReader (talk) 21:42, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
MapReader: You're one data point. Let's see some statistics backing up the idea that North Americans who pronounce it that way do so only because they were taught to. It wasn't taught at any school I went to, yet plenty of people pronounced it that way in informal conversation. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:08, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
I wasn't the only guy in the school, but, for sure, it's just an anecdote. I don't claim it is meaningful other than as a response to your never heard of this being taught in school. Now you have ;) MapReader (talk) 05:28, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Curly: I was the one who introduced the term "affectation", and I am American (and not a "self-hating" one in case that was your next thought). It's possible I was incorrect, but it certainly was not an anti-Yank slam. --Trovatore (talk) 23:41, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
Okay, but my point remains: here we have a lot of folk theorizing, and a tad of anecdotal evidence wrung through people's beliefs and prejudices, and nothing empirical for anyone to make their pronouncements on. Are Americans who say "an historical" a bunch of miseducated stuffed shirts? Maybe they are where you come from—and maybe they aren't where I come from. And maybe we're both wrong. But nothing that has come up in this discussion can provide the basis of any sort of advice the MoS could give. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:09, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Well, since my view is that the MoS should continue to say nothing about this, that works for me. --Trovatore (talk) 04:09, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
If you want an example of how this has changed over time, consider "humble". In the 1662 Prayer Book, it's always preceded by "an" and was clearly pronounced "umble". But Dickens uses Uriah Heep's use of "'umble" as a negative marker. In the 1960s and 1970s, older academic historians at Cambridge University almost universally pronounced the name of their discipline as "istory", but few younger people did, and I didn't and don't. What's annoying to a pedant (which I admit to being) is to hear people read "an humble" with the "h" pronounced.
More seriously, this is a complex issue, with differences in usage between and within ENGVARs, which is all the MoS could usefully say. Where possible it's better to avoid "a/an" before words with different contemporary pronunciations – "a/an" before "herb", "herbaceous", etc. cause perennial* edit wars in plant articles. (* pun intended.) Peter coxhead (talk) 23:00, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
In Australia (and probably New Zealand), we pronounce the h and hence we nearly always say and write 'a historic'. However, since we get so much TV, movies, magazines, internet-blather, etc from the US and UK, we barely notice when somebody says or writes 'an historic'.  Stepho  talk  23:23, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Use "a historic". The h-dropping from "historic" is just a matter of localised accent (it's not at all consistent even in England); we wouldn't permit "King 'Arold died on 'is 'orse with 'is 'awk in 'is 'and", either; WP is not written in eye dialect. "An h[something]" is reserved in writing for h words where the h is universally silent, as in "an honorable discharge".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:23, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
    • That might be how you want it to be, but it's really not how it is. The an+h appears plenty in writing. I don't have examples immediately at hand, but I'm sure they can be found. A calculus book of my dad's that I used to read as a kid had "an hyperbola", for example, which I thought was odd at the time which was why I noticed it. --Trovatore (talk) 03:27, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
      This isn't a discussion of how every single English speaker in the world has ever written something, it's about encyclopedic writing standards on Wikipedia. WP is not written in eye-dialect. The fact that something things in the world are written that way has nothing to do with how WP is written.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:09, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
      • Well, you haven't given any evidence that this spelling is "eye dialect". Look, I don't particularly approve of it either, but that's not really the point. There are plenty of uses in high-quality formal writing. --Trovatore (talk) 09:13, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

I was taught to use "an" before vowels. "h" (and one other I think but it escapes me ATM). The link [www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/an_or_a.htm] says "an" before a vowel sound. It is how we speak, if not how we write. So, "an honour" but "a history"? Regards, Cinderella157 (talk) 14:52, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

I was taught the opposite in Australia in the 1970s. Australians pronounce the 'h' in 'history', therefore we aren't trying to join an 'a' and an 'i', therefore we say and write 'a history'. That's the point of this discussion: different regions (and possibly different generations) have different grammar and pronunciation rules, so there is no universal rule to cover everybody.  Stepho  talk  12:05, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

No one said it's unknown, it's just a minority usage (and a largely obsolete one, even in British news, e.g. there's about a 1:500 usage ratio of "an horrible" [1] to "a horrible" [2] in The Guardian, and 1 to 300 [3][4] in The Economist); when it is used, it's often in quotations of speech and in signed editorials (i.e., reflecting a personal style, not the publication's voice). So, we wouldn't use it absent a really compelling reason to do so, and there are more compelling ones to not, outside of direct quotations.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:36, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, but this is utter rubbish. It's not obsolete in the slightest. That smacks of a somewhat arrogant "I don't use it, so it must be obsolete". Well, you might not, but many people do. And it's not "eye dialect". It's standard usage for many with standard (not localised) British English accents. Of course "an horrible" is (and hence would usually actually be written as "an 'orrible"), but nobody except you has mentioned this. "An hotel" and "an historic", however, are used by many, many people with standard accents; they're not in the least incorrect, obsolete or eye dialect. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:55, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
WP:KETTLE. You're not in a position to make an argument that someone's engaging in WP:ILIKEIT / WP:IKNOWIT when they've presented evidence of a one-to-hundreds usage ratio against "an" – including in the very dialect (British) your asserting its alleged correctness and currency, and you're presenting nothing but your preference and your unsourced belief in a "standard" of usage and a "standard" accent. What standards? Who issued them? Please cite them in detail. LOL. There's no such thing as a standard in English. (Even languages that do have them, like French, find the standardization attempts widely ignored; language just doesn't work that way).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:42, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
Hardly. I've said it's commonly used and should be left alone if it is used. You've said it shouldn't be used. I'm not saying either I like it or I don't like it. I'm saying leave it alone and let editors use it if they choose to do so. You're alleging it's obsolete, with absolutely no evidence apart from your own belief. I'm saying it's not, with the "evidence" that I and many people I know and hear use it daily. I'm not trying to force you to use it. You, however, are trying to force me not to! Have you not heard of Received Pronunciation then? I shall quote from our article: Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent of Standard English in the United Kingdom and is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the south of England", although it can be heard from native speakers throughout England and Wales. Hmm, looks like there is a standard then! Or at least, that totally unreliable source the OED thinks there is. I think maybe you're getting confused between French attempts to impose a standard language and the term "Standard English", which is most definitely commonly used in the UK, but doesn't hold any implication of trying to impose a standard language; it just means the accent and usage that is considered to be the commonest throughout the country and which is therefore the accent and usage that people most often associate with English people (for example, it's the version of English that actors usually learn at British drama schools, even if they don't already speak it, to prepare them for the widest range of roles). You also seem unable to differentiate between "an hotel" and "an historic" (commonly used in both written and spoken standard British English) and "an horrible" (never used except in some spoken dialects). So, I shall reiterate: Nobody is saying we should write "an horrible" because nobody does that. Okay? So I have no idea why you think your "hundreds to one" comment is at all relevant to this discussion. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:41, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
The ratio I see on Google Ngrams is more like 9:5 in British English [5] and 3:1 in American English [6]. But the arguments about "h" dropping miss part of the point. The rule about "using 'an' before a vowel sound" was often accompanied by a second rule about words like 'historic' that begin with a pronounced h and an unstressed syllable. So even if the 'h' is not dropped, "an historic" fits the second rule, although "an history" doesn't. So the 3:1 ratio in American English is not a sign that 25% of American writers drop the h in "historic" - it means that the presence or absence of a pronounced h is not the only factor in the choice of article. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:13, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
  • I !vote for use a historic as Wikipedia is not spoken but read, standardization is good, and standard grammar uses "an" only when the next sounded letter is a vowel, and regardless of how one pronounces it, "historic" starts with a consonant when looking at it in print; SMcCandlish said this better than me. People who pronounce the h in "an historic" sound exactly like nails on a chalkboard to me, as the reporters on CBC Radio seem inclined to do, as they also do when emphasizing the first syllable in "harassment". But these are rants, not comments applicable to a written style guide. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:27, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
  • "An historic" etc. is perfectly fine. Carl's statistical evidence is much appreciated. We don't need testimony from all accents (or commentary on how something sounds to them)--there's plenty of "an" usage in various Englishes, written and spoken. The MOS is already dictatorial enough and we don't need to add to it, certainly not on grounds of taste or linguistic favoritism. Drmies (talk) 16:38, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

How to determine if "incident" should be capitalized?

There have been some moves recently between capitalized/lowercased "incident" (Honnō-ji Incident,[7][8] Jōwa incident[9][10]) and would like to get some clarification on when "incident" should be capitalized. There is a discussion with limited participants at Talk:Honnō-ji Incident#Move. Some questions that arose:

  • When and under what circustances can "XXX incident" be considered a proper noun?
  • Does the term used in the source language affect whether "incident" would be capitalized?
  • Does the styling of the "incident" in RSes affect whether we capitalize it here?

I assume these questions are not limited to Japanese topics, so I bring it up here. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:09, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

  • I haven't taken a hard stance on capitalization, but I do think it should be consistent—either capitalize or lowercase consistently. You can see my arguments at Talk:Honnō-ji Incident#Move. I lean towards lowercasing, as that seems to be the way Wikipedia leans—we consistently lowercase XXX dynasty and YYY period titles, which are as much proper nouns as XXX incident titles.
    I see no value in leaving it to RMs—it leads to unpredictable titles and the instability of constant moves back and forth over hairsplitting differences. Editors' time could be used better. Also, this can result in awkward, broken-looking text such as "General Turkey was involved in the XXX Incident in 1937, which led to the YYY incident the following year." Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:09, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
note... we had a similar discussion many years ago about the capitalization of the word “massacre”... what we came up with was that it depended on the sourcing... it is capitalized in names such as “Boston Massacre” and not capitalized in descriptive situations. In other words... if historians routinely NAMED the event “the XXX Massacre” (or in this case “the XXX Incident”) then we capitalized, but in other situations... no. Blueboar (talk) 23:41, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
A situation: Journal A, B, and C have a style guide requiring capitalization, while Journal D, E, and F require lowercasing—XXX Incident appears in Journal A, B, C, and F, while YYY incident appears in Journal B, D, E, and F. We capitalize or not based on which journals happened to have printed articles on the incident? We end up with the situation I described above, where one is capitalized and the other not—is this what we want? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:01, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
As much as I hate adding new rules, you've pretty well convinced me that MOS:CAPS should address this. Hopefully we can do it without making a rule specifically for "incident". See my comments below for a general rule of thumb that reasonably follows the precedents that we've set already. Curly, would you object if I move this to WT:MOSCAPS? If we're going to propose a new rule about capitalization, or even a consolidation of existing rules, that would be the place where the most interested parties would see it. —Ben Kovitz (talk) 03:03, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
I wouldn't mind. I was under the impression that MoS discussions were supposed to be centralized here (I thought there had been some discussion about it). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:29, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
OK, I'll wait one more day before moving it, to see if anyone can provide a link to that discussion or its conclusion. (I looked briefly, here and on WT:MOSCAPS, and I didn't see anything.) —Ben Kovitz (talk) 18:59, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

The MOS has an entire page devoted to capitalization. It doesn't specifically render a decision about "incident", but I think it's pretty clear that we favor lower case for everything except proper names. Perhaps this could be clarified. It does say to choose lower case unless "a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources" capitalize. So, Gulf of Tonkin incident is how we normally do it. "Gulf of Tonkin" is a proper name; "incident" isn't. —Ben Kovitz (talk) 00:38, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

You have to do it the same way everything in English works: by precedent. But here's a simple rule of thumb (not a true rule, as it can be overridden by precedents in specific cases): if there's a name of a person or place combined with "incident", then that person's or place's name gets capitalized but "incident" doesn't. You can think of "incident" as a common noun being modified by a proper noun. (Yes, I know that this explanation doesn't run very deep, since words like "gulf" and "lake" are common nouns, too. So let's not just not dig there unless we really need to.) Since Honnō-ji is the name of a place, it's a proper noun modifying "incident". You still need to check the sources, though. When I take a quick look at Google Books, I find (in the body of texts, not titles of books and articles) "Honno-ji Incident", "Honno-ji incident", "Honnoji Incident", and "the Incident at Honnoji". If you put "incident" first, then it definitely gets capitalized. But I don't see any clear preference in the sources. "Honno-ji incident" seems to be the most common. So, I'd say that "Honnō-ji incident" wins, especially given the MOS's preference for lower case. Does that help? —Ben Kovitz (talk) 02:57, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Well, the wording of the article title has already settled on "honnō-ji incident". What hasn't been settled is the capitalization, as you can see from the moves and reverts. By relying on "precedent" (especially with subjects not often discussed in English) we'll end up with a hodge-podge, as in the ABCDEF example I've given above. The "rule of thumb" does us no good if it's not explicit in the guidelines—as you can see, Dekimasu has a different "rule of thumb" with different reasoning behind it. Do we want a thumb war? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 08:51, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
At the risk of repeating myself, a few points on this: 1) ”Incident,” unlike, say, “bombing,” is fundamentally not descriptive; further, when part of the proper name of an event, it does not describe “an incident called X,” but rather “an incident called the X Incident.” For example, calling the Mukden Incident “Mukden” or the Gunpowder Incident “Gunpowder” would not convey what you were talking about. The set is necessary in order to convey the intended meaning. This is probably true of most “incidents.” I have trouble agreeing that "You can think of 'incident' as a common noun being modified by a proper noun." 2) I think it's important to point out that whether or not there is a single term for something is not a determining factor in whether the names for it are proper nouns (World War II, Second World War; Willam, Bill). 3) Whether something attaches to a word that can be a common noun has little, if anything, to do with whether the end of the name is acting as a common noun. In addition to “Gulf” or “Lake” in your example, we could pull up any number examples from all walks of life: United States Senate, May Day, Spanish Inquisition, Nanking Massacre, Doosan Bears, etc. 4) This proves Curly Turkey's point that rules of thumb only go so far. I never intended to use only my own, but if the result is to rely upon reliable sources in each individual instance, then I have to say we are back to WP:RM and local consensus. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that. Dekimasuよ! 09:03, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
There is something inherently wrong it—constant title moves back and forth, unpredictability for editors writing text (so they have to check every link before they link it), inconsistency in running text, meaning lots of good-faith "fixes" and reverts, lost time and effort over RMs, amongst the other reasons I've brought up. There's basically nothing right with it. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:03, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Instability sounds like the normal state of things on Wikipedia, and much in line with its dialectical philosophy. In either event, the assumption that it is acceptable to revert bold moves and reinstate the status quo should not go anywhere anytime soon. And when that happens, I have faith in RMs to create consensus for titles. I spend much of my time at Wikipedia around WP:RM, and don't consider the time people spend there to be wasted. Dekimasuよ! 20:04, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Two small points to make here: (1) see Proper noun which covers proper nouns, proper names and noun phrases; and (2) other people's style guides are useful for inspiration but are not WP's style guide, this is. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 10:08, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Dekimasu, those are some excellent examples. Your point is well taken. I think the current MOS:CAPS suggests that all those should be capitalized and "incident" in "Honnō-ji incident" should not, but it's not written clearly enough to prevent the back-and-forth editing, WP:RMs, textual inconsistencies, etc. that Curly brings up. Hopefully we can fix this without too much trouble. We could also provide some advice about how to settle this sort of question efficiently and prevent arguments from restarting. —Ben Kovitz (talk) 19:29, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Since it seems like it might be necessary, I'll write a little about zeroing in on “incidents.” Not that I think it’s particularly helpful for the MOS, but there is something in particular different about these events from a good deal of what's being discussed here. Wars and battles and revolutions tend to be capitalized, correct? “Incidents” in the cases I have been concerned with usually refer to military conflicts or coups: Xuanwu Gate Incident, Mukden Incident, February 26 Incident, Fashoda Incident, Memali Incident, Auspicious Incident, High Treason Incident. I am not at all concerned with trying to add caps to incidents named after someone getting kicked off an airplane or arrested for DUI (or for that matter, at all trying to argue that the animal attached to a breed name should be in caps). But there is a significant number of articles about this type of “incident” that appear to be proper nouns, based on either the article at proper noun (which notes that major manuals of style are often inconsistent on the point) or on usage in reliable sources. I’d be happy if these articles simply aren’t de-capped without evidence based upon blanket application of an interpretation of something that’s not laid out explicitly in the MOS. I certainly do not intend to go around adding caps to things that are at stable lowercase titles. Perhaps there is a set of words relating to historical events that is worthy of special mention as deserving of further consideration before a change. Dekimasuよ! 19:57, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Arguably the Incident on King Street (that is, the [in]famous incident on King Street, Boston, in 1770, not the incident on King Street, Charleston, in 2017). --Boson (talk) 11:40, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Lower case, except in the odd case that RS do in fact consistently capitalize it almost all the time. There may be no such case. This is not a new or special capitalization question; it's the same standard we apply to everything.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:57, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment In my experience the majority of X no Hens and X Jikens in Japanese history are usually referred to as "X Incident" (capitalized) in English RSes, or are referred to with a different word entirely like "Battle" or "Rebellion", and those are capitalized. The most famous one of these in modern history is probably the "Nanking Incident", which is usually capitalized in those rare cases where non-Japanese sources refer to it as an "Incident" rather than a "Massacre". (There was also another Nanking Incident, but that is almost certainly a failure of titling, since the Japanese euphemistic name for the massacre in 1937-1938 is much better-known than the minor incident ten years earlier. Anyway, the earlier one appears to have significantly less to do with Japan and also currently capitalizes.) I don't have strong feelings on the matter either way, but I think saying "Well, in the few cases where we have a lot of English RSes, they overwhelmingly capitalize, so we should capitalize those, but we should not capitalize where there are not as many English sources and proportionally more don't capitalize" is silly and will necessarily lead to inconsistencies. Cover them all together (and then maybe where other names using "Battle", etc. are more common, use those, but still count the sources that say "Incident" or "incident"). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:31, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Extended discussion

Inserting non-arbitrary break here because this is mostly lengthy meta-discussion about how to decide such things.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:14, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Japan-related stuff isn't a special case. This is no different from any other kind of "incident". It is not possible to have 100% consistency, because qualitatively different kinds of conformance are in direct conflict with each other. Thus various things in English are capitalized (here and in other writing), or are not, based on the overall convention (in our terms: what the majority of reliable sources do) for the exact topic in question, not based on what word is used. While it would be nice and convenient if every conceivable thing that had a word like "incident", "war", or "battle" in our article title were either capitalized or not capitalized, that would be an artificial, WP:OR consistency, in direct conflict with more important principles, the main one of which is the application of WP:V and WP:RS filters to WP:MOS: WP does not capitalize (or otherwise stylize) unless the vast majority of independent, general-audience RS do so for the exact topic (not vague category) in question.

In this particular case, I agree that "incident" naming is wrong in both cases. A WP:COMMONNAME analysis seems to have arrived at Nanking Massacre (whether that should be "Nanking massacre" is another question, but it seems unlikely). A COMMONNAME analysis for what is present at Nanking Incident does not appear to have been performed, and it's more likely that whatever term is applied would be lower-case, because the sources are even less consistent in how they refer to it, and it's generally descriptive (cf. the difference between American Civil War, a term used (and capitalized) rather consistently in sources, and Basque conflict, just one of numerous descriptive terms used inconsistently with regard to it (it's basically a WP:DESCRIPTDIS, not a proper noun phrase; see also the difference between Arab Spring, an evocative proper name consistently used and capitalized, and African-American civil rights movement (1954–1968), a descriptive appellation that WP made up, and which has many names (generally ambiguous ones) that are closer to proper names (most commonly "the Civil Rights Movement", which only makes sense in particular contexts, since there have been a great many civil rights movements), and note that Arab Spring synonym Arab revolutions is a descriptive label not a proper name, and not capitalized.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:20, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Note: there's been discussion about whether a different title or romanization would be appropriate for Nanking Massacre, as sources are thoroughly inconsistent, but I can find no discussion of capitalization in the article's talkpage archives. An NGRAM shows about a quarter of sources using the lowercase. "Nanjing Incident" is not one of the titles that's been considered, as it's inherently non-neutral (though that might not be obvious if you haven't read up on the subject). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:52, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
Well, a 3/4 majority is fairly conclusive to me... historians routinely use the word massacre as part of a proper name for the event (like”Boston Massacre”)... so capitalize “Massacre”. As for using “incident”... that is rarely used by historians... but when they do, they do so not as a name but descriptively. We can tell by the fact that NGRAMS shows almost NO hits on “Nanjing Incident”. Blueboar (talk) 12:24, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
Blueboar: "a 3/4 majority is fairly conclusive to me": This is an arguement that comes up fairly frequently, and has two problems: (a) where is the line drawn? 2/3? 51% And what happens when the percentage falls below this threshold? (b) it doesn't address the ABCDEF example I gave above, which results in article text that looks "broken". (a) + (b) If the threshold were, say, 2/3, then it would take a single article from a "competing" journal in the ABCDEF case to mess things up.
Obviously, I think that's a silly way to determine capitalization. We should have a simple, easy-to-follow rule, and exceptions should be truly exceptional. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:24, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
Yes, it would be nice if reality has simple and easy to follow rules... unfortunately, it doesn’t. Blueboar (talk) 23:36, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
Blueboar: It's as if you didn't actually read what I wrote. Let's turn this around—in what way does Wikipedia benefit from not having such a simple, easy-to-follow rule? Of course, we're talking about this specific, concrete case. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:11, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
Readers who are used to seeing a word capitalized in the real world (ie in the majority of sources) will be surprised to not see it capitalized on Wikipedia (and vice versa). Wikipedia is not the place to “right great wrongs”... even when those “wrongs” involve style. Wikipedia should reflect the world outside Wikipedia... as messy as that may be. Blueboar (talk) 00:34, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
Blueboar: We're not talking about cases where it is consistently capitalized—not to be rude, but, seriously, have you read any of the discussion before responding? Readers are certianly not used to reading "General Turkey was involved in the XXX Incident in 1937, which led to the YYY incident the following year."—or can you cite real-world examples where sources consistently do this? Given that you're concerned that we should "reflect the world outside Wikipedia". Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:41, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps this is a good place to break in and point out that as far as I can tell the Honnō-ji Incident (let alone the Manchurian Incident or High Treason Incident or Auspicious Incident, a few examples I listed above) is mostly capitalized. (We went through the fact that there are a variety of translations, of course, but:) Here are the top hits on Google Books for "Honnoji Incident": a capitalized LOC subject heading, capitalized in Columbia Chronologies of Asian History and Culture, capitalized in Mary Elizabeth Berry's Hideyoshi, capitalized in The Samurai of Japan, capitalized in Samurai War Stories: Teachings and Tales of Samurai Warfare, capitalized in The Hutchinson Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Warfare, capitalized in Monumenta Nipponica, capitalized in Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, capitalized in Treatise on Epistolary Style, lowercase in Compendium catholicae veritatis, capitalized in Journal of Cultural Science, capitalized in The East. Also caps in 6 out of 8 on Google Scholar. For Manchurian Incident, 23 out of the first 30 in caps, mostly from well-respected sources like Louise Young's Japan's Total Empire and Sources of Japanese Tradition. This was a couple of minutes of searching I probably should have done earlier, but are you getting different results? Dekimasuよ! 05:37, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
It may be a case that 本能寺の変 is one of those "exceptional exceptions" I was talking about (or not, if the default were to capitalize), but we're not talking about a single article here, but general principles. I'd like someone to give a straight answer to my question about who is supposed to benefit from having text like "General Turkey was involved in the XXX Incident in 1937, which led to the YYY incident the following year." Do any of our sources do this? Do any style guides recommend it? If not, why would we do something so bizarre? Especially when Blueboar tells us our style should "reflect the world outside Wikipedia". Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:13, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
When this sort of formulation exists it is not necessarily incorrect. Style guides can allow like items to be styled differently based upon circumstances. For example, AMA says not to capitalize proper nouns in the plural, so you could have "General Turkey sailed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but he has never crossed the Indian Ocean." Or many style guides would say "Last year he was ten, but now he is 11," or spell out only numbers at the start of sentences. Or we might have "Leaves of Grass was written before Quelques-uns des mots qui jusqu'ici m'étaient mystérieusement interdits." Dekimasuよ! 07:20, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
None of those parallel the example I've given, do they? We don't talk of the "Pacific Ocean" and the "Atlantic ocean". My question again: who benefits? Aside from those who thrive on splitting hairs and manipulating NGRAMs at RMs? And the moves and moves back and moves back—I count seven moves at Honnō-ji Incident alone. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 08:58, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
There aren't always enough sources for a meaningful analysis. E.g. a Google Ngrams search on "the Honnoji Incident,the Honnoji incident,the Honnō-ji Incident,the Honnō-ji incident" produces no results at all [11]. And we're mix-and-matching evocative proper names like "the High Treason Incident" and "the Auspicious Incident" with simple descriptive appellations like "the Honnō-ji [or Honnoji] incident" and "the Manchurian incident" (it's the same as the difference between Grand Central Terminal and Olympic Station – evocative names – and Van Ness station (the station at Van Ness and Market) and the Daly City – Richmond line (the line between those two cities) – descriptive appellations.

There's nothing inherently problematic about writing "He started his transportation career at Van Ness station in San Francisco, and later became the superintendant at Grand Central Terminal in New York City." A refrain of "but it's not consistent!" is basically meaningless, because there's a conflict of qualitatively different kinds of consistency, as with some other threads ongoing on this page. The desire to be consistent in the treatment of all station names in China or all Japanese "incidents" is at war with the desire to be consistent in the treatment of proper names versus descriptive labels, and the latter kind of consistency is much more important. Avoiding a construction like "General Turkey was involved in the XXX Incident in 1937, which led to the YYY incident the following year" is just a matter of competent writing, like using piped links, and not treating descriptive terms as proper names (e.g., there's no reason to use [[YYY incident]] when something else, e.g. [[YYY incident|resumed hostilities in YYY]] will do the job (and doing it that way often provides more context; a litany of "incidents" without an indication whether they were wars or scandals isn't useful to the reader).

Moving on, "23 out of the first 30 in caps" isn't consistent capitalization in RS, it's just a majority, and looks to be a WP:Specialized style fallacy (i.e., it's a style favored by writers in a particular discipline for particular journals, and WP doesn't follow their house style, otherwise we'd be capitalizing hundreds of thousands of things we do not capitalize, just to mimic the style of specialists writing for other specialists). As with previous discussions, e.g. of Japanese and Chinese transit stations and rail lines, we're also dealing with English-language approximations of names and descriptive terms that are not in English in the first place, so claims of proper name status have to be based on the character of the terms (non-descriptive or descriptive?), not on what a tiny number Ωof sources are doing, since they're almost entirely clustered in a very narrow style avenue that conflicts with WP style. By the same reasoning, we do not mimic the bombastic style of rock journalism when writing about a band, even if 100% of sources we have about the band are rock journalism and written in that style. We probably should not be using these "incident" euphemisms in the first place, per WP:NPOV, unless the sources overwhelmingly prefer a particular such "incident" name for a particular case, and there are more than just a handful of English-language sources for that case.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:43, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

SMcCandlish: I intended the "General Turkey" example to link to two qualitatively similar "incidents" that had arbitrarily been capitalized or lowercased, which is what we have with (at least) Japanese articles right now. I've copyedited a lot of articles on Japanese historical figures, and this keeps coming up. I have to keep checking the articles for capitalization, but it does little good because they keep getting moved (Honnō-ji Incident at least seven times).
Re: piping—are you saying (or is the MoS) that we should decide on whatever capitalization standard for "incidents" mentioned in an article? That they could all be capitalized in one article, and the same "incidents" all lowercased in another?
Re: "evocative names": you can see there's disagreement over what sort of names fit this bill. I doubt Dekimasu believes they're making these moves in violation of the guidelines. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:52, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
I have made only two moves, both reversions reinstating the status quo. I'd be just as happy as you to see some sort of guideline if one were possible, since some editors have a lot more energy than me and preemptively change a large number of titles to their preferred style. Dekimasuよ! 22:25, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

I understood the point of the General Turkey example. Where something is a proper name, Foo Incident, and something else is descriptive labeling, Bazquux incident, and it's awkward to have them in series because of the differing capitalization, replace one with another description. Desire for consistency within the article isn't an excuse for down-casing proper names conventionally capitalized, or overcapitalizing things that are not proper names; that's an artificial pseudo-consistency, a mistake. E.g., we would not write "The Cure's Greatest Hits 2001 anthology contains twice as many tracks as their previous Greatest Hits release, Galore: The Singles (1997)"; the second instance of "greatest hits" is description, not a proper name (adjectival or otherwise).

I agree there's a lot of confusion on Wikipedia about what a proper name is. (There's some confusion even among academics in linguistics and philosophy.) The simplest, hybrid ling./phil. explanation is that if a name is not descriptive but figural (or an eponym) it's a proper name (Pacific Ocean, Van Ness Avenue); if it's descriptive (including of something else that's an eponym) then it's a not a proper name (Van Ness station, the station at Van Ness Avenue). There can be exceptions, which occur when virtually all RS agree to make them. E.g. the American Civil War is descriptive, but is treated as a proper name (aside from the now obsolete "War Between the States", it's pretty much the only name that conflict has); the Druze–Maronite conflict of 1860 is just a descriptive term among many. In the other direction, bottlenose dolphin is a figural name for a species (it doesn't literally have nose made out of a bottle), but near-universal convention is to not capitalize species names (capitalization of them is just the house style of certain academic publications, and is a common style in field guides, to make them easier to visually scan in a hurry).

The beliefs that "if it's a proper name it must be capitalized" and "if it's capitalized, it's a proper name" are wrongheaded myths (and patently circular reasoning). E.g., genus names are capitalized while species names are not, yet there's no difference between them but in degree. Works known by their incipits have these treated as proper names consistently in reliable sources (i.e., they are typically the only names the works have), yet it is is not conventional to capitalize them the same way as proper titles. Titles of published works are always capitalized, even when purely descriptive ("Model XB-2349 User Manual"). And so on. There is no one-to-one mapping between proper names or proper nouns (under any definition) and capitalization; there's just a conventionalized trend, with numerous exception, to capitalize proper names (and some but not adjectives derived from them) in English. Another example is that genres are not capitalized (by much of anyone), but global artistic movements tend to be, despite being another difference of degree; thus science fiction and jazz, but Art Nouveau and Classical.

Yes, this is "inconsistent" on one trivial level, but it's consistent on another, more important one (the categorical one). Over time, the trend in English, across almost all types of writing, is to capitalize less and less, and we should respect that real-world shift in the language (ongoing since the early nineteenth century at least, and greatly accelerated since the second half of the 20th). The MOS:CAPS default to use lower case unless less sources almost always capitalize something reflects that. I.e., any time there's a "should we capitalize 'the Bazquux [i|I]ncident'?" kind of question, assume lower case, and make people provide a truly compelling argument for capital letters.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:59, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

SMcCandlish: "I understood the point ... Where something is a proper name ... and something else is descriptive labeling"—then you haven't gotten the point, because this is not what's happening at all. If you went through a pseudorandom set of Japan-related XXX rebellion and YYY incident articles, you would not find a "categorical" consistency to their capitalization—you wouldn't even find stability at individual articles, as I've pointed out already. If this is something the MoS addresses, then it's obviously not getting across—neither Dekimasu nor Blueboar interpret it the way you do, do they? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:38, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
Well, this discussion wouldn't exist if everyone were already on the same page. I am (I thought obviously) arguing for an interpretation and application that's consistent with what we do otherwise, while some others are arguing for an artificial consistency based on what word is used (and by their reasoning, we'd have to capitalize everything ever described as a "something incident".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:14, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Well, I've taken to avoiding "correcting" the capitalization/non-capitalization of "incidents" and "rebellions" when I copyedit, because there's no obvious way to tell if they're ever "correct", and I can never tell when they're going to be moved. But seriously, are there sources that consistently do what happens in the "General Turkey" example? I don't believe I've ever seen such a thing. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:50, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Probably not, because writers will generally write around such things, and house styles will also more ruthlessly impose either LC or UC. WP's problem is that we're mostly building an aggregate, averaged style – and it maybe can't be any other way at least for the short term, because the editorship at present will rarely accept logic or clarity as a rationale, only "what do most of the RS do?" (This is a change, a shift that happened around 2014 or so.) When most of the RS call one thing the "Foo incident" and another thing the "Bazzquux Incident" (and they may be entirely different sets of sources) this causes a conflict we have to write around.

To address the underlying issue in more general terms: It's the price we pay for having style designed by committee, a committee that too often defer to a overall consistency on something topical in RS whether it makes sense or not (generally, or when inserted into WP's overall style system), and which is very frequently skewed toward an answer that doesn't make much sense, especially in cases when most of the RS on a particular thing are specialized sources written in a particular style for a narrow audience (academic, governmental, in-house organizational, news, entertainment, technical, legal, etc.). It injects unencyclopedic, conflicting style into our work, just to pander to tiny, vocal camps of foot-stompers. This RS-imitation approach does make sense when asking "should this trademark receive unusual stylization on WP?" (because other style guides do not provide us with lists of hundreds of thousands of trademarks and how to render them in text), but it's piss-poor for most other style questions. We should be basing our style on what other, non-news style guides say to do whenever possible, never on usage examples unless there is no other choice. There is no choice when it comes to trademarks, but this is not true of capitalization rules in general. It was a mistake to apply "count the RS" instead of "follow this algorithm" to capitalization. (But it's what we've got for now.)

When we throw this mimicry idea out the window and impose a consistent style because it makes the most sense for our readership (and it can take huge RfCs like WP:BIRDCON to do it), or because there is no dominant style in RS and we have to pick one arbitrarily (e.g. the five-letter rule for capitalizing prepositions in titles of works), or because it's demonstrably better for encyclopedic writing (e.g. the guarantee against misquoting provided by logical quotation), or because usage has changed (e.g. losing the comma in front of Jr./Sr.), and so on, then we usually get more serviceable rules, a more recognizable and consistent house style that people accept as "just how it's done here", instead of topic-by-topic squabbling over style source quality, whose sourcing stats aren't skewed, complaints that we're not writing something the way astrophysicists or Microsoft or the government of Australia write it, and all the other typical wastes of time around here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:07, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Okay, so, pragmatically, what do I do? It sounds like I should continue to ignore "incidents" and "rebellions" when copyediting because there's no agreement that the capitalization of these article titles will ever be reasonably stable. And if an "incident" happens to be capitalized at one point in the article and not ina another (happens a lot), I have no reason to settle on one over the other, for the same reasons. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:12, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Yup... sometimes the most pragmatic attitude is to simply accept that WP (and English in general) is inconsistent. Blueboar (talk) 23:26, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
English is nowhere inconsisent in this manner. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:30, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
I think what I would do is presume lower case, but see if a particular thing, with an actual article we link to, is consitently capitalized in sources. For one that's not, in an article also linking to one that is, I would see if the non-proper-name one can be described in other terms to avoid the inconsistent treatment. If a "Foobar Incident" and a "Bazquux incident" are not juxtaposed in the article, but separated by a lots of text, I simply wouldn't worry about it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:56, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
I'm not about to interrupt my copyediting to hunt up the likely capitalization of these article titles—that could happen dozens of times a day and only end up being contradicted by talk-page consensus in the end (assuming it ends, rather than endlessly going back and forth). I'm just going to ignore it until the MoS can get its shit together. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 08:35, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Can we clarify what does and does not constitute 'strong national ties'?

  • 1. Quite a long time ago I spent quite a lot of time in a fruitless dispute over whether British or American English should be used in an American-English article about a German warship that only ever fought the British, during which it became clear that there had been other such disputes about British-English articles about Japanese warships that only ever fought the Americans. Eventually the original language was kept, largely through exhaustion, as well as through claims that I later suspected, perhaps wrongly, were at least arguably contrary to WP:LOCALCONSENSUS.
  • 2. I suspect there have been similar disputes involving other kinds of conflicts and other kinds of ties. For example should articles about Mexico be in American English because of the ties arising from America and Mexico being neighbours, and similarly for Britain and its non-English-speaking European neighbours, and so on?
  • 3. Although I used to think the opposite, I now tend to think that keeping the original language variety is usually best from our point of view as editors (even though in theory it's arguably wrong from the point of view of most readers, but even that's debatable as arguably most of our readers are American and prefer American English in all circumstances).
  • 4. And I suspect future disputes might be avoided if this were spelled out more clearly in MOS:TIES, along with some examples of what does NOT constitute strong national ties.
  • 5. But I don't want to try to do anything about it until I get some feedback from other editors (and possibly not even then, especially if it seems likely to be controversial, as there may not be much point in having a long argument now just on the off-chance that it might prevent some arguments in future).
  • 6. Regards, Tlhslobus (talk) 08:15, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
I think it's futile to try to completely nail this down. I will say that my opinion is that ties need to be clear. If you have to stretch a point to establish national ties, then don't do it — fall back to WP:RETAIN.
Examples of clear ties: A bio of a person who is/was a citizen of an English-speaking country, or spent most of his/her life in such a country or in its service. A geographic location in an English-speaking country. A company based in an English-speaking country. An aspect of the law or culture of a specific English-speaking country. An event carried out by citizens of a particular English-speaking country (say, the Moon landing).
Unclear ties: A person who is/was a citizen of both the UK and the US, or a citizen of one but spent most of his/her life in the other. A legal concept that applies to both English and American law. A scientific discovery that happened to be made by citizens of one country (science has no nationality). Anything with strong ties to a non-English-speaking country, even if one English variety is more prevalent there (so no automatic preference for British English in France, say).
These are just a few examples that come to mind; I'm not proposing codifying them anywhere, and it could be that you'd come up with specific cases that I would judge differently from what I've written above. But hopefully it clarifies what I mean. --Trovatore (talk) 09:19, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
That's right. If the ties are not straightforward—if there is any room for argument—then TIES does not apply, and you are in the realm of RETAIN. TIES is meant to avoid disputes, never to be used as fodder for them. Unfortunately there are many editors who use guidelines such as TIES and WP:COMMONNAME to stir the pot. These guidelines should have explicit wording that they apply only when their application is virtually beyond dispute (Toronto in CanEng, Ringo Starr as COMMONNAME). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:07, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
It's left open to editorial discretion for a reason.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:07, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
Good point, SMcCandlish. One area of concern that I have is I don't want to risk forcing the retention of problematic language varieties (for instance ones which very few editors are familiar with, or perhaps where it's debatable whether a 'standard' variety even exists - I'm Irish and I've lived most of my life in Ireland, but I'm not too sure what is and is not to be deemed part of 'standard' Hiberno-English, though admittedly this has never stopped me editing articles about Ireland that are presumably all supposed to be written in the afore-mentioned 'standard' Hiberno-English). As I'm still looking for editors' feedback, if it's not too much trouble (if it is, please don't bother) can you perhaps suggest some other reasons why editorial discretion might be wanted, perhaps especially in the context of whether it would be a bad idea to give a few guidelines and/or examples of what should usually not be deemed a strong national tie? (I also suspect there's a case for having different recommendations for newly-created or planned articles compared to already existing articles, such as recommending that a new article about a German ship that only fought the British should ideally be in some variety of British English, but that existing such articles should stay as they are, though that is perhaps a separate issue, and perhaps also not worth worrying about)Tlhslobus (talk) 08:45, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
My view is that "only fought the British" is too tenuous a connection to be worthy of consideration. I would not support adding any recommendation that such thin reeds be used to decide the variety even for new articles. --Trovatore (talk) 08:50, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
Fair enough, Trovatore, and thanks for all your useful feedback. But would you then support mentioning it as an example of something that should NOT (or perhaps 'usually not') be considered a strong national tie? Tlhslobus (talk) 08:58, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
I would. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 09:30, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for all your useful feedback, Curly "JFC" Turkey.Tlhslobus (talk) 21:57, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
I concur with "TIES is meant to avoid disputes, never to be used as fodder for them." Yet it's more and more being used to feed than prevent dispute. See subthread below for picking up where we left off in fixing that. PS: I also agree that "a German ship that only fought the British should ideally be in some variety of British English" is too tenuous a connection, and it's a RETAIN matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:39, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, SMcCandlish, and thanks for all your other useful feedback. But, as I already asked Trovatore, would you then support mentioning it as an example of something that should NOT (or perhaps 'usually not') be considered a strong national tie (or would you instead prefer to avoid doing so, perhaps per your above mentioned need to keep things flexible)? Tlhslobus (talk) 21:57, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
I don't feel strongly about it either way. Examples are often helpful, as long as people don't take them to be an exclusive list of cases/situations.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:14, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the useful feedback, SMcCandlish. I think I now have enough feedback to think about whether I want to make a preliminary proposed change or not (perhaps sometime in the next few days).Tlhslobus (talk) 01:17, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Revisiting the pointless profusion of ENGVAR templates

One issue – and we do need to qualify this – is that ENGVAR only applies to dialects that exist in a formal written register. That appears to mean American, Canadian, and "British" for certain. I've yet to see any credible evidence that Australian, New Zealand, Australian, South African, Irish, Indian, Hong Kong, etc., exist in the formal register distinctly enough from British English that they can be codified in a meaningful way that would affect how we write articles here. I.e., they're all Commonwealth English, and almost totally conformant, in formal writing, with the major British style guides, which are usually the only ones used as references in these countries. Most of them produce no reputably published style guides of their own. Australia does, kinda-sorta, but only a) one very infrequently updated government-published manual that is widely excoriated including by Australians, and b) one published by Cambridge (if I recall correctly) that is actually just a copy-paste of their British one with a handful of tweaks.

The notion that you can write articles in pidgin dialects like Jamaican and Philippine English is false. For some reason (namely blatantly nationalism) we have a large number of ENGVAR-related "This article is written in ..." assertion templates. A couple of years ago, these were mostly deprecated in an RfC here (a WP:TFD-preliminary discussion), but the cleanup effort got derailed after someone flat-out misrepresented the nature and intent of the RfC at WP:VPPOL and started an "anti-RfC" that stalemated the situation. We need to revisit that. I'm thinking we should probably end up with templates only for American, Canadian, and Commonwealth English.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:39, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Interesting viewpoint, though it's clearly contrary to MOS:TIES in its current ('consensus'?) form, as that currently gives the following examples:
Afrikaner (South African English)
American Civil War (American English)
Australian Defence Force (Australian English)
Christchurch (New Zealand English)
Great Fire of London (British English)
Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Pakistani English)
Mumbai (Indian English)
Vancouver (Canadian English)
Institutions of the European Union (British or Irish English)
Presumably after Brexit next year there will be demands that articles on the Institutions of the European Union will all have to be changed to Irish English per the above example. Incidentally I'm not at all sure that there are no proper published (or at least accessable on request) style guides for Irish English - I would think that 'registers' like The Irish Times and RTE have one each (and quite likely so do some other Irish media outlets), and, I would expect, so do Irish Government Information outlets (whose style guide(s) is/are possibly or probably obtainable under Ireland's Freedom of Information Act). And they need them for things like accents on words like Dail (needs an accent on the a) and RTE (needs an accent on the E) as well as writing Ireland rather than Irish Republic, Taoiseach rather than Prime Minister, Derry rather than Londonderry, Ireland and Britain rather than The British Isles, etc. And I would expect that English media in countries like India and Pakistan have similar guides to meet similar needs (such as writing Lok Sabha rather than Parliament in India, and Mumbai rather than Bombay, etc, and writing Qur'an rather than Quran or Koran in Pakistan) and so on ad infinitum. And it's not at all clear that British (which actually has English, Welsh, and Scottish 'standards' and 'registers', at least according to the relevant articles) and American English have any official style guides, as opposed to a plethora of often conflicting unofficial ones (almost as many as there are major media outlets, as most of these seem to have their own style guides). Tlhslobus (talk) 21:31, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
This just points out why I'm on the right track. Brexit and the EU have nothing to do with language and dialects thereof. This is all extraneous political nationalism.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:16, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
English is one of the official languages of the EU. If Britain were no longer a part of it, are you confident there'd be no claim to having EU-related articles moved to formal Irish English?—assuming there are significant differences that would affect the articles (I wouldn't know). This sounds like one of those edge cases ENGVAR maybe isn't prepared to deal with. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:24, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
There is no difference, that WP needs to care about, between formal written British and Irish English (it's a difference of accents and of colloquial vocabulary like gansey for what the British call a jumper and North Americans call a sweater). Articles on rockets, sea lions, Madagascar, or the Rape of Nanking written by a Irish person would not be distinguishable from ones written by native speakers from England, South Africa, Australia, or Hong Kong, but you would be able to tell if the writer were from the US or (maybe) Canada. We need to get rid of these divisive, politicized, WP:BATTLEGROUNDish templates and retain only those that identify solidly sourceable differences in overall form of English and the register in which WP employs it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:26, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Sorry, as I had already pointed out below, it's not simply accents and words like gansey, it's also about outlawing a fairly large (and sometimes surprising) list of expressions like British Isles and Irish Republic and words like Londonderry and Eire (my inclusion of Eire and Irish Republic are intended as instances of what may seem surprising to those unfamiliar with the issues), all of which are liable to cause nationalistic Battleground behaviour by both Irish and non-Irish editors in articles about the EU (and probably also in many EU documents after Brexit, always assuming they don't already do so before Brexit). It is a matter of opinion whether this is a difference 'that WP needs to care about', but the battleground behaviour by both sides is difficult to resolve and has thus been going on intermittently for decades or centuries outside WP (both linguistically and in literal battles, in both Ireland and, in modified form, everywhere else across the former British Empire such as India, Pakistan, South Africa, etc), and is thus liable to occur within WP whether WP cares about it or not. However WP can at least in theory try to minimize it by putting clear consensus guidelines and policies in our rules, though in practice I don't know whether that is what we are now wisely trying to put in place, or whether that is what we already have and are now unwisely in danger of tearing up (but the latter risk is increased if we are misinformed about the nature of the differences involved).Tlhslobus (talk) 13:28, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Given the current wording of MOS:TIES, I would expect attempts to slap Irish English templates on the EU articles even when no other change was needed at the time. I would also expect attempts to remove expressions like British Isles and words like Londonderry from any such EU articles in which they appear. Whether any such attempts would succeed is unclear. It is also unclear whether there is such a thing as formal Irish English (at least as far as most Wikipedians are concerned). My common sense and my experience tell me there is (even if I'm only consciously aware of a few of the details, and even if I suspect the differences are too small to constitute a proper dialect, as distinct from a mere linguistic variety). But my common sense and my experience are Original Research unless their conclusions are mentioned in Reliable Sources, and I'm not sure there are any such mentions. And even if there are such mentions it would still be open to argue that the EU itself continued to use British English, not Irish English (and there might even be Reliable Sources that said this), and that I-forget-where-else it says we're supposed to use the variety of English used by an international organisation in articles about it (which is yet another instance of a conflict between MOS:TIES and other rules elsewhere). Tlhslobus (talk) 01:12, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Quite likely it could also be argued that Malta is an EU member which has English (British and/or Commonwealth and/or Maltese variety?) as one of its official languages, which could either allow the retention of British English, or lead to a row over whether there was such a thing as formal Maltese English.Tlhslobus (talk) 02:00, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
You're probably right, SMcCandlish, that it's all political nationalism (including also the insistence on having both British and American English articles, but let's not get into that). But political nationalism is something we're stuck with in this world, in Wikipedia as elsewhere, so I rather doubt whether there's any such thing as a 'simple sensible fix' that can achieve consensus support - and if there is in fact such a fix I have no idea what it is.Tlhslobus (talk) 01:29, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
I'll outline one in an RfC below. We're stuck with a million kinds of PoV pushing in the real world that we dispense with on Wikipedia; there's no reason for this to be specially different.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:26, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Comment 1 - TLDNR (but the first bit). Comment 2 - Au Eng accepts some American spellings (per Macquarie dictionary). It is probably not too unlike Canadian Eng in that respect. An article can be written in either Br Eng or Am Eng or something that accepts the spelling of a particular word in either - so long as it is consistent. Perhaps the biggest difference in language is in "colloquial" words and terminologies and words - but this is otherwise covered by the MOS. The indirect issue is things like date formats, that might be defined by a "language". One could say, if it is written consistently (particular words spelt the same in the same context [and dates etc]), then keep it (them) the same. Regards Cinderella157 (talk) 15:09, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

There's long-standing consensus at WT:MOSNUM that WP:ENGVAR and WP:DATEVAR are not strongly tied to each other, and are separate guidelines for a reason. For example, articles on the US military use DMY dates, following military standards. This is another of those common-sense thing. No one needs to be told that, on average, US articles are going to use MDY dates and those written in non-North American English are likely to use DMY. It's actually permissible to write an article (or make one a non-stub) using British English and MDY dates; it's not really an ENGVAR matter. However, if you did this, it's likely that a consensus discussion on the talk page would favor changing the date format to DMY to match reader and editor expectations better. Remember that the *VAR guidelines are not laws, they're provisions that direct us to have consensus discussions rather than change certain things willy-nilly, and only after failure to come to consensus to default to what was done in the first major (non-stub) contribution. Ergo, it's very unlikely that DMY would survive in a BrEng article, rather likely that it would in a CanEng one, and virtually guaranteed that it would in an AmEng one unless the context (e.g. military) strongly suggested MDY – not because of any rules and "enforcing" them but because of WP:COMMONSENSE and WP:CONSENSUS.

PS: Whether an American spelling appears in an Australian dictionary is probably not very relevant; British spellings also appear in most American dictionaries, and vice versa. We'd need to see that the majority of Australian dictionaries favour an American versus British spelling. And even then this is no cause for annoying banner templates or other "Australian English" labeling; the existence of a consensus to prefer an American-leaning spelling over a British-leaning one, based on RS about usage, is sufficient to use the Americanized spelling in a article about an Australian topic, without any templated chest-beating.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:58, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

I am disappointed that you continue to push this, in the face of broad opposition. The points you make about Australian could apply equally to Canadian, and you have never properly justified why your proposal singles out Canadian for exceptional retention. Your use of the term non-American English betrays the cultural bias in your proposal. Your use of the term Commonwealth English is clearly inappropriate given that Canada is a leading member of the Commonwealth yet excluded from this template under your proposal. And you might wish to review your earlier post on date formats; you may have confused yourself regarding DMY and MDY? MapReader (talk) 06:27, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
MapReader: How familiar are you with CanEng? The reason CanEng othography is singled out is that it really is irreconcilable with either BrEng or AmEng. Can you give an example of formal AusEng orthography that couldn't be reconciled with BrEng orthography? I ask because I don't know, and you seem to suggest that CanEng articles could actually be written in Commonwealth orthography.
You haven't given an example yourself; the WP articles for both Canadian and Australian set out how these are mostly a mix of British and American spelling and vocabulary, each with some unique features. But I do not seek to downplay Canadian English, in the slightest - my point is simply that the proposal for "American", "Canadian" and "Other" ('Commonwealth' clearly being the wrong title) is being put forward from a perspective of North American bias that is inappapropriate for a global encyclopaedia. MapReader (talk) 07:10, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
MapReader: "You haven't given an example yourself"—"The driver was colourblind and, on the way to the theatre, drove the car over the curb when she failed to realize the traffic signal had turned red, resulting in a flat tire." This isn't just "acceptable" CanEng orthography—if the spelling were made more American or British, it would become unacceptible CanEng. "Colorblind"/"theater" and "kerb"/"tyre" are unacceptable in CanEng—the only acceptable alternate spelling is "realise" for "realize". This is what I mean when I say CanEng orthography is irreconcilable with either BrEng or AmEng orthography. Do you have an equivalent in AusEng orthography? SmC tells us that Tony1 says there isn't. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 07:35, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
I have no particular expertise in Australian to offer, but ISTM that it would be possible to construct such a sentence with different spellings from any of the dialects listed here where there are varying forms in use. Canadian is special but not uniquely special. Further, I see that this WP article cites the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language as stating that the principal branches or strands of English are British (Isles), North American, and Australasian. MapReader (talk) 07:58, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
MapReader: "... the Cambridge Encyclopedia of ..."—You seem to be forgetting that we're talking orthography. Spoken Canadian definitely falls sqaurely within "North American", and WP:COMMONALITY demands CanEng articles to default to vocabulary and grammatical constructions not limited to CanEng. It's strictly orthography that makes CanEng an exception at en.wp. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:31, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
To respond to MapReader's "How familiar ..." reply to my latest post, point-by-point since this has been separated by so much later material and the points are not closely related to each other:
  • "I am disappointed that you continue to push this" does't make sense. I didn't "continue to push" anything; I pointed out two clear facts: 1) ENGVAR and DATEVAR are not slaved to each other. 2) Apearance of a spelling in a dictionary doesn't mean anything; what matters is aggregate preference one of spelling over another in a majority of dictionaries written for a particular dialect.
  • "in the face of broad opposition" is a distortion; there's plenty of support here as well, and the opposition arguments are weak, mostly argument to emotion, and assertions without any backing.
  • "you have never properly justified why your proposal singles out Canadian for exceptional retention" – Patently false statement. I was quite explicit that Canadian English is the subject of multiple, reputably published style guides and dictionaries, published for several decades and based on search like nation-wide usage surveys and corpora built from Canadian publications. Meanwhile, Australian English seems to have only one notable dictionary and one notable style guide; the latter is just for governmentese and is widely criticized even by Australians (i.e., it is not actually a reliable source for anything other than what the .au government writes; it is the .au equivalent of the .us Government Printing Office Style Manual, another work no one follows but bureaucrats).
  • "The points you make about Australian could apply equally to Canadian" isn't true at all. Canadian English cannot be generally represented in either American or British/Commonwealth orthography; it's isn't one or the other with an occasional maybe-an-exception-according-to-one-dictionary; it's a wild blend of them, veering back and forth (but doing so in increasingly regular and codified patterns, which makes it a recognizably distinct written dialect, which Australian is not).
  • "Your use of the term Commonwealth English is clearly inappropriate given that Canada is a leading member of the Commonwealth yet excluded from this template under your proposal" – We've already been over this red herring; I'll quote my earlier response to this: "The term Commonwealth English wasn't invented by us, and does not mean "English exactly as spoken in every single Commonwealth of Nations country", it means English as generally used in most of them; it's a blanket term, and it could not be any other way, since even British English isn't one monolithic thing, but a widely ranging dialect continuum .... Whether the term, as one to use for an ENGVAR categorization and template, is 'perfect' or not is immaterial; it's close enough. It's a well-documented term, and the fact that Canada doesn't fit the pattern entirely isn't consequential." I.e., you're engaging in the fallacy of equivocation, trying to redefine the term on-the-fly to mean what you think it should mean, or what it would be convenient to you for it to mean, rather than what it usually connotes in the real world. CanEng is generally excluded from Commonwealth English by the actual meaning and usage of the term, though our stubby article doesn't go into it very much. But it doesn't matter anyway. The point of the thread isn't "use this term and force everyone to be happy with it", it's "stop abusing ENGVAR with templates that serve no purpose but anti-collaborative nationalism". We could use some other term, like "non-North American English", "world English", "international English", or "global English" (all RS-attested terms, and sometimes capitalized as "Global English", etc.). This is not an argument about a term, so please stop trying to turn it into one.
  • "you might wish to review your earlier post on date formats; you may have confused yourself regarding DMY and MDY" – Not sure what post you mean. My 18:58, 13 February 2018 (UTC) post uses DMY and MDY as intended. The point is that MDY ("February 14, 2018") is generally the default in North American writing, with exceptions like military topics, and DMY ("14 February 2018") is generally the default otherwise, but this is not because of ENGVAR rules, it's because common sense and consensus lead it there. Not everything is a matter of rule thumping, and the fact is significant that people with the misconception that date formatting is an ENGVAR matter and that DATEVAR isn't its own guideline (and that ENGVAR is some rule to push to start with when it is actually the if-consensus-discussion-has-failed last resort) tend to overlap with people who think that every spoken dialect deserves a template for "enforcement". It's entirely the wrong conceptualization of what MoS is for and how it works.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:51, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
That's a lot of characters to dismiss all of the arguments and evidence you don't like, including our own WP articles on varieties of English, try and muddy the water on the aspects of your proposal that dont work such as the terminology, skip over the key point that your proposal is being made from a partial North American rather than a global perspective, and still not notice that your DMYs and MDYs are all mixed up? ;) MapReader (talk) 11:00, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
Closing this RFC, consensus is to oppose the proposal. Fish+Karate 13:39, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Issue statement:
We have arrived at a bewildering profusion of ENGVAR-related templates, the only purpose of which seems to be advancing nationalistic viewpoints. For those not reading the discussion above this one, the short version is that in an encyclopedic, formal register, there is no meaningful difference between English, Scottish, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, African, Hong Kong, etc., varieties of English, only between Commonwealth English as a dialect continuum and the North American varieties (American English, and Canadian English which is a hybrid of American and British/Commonwealth). Commonwealth English is based on UK-published style guides; there are virtually no reliably published style manuals for Commonwealth dialects that are not produced in England in particular (by contrast, US and Canadian English are the subject of multiple mainstream style guides published in those countries).

Concrete proposal:

  • For WP purposes, we would just a {{Use Commonwealth English}} template with a {{Use European English}} redirect to it (since Ireland is not part of the Commonwealth at present). That will cover the full gamut of non-North American dialects of English following the style most often called "British".
  • We would retain {{Use American English}} and {{Use Canadian English}} to cover the North American written dialects. Canadian is essentially a hybrid of US and British, and there are multiple, reputably published style guides for both US and Canadian writing.
  • This would take care of the quiet, categorizing templates in Category:Use English templates; the big talk-page and editnotice banner equivalents (e.g. {{American English}}, etc.) in Category:Varieties of English templates would also be merged into a corresponding set of templates.
  • Categories used would also, naturally, be merged as needed.
  • MOS:ENGVAR and MOS:TIES would be clarified and shortened, no longer suggesting that things be written in Pakistani English, etc., which is essentially meaningless with regard to encyclopedic prose.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:36, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

A similar but weaker and more dispute-prone solution would be to retain all the "Jamaican English", "Scottish English", "Hong Kong English", etc. nonsense template names, and redirect them to Commonwealth English, with a category up-merge. This would still result in nationalism-inspired tagging, but maybe with reduced potential for actual edit-warring over style matters.

Rationale:
We already resolved to deal with this problem once, several years ago, only to have the RfC which concluded to deprecate and merge away most of these templates get stalemated by a counter-RfC that seriously misrepresented the original one. More than enough time has passed to revisit this and break the deadlock. We've permitted, by inaction, the hijacking and proliferation of linguistic templates, for jingoistic, nationalistic posturing which serves no interest but WP:NPOV violation. It's actually worse, in that politicized language forking (like that promulgated by Noah Webster, by the USSR forcing intentionally divergent forms of Cyrillic on subject populations in Asia, and by various machinations of a nationalistic character in the former Yugoslavia) is destructive, harming mutual intelligibility. No WMF project should be bent toward such an end, not even a little at a time with the best of alleged intentions.

Of more immediate concern are:

  1. Nationalistic conflicts at articles (e.g. re-branding all EU articles as "Irish English" or "Hiberno-English" after Brexit).
  2. Misuse of ENGVAR arguments to lace articles with colloquialisms instead of following WP:COMMONALITY.
  3. Assertion of dialects like Trinidadian and Sierra Leonean which have no formal register at all other than what's generally called Commonwealth or "British" English; this is being done just to stake a claim, and most of the profusion of big, annoying ENGVAR banners can be traced to a handful of singleminded editors tagging page after page despite lack of any dispute in evidence.
  4. Templates in Category:Varieties of English templates do not map onto those in Category:Use English templates; people have been randomly creating nationalistic templates without any regard for what they're for or whether they make sense (other than claim-staking) {{Sierra Leonean English}}? Seriously?

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:36, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Survey on ENGVAR template proposal

  • Support merging down to three templates: Commonwealth/British/etc., American, and Canadian. As the OP notes, formal style guides for English writing essentially recognize these three styles, and there does not exist a formal, written form of many forms of vernacular English which is meaningfully different from one of these three written forms. If there is, and someone can produce several, we may modify this to include those as a possibility, but absent that, the proposal makes sense. --Jayron32 13:34, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. It is unclear whether what is being proposed here is essentially that Commonwealth counties (other than Canada - so immediately there is a terminology problem) should follow British English - in which case this should be the proposal, presented honestly and transparently - or whether some sort of amalgam "Commonwealth English" - which doesn't exist anywhere - is being proposed to try and bundle all of the smaller differences in usage into a category that is distinct from American and Canadian (and what is so special about Canada anyway - it uses a mix of British and American constructions, plus some unique vocabulary, just as you'll find, with different elements, in Australia). And it would be a nonsense to have a set of categories for 'varieties of English' without one for its parent country. And even more of a nonsense to have to make changes to the vast library of British historical, geographical and cultural articles on WP to conform with some new non-existent variety of "Commonwealth" English, in instances where it differs from British usage. And we're going to keep the bits of the MOS that direct to following the particular styles of individual authors or organisations, in articles about them, yet deny a country the size of Australia its own linguistic nuances in all of the articles about that country? Really?? So an article about an Australian author or organisation can be written in Australian English, but not an article about Australia itself? Whoever proposed this hasn't given the implications much thought, ISTM, and whatever problem this solution is trying to solve would surely end up worse rather than better, if we try to implement it. MapReader (talk) 14:36, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
And, besides Australia, you might (per WP:WORLDWIDE (aka WP:BIAS), WP:CSB, and WP:WER (assuming we wish to retain editors from places like India), etc) have added a country the size of India, whose English-speaking population, estimated at 125 million (see Languages of India), outnumbers that of any country except the USA, while its total population of over 1.3 billion is far more numerous than all the world's English-speakers put together. So arguably we should 'logically' scrap British English and (non-existant?) Commonwealth English and just keep Indian English (and presumably American English, though even that could 'logically' be debated). Tlhslobus (talk) 15:21, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
And also (as already mentioned below in my comment and questions of February 3rd, and in my reply below to Blueboar at 15:50, 30 January 2018 (UTC)) per the apparent folly of a group consisting largely or entirely of Westerners repeating the same mistake we made a few years ago, which will presumably eventually be reversed once editors from the affected countries (both Western and non-Western) get to hear about it, just as happened last time, but not before a lot of unneccessary harm has been done to Wikipedia through wasted time and pointless inter-cultural unpleasantness, and pointless damage to Wikipedia's reputation in the affected countries, with negative consequences for retention of good editors from those countries, while simultaneously attracting many POV-pushing ultra-nationalist editors from them to resist what they would presumably see as 'the Western imperialist racists', etc... Tlhslobus (talk) 05:56, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Currently oppose, but it is indeed unsettling to think most readers might encounter peculiar English in an article about Jamaica. However, MOS:COMMONALITY covers the the basic need for articles to be comprehensible to all readers. It should already be clear that colloquialisms and idioms are not allowed in articles, and if it isn't clear, that should be added. As stated above, this proposal concocts a "Commonwealth English" which does not clearly exist, and creates a bias against certain English-speaking countries. Then again, if Singapore had some peculiar grammatical rules (for example) this would call into question the very basis of ENGVAR. I also would not like to see European Union articles caught in a tagging dispute between British and Irish English when the distinctions are trivial, and to me, as an American, Irish English seems irrelevant when trying to read an article about the European Union. —DIYeditor (talk) 19:57, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
The EU question is an interesting side-issue (as Ireland currently nominates Gaelic and Malta Maltese, and one will need to change if English is to remain an official EU language, unless a more pragmatic solution is reached), but the ENGVAR issue is resolved by the existing MOS provision that for organisations the style follows that of the organisation. I doubt the EU will be introducing Irish-specific nuances to English style or vocabulary, even if Ireland changes its linguistic nomination. (The existence of the organisation-provision is, as I say above, a further reason why the proposal doesn't make logical sense) MapReader (talk) 20:17, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
Actually English is an official language of the EU and will remain one after Britain leaves, and this will not require any change by Ireland or Malta (and it would remain one even if both Ireland and Malta were to leave too). However as far as I know the variety of English used is not officially defined. It is already somewhat influenced by Irish English in practice (for instance its official documents are supposed to use the misleading Irish English expression Ireland instead of the British English expression Irish Republic, a rule which, incidentally, we already largely have in Wikipedia too, quite likely largely as a result of this EU practice). And this influence will presumably gradually increase if Britain leaves. Meanwhile MOS:TIES is currently in conflict with the MOS organisation provision (and MOS:TIES logically takes precedence by explicitly stating that EU institutions should be dealt with in British or Irish English). But none of this should matter too much to us in practice, as explained below.Tlhslobus (talk) 03:48, 28 January 2018 (UTC)
And in any case the EU issue won't arise for another 14 months, and will only ban British English in the seemingly unlikely event that we then modify the current example in MOS:TIES so as to ban it (for which there will probably be no consensus). The current proposal is not required to handle that issue, if and when it arises. (All we are likely to have is a few almost certainly unsuccessful attempts in March 2019 to ban British English for EU articles, but these should be fairly easily seen off at the time) Tlhslobus (talk) 03:03, 28 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Mapreader. The assertion that there are no significant differences between varieties such as Australian, Indian, South African, Jamaican, etc. is unproven. There are many authorotative grammars and dictionaries for at least some of these varieties which demonstrate their evolution away from the British "mother" variety. It is obvious nonsense to assert that only North American English varieties have undergone such divergence. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 12:34, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose per MapReader and Tlhslobus. There are in fact many distinct dialects or versions of English, with significant differences, which is why there are articles about them – see Scottish English, Australian English, etc. There's no article on Commonwealth English because there's no such thing: Commonwealth English is a redirect to English in the Commonwealth of Nations which ironically is an article that discusses the variations of English across the Commonwealth and points out in its lead that "many regions, notably Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and the Caribbean, have developed their own native varieties of the language." — Stanning (talk) 16:45, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Support, as something that reduces the number of Englishes used and bickered about in English Wikipedia and/or removes Wikipedia from the role of legitimizing nations. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 17:44, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Weak oppose. I sympathize with the underlying reasoning, but I don't think it's worth the hard feelings. See my more detailed comments in the discussion section. --Trovatore (talk) 21:21, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Support The original British and American English templates were meant to discourage situations where an American editor 'corrects' an article to all American spelling, followed by a British editor 'correcting' it to all British spelling, and endless bouncing between the two. This was fine. But the other country specific templates are just exercises in flag waving. As SMcCandlish pointed out above, Australians using 'servo' for 'service station' or 'petrol station' is just slang. Since WP is meant to be understandable by the majority of English speakers (both native speakers and those that learnt it later), it is not a good thing to promote localised languages that can only be understand by a limited number of readers. Like it or not, practically all English speakers favour either British English or American English. Some may be a blend of the two (eg Canada and my native Australia) or a blend of one of them with a different language (eg 'lakh ' in Indian English) but they still understand British and American English. I find it jarring when I read an article and find a phrase like '10 lakh ' that could have used the widely understood '1,000,000' or '1 million'. I would gladly agree to lose the use of my native Australian English on WP if it meant that a wider audience could read the articles.  Stepho  talk  13:26, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Support As explained above, the purpose of ENGVAR is to stop edit wars regarding color/colour etc. There is no evidence showing any encyclopedic purpose would be served by encouraging the proliferation of language quirks. Text such as "in the year 1984" should be corrected to "in 1984" regardless of a tag someone thoughtfully added to the article. Johnuniq (talk) 23:41, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Support – If we're going to try to get editors to respect established variants, we can't have more of those than are well documented. Three seems good. Dicklyon (talk) 07:30, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Where, Dicklyon (talk · contribs), is this "Commonwealth English" well documented? MapReader (talk) 07:26, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Support, in principle. The only templates that are needed are those that flag up actual, practical difference in *formal*, *written* English, to help readers and editors understand why, respectively, certain things might look odd to them or need to be written in a certain way for consistency. This shouldn't be about slapping flags on pages or declaring ownership. There are 101 dialects of English, but WP is not written in dialect or slang. As pointed out, there are probably at best three or so broad "styles" of formal English when it comes to significant spelling, grammar etc distinctions. N-HH talk/edits 22:08, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose as currently phrased. RfCs should be neutral; this one isn't. The very title, "that do not serve an encyclopedic purpose", is already loaded, and in the proposal itself I read "the only purpose of which seems to be advancing nationalistic viewpoints". That these don't serve a purpose should be the result of an RfC, not its premise, and that they "advanc[e] nationalistic viewpoints" suggests a lack of good faith (really), as if all of those editors are nationalists who use Wikipedia only as a platform. I'm somewhat disappointed to see Giraffedata make a similar point: Bryan, I know you as a conscientious editor, not as a politically-inclined prescriptivist. "Reduc[ing] the number of Englishes" is not one of our pillars and shouldn't be; if it were, we might as well throw a coin and call AmE or BrE, or have a shootout--why would we need more than one if reduction is good? Morever, "legitimizing nations" repeats the same mistake made in the beginning of the RfC, with the additional problem of confusing nations with languages.

    Babylonic confusion and needless proliferation of templates is not a good thing, of course, but this is not the way. The first way should be science, not politics--the science of linguistics. Between BrE and AmE are legitimate differences of spelling, and some (minor) syntactical differences. If it turns out that, say, formal writing in Singaporean English cannot be distinguised from regular BrE (or whatever), then that particular template/distinction can be dropped. But this way, to get rid of them wholesale with the premise that only two (or three?) Englishes are legitimate and thus suitable, that is not the proper way to do it, and smacks of (yes) systemic bias, and if we throw in "nations" (I didn't, proponents did), then we're open to the charge of linguistic, encyclopedic colonialism as well.

    (For the record, I wouldn't have been here if Tlhslobus, whom I don't believe I know, hadn't left me a note--but they wrote me only, as far as I know, and while their note was more desperate than neutral, I don't think they could have guessed how I would come down on the matter.) Drmies (talk) 16:33, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

FWIW, if it were proposed, I would support throwing a coin and choosing exactly one standard language for English Wikipedia. So at least I'm consistent. But that's not what this RfC is about. It doesn't propose eliminating variations of English; it proposes eliminating templates. As I said in the threaded discussion section, before the survey section became threaded discussion, it's not the same thing.
And the reason for conflating nations and English variations is that ENGVAR does. English varies in a lot of dimensions besides nations - subnational region, profession, age, education level, etc. But ENGVAR gives special consideration to varieties that are tied to nations. It certainly looks like it's about national pride. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 03:23, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
Giraffedata is correct that this is about profusion of templates [and battleground behavior they generate] not profusion of dialects. Consider that in the case of the only person long-term topic-banned from the MoS any time in the last several years, it was for tendentious nationalistic PoV pushing about "American" vs. "British" English. I'm going to skip over Drmies's failure to distinguish between criticism of a negative effect of actions, and criticism of the personalities behind the choices to engage in them; I'll address his "science" point. It is not even remotely mainstream linguistic science to treat dialect as a national matter. See, e.g., Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (at a library – few of us can actually afford it), and you'll notice that the regional groups do not follow the US/Canadian border but cross it. (There'll be cases where a dialect and national boundaries coincide, but it'll be insular ones, like Belizean English surrounded by Spanish, or more literally island nations like Jamaica.) Ever putting this in terms of nationalities was a mistake Wikipedia made early on, before we knew better, though  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:44, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose - this is just not very well thought out. To a Canadian, "color" and "honor" are misspellings, as are "tyre" and "aluminium", and if we impose that Canadian articles must now use one or the other foreign dialects of English from now on, each and every one of those articles will more or less immediately join a nationwide edit war the likes of which Gord Downie would have written an epic ballad about, had he not passed last year. And you'll all think it's amusingly polite but it will really be laden with passive-aggressive yet bitter personal attacks that only a Canadian would recognize, probably involving beer, hockey, the status of Québec as a distinct society, and farm animals. That being said, Canada is a likely outlier in this discussion; perhaps there are some useful takeaways here: articles adhering to different varieties of English should still strive to be mutually intelligible to all English readers, as some have pointed out; using local jargon and slang in an article is what's unencyclopedic, not the standardized use of a broadly-recognized dialect. If an article on a Scottish topic is describing "wee bairns" throughout it should be cleaned up, or perhaps transwikied to the Scots Wikipedia. And I'll also say that if there are going to be templates enforcing the use of a particular flavour of English, then there need to be corresponding on-wiki style guides explaining what quirks those flavours entail. In the Indian example given somewhere above, it ought to be written in a style guide (I think it is already) not to use measurements of lakh or crore exclusively in an article, and perhaps a template created along the lines of {{convert}} to automatically convert those numbers to widely-recognized formats inline. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:54, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose as written, if you want to eliminate all English varieties besides US or UK, or US, UK, and Canada, or US, UK, Canada, and Australia, or some grouping thereof, (add and subtract as required), that is a reasonable request. I could even possibly get behind reducing to simply US and UK (by begrudgingly using US spelling for Canadian articles and UK spelling for Australian, Indian, etc., for example as they have the most similarities). However to say "everything which isn't US, UK, or Canadian falls under Commonwealth English" is preposterous as it simply doesn't exist. If Commonwealth English were actually a thing, it would be what we would have been using for the last 10-15 years. --kelapstick(bainuu) 16:59, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
The proposal is actually worse even than that, because it abolishes the British (UK) English template as well. MapReader (talk) 20:01, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose Honestly when I see any of these tags anyway I completely disregard them and in the future I'm going to continue to disregard them. I would encourage anyone else to disregard them. I use American English. However, as color and colour are actually both correct and attempting to adhere, at least on the article level, to some standard of consistency is reasonable I can not support this. Where localized forms of English are not wildly different (color and colour) maintaining that standard is reasonable when either it was first written or least in the long term maintained in that form of English. Be it Canadian or Kryptonian English. Any form of English that is mutually intelligible should be allowed. -Serialjoepsycho- (talk) 05:47, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Procedural oppose, because "Commonwealth English" isn't a thing that exists. I would support merging HK, Singapore, Scottish and Irish into the British English template and the others on a case-by-case basis. Australian English, for example, does have some vocabulary differences from both British English and American English. Jc86035 (talk) 12:12, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose as formulated, because trying to fit all ENGVARs outside North America into "Commonwealth English" is a step too far (even written British English has two spelling variants with respect to -ise/-ize endings). On the other hand, having a template for every country that has English speakers is also wrong, so I understand and sympathize with the intention. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:10, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Procedural oppose as this is a textbook case of what not to do when writing an RFC proposal. Regardless of the merits of the proposal (and I think that's somewhat lacking as well, for many of the same reasons as the other opposers), the sheer biased phrasing of the RFC should have lead to this being closed almost immediately. Ironic that an RFC about how to notify people about rules couldn't be hosed to follow rules. oknazevad (talk) 18:28, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose This proposal would remove or rename the British English one? That would be a mistake.

Discussion on ENGVAR template proposal

  • Comment
  • 1) At least for now, I am broadly neutral on the proposal I've now switched to oppose (see my above vote)
  • 2) But I think at least two parts of it is arguably misinformed and misleading:
  • 2b) These are:
  • 2b1) The assertion in the Issue statement that "For those not reading the discussion above this one, the short version is that in an encyclopedic, formal register, there is no meaningful difference between English, Scottish, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, African, Hong Kong, etc., varieties of English, ..."
  • 2b2) The assertion, in relation to modifying MOS:TIES and MOS:ENGVAR, that being told to write things in Pakistani English, etc, is 'essentially meaningless with regard to encyclopedic prose'.
  • 2c) I don't know much about Pakistani English, tho I expect that disputes over whether one writes Qur'an or Quran or Koran are involved (as well as other less inflammatory issues), a question that an encyclopedia can't easily avoid (and disputes about which are potentially so inflammatory that they just might some day get editors murdered, although hopefully that is none too likely, tho that's perhaps what people once thought at publications like Charlie Hebdo before the terrorist killings there).
  • 2d) The proposer has also written in the discussion before his/her proposal, that the differences between Irish and British English are simply about accents and words like gansey, which s/he placed immediately above a comment I had already written that mentioned it was actually largely about outlawing expressions like British Isles and words like Londonderry.
  • 2e) I later expanded that to say that it's about outlawing a fairly large (and sometimes surprising) list of expressions like British Isles and Irish Republic and words like Londonderry and Eire (my inclusion of Eire and Irish Republic are intended as instances of what may seem surprising to those unfamiliar with the issues), all of which are liable to cause nationalistic Battleground behaviour by both Irish and non-Irish editors in articles about the EU (and probably also in many EU documents after Brexit, always assuming they don't already do so before Brexit).
  • 2f) I then added: It is a matter of opinion whether this is a difference 'that WP needs to care about', but the battleground behaviour by both sides is difficult to resolve and has thus been going on intermittently for decades or centuries outside WP (both linguistically and in literal battles, in both Ireland and, in modified form, everywhere else across the former British Empire such as India, Pakistan, South Africa, etc), and is thus liable to occur within WP whether WP cares about it or not.
  • 2g) I fail to see how, at least in practice in the real world, the question of whether, for instance, an editor can or cannot write British Isles or Londonderry instead of Britain and Ireland (or should that be Ireland and Britain?) and Derry, or vice versa, is 'essentially meaningless with regard to encyclopedic prose'. For further details, see for instance Geographical naming disputes, although non-geographical issues also arise, such as job-names (deputy or TD instead of Irish MP, etc), names of institutions (Lok Sabha instead of Indian House of Commons, Seanad instead of Irish Senate, Bord Failte instead of Irish Tourist Board, etc), and so on. And see also 2c above, about the spelling of Qur'an/Quran/Koran, etc.
  • 2h) However WP can at least in theory try to minimize the resulting battleground behaviour by putting clear consensus guidelines and policies in our rules.
  • 2h) But in practice I don't know whether that is what we are now wisely trying to put in place, or whether that is what we already have (at least to some extent) and are now unwisely in danger of tearing up (which is why I was originally neutral on the proposal, though I've now switched to oppose, though partly for other reasons, as I'm still not 100% sure about which of the 2 possibilities mentioned here is more likely, though I'm now very much inclining towards the 2nd one).
  • 2j) But the latter risk is increased if we are misinformed about the nature of the differences involved.
  • Request: Can somebody please supply links to the Rfc a few years ago that proposed this, and to the counter Rfc that reversed it, so that we ca have a more informed discussion, and a better chance of understanding whether this proposal has a realistic chance of long-term success or is bound to be reversed if it succeeds in the short term, thereby presumably just wasting everybody's time.Tlhslobus (talk) 16:23, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment regarding Indian English. Yes, it is basically British English and it has long bugged me that consensus is to designate it separately. Attempts to discuss it hit a brick wall of Hindutva-type nationalists in past local discussions at WT:INB. The three very noticeable differences are (a) occasional use of rather archaic terms, current during the Raj era; (b) the frequent omission of "the"; and (c) a tendency not to put a space between initials in names of people. The latter two of these are particularly common. - Sitush (talk) 03:05, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
What the above comment appears to be unwittingly saying is that British English is basically the same as Indian English. And since there are about twice as many speakers of Indian English (c 125 million, see Languages of India) as British English (c 60 million), the 125 million could complain, with at least as much 'logical' justification, that it has long bugged them that attempts to discuss suppressing British English in favour of Indian English invariably hit a brick wall of British nationalists, made much worse and much more offensive by Imperialist-type British nationalists who don't merely want to keep British English but actually propose to suppress Indian English as well, despite there being twice as many speakers of the latter as the former, a proposal that requires quite a bit of charity to attribute to mere thoughtlessness or ignorance rather than something much worse. Even more charity seems needed given the vast amount of rather horrific evidence on that question from both history and current affairs, including some rather well-known offensive sayings in British English about this question, which I will charitably refrain from repeating here. It is not entirely clear to me where to find the logical error in such an Indian argument if it were put forward (always assuming that there actually is an error in it, which is far from self-evident, at least to me, and especially with regard to its second half, where it is objecting to proposals to suppress Indian English). Tlhslobus (talk) 11:27, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
I suppose it could be argued that British English is older than Indian English, but on that basis we should also be proposing the suppression of American English, which for some strange reason we are not proposing. Tlhslobus (talk) 12:26, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Of course the irony of all this is that I'm a Westerner (and one from an archipelago first called 'The British Isles' by Roman historians about 2000 years ago) trying to defend the Indian perspective from a comment by an editor who appears, at least to me (though my impression may well be mistaken), to be an Indian defending the British perspective . I guess this just proves it's a funny old world . Tlhslobus (talk) 12:09, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
I am British. "Indian English" (such as it is, which is effectively nothing) did not exist until ca. 17th/18th century, and was uncommon until ca. late 19th century. There are plenty of people in India who do not speak any English, probably the vast majority in fact. I could check some figures if anyone is that fussed - the 2011 census probably covers it. The single most common "Indian-ism" I see is Britisher, which is a bit like using Hun every time German would suffice. I guarantee you, the nationalist issue of wanting to avoid mention of "British" is the key argument used by those at WT:INB who have favoured a separate tag. And many of them have ended up blocked or topic banned for their other activities. - Sitush (talk) 13:04, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
For the numbers, try this story, remembering that the headline figure includes second- and third-language speakers. - Sitush (talk) 13:13, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Sorry about thinking you were probably Indian, based on the amount of Indian stuff on your user page (though I did mention that 'my impression may well be mistaken'). The story to which you link confirms that there are about 125 million speakers of English in India, adding that this is about twice as many as speakers of English in Britain. (It doesn't seem to discuss varieties). Obviously the Indians tend to speak it as a second or third language, but so what? Tlhslobus (talk) 13:54, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
The "so what" is competence. Hang around the India-related pages and you will see a massive array of competence, including a lot of people who think they can write it but in fact produce mostly gibberish (not intended offensively, as I am utterly incompetent in Indic languages and gibberish is probably my own second language). Those that are competent tend not to fall into the sort of habits that I mentioned above, nor to produce ambiguous statements etc. In addition, there is a pride issue: while ultra nationalists don't even want English to exist, some other groups like to claim an association that actually does not exist for reasons of social standing. If you don't understand the caste system etc in India, there is no way you will understand these nuances, unfortunately, but social aspirations, often based on the flimsiest of notions, give rise to all sorts of wild claims, including linguistics. And before anyone says it, I'm on record as being no fan of the Raj era, its methods and its theories. - Sitush (talk) 14:16, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Indians presumably have no monopoly on pride, nationalism, xenophobia, or incompetence (and those Indians who are incompetent are presumably even more incompetent in British English). Finding some kind of Indian style guide, or, if none exists, getting Indian editors to gradually build one as part of Wikiproject India, using registers such as Indian Government publications and The Times of India, etc, might be a less hopelessly WP:SNOW fix than Westerners, and especially Britons, telling them they can't use Indian English for Indian articles. But I guess that's probably something that is better discussed there than here, and mainly by Indian editors rather than us Westerners. Tlhslobus (talk) 14:57, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
The Times of India is a crap newspaper nowadays. Do not be mislead into thinking it somehow has a connection to The Times of London, and do not think that huge circulation is a guide to comprehension. It is incredibly inconsistent and ambiguous in much of its reportage - precisely because of its linguistic incompetence - and is little more than a tabloid-style news organ in practice. I think you will find that the likes of RegentsPark and SpacemanSpiff will agree on this point, if nothing else that I have said in this discussion. - Sitush (talk) 01:20, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
As for "pride" etc, true, there is no monopoly. But the extent of it is probably much greater than you think. There is a reason why the entire India/Pakistan etc topic area has a notoriety that puts off even the involvement of experienced admins etc, and the issues of pride etc are fundamental to much of it. I think you perhaps lack an understanding of these issues and are trying to hard to approach it from a meta level. - Sitush (talk) 01:26, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
We can't go around creating our own definitions of languages so, no, we shouldn't be trawling through the Times of India's constructing an Indian English grammar and lexicon. Regardless of the quality of writing in that once august newspaper --regentspark (comment) 02:57, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Question: With both US English and UK English, there are dictionaries and published style guides that help define the variety - that can tell us what the style rules actually are. There are works such as Webster's dictionary or the OED (for spelling) and the Chicago Manual of Style or the Oxford Manual of Style (for grammar and style). My question is this: Are there similar dictionaries and published style guides for (say) Indian English or Trinidadian English (etc.) - Reference works that would help us to actually define a given national variety and distinguish them from other varieties? Blueboar (talk) 13:45, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
For [[South African English these publications are generally accepted as authorotative. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:02, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Nothing for Indian English that I am aware of. Of course, there are numerous loan words from India in British English, eg: bungalow, dhobi. - Sitush (talk) 14:06, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
And vice versa, I think (e.g. I understand practical words like 'spanner' are now used in many native Indian languages). Does the Indian Government have a Freedom of Information Act that might oblige it to release any English style guide(s) that it may use in its publications (assuming it hasn't already done so)? Tlhslobus (talk) 14:40, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Yes, there is legislation related to freedom of information - see Right to Information Act, 2005. Don't expect much joy with it, though. The Indian legal process is dreadfully slow and, to be honest, I would be pleasantly surprised if there is any coherence on this particular issue. As for spanner, well, that word has more meanings in British English than it probably does in India: someone can be a spanner in Brit Eng slang, where it would be a mild insult, but I doubt that has entered Indian lexicography because it is a usage that would have been uncommon in the Raj era, if it existed at all.
I'm not that fussed about this entire debate, either: I regularly insert {{use Indian English}} because I accept that it is the consensus. It just narks me that there is little practical difference in well-written prose and that the template appears mainly to exist to promote nationalist/political agendas. Any lack of comprehension of British English by contributors from India has next to nothing to do with language and everything to do with education and caste prejudices etc - the desire for self-glorification etc that has no connection to omitting the or occasionally preferring cops to police, and so on. Erudite contributors from India routinely use what we would all recognise as British English, and the less erudite certainly understand it except when they are here merely to promote an agenda. Gosh, I sound so racist now but hopefully people will understand; certainly, those who frequent WT:INB will. - Sitush (talk) 01:14, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Roger (Dodger67) wrote above "There are many authorotative grammars and dictionaries for at least some of these varieties which demonstrate their evolution away from the British "mother" variety. It is obvious nonsense to assert that only North American English varieties have undergone such divergence." So he may be able to provide you with some details. (I now see he has already done so above for South African English). I don't know of any myself (though that most definitely does NOT mean that none exist, as thankfully Roger (Dodger67) has just proved above), but there are plenty of registers in the form of newspapers like The Times of India, The Irish Times, Government publications, etc. Most probably need and thus have style guides, some of which may be published or available on request - many of the Governments have Freedom of Information Acts which oblige them to supply such information on request, tho usually for a small fee, and perhaps only for requests from its own citizens (the Irish Government definitely has such an obligation, if it has such style guides, which it probably does). Of course the problem with all such style guides, including the numerous British and American ones (but perhaps not the Canadian Government one), is that they tend to be unofficial and sometimes contradict each other - the 'logical' solution might therefore be to ban all varietes of English except Canadian English, but such a 'logical' proposal would fail WP:SNOW, for various reasons, including that it would run into a brick wall of British and American nationalists (among many others). Tlhslobus (talk) 14:10, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
In terms of major linguistic strands, I would expect most authorities to recognise Australian and South African English as equivalent in distinctiveness/status to Canadian. But the proposal here isn't to narrow down to five or six main varieties - but to recognise only American, Canadian, and lump everything else together as 'Commonwealth'. Which remains so ridiculous (advanced from an overly-narrow geographical perspective might be more polite) it is remarkable that we are still debating it days later. Narrowing down might make sense, although achieving consensus on a shortlist would remain exceptionally difficult. But the fact remains that, so long as the MOS enables the styles of individual authors and organisations to be mirrored by related articles, we are accepting a very wide variety of English language will be used in WP, and there is nothing to be gained here whatsoever. MapReader (talk) 14:20, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
MapReader: "I would expect most authorities ...": not in the case of spelling, which is where CanEng stands out from a MoS perspective. In terms of vocabulary, etc. the MoS calls for CanEng articles to conform to MOS:COMMONALITY, which means preferring "couch" to "chesterfield" and "napkin" to "serviette", even if the editor (me, for instance) grew up using the latter terms. Canadian spelling, however, cannot be reconciled with American or non-Canadian Commonwealth spellings. In what ways can formal Australian writing not be reconciled with non-Canadian Commonwealth conventions? Note: I'm not actually taking sides in this discussion. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:26, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
It's set out in the WP article, which recognises Australian English as a major variety. Just like Canadian, Australian is mostly a mix of British and American spellings, leaning more toward British than Canadian does. Note that I am not arguing that Canadian shouldn't be recognised/accepted - simply with the OP proposal that it is so distinct that it deserves such, not only in the absence of the same for Australian, but also for British English! MapReader (talk) 05:40, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
SMcCandlish: I was taking you at your word when you characterized AusEng as more-or-less conforming to BrEng standards, but it looks like that's not the case. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:01, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Australia in particular: Based on what evidence? I've never seen anything to suggest that AU English is leaning unusually or increasingly toward US English, any more than other dialects are (given very strong ties between Aus. and the UK and lack of them between the former and the US, it's not plausible). Long-term MoS cat-herder Tony1, an Australian, has said this before, too; my earlier phrasing, that in a formal written register all the Commonwealth Englishes are basically indistinguishable from British aside from minor vocabulary tweaks, is a paraphrase of something he said ca. 2008, borne out by 10 years of style research. Our own article says "Among the changes starting in the 19th century were the introduction of words, spellings, terms and usages from North American English." That's true of all Englishes, including British. You'll notice that American "program" (not "programme") tends to be used for computing contexts, but this is also true in British English, not just Australian. Someone's trying to generalize from "AusEng uses 'program' and some other Americanisms sometimes" to "AusEng is a mixture of BrEng and AmEng", a logic error of not noticing that the relationship isn't unique or unusual; this is the worst form of OR. There's also lots of recent flow in the other direction, especially with the rapidly globalized uptake of BBC and other British output in the US over the last generation.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:04, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
Anecdotally, I can testify that my generation speak of cracking a tinny while sitting on the lounge to watch telly, getting a sore arse and filling up at the petrol station (or servo). The millennials talk of having a can of beer while sitting on the sofa to watch TV, getting a sore butt (or ass) and filling up at the gas station (even though they don't say gasoline). Mostly because we are bombarded by American TV and movies. Growing up in the 1970s we had a lot of British TV shows but now it's all American and we copy what we hear.  Stepho  talk  13:36, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
Tlhslobus,I've addressed your attitude to The Times of India a few minutes ago, above. But I will refer to it here because that might get lost in the noise. As far as matters India are concerned, I think you have a significant lack of knowledge, sorry. You are the "do-gooder" coming into a situation of which you have effectively no understanding, which is pretty much what the Brits were like when they arrived in India in the first place. No offence intended - it is a common problem. Some argue that it was that lack of understanding (by the Brit colonialists) that caused all the problems related to caste that now exist, so this is not a trivial point. Unless you immerse yourself in the topic area, you know nothing that could possibly be helpful to it. - Sitush (talk) 01:35, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Indeed, the more we dig into this matter, it is increasingly looking like an exemplar of the stereotypical "solution in search of a problem". Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:43, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
OK... thanks for the replies. I have a few follow up comments: Perhaps we could use the existence of an "authoritative style guide" as an initial criteria for saying whether a "national variety" actually exists (note: by "authoritative" I don't mean "official"... I am thinking more along the lines of "widely followed and influential"). If there is at least one such reference work published for country X, then we can say that country X actually has a "national variety". More importantly, we can then use the work (or works) to determine whether a given article is well written within that national variety. We can use these reference works to inform our discussions on usage, vocabulary and spelling (understanding that, where there are multiple "authoritative" style guides, they may not agree). However, if no such work(s) exist, then we can say that country X does not have a unique "national variety" of English. Just an idea. Blueboar (talk) 15:36, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Good idea in theory. But it would probably need a completely new proposal. And in practice it would probably just waste even more time than this proposal already has, because, even if it somehow succeeded, it ignores the likely reaction of editors whose preferred variety gets banned. Even in the seemingly unlikely event that there really is no relevant unpublished style guide used by the country's main newspaper(s), it probably takes less than a day for offended nationalists to create and issue online an 'authoritative style guide' - you just take an existing style guide, make a few obvious changes, and add on a newspaper name, a date, and a claim that this style guide has been used internally in this 'authoritative' linguistic register (newspaper) for many years - it should be easy to find a newspaper that cooperates because it needs the publicity, etc; you then update it and publish a new edition as often as desired. But in the meantime we will have wasted a lot of editors' time on the debate, driven away a number of offended editors, damaged Wikipedia's reputation in the offended country, and attracted in a lot of fiercely nationalist POV-pushing new editors, all for no clear benefit. Tlhslobus (talk) 15:50, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment: Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit. This principle leads to the idea that to recognize a variety of English, there should be sufficient published reliable sources on the variety's vocabulary and usage that a person fluent in a different variety could manage to edit an article written in the putative variety using the reliable sources. Newspapers are not such a source, because they are not organized in a way that would help the editor fluent in a different variety. Government-published style manuals should be viewed with suspicion because they may be designed to reinforce the political beliefs of the current government rather than intended to reflect the actual usage of well-educate inhabitants.
Some of the arguments above aren't really about an entire variety of English, but rather, which geopolitical words should be used in a particular article. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:03, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Anybody can edit any article without knowing anything about English varieties. If they make a variety-related mistake (which will normally be rather rarely), then others can fix it, as with any other kind of mistake. All style guides, not just Government ones, can hide a political agenda, as has long been the standard experience of Irish people when they check the Ireland-related parts of British style guides (this is often unavoidably so, because the most contentious stylistic issues usually stay contentious because they have no neutral non-political fix). The geographical names are mentioned above as just some obvious examples of why an Encyclopedia can't simply ignore the problem (but there are plenty of non-geographical examples too). Tlhslobus (talk) 15:19, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Question: how do you propose to treat {{Use British English Oxford spelling}}? This variety is the same as BrE WRT diction and grammar, while resembling CanE orthographically (with a few exceptions).—Odysseus1479 17:44, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment When no formal style guides exist for a variety of a language, I don't see how we can ask that our articles conform to that variety. With Indian English, the only documented difference is in numbers (lakhs, crores) and all we get is the occasional nationalist demanding that Bangalore be moved to Bengaluru or Ganges be moved to Ganga because Engvar trumps common name. Other than that, whether there are spaces between initials or whether there are differences in the way "the" is used is pointless because we don't have a style guide to refer to and, in all likelihood, these usages are unlikely to be consistent. (It is also worth pointing out that much of the discussion about Mumbai vs Bombay centered around the common name argument so using it as an example of engvar is not really kosher.) However, I'm loathe to support the current proposal because creating a non-existent commonwealth english variety is no solution. --regentspark (comment) 02:52, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Surely, the very first sentence of your comment makes it a logical oppose to the proposal as put? As effectively stated by your last sentence. MapReader (talk) 05:45, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Some further matters for consideration; the proposal as written doesn't seem to be gaining any traction (and I didn't expect it to on a first draft):

    Dealing with minor "national" variation (short of colloquialisms): We can just have a rule to permit it in articles with a strong national tie, though it would be better to drop "national" and use "cultural". E.g., if the most common Australian term for a particular vegetable is the Italian "zucchini" as in N. Am. Eng., rather than the French "courgette" as in Br. Eng., then use "zucchini" if the plant is mentioned in an article about an Australian subject. But there's no sensible rationale for, say, writing an article on a Korean village using Commonwealth English except for the word "zucchini" and then branding it with a huge, annoying Australian English template. It's a form of sublimated mammalian territory marking filtered through nationalism, and it serves no encyclopedic or encyclopedia-management purpose. "I'm going to spray my Singaporean English musk on this article", "I'm going to leave my Scottish English spoor on that one." This just needs to stop.

    Mis-conceptualized: Most pronouncements about what's "correct" in one dialect or another are prescriptivist nonsense; what you'll actually find in dictionaries and (when they exist for a dialect at all) style guides are ranges of usage trends, with multiple variants of things ("semi-final" vs. "semifinal", etc.) found together in most such works, with one favored over the other by some but not others, except for a handful of very sharp splits between US and British/Commonwealth (even Canadian) English, because they were invented by Noah Webster in 1828 (in living memory of the American Revolution) as an anti-British political move. Dialects are almost entirely a spoken matter; where the vocabulary and (rarely) grammar doesn't differ (which of course affects written word choice), then otherwise the spelling, hyphenation, and other style matters are not really questions of dialect but of the preferences of major publishers in particular markets and their own style guides (aside from a few noteworthy monographs by Fowler, Strunk & White, Gowers, and Garner, all of them either American or British – zero other countries have produced any general-audience English style guide worth mentioning). Differences aside from the sharp -re/-er and -our/-or split are mostly shifting waves of usage and have more to do with era (including age of writer), type of publishing (books, academic papers, news journalism, and informal writing), and sub-national regionality, than anything like national standards. No bodies exist to set them, unlike in French and some other languages (not that they have much effect; Quebec French, for example, remains notably distinct from France French).

    Canada in particular is undergoing major usage shifts, as can be seen by comparing fairly current Canadian dictionaries and style guides with those from the 1990s and earlier (on the plus side, it's shifting away from chaos and slowly towards standardization). Plus there are plenty of articles on the matter, following on organized surveys and corpora of Canadian spelling and usage (e.g., we know the shifts are moving from the coastal major cities inland). It's not even really clear what it means here that an article is written in Canadian English, since that varies from Canadian to Canadian; it probably resolves to using -re and -our spellings, with vocabulary, collocations, and punctuation that mostly coincide with US usage. Aside: The term Commonwealth English wasn't invented by us, and does not mean "English exactly as spoken in every single Commonwealth of Nations country", it means English as generally used in most of them; it's a blanket term, and it could not be any other way, since even British English isn't one monolithic thing, but a widely ranging dialect continuum with marked intelligibility complications between, say, Devon and Inverness locals. Whether the term, as one to use for an ENGVAR categorization and template, is "perfect" or not is immaterial; it's close enough. It's a well-documented term, and the fact that Canada doesn't fit the pattern entirely isn't consequential.

    Commonality is key. This should be our no. 1 guiding principle and should supplant our current fetishization of nationality, a patently anti-linguistic, anti-scientific, all-emotional idea that's caused more harm than good. This even speaks to the "chesterfield" post above; that term is also used in the US, and there are numerous other words for couches/sofas, like "davenport", "divan", "settee", "dufo", etc., some with shades of meaning (there have been entire dialectology papers written about this). It has nothing to do with national dialect but highly localized dialect. By this point everyone knows what "couch" or "sofa" means just like everyone now recognizes "aluminium" even if they'd prefer "aluminum". By now, most fluent speakers know that a sweater and a jumper are the same thing, but have no F'ing idea what a gansey is, as an illustration of why "This article is written in Hiberno-English" templates are a terrible idea: "Write in colloquial vocabulary just to stick it to the Brits and the Americans". This kind of politicized bullshit harms Wikipedia's mission. Similarly, the reasoning "The average Australian uses 'servo'" is no rationale to use it here in place of "petrol station" (universal in Commonwealth English and understood by North Americans), and the reasoning "there are lots of weird Australianism like this, so Australian is a dialect [including at the formal written level], and should have a template, and we should write WP articles in this dialect as faithfully to local usage as possible" is a chained load of bollocks [another phrase everyone understands at this point].
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:13, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

    Frankly, I would be looking for someone to draw this pointless discussion to an end on the basis of WP:SNOW. It is offensive for an editor to have suggested that the only English varieties that deserve recognition are American and Canadian, and that the other billions of English speakers, including those in the language's mother country, can be lumped together under "Commonwealth" (which is an association that includes Canada). Enough already? MapReader (talk) 12:37, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
    If that's what you thought the proposal was, then you didn't actually read it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:31, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment: I support the proposal. Commonwealth English is indeed vague, much like British and US English are, and definitely Pakistani English. Yes, there are identifiable differences between the English used in many of the nations we're talking about. But that doesn't mean we have to fly national flags over these articles and pretend there is some standard that will resolve any dispute over wording in them.
And tagging an article as Commonwealth English will not stop it from using nation-specific language either. The MOS suggestion to use the English variety of an organization in articles about the organization is helpful here; a commenter above mentioned this, but misinterpreted the suggestion. It doesn't say that if an organization invents its own variety of English we should feel obligated to use it. It says if for example an international welders union, to avoid an argument like this, has a bylaw that says all of its publications should be in British English (just because its first chapter was in London), then Wikipedia articles about the union, and probably welding in general, should probably follow suit. And by the same philosophy, regardless of whether we use templates to recognize the legitimacy of a national variety, if there is a local word for something and no common word for it, an article with strong ties to that local place would use that local word. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 18:00, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment. I think Stanton's proposal recognizes this key fact, which MapReader refuses to: As a practical matter, ENGVAR is a compromise between Americans and everyone else. There are lots of distinct English varieties, but among the ones that get lots of use in scholarly writing, American English is the really distinct one; all the others are sort of clustered together.
    There is a view on the "everyone else" side that says, well then, the Americans ought to just give in, because counting by countries, they're outnumbered. But American English is the variety that claims about 2/3 of the world's native English speakers, so there's that. As a practical matter, it would deeply alienate many American editors to have "British" rules imposed on Wikipedia; there would be a movement to split en.wiki into two languages, to no one's benefit.
    All that said, I don't see the benefit to this change that justifies the affront to editors from Australia and India and et cetera. Yes, it would be a little more honest about what we're really trying to accomplish, and yes, it might prevent an occasional argument about whether some article ought to be in Australian English versus New Zealand English. But an occasional argument at an individual article is OK. Probably better than the argument we'd have to have about this. --Trovatore (talk) 20:42, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
I don't see anyone arguing for the imposition of "British" rules, and neither is the proposal being debated here simply "American" rules versus the rest? The proposal is to recognise American English, Canadian English, and 'other' English. Which is objectionable as I have tried to explain above. MapReader (talk) 22:04, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
I wasn't saying anyone was arguing for doing everything the British way; I was explaining my understanding of why we need ENGVAR in the first place. As for Canadian, yes, the proposal does muddy the waters by including that. It would have been clearer as just "American" and "Commonwealth". --Trovatore (talk) 22:24, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment This discussion feels surreal, at least to me, in that we appear to be largely or entirely a bunch of Westerners discussing the banning of existing varieties of English from India, Pakistan, Jamaica, etc, without any input from people from those areas, even tho we were told at the beginning that a similar proposal was passed years ago and then reversed when editors from those countries got to hear about it. If only to try to avoid a repetition of that pointless disruption (among other reasons), I would bring it to the attention of those Wikiprojects, except that I don't know whether that would be a violation of WP:CANVASS, and I also fear that it might unnecessarily inflame a dispute about a proposal that currently appears to be just wasting everybody's time as it currently appears, at least to me, to have no hope of gaining consensus support (which is why I have now stopped taking part in the above seemingly endless and pointless discussion, even tho I have sometimes been mistaken when I have had similar impressions about other seemingly 'doomed' proposals in the past). Tlhslobus (talk) 20:56, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Question Per my comment (currently immediately above), should affected Wikiprojects (such as India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, etc) be informed of this proposal that particularly affects them? (Note: It is possible that some projects are already notified, tho I saw no notifications on the main Talk Page for the first two I checked, India and Pakistan) Tlhslobus (talk) 20:56, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Question Per my comment (currently immediately above my previous question), should this debate be closed per WP:SNOW as having no chance of reaching consensus, as has also been suggested by another editor above (MapReader)? (Unfortunately that editor and I seem too involved in the debate to be able to assess this question neutrally) Tlhslobus (talk) 20:56, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment I think this makes sense, with one thing to clear up in my mind. Can we just clarify that we are talking about restricting only the templates here, and not proscribing the variety of English someone chooses to use in an article that has no trend yet? I.e., if a new article appears to be written in Ozzie or Jamaican English, I'm fine with the fact that there's no template to enforce that variety going forward, but do we also now Template the User and say, "Sorry, that's not one of our approved 'Big Three', you'll have to change that."? Not sure I'm comfortable with that. Suppose they're not comfortable in writing in any variety but their own: I would want to ensure that they can continue to do so, without prejudice, ad infinitum, with other editors (perhaps) picking up the slack to convert to a standard variety (if deemed necessary) but I don't want to see people slapped on the hand for using the only variety they know at a native level of competency. With that caveat, I'd vote to support. Mathglot (talk) 07:23, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
So you're fine with me and my China plate grousing about drongos yapping on in their foreign lingo? S'truth - save me from the Seppos! I'd happily give up my Aussie quirks if it means more readers can actually understand what I am writing.  Stepho  talk  09:41, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Regardless of the national variety of English, we should only be writing in formal English, not slang. Indeed slang isn't internationally comprehensible. But we're only talking about differences like "President pro tem" (American English) vs. "President pro temp" (Liberian English). —Ben Kovitz (talk) 11:15, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
There's no reason to abbreviate "President pro tempore", anyway; both the "tem" and "temp" versions are politico MOS:JARGON opaque to many readers, and save a maximum of four characters, so not worth doing.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:47, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
If that's the only way you can communicate, Stepho-wrs, then yes, I"m fine with it. One of your OZ mates compatriots will come along soon enough and fix up your bodgy Strine colorful regionalisms. Mathglot (talk) 22:06, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
  • It looks as if, again, this isn't going to go anywhere, for various reasons. Yet a lot of the objections appear misplaced. These templates should simply be about providing clear guidance for how an article is or should be written in terms of some spellings, occasional grammar points and very occasionally terminology (where commonality is not appropriate). If say 10 countries all use more or less the same formal rules in those respects, and 15 countries another set of different but fairly consistent rules, we need two templates, not 25 separate ones. Many of them will simply be saying, in practical terms, exactly the same thing, and the more obscure of them will leave people scratching their heads as to what rules exactly they should be applying – if the rules for "Ruritarian English" are the same as those for US English, which more people will know and be aware of, let's just say the latter. Are people seriously suggesting we need 43, as currently listed at Category: Varieties of English templates (which also, erroneously, talks about "dialect")? The Namibian English template for example isn't even used on any pages; the Namibian English page itself, which is linked to from the template, is about dialect and slang, and no WP page would ever be written in slang, from wherever. N-HH talk/edits 15:51, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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