Jump to content

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 212

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archive 205←Archive 210Archive 211Archive 212Archive 213Archive 214Archive 215

Under what conditions can WP:IGNOREALLRULES override MoS? (re: closing comma in MDY dates)

(non-admin closure) BMK has been blocked for violating 3RR for 48 hours by MSGJ. I don't see any point in continuing this. If there are any other concerns once the block expires, a new thread should be started. Amaury (talk | contribs) 01:33, 20 February 2019 (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.

Beyond My Ken has invoked WP:IGNOREALLRULES to override the guidance in MOS:DATE to editwar over date formatting at Joey Gibson (political activist). He apparently has an issue with the trailing comma in American-style MDY date formats, declaring them "still not needed", "when a comma is not needed, it's not needed".

Gibson hosted a rally on April 2, 2017␣ which was met by thousands of counter-protesters. (BMK's version)
Gibson hosted a rally on April 2, 2017, which was met by thousands of counter-protesters. (MoS-compliant version)

Ignoring the editwarring violations, under what conditions can WP:IGNOREALLRULES legitimately be invoked to override the MoS, and does this case fall within them? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:12, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Let me repeat what I wrote on Talk:Joey Gibson (political activist):
Well, here's how I look at it, if a comma ain't needed, there's no necessity for a comma. Read the sentence out loud, there's no pause after that date, it flows naturally into "which was met by...". That's not case with a previous date, "On February 25, 2018, Gibson announced..." where a pause is natural. The comma is the pause, so a comma is appropriate there. ... Not a long pause, a tiny caesura, a mere uptake of breath.
Why is this the case? Because a comma is not an abstract typographical invention disconnected from reality, its purpose is to mimic how people talk. After all, writing is merely (merely?) codified speech, which existed long before writing, and long before the comma.
Sometimes, many time, maybe even most times, a comma after a date is appropriate, but no grammarian will tell you that is always the case. There are times when not having a comma is the better choice. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:30, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
"it's purpose is to mimic how people talk"[citation needed] – We're not seriously going to buy the idea that a comma is a visual pause, are we? If this is a legitimate argument, then MOS:DATE will have to change. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:34, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
CT, do you know anything about this subject? If you're just kind of vamping in the hope that you'll pick up some traction, you're in danger of exposing your ignorance. And I said nothing about a "visual pause". I am talking about talking, what does visuality have to do with it? What do you think the function of a comma is?
And, of course, the notion that MOS:DATE has to be completely revamped is hogwash, pure rhetorical overkill. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:42, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Incidentally, if anyone's interested, the real reason this is here is that Curly Turkey just flat out doesn't like me. I've never actually been able to determine why, but he seems to think that I done him wrong at some time in the past, so now he occasionally parachutes into an article I'm editing and sticks in his oar -- as he did on Joey Gibson (political activist), an article he's never edited before today -- just to kinda of annoy me. He used to do it more often, but this is the first instance in a while. It's the kind of thing you just have to put up with, like sand in your ice cream at the beach. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:42, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
BTW, I think I'm done with this discussion. I don't believe that Curly Turkey's complaint is anything more than another way to lash out at me, it's not in any way a serious request -- does he really expect the MOS talk page to decide what the proper usage of WP:IAR is?? That's something that's been discussed from Day 1, and has not been, and can not be, determined -- that's really the genius of IAR. In any case, it's outside the scope of this page, and CT's complaint is disingenuous at best, so I'm outta here. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:47, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Well, Primergrey "parachuted in" to revert BMK, and BMK 3RRed it back. Is this legit? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:20, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I missed that, but I also just put the comma back, so that's a 3:1 ratio at least.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:44, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I've had trouble with BeyondMyKen before. Seems to be a hard-liner who won't compromise or yield to common sense—including the common sense contained within our centralised guidelines. To override MOS, in my view, requires cogent argument in a particular context. Where has that been expressed? Tony (talk) 06:27, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • As phrased, this is a nonsensical question, seeking to restrain an anti-rule – an escape valve to get away from unhelpful application of rules – by trying to pin it down with an unhelpful rule about when it can be invoked. :-)

    More seriously, and as to the case at hand, this simply isn't an IAR matter, it's someone editwarring to impose a style quirk that reliable sources consider substandard English. IAR is invoked when a rule impedes someone from objectively improving the encyclopedia. Defying punctation norms to suit personal whims is objectively a detriment to our content, and subjectively an improvement only to someone who shares the exact same peccadillo and who is apparently in a class of people who do not read or absorb style guides (not just ours, but "real world" ones, which are consistent: parenthesizing commas always come in pairs except when the second one is replaced by other punctuation like "." or "?"). That's actually a fairly large class of people, but they're still in the wrong on this and have no business insisting on style changes, against either general English norms as codified in major style guides, or against our own style guidelines (based on the former). There simply is no IAR to be found anywhere in that. There's no rule against saying "IAR!" in your revert, but it will not save you from a 3RR block, etc. No one takes IAR claims seriously when the rule is not being defied to actually make an improvement.

    [I decline to comment on whether there's a specific tendentiousness pattern with BMK in particular, since WT:MOS isn't a disciplinary venue. If this sort of thing seems habitual, and user- and article-talk discussion has no effect on it, it may be a WP:ANI or WP:ANEW matter, or even WP:AE if they've received a {{Ds/alert|mos}} within the last 12 months and are being genuinely disruptive.]
    — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:44, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

  • To answer the original question, there are self-evidently no "conditions" under which IAR can or cannot be invoked. If we start attaching rules to IAR then we're kind of missing the point of it. In the specific case mentioned here, however, there doesn't seem to be a good case for ignoring the rules. It would create a strange exception to every other usage in the prose of articles.  — Amakuru (talk) 07:43, 19 February 2019 (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.
  • And to address the underlying actual style question behind the dispute: BMK's allegation amounts to "everyone arguing against me is wrong, and MoS is wrong, obviously, cuz everyone knows a comma doesn't go here", but this is just flat-out counterfactual. To quote from The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., sect. 6.17, "Commas in pairs"), since I have that handy in digital form:
    • 'Whenever a comma is used to set off an element (such as “1928” or “Minnesota” in the first two examples below), a second comma is required if the phrase or sentence continues beyond the element being set off. This principle applies to many of the uses for commas described in this section [No, I'm not pasting in the entire section]. An exception is made for commas within the title of a work (third example): June 5, 1928, lives on in the memories of only a handful of us.; Sledding in Duluth, Minnesota, is facilitated by that city’s hills and frigid winters.; but Look Homeward, Angel was not the working title of the manuscript.'
What's probably happened here is that BMK reads a lot of certain news publishers' output, with a house style that drops a lot of punctuation, and has then assumed that particular "abbreviated" style is some kind of universal norm and rule in English. It just isn't true, and WP is not written in news style, as a matter of actual policy. That said, it is never required to cite off-site style guides to bring an article into conformity with MoS; people can't "IAR" you for not having book citations. It is enough that the guideline says what it does, since WP built it with editorial consensus from such sources in the first place (and more importantly from years of negotiation about, and adjustment for, what is actually best for Wikipedia's needs to communicate to its audience; it is not a rote regurgitation of any particular "rule books"). I'm just citing CMoS on this particular matter to put away any doubt about this comma nit-pick, about the idea that MoS has some kind of "mistake" or "made up nonsense" in it. This should forestall any kind of "I wanna delete this line from MoS because it's wrong" thread; let's just disprove that idea right this second and save everyone the trouble.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:01, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

This user has done the same removing a comma following a state name: [1]. Reywas92Talk 19:55, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

I actually predicted that would be the case: "I'm almost willing to bet cash you wrongly try to delete those commas, too." [2] Heh. This is why I'm certain it's due to importing style ideas from somewhere else and mistakenly treating them as something like a natural law. It fits a specific pattern common in some flavors of news journalism, an insistence on throwing away certain punctuation to save trivial amounts of space (at the expense of clarity). This problem of "I learned and prefer X from [insert one of: my favorite news site, my job, my 5th grade teacher, Daddy, the obscure style manual required in my community-college English class], and since I know it better I will assert that it is the One True Way to write and that MoS is wrong" is a pretty common cause of MoS-related grumbling. But there's not much we can do about it, other than be patient; people do eventually come around to the fact that this is a guideline about how to write WP not an article describing "official standards" of English.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:09, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
That's a case that's been the subject of debate—whether there should be a comma when the placename is used as a noun adjunct. I seem to recall there was a discussion about it just recently, but I don't recall if there was a consensus on how to handle it. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:19, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
If a preponderance of real-world style guides do not advise drawing such a distinction (or even mention one), and/or there's not a truly compelling Wikipedia-specific reason to draw it (like frequent hair-pulling disputes about it), inserting some MoS line-item about this involves a risk of it being interpreted as exactly the kind of "made-up nonsense" that people fear MoS contains or will contain.

I can't see a reason that we'd treat a noun-phrase adjunct (an NP acting as an adjectival modifier of another noun) differently; there's nothing broken about "They sold their Clovis, California, home in 2014." It doesn't structurally make sense as "They sold their Clovis, California home in 2014.", though most people's brains wouldn't melt. But trying to lay out a rule for editors to drop the second comma in that but retain it in "They bought a house in Clovis, California, in 1998" would be a WP:CREEP nightmare of the kind we've already had to wrestle with before: lots of "I just can't get it" problems, and people disputing it as nonsense or at best as an attested style that's too complicated to employ here.

When such a place name is used in a larger compound construction (the adjectival noun phrase being just part of the compound modifier), like "They sold their Clovis, California-based business in 2014", the hyphen is a replacement for the second comma, just as would be terminal punctuation ("They moved to Weed, Texas.") I don't think even Chicago spells all this out very clearly (as it does for actual terminal punctuation), though their examples illustrate such cases. But we don't seem to have any active problem of editors doing daft things like "They moved to Weed, Texas, – a much smaller community – the same year." (or "... –, the same year"). We just intuitively know that things like ", –" are not idiomatic in English writing. [They actually used to be, in the 1800s; Emerson used such patterns, as illustrated at WP:EMERSON, an essay created for an unrelated reason.]
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:09, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Discussion of the "Style discussions ongoing" talk page section

May I suggest that this section be kept at the top of the page? It's a losing battle keeping it at the bottom. BTW I added a hidden "Do not archive until 2029" tag so that problem's handled. EEng 08:05, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm not much caring; someone wanted to put into some kind of sidebar template or something. I only bother moving it back to the bottom when updating it anyway. [shrug]  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:04, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
This should probably be on Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Discussions of note or some such (deliberately not using the 'noticeboard' nomenclature given the past-year-or-two's discussion about having a MOS noticeboard), with some active content transcluded here into some {{to do}}/{{cent}}-ish kind of thing and the inactive content not. --Izno (talk) 13:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Perhaps Izno is right, but I've moved this to the top of the page for the time being. EEng 14:20, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, there are multiple ways to approach this. I didn't recall that the noticeboard idea had been discussed that recently (it was an RfC something like 5–8 years ago). I don't think a noticeboard is an appropriate direction, since we do not "enforce" MoS like a policy, and there's already been F-loads too much drama resulting from certain individuals' attempts to make MoS excessively emphatic, nit-picky, and at times nationalistic. We don't need a bureaucracy for handling formatting trivia, and tensions already run too high too often about such matters. (If someone's being genuinely disruptive, ANI or AE or ANEW can and does already handle it.) The kinds of "not a noticeboard" informational pages used for topical tracking of deletion discussions are probably a better model (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Sports).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:29, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Pronunciation of redundant parts of foreign names

I'm asking for the general case, but my question arises more specifically from treatment of Thailand-related proper nouns. The current convention is to include the Thai spelling of a name after the bold title, followed by the pronunciation. But this leads to words which aren't part of the English name appearing in the transcribed version. Take Chulalongkorn University, for example. The name in Thai is Thai: จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย, RTGS: Chulalongkon Mahawitthayalai. The IPA pronunciation is given for the entire name, but the Mahawitthayalai part means "university", and is actually redundant. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation says, "If the name consists of more than one word, include pronunciation only for the words that need it (all of Jean van Heijenoort but only Cholmondeley in Thomas P. G. Cholmondeley)." But is [ma.hǎː.wít.tʰa.jāː.lāj] needed here? Readers who look at the bold title Chulalongkorn University will expect to only find the pronunciation for Chulalongkorn, and will be confused where the Mahawitthayalai comes from. But readers who are looking at the Thai name would also presumably want to know the pronunciation in its entirety. How should this be dealt with?

Another example is Charoen Krung Road. It's ถนนเจริญกรุง in Thai, RTGS: Thanon Charoen Krung. But the {{RTGS}} template isn't needed here, since the article title already follows the RTGS transcription. So the appearance of [tʰā.nǒn] in the pronunciation guide is even more confusing to reader who doesn't know Thai. There are also thousands of other streets, bridges railway stations, etc. Would repeating the pronunciation of the same few words for all of them be too redundant? Should they be included or omitted? --Paul_012 (talk) 02:36, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

It's an editorial decision, but I agree with you—the lead really only needs the IPA for Chulalongkorn, and probably doesn't need even the Thai transcription, unless there are multiple ways Chulalongkorn could be written in Thai. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:44, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

RfC on drug name

Requests for comment are sought at Talk:2010–2017 Toronto serial homicides § RfC on drug name on how to state the name of a drug mentioned in court documents about a living person. – Reidgreg (talk) 16:34, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Yet another dash question

Very simple question: should it be Deer Park–West Werribee railway line, or Deer Park – West Werribee railway line?

I moved it to its current location a while ago after noting "Los Angeles–New York flight" was preferred by MOS:DASH, but now I’m not sure if it falls into the category of ranges with spaces in the elements. Any advice is appreciated. Triptothecottage (talk) 09:41, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh boy, this will really put the cat among the pigeons. EEng 09:58, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
To put it another way, there is an inconsistency near MOS:ENBETWEEN, where the first bullet includes this example:
a New York–Los Angeles flight
(unspaced), but the subsection just before that says:
The en dash in a range is always unspaced, except when either or both elements of the range include at least one space
and lists examples like:
Christmas 2001 – Easter 2002
I suggest that the first example shown above be changed to:
a New York – Los Angeles flight
(spaced) to be consistent with the written text. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 11:58, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
The difference is the first range are dates, while the flight example are places. When the section was hashed out in a massive RFC some years ago, there was strong opposition to having "New York–Los Angeles flight" be punctuated differently from "Chicago–Atlanta flight". I don't think it should be changed. oknazevad (talk) 13:49, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
Some of us didn't like the spaces in dates, either, but that's how it came down. I would not be in favor of re-opening any of this, given all the last 8 years of working toward consistency with the consensus guidelines. Dicklyon (talk) 19:25, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
Agreed. This isn't worth changing, even if we could agree on what to change it to.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:20, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
I don't see any inconsistency. MOS:ENTO (ranges that might otherwise be expressed with to or through) and MOS:ENBETWEEN (compounds when the connection might otherwise be expressed with to, versus, and, or between) are distinct, separate subsections. I don't see any reason to presume that the spacing rule described under MOS:ENTO would apply to MOS:ENBETWEEN. --Paul_012 (talk) 18:59, 24 February 2019 (UTC) PS Well, one could say that prescribing different styles for different uses of the dash is inconsistent, but the guidance is clearly structured, and I don't think there's significant potential for confusion in the way the MOS page itself is written. Though it is indeed a bit counter-intuitive and could confuse editors who hadn't taken the time to study the MOS. --Paul_012 (talk) 19:12, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
When I wrote the above, I missed the hatnote on the earlier section Here the ranges are ranges of numbers, dates, or times.... I change my objection to that it's inconsistent and counter-intuitive to have different styles depending on the use case, even acknowledging there may be underlying reasons for it. MOS should not be just (or even primarily) for use by experts – they don't need it. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 20:05, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Good grief. Thanks for the answers – I was not interested in upsetting anyone's apple cart, I just wanted to know what the correct interpretation of the consensus guideline was. I missed the hatnote too, which makes it quite plain. Triptothecottage (talk) 11:28, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

IAR for MOS:IM

The MOS is also quite clear with regards to certain image placement: "Each image should be inside the level 2 section to which it relates, within the section defined by the most recent ==Heading== delimited by two equal signs, or at the top of the lead section. Do not place images immediately above section headings."

The same user as above believes that because "MOS is not policy, it is not mandatory" that this should be ignored for no clear reason. He claims it provides "VISUAL BALANCE" to the article, but in this case the images are cleanly alternating left and right with no excess images stacking on top of each other so putting the images within the relevant sections is perfectly visually balanced. I think they look bad being in the wrong section and breaking the horizontal header line. What would be a good reason to ignore the MOS for image placement? Reywas92Talk 19:55, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

(a) I can't even tell what the section you quoted is trying to say, and (b) MOS is to be applied with common sense, which may override rigidly stated rules. I can't really tell what's going on in the particular article you linked. EEng 00:53, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Same user as in the IAR thread above, already blocked for similar "my way or the highway" editwarring. It's not a valid WP:IAR, since what the editor wants to do isn't an improvement of any kind, but introduced problems for no benefit. For one thing, it separated the image from the material to which it pertains, and as a more immediately obvious problem, it confusingly caused the heading to wrap to the right of the image (though this might vary by viewport size, etc.)

Meta: We (the entire community, or rather the image and layout geeks in it, who care) may need to revisit MOS:IMAGE, Help:Pictures, and image-related parts of MOS:ACCESS to make sure they all still make sense in 2019 and on mobile devices. I'm not sure all of this material has kept pace with display issues, former display issues possibly no longer being issues, changes to MediaWiki, and so on. A lot of this stuff probably needs a round of focused test-casing to see what actually happens today under what circumstances, on the desktop and mobile sites, and on different devices.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:25, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

This section says that the images should be placed in the relevant section below the header like at [3], not in the previous section above the header like at [4]. I see no common sense argument that the latter should override the MOS-compliant former. Reywas92Talk 08:12, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Apparently my bringing Daniel Burnham into compliance with the MOS is "harassment". User:Beyond My Ken has placed the images back above the header lines in the previous section, claiming "better layout" with no explanation why this is better. Thoughts? @SMcCandlish: Reywas92Talk 08:11, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

@Reywas92: I put it back to what it's supposed to be [5].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:12, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Why did my addition get reverted? (Word Variation and Repetitiveness)

Hi Wikipedia folks, I would like to know why my addition to the article with the section titled “Word Variation and Repetitiveness” was reverted/deleted. Repetitiveness is a problem I see in Wikipedia pages sometimes, and there’s no mention of it on this article, even though this would be the perfect place to have it. As the spirit of that addition would be productive and helpful for the article, at the very least we should talk about it here instead of reverting it. Or I can make the addition, and the other users who are more knowledgeable about how these pages work can tweak and edit it as they see fit. I greatly welcome and appreciate any feedback, insights, or comments. Thanks everyone! Thanks Mrbeastmodeallday (talk) 21:44, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Seems to be: New content added to this page should directly address a persistently recurring style issue. As this page, including this talk page, applies to all articles, it should be read by many people. There is an unusually high bar for additions to the article page, and even for this talk page. Gah4 (talk) 22:07, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
Our Manual of Style is already very long; it has to be because Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia that covers almost everything, but it doesn't need to cover every aspect of good writing. It just needs to cover the things that are particular to Wikipedia, things that have caused conflict, places where standardization is helpful, etc. We want the MoS to be readable and no longer than it needs to be. I hope that helps.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
Repetitiveness and other forms of redundancy are frequent writing faults, but a matter of basic copy-editing; they're not the sort of thing that people fight about. Most everything in MoS was added to forestall cyclical, same-every-time editorial disputes, and the few exceptions are matters of technical need. WP:How to write better articles is a better place for general writing advice, including on redundancy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:09, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

The birthplace that changed

Is the way that birthplaces are described in the infoboxes at Gandhi, Miloš Zeman and Andrej Babiš described in a MOS somewhere? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:28, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Is this what you mean? Not sure if you meant that those infoboxes are using "now" in the birthplace. Also Template:Infobox_person has some guidance in the table, but that's not the infobox being used in those articles. I often take out "now" or "present day" out of articles. It depends on the situation. But I figure that most of the place names are linked anyhow and if anyone really wants to know, they can click the link and see what the current place name is. I just did this for an article that kept saying something like "Bombay (present day Mumbai)". Other editors may have additional guidance. PopularOutcasttalk2me! 14:58, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for replying. What I meant was "British India" vs just "India" etc. Your first link says "If a different name is appropriate in a given historical or other context, then that may be used instead, although it is normal to follow the first occurrence of such a name with the standard modern name in parentheses." The template says "Use the name of the birthplace at the time of birth, e.g.: Saigon (prior to 1976) or Ho Chi Minh City (post-1976)." IMO this is clear enough, but that is my view. Thanks again! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:01, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Punctuation (commas) in connection with title(s) and honorific suffixes

AlbanGeller (talk · contribs) and myself had a discussion on his talk page regarding when/where/whether to use commas where title(s) and honorific suffixes occur (such as in the article Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington), and he suggested that I bring the subject up here to see if there could be more input.

HandsomeFella (talk) 08:49, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Use the comma. It's just better semantics with an appositive. Maybe more importantly, anyone not intimately familiar with generational labeling in English (and MOS's particular take on how to write that labeling), and British treatment of post-nominal titles, could easily misinterpret "Peter Carington 6th Baron Carrington" as "Peter Carington VI, Barron Carrington". Some people's "death to commas" habits (generally imported from news style and highly specialized technical writing) has to give way to clear communication at Wikipedia. The majority of actual British usage I've seen (off-site, I mean) favors the commas, though I've not exhaustively researched this. FWIW, Encyclopædia Britannica also includes the comma [6].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Actually, it was the comma after Lord Carrington's lifespan I was referring to. Pinging @SMcCandlish and AlbanGeller:. HandsomeFella (talk) 19:14, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Footnote k under MOS:COMMAS doesn't address round-bracket parentheses in particular, but it also doesn't suggest that what it does address is an exhaustive list. Since a clause-delimiting dash would merge with and replace the final comma of the appositive (in this case, a post-noms list with its own internal commas), and a dash-delimited parenthetical can be converted into a brackets-delimited one and vice versa, a round bracket in this kind of construction should also merge away that final comma. But if a bracketed parenthetical were properly part of an item being bracketed, it would still get a comma after it. That is, if the second post-nom in the list had its own brackets, e.g. "XY (Z)", a comma would come after that in the list of them. Unless it were the last of them and were followed by comma-replacing alternative punctuation per footnote k.  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:19, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
No, you absolutely do not need a comma after the dates. It looks ridiculous and it's not standard practice. I've deleted many of these extraneous commas over the years. As well as final commas after the list of postnoms but before the dates. Also completely pointless. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:28, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
Agree with others above. This is a case of two consecutive parentheticals: the comma-delimited post-noms and the parenthesis-delimited dates. Without the post-noms, no comma is necessary. With them, it could seem reasonable to include the dates as well (with a trailing comma to complete the list), which is what the Carington editor appears to have done. I would prefer to keep them separate because they have different purposes and delimiters. The left parenthesis terminates the post-noms and no comma follows the dates. Would be good for MOS to address this issue. Jmar67 (talk) 05:13, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

First-magnitude star or First magnitude star?

Circling back to the compound modifier question from above once more, it seems I have been "corrected" here, when someone said should be "First magnitude star" rather than "First-magnitude star". Does that qualify as a valid exception? Usage in sources seems mixed. Pinging @Modulus12: who made the change.  — Amakuru (talk) 23:44, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Of course it's mixed. Useful hyphens are very often dropped in such contexts. For our readers' sake, we prefer not to drop them. Dicklyon (talk) 23:58, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
By the way, I do see the compound-modifier question above, but not a compound modifier question, if you get my drift. Dicklyon (talk) 00:01, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 — Amakuru (talk) 00:05, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Your ping didn't work because you didn't add it on a new line (see Help:Fixing failed pings) but luckily I have this page on my watchlist. I've no objection to adding a hyphen now that the article has been moved. And in related POTD style discussions, I saw that the Coup d'état article was swapped back to italics... Not sure if anyone wants to re-open that debate. Modulus12 (talk) 02:17, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Ha, that is ridiculous. There can be no "debate" - "coup d'etat" is a vastly more common English term than the actual textbook example of a non-foreign term "esprit de corps", which is given at MOS:FOREIGNITALICS. If people want to apply different rules then they should do it via a change in the MOS, not via individual articles. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 09:35, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Hyphenate it. This is another WP:SSF case. A phrase like this, without the hyphen, is only sensible to people already familiar with the subject matter. Without the familiarity, one wonders "What's a magnitude star, and which one came second?".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:55, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Contradiction between MOS:HYPHEN and MOS:ENBETWEEN

There seem to be two contradictory lines in the manual of style:

  • But never insert a hyphen into a proper name (Middle Eastern cuisine, not Middle-Eastern cuisine) (from the MOS:HYPHEN section)
  • but a family of Japanese-American traders or a family of Japanese Americans (from the MOS:ENBETWEEN section)

It seems to me that Japanese American would count as a proper name in the smae way that "Middle Eastern" would. This became an issue at WP:ERRORS, regarding today's OTD entry "African-American teenager Trayvon Martin was killed while walking...". Should "African-American" be hyphenated? I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but it seems like one or other of the above lines needs amending. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 09:23, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Amakuru, Middle Eastern cuisine is a proper name. Japanese-American in Japanese-American traders is an adjective. Right above that section in ENBETWEEN it says for people and things identifying with multiple nationalities, use a hyphen when applied as an adjective or a space as a noun. I am not sure there is a contradiction. PopularOutcasttalk2me! 10:13, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@PopularOutcast: so are you saying that the "Japanese American" and "African American" constructs are not equivalent? Because obviously "African" is a not a nationality, and the phrase "African American" is not meant to imply any connection with the continent of Africa. So the line you mention can't apply there. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 10:19, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Amakuru, I am saying they are equivalent. Your initial argument didn't seem to indicate that you objected to this format because you do not consider African a nationality. You may want to take a look at African Americans, specifically the lead and the section on terminology. PopularOutcasttalk2me! 10:31, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Editing to add that on the front page African-American was used as an adjective in African-American teenager. PopularOutcasttalk2me! 10:39, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@PopularOutcast: I don't "object" to anything, I'm just saying there's a contradiction that needs clearing up. Even if you think it's all crystal clear, the two lines are still open to different interpretations. Perhaps "Middle Eastern" (the adjective form of Middle East) and "African American" (the adjective form of African American) are different things, but if so that should be explicitly stated, and why. So that we don't need to debate this issue in the future. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 10:45, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Amakuru, Right, so then back to my original reply. ENBETWEEN makes the distinction to add a hyphen for people or things that identify with multiple nationalities when used as an adjective. Middle Eastern is not multiple nationalities. I will stop here though because I don't see the contradiction and someone else might be better able to assist the both of us. Cheers. PopularOutcasttalk2me! 11:00, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Alright, thanks. If what you say is correct, we just need to add a clarifier to the Middle Eastern line to that effect, but let's wait for some more views. (Although as I already noted, African is not a nationality... and an African American is not someone with dual citizenship between Africa and United States, just so that's clear!)  — Amakuru (talk) 11:05, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Right, since "African American" is not a case of someone holding a dual citizenship or such, but the name of an ethnic group in one country, it shouldn't be hyphenated when used as an adjective. A quick survey of news and book sources confirms this. Removal of the hyphen was the correct action. And the sentence at the African Americans article should be removed; neither reference attached to it actually supports its claim, and they're just general references to the definition of the term that probably were separated from the preceding sentence (which they actually support) in a careless previous edit. oknazevad (talk) 13:06, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
PS, I did remove that sentence. I also want to note that recently there was a large set of proposed moves that was withdrawn by the proposed that essentially release on that sentence for arguing against those moves, which means the justification was in error. See Talk:African-American gospel. oknazevad (talk) 13:23, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Agree with oknazevad, PopularOutcase et al. Tony (talk) 13:09, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
    @Tony1: As far as I can tell, oknazevad and PopularOutcase are saying the opposite thing. ok is advocating no hyphen in African American teenager, while Popular is saying there should be a hyphen. What think you?  — Amakuru (talk) 16:44, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
    My bad. I agree with Oknazevad. No hyphen is by far the most-commonly used. And I somehow get the feeling (unverified) that African American writers prefer it. I presume the hyphen is used when it's a double adjective (is it? ... "African-American health statistics"?). Tony (talk) 04:28, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
    I would use the hyphen. African American is a compound noun, and we don't really mean an American teenager who is African, but rather a teenager who is an African American. It's a subtle enough difference in this case that dropping the hyphen is common and not really harmful, but I prefer consistent use of the hyphen to make it read easier. And African American is a compound of two proper name terms, but is not a proper name like Golden Gate is (which is why we don't write Golden-Gate Bridge). Dicklyon (talk) 16:06, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Dicklyon—I doubt either "African" or "American" is a proper name. Unsure of what a "proper name term" is, too. Tony (talk) 08:15, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
True. But they're derivations from proper names, of the sort that get capped. Dicklyon (talk) 16:04, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
But that's just it, "African American" is a single proper noun term, being the name for the ethnic group of people descended from slaves of the American south. I mean, at this point we're getting into fraught realms of discussion involving ethnic identities and national origins and such, which are almost inherently minefields, but it remains that while etymologically coming from two words, it's not a compound of two separate words but a single term. oknazevad (talk) 17:07, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
I disagree that African American is a name for a group. It's a descriptive compound. Here is one analysis that agrees with me. I expect you have some on the other side? Dicklyon (talk) 18:52, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Yep, they're all over the African American article. oknazevad (talk) 18:58, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • For those advocating no hyphen, please consider Japanese English teacher (a Japanese teacher of English) versus Japanese-English teacher (a teacher of dual cultural backgrounds). Without the hyphen, the "Japanese" describes "English teacher": [Japanese [English [teacher]]] vs [Japanese-English [teacher]]. Thus it's possible to misparse African American teenager as [African [American [teenager]]], whereas African-American teenager is unambiguous. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:44, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Agree. WP is not here to promote grammatical consistency or improvement, but to convey information to readers. Phrases of the form "African American teenager" can be confusing to many readers if we don't hyphenate, so we hyphenate. It's a simple as that. --A D Monroe III(talk) 18:20, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
  • I disagree strongly with Oknevazad, for four reasons: Most strongly, it's for the same ambiguity-avoiding reason that Curly Turkey and A D Monroe III object. It's also a random-looking and, to many, inexplicable inconsistency with all other compound modifier hyphenation. The underlying premise is faulty; it's a true compound referring to Africa and [the United States of] America; there is no place "African America", so it it not like "New York" or "United States" not having a hyphen in them when used adjectivally. Finally, the claim that the non-hyphenated form (as an adjective) is the most common is failing to account for the fact that news style (which WP is not written in) accounts for the vast majority of occurrences of things like "African American traditions", and news style is unusually hostile to hyphenation, thus badly skewing the results; it's invalid statistics. And on a matter like this, we don't care about statistics anyway, but consistency and the likelihood that editors will comply with it rather than argue to death over it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:31, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
    That's all well and good, but in this case our MOS clearly says not to hyphenate proper names. And African American is clearly a proper name. Much like Middle East is. So we're in keeping with reliable sources and our house style by not doing so. Let's be honest, the phrase "African American teenager..." cannot possibly be misconstrued. But anwyay, I was thinking from Tony and Oknazevad's comments that this would be a fairly easy one to resolve, but it seems from the more recent comments like an RFC may be required to nail this one down properly. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 21:31, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
    "African American" is not a name (a type of noun), and not a noun at all. It is an adjective, as you clearly understand yourself when you use it to modify the noun "teenager". And for that matter, it is also incorrect that we must avoid hyphenating proper names. Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, for instance, should be hyphenated. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:38, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
    @David Eppstein: yes, I know "African American teenager" is an adjective, but then so is "Middle Eastern" in the textbook example at MOS:HYPHEN, "Middle Eastern cuisine". The point is that the terms are adjectives which are derived from proper nouns. So we need to either (a) hyphenate both "African American" and "Middle Eastern" when they are used as adjectives, (b) hyphenate neither of them, or (c) explain in the MOS why one is hyphenated and the other is not. I don't mind which of a, b or c we choose, but we should do one of them. That's the purpose of my post here. As for Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, that's a bit of a red herring. The hyphen there is because it's part of his name, and is present in the noun form too. The more relevant point is that if he had, say, a theorem named after him we would always call it the "Peter Swinnerton-Dyer theorem", not the "Peter-Swinnerton-Dyer theorem", even though in that case his name is being used as a compound modifier.  — Amakuru (talk) 07:11, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
    They're still not grammatically parallel. If they were parallel, there would be an "African America" that African American people come from, but there isn't; "African" modifies the people, not the place. However, Middle Eastern people are not the same as Eastern people whose ancestors came from the Middle; they are people from the Middle East. So since these are constructed differently I don't see why it is obvious that they should be hyphenated identically. As for things named after S-D, the one you're looking for is probably the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:18, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
    That's also not a parallel case. Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer are two different people, and that is a dash, not a hyphen. We would call it the Birch–Swinnerton conjecture even if there were no Dyer in the mix at all. The kind of example I'm talking about is Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories rather than Barack-Obama citizenship conspiracy theories. Anyway, I don't dispute your opinion - if you and the the rest of the community think it should be "African-American teenager" then that's fine. But it's clear, from the differing opinions on the issue expressed here, that this is an issue that needs resolution. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 07:49, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
    "Double-barrelled" surnames aren't a parallel case; they "arrived" here pre-hyphenated. The hyphen is a formal part of such a name (for individuals and families that use the hyphen) for the same reason the diacritic belongs in the name of Abimael Guzmán but not Ryan Guzman. "New York" has no permanent hyphen in it, so it is not hyphenated internally in an adjectival construction, like "New York-style pizza".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:42, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
    Amakuru: What do we gain by granting "African American" a no-hyphen exception? What do we lose by not granting this exception? What concrete problem would be solved by avoiding "African-American teenager"?—and think of how "wrong" it'd look to see "African American and Mexican-American teenagers ..." Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:54, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
    @Curly Turkey: I don't know what we gain or lose, perhaps nothing. But like I say, I don't myself favour one form or the other, I think we just need to clarify. Is there a fundamental difference between "African-Amreican teenager" and "Middle Eastern cuisine" that means we hyphenate one but not the other? I think whatever we decide should probably cover "Japanese-American teenager" and "Mexican-American teenager" too, as well as "African-American teenager", as I don't think there's a fundamental difference between those. None of those terms are strictly about simple dual nationality, they are more a description of a group of people, i.e. Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans... those are Americans (perhaps with no other citizenship), but who are culturally or through ancestry linked to Japan/Mexico/Africa. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 07:11, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
    I have no problem with (maybe even would prefer) "Middle-Eastern cuisine", and prefer it to a rule with numerous hard-to-understand exceptions. I hoped the "Japanese[-]English teacher" example would clarify that the presence or absence of a hyphen has semantic importance. Somebody pointed out that "Africa" is not a country, but neither is "Asia" or "Jew", and I'd hyphenate "Asian-American teenager" and "Jewish-American teenager". Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:23, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
    I wasn't intending to imply above that it has to do with "countries" in particular (a word with more than one meaning anyway). "African American" isn't a unitary noun like "New York", but a descriptive compound, a shorthand for "American of African ancestry" (New York isn't a new part of York, or York moved from one place to another; it's evocative not descriptive). There are edge cases; is "Middle East" a shorthand for something like "the East, but the middle-ish part of it"? It arguably was 100 years ago, when terms like "Near East" and "Middle East" were used in a subjective, hand-waving way without very concrete meanings – "Near East" even included Ottoman-controlled parts of Europe for some people. But not today. MoS didn't make this stuff up; it's just following what other English-language style guides advise (other than news ones, which lean anti-hyphen about everything). And that would not have a hyphen in "Middle Eastern cuisine". Such a hyphen isn't conventional in unitary placenames (even unofficial ones), but it is in "A modifying B" compound adjectives, as in "a Filipino-Canadian pool player", while an en dash is used in "A relating independently with B" ones, as in "the Philippines–Canada trade agreements". Neither relationship exists between "New" and "York" in "New York politicians" or "Middle" and "East" in "Middle Eastern cuisine", though this is maybe less certain about the latter case. N-grams are not terribly helpful on this; they always show suppression of the hyphen for all such constructions, because news style is anti-hyphen in general, and skews the results (Google's N-gram database is full of news material). However, if you compare plots of phrases like "Middle[-]Eastern politics" to those for, say, "African[-]American actor", you'll find that the hyphen nearly never occurs in the regional reference, while its suppression in the ethnic one is much milder.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:42, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I sense that, with a few notable dissensions, we may have a consensus here that the preferred usage is: "African-American teenager", "Mexican-American teenager" etc. but retain "Middle Eastern cuisine", "New York train crash", "Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture", "Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories" etc. If there's general agreement for this, perhaps some sort of explanatory note can be added to the proper name line because it may not be immediately obvious that African American does not count as a regular proper name in this context. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 10:44, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Request for neutral input regarding Mormons

I have absolutely no horse in this race and couldn't care less on whether the Mormons call themselves "LDS" or "COJC", but, as pointed out here, the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Latter Day Saints#changes based on recent style request from LDS Church? has fizzled out without any kind of consensus as to what Wikipedia should be calling these people, so there are minor good-faith back and forth changes and reverts going on all over the project. While I normally feel the MOS is too overreaching, this is something Wikipedia should micromanage to the extent of coming up with a single approved name otherwise people will be changing "Mormon", "Latter-day Saint" and "Church of Jesus Christ" back and forth for eternity; if people have a spare few minutes can they pop over there and try to get this settled on one name or another? ‑ Iridescent 09:11, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

back and forth for eternity. Does this proves the True Eternity for ever ? Or do we have Jesus cries, but the caravan goes further ? Pldx1 (talk) 09:48, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Explanatory supplements to this guideline. Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy

Is Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy an explanatory supplement to this guideline? If yes, it should be linked prominently. If no, that page should not be making the claim. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:43, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

I would call it a strongly supported essay (at least it is strongly supported by the editors who regularly contribute to discussions on MOS pages) related to MOS guidance. I’m less sure that “supplement” is the right word. Blueboar (talk) 14:53, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
I am not sure about the word “supplement”, but it is not the worst choice, and that word is used on many essays that have been decided to not be mere opinion but an important explanation that should be read when interpreting policy on a particular angle. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 15:01, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

SmokeyJoe: So where have the proposed links been placed, specifically? I couldn't find any new links, despite this discussion and its contributors seeming to agree on the need for them. cherkash (talk) 02:16, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Hyphens vs. dashes in geographic names

It seems there's no clear guidance on which of the two alternatives should be used in geographic names. E.g. in the case of Austria-Hungary, a hyphen is advised by the MOS. Whereas, logically and per closer reading of the en-dash/hyphen policies, even this case is not so clear. Specifically, Austria and Hungary were essentially two parts joined together, and so per most other similar cases there should be an en-dash (Austria–Hungary). On the other hand, it has also been known as Austro-Hungary (where it's clearly the combining form that's intended here, and hence the hyphen).

Other recently discussed cases are:

In the case of KC and KB, the original Russian versions of their names both use the combining form (similar to Greco-Roman or Anglo-American), namely Russian transliterations are Karachayevo-Cherkesiya for KC (I'm ignoring -siya to -ssia transition as not relevant to the subject) and Kabardino-Balkariya for KB. But then somehow KB is the only one that retains this Russian form in English: KC changes what should have been "Karachayevo-" to "Karachay-", whereas KB forms what seems to be a combining adjectivial form "Kabardino-" from the noun "Kabardin" (a variation of the name for Kabardians).

Other cases from the fairly modern history include:

  • Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, where again two nationalities have formed the name on essentially equal terms. And so either Chechen–Ingush (with a dash) or Checheno-Ingush (with a hyphen) would be appropriate – solely depending on which grammatical form is used.
  • Same goes for Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and State of Buryat-Mongolia. The first is the equal-terms use: both "Buryat" and "Mongol" are nouns denoting nationalities – and so it should be used with an en-dash: Buryat–Mongol ASSR. Whereas the second one seems to be a combining form: it would be Buryatiya–Mongolia (like Austria–Hungary) if it were an equal-parts form, but instead it's on the pattern of Austro-Hungary (with a hyphen).

And so by looking at these examples, it seems that the choice between hyphen and en-dash should be guided by the grammatical/semantical meaning of the compound name in question, instead of applying a hard and fast "always use hyphen" exception rule (as seems to be superficially prescribed by MOS).

Pinging editors from other related recent discussions to opine on this: SMcCandlish, Dicklyon, Tony1. cherkash (talk) 02:57, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Where it's two parallel names that connected, I prefer the en dash. But I often don't know how to interpret whether that's what it is. Sounds like you've figured some out. Dicklyon (talk) 03:07, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
I also prefer the en dash as reasoned and described above. (I would also prefer a dash for Austria–Hungary even though it is almost always found in printed sources as the hyphenated Austria-Hungary). Doremo (talk) 03:21, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
Also, "the original Russian versions of the names" is a red herring. The Russian language has its own orthographic rules which differ from those of English. WP isn't dictated to by officialese much less non-English officialese, or transliteration by non-native English speakers from foreign officialese into the Latin alphabet.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:39, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
  • En dash. The entire point of the en dash (in such a construction – it's also used for an unrelated syntactic purpose, as in this parenthetical) is juxtaposition of two or more equal, comparable, or parallel entities, to indicate a relationship among them, a conflict between them, their joint output, or their merger. Incidence of hyphen usage in place of this is frequent primarily because some style guides eschew dashes for this purpose, including most news style guides, but not academic ones. An encyclopedia is essentially an academic work, not news, so we use the en-dash style for a reason. Informal online writing and the fact that most keyboards have a hyphen key but no dash key is another cause of hyphens substituting for dashes, but WP is not written in random lazy schmoe's blog and forum posts style, either.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:55, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
    • SMcCandlish: Did you ignore the cases using a combining form (Kabardino-Balkaria, Austro-Hungary) on purpose? It doesn't seem that either "always use hyphen" (as advocated by the MOS) or "always use dash" (as advocated by you) could be the answer here. I think we'll have to keep distinguishing between the two depending on the etymology and semantics of the name. cherkash (talk) 04:22, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
      • Combining forms always use a hyphen because they are prefixes and prefixes that are not fully merged into a word are hyphenated. Thus Austro-, Sino-, etc., just like pre- and post- and meta- and semi-. They aren't names in their own right, but derived 'of or relating to ...' adjectival prefixes. (There's a special exception for converting a prefix's or suffix's hyphen into an en dash when the affix is added to a unitary compound that has its own internal hyphen or space: pre–Austro-Hungarian, post–Winston Churchill Britain. Various style guides omit that idea (besides journalism ones which are just anti-dash), while some don't; we've retained it, though it may be a bit fussy.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:36, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
        • Ok, I'm with you here, SMcCandlish. But this latest comment of yours contradicts your top-level comment that starts with the bold "En dash" (which I construed as "always use an en-dash" – was that not your initial opinion?) – and in fact calls for distinguishing between hyphenated and dashed cases, as I hinted towards in my original inquiry here. cherkash (talk) 02:06, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
          To be clear, I'm not contradicting your original comment; it should obviously be "Austria–Hungary". In news style, this would be written "Austria-Hungary", just because news is the anti-dash realm. Since WP isn't written in news style (WP:NOT#NEWS), MoS has no reason to care. Some non-news publishers are also anti-dash and use hyphens for everything like this; the ones that would write "Austria-Hungary" would also write "Mexican-American War" and "Dunning-Kruger effect". WP isn't among them, so we shouldn't be writing "Austria-Hungary". It just causes confusion. The material probably needs to be clarified (see below).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:20, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment. This parses as: we are using em--da because we are academic, and we are academic because we are using em--da. Part of the people will say this is a circular-reasoning, to underline that circular shape is combined with reasoning, allowing to build a higher concept. Part of the people will say this is circular--reasoning, to underline the juxtaposition between reasoning and fallacy (oxymore). Dissenters will use circular---reasoning to underline the opposition between the two concepts (oxy--more and more). Indeed, how academic we are ! Pldx1 (talk) 09:12, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
    • Agree with SMcCandlish. And the number of academics who don't "bother" with en dashes is striking – even for page ranges, where all of the major US and UK styleguides insist on one. Wikipedia is more professional than that. Tony (talk) 09:44, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
    • Pldx1's circular-reasoning fantasy is just that: imaginary. We're academic because we're an encyclopedia, which is an academic book-publishing endeavor, not fiction, not editorial, not humor, not news, not govermentese, not signage, not research papers, not advocacy material, not anything else. It's written like an academic book because it is one. Almost all of our style disputation is caused by people refusing to accept this and expecting to be able to write like this is a blog, a newspaper, a novel, a legal document, an action alert, or a paper in Journal of Applied Econometrics. We use academic style based on that of leading style guides for academic book publishing because of WP's academic-book nature; it isn't the use of that style that makes WP an encyclopedia and not something else; WP:ENC, WP:5P and other founding principles define what WP is.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:36, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Here's the problem: It looks to me like "Wrong: Austria–Hungary; the hyphenated Austria-Hungary was a single jurisdiction during its 1867–1918 existence" was added by someone to encapsulate some kind of personal opinion or to rationalize an existing article title instead of moving it, and without any consideration of conflict with the rest of the dashes guideline and with actual practice (virtually all of our articles on places that are merged polities and whose names have a horizontal line in them separating the two formerly separate place names use an en dash, and RM regularly moves them to do so). All such places are "single jurisdictions during [their] existence" under the compound name, so the rationale in that quoted bit just doesn't work. I think this line should simply be removed. I'd been wondering why we keep getting recurrent confusion about dashes and hyphens in place names, and this is clearly the source of it. (Or most of it. Odd cases like Guinea-Bissau, "the Guinea of Bissau", and Wilkes-Barre, a town named in remote honor of people with no connection to the place, generate some questions. However, they reflect patterns of hyphen usage that no longer survive in contemporary English. They're nomenclatural fossils, like all the "St James Church"-style locations in the UK and Ireland without a possessive apostrophe.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:20, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia style guidelines is confusing for a new user

Category:Wikipedia style guidelines is confusing. It lists both legitimate guidelines and essays. Essays are not guidelines, yet are listed there. They are two: 1 and 2. I suggest making them separate from the legitimate guidelines for the sake of preventing new users' confusion.--Adûnâi (talk) 12:11, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Be bold. --Izno (talk) 14:12, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
We have this problem all over .....that is essays and user pages are seen in policy and guidelines cats.--Moxy (talk) 03:15, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
I fixed that one. You linked to the same page twice. The essay's categorization error was caused by attempting to pipe-link a category without preceding its name with ":"; the fix was just doing [[:Category:Wikipedia style guidelines|style guidelines]]. It wasn't an intentional attempt to mark the page as a style guideline. I also added Category:Wikipedia essays on style to it. I did find another essays in there, Wikipedia:Use feminine pronouns, which was intentionally mis-categorized, and I've fixed that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:46, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
I've removed some pages that were essays from the category, but I'm not sure what the status is for the following guidelines - Wikipedia:Manual of Style/India-related articles, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Serbia-related articles, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Russia-related articles, Wikipedia:WikiProject Athletics/Manual of Style/Competitions, Wikipedia:WikiProject Athletics/Manual of Style/Biographies, Wikipedia:VG/MOS/ESports, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Colors and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Article message boxes. Are these guidelines? --Gonnym (talk) 14:54, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
The esports one is definitively a draft. The color one I think could reasonably be called a supplement (in the true sense of the word) since it doesn't provide any guidance at all from what I can see, though it reasonably follows from the rest of the accessibility pages that if you want to be AAA compliant (which I don't believe we mandate), those are the colors and hues to use. --Izno (talk) 17:29, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
"I've removed some pages that were essays from the category" – which pages? As for MOS:ACCESS subpages and such, I would leave them categorized as-is; they're part of MOS:ACCESS, basically, just broken out into subpages. Maybe we could create some kind of MoS supplements category for them, if we really want to. [Never mind; that already exists, and the subpages of MOS:ACCESS and MOS:CHEM are now in it.] The ones created by and living under wikiprojects are WP:PROJPAGE essays. I'll re-cat. those as needed (and rename the e-sports one to have a name that makes sense). The athletics ones are categorized as PROJPAGEs, in Category:WikiProject style advice and in a category called Category:Wikipedia Manual of Style (sports). I'm not sure we need that category, since there is no such MoS page and most sports-related style pages aren't part of MoS. But it probably won't do any harm; I've added a note at the top of it explaining that the category's contents range from essays to guidelines. As for the others, I'm not really sure. I guess the question is primarily whether the ones on India, Russia, and Serbia are actually followed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:06, 12 March 2019 (UTC); updated: 00:17, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Updates:
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:03, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
You can check my contributions as I haven't done a lot of editing since so they are at the top. I think, based on the text description placed in Category:Wikipedia style guidelines, that pages added to this category AND to its sub-categories should all be guideline-level pages. Those I removed from the category (and placed in Category:WikiProject style advice/Category:Wikipedia style guideline proposals/Category:User essays on style) all did not have the guideline tag at the top. As a side note, I think that pages which aren't guidelines, should not be sub-pages of the manual of style, as that misrepresents them as part of the accepted MoS. --Gonnym (talk) 21:44, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
We need not get too nitpicky about the page naming and categorization. These are not article categories, but internal categories for our own page-management purposes. Something has the force of a guideline because it represents actual best practices, editors who care to have discussed it, and editors in general follow it; not because of what template is at the top of it. E.g., WP:BRD, WP:COI, WP:ROPE, WP:AADD, WP:NOTHERE, and WP:ENC have an authority verging on policy level (the community treats them as actionable, including for deletion, user blocking/banning, and so on), but are essays. Similarly, WP:5P is effectively a policy but not tagged as anything, and WP:MEDRS verges on policy but is technically a guideline. It's more utilitarian to keep things like MOS:ACCESS's sub-pages grouped with the main guideline. They're basically giant footnotes that have been moved to subpages to reduce clutter, and same goes for those of MOS:CHEM. Anyway, I tracked down what you were doing, and made some further cleanup, including applying the right templates and categories, merging some shortcut templates into banners, removing duplicate banners, etc., etc. Removed some wording from the MoS subpages that seemed to indicate wikiproject control, and removed "guideline" and "part of MoS" claims from the wikiproject pages. I put the MOS:CHEM subpages back in the MoS category tree, under a new Category:Wikipedia Manual of Style (chemistry) and tagged them as supplement essays; same with Category:Wikipedia Manual of Style (accessibility), other than many of them are how-tos or other material, not guideline supplements. I think these are the only two MoS guidelines with a pack of sub-page stuff around them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:13, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Nice work on the cleaning. I do however, disagree with your opinion that it doesn't matter if we add non-guidelines to a guideline category. The category tree makes it perfectly clear, that if it is a guideline it belongs in category X, if it is an essay in Y and so on. I agree that having stuff in the MoS category is for our own management purposes, but if the category is a mix of two (or more) different "things" then it is not useful. There is a reason why there is a category for Category:Wikipedia Manual of Style and one for Category:Wikipedia essays and information pages about the Manual of Style. Not going to revert your changes, but just stating it out there that I don't agree with them. --Gonnym (talk) 10:00, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

HTML character code   in Other uses (em dash only)

Let's preclude the first example in MOS § Other uses (em dash only) with a clarification that a hair space will be used. It may prevent readers from unnecessarily looking up the HTML character code mentioned— . Turns out it's explained in the very next sentence, yet this is easily overlooked when a reader's first inclination may be to immediately look it up without reading on, as was the case for me. Perhaps it's barely worth suggesting, but I believe it will be an improvement, slight though it may be.

Current paragraph:

An indented em dash may be used before a name or other source when attributing below a block quotation, poem, etc. For example, {{in5}}— Charlotte Brontë will produce:

     — Charlotte Brontë

This dash should not be fully spaced, though it is best for metadata and accessibility reasons to hair-space it from the name with the HTML character code  . Most of Wikipedia's quotation templates with attribution-related parameters already provide this formatting.

Amended:

An indented em dash may be used before a name or other source when attributing below a block quotation, poem, etc. This dash should not be fully spaced, though it is best for metadata and accessibility reasons to hair-space it from the name with the HTML character code  . Most of Wikipedia's quotation templates with attribution-related parameters already provide this formatting.

For example, {{in5}}— Charlotte Brontë will produce:

     — Charlotte Brontë

I can't imagine anyone would object. Nothing's rewritten and the only difference is that I moved the example to end of the paragraph. I'd do it myself, but I'm hesitant. Prior MOS edits I thought were minor and non-controversial have been reverted nonetheless.

Anyways, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Regards, Jay D. Easy (talk) 19:23, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Many are cold, but few are frozen.

— Matthew 22:14

We shouldn't be encouraging use of {in5} and other such debris. {{quote}} has an |author= parameter which adds the emdash and spacing anyway. For some reason {quote box} doesn't add the dash -- what a mess Wikipedia templates are -- so a good example might be
{{Quote box |salign=right|quote = Many are cold, but few are frozen.|author = {{mdash}}{{hsp}}Matthew 22:14}}
which gives the result seen at right. I don't know why we'd bother with the #8202 fiddling when we have nice mnemonic templates. EEng 21:38, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I'm fine with Jay D. Easy's rearrangement. I see where EEng is coming from, but MoS wants people to use {{quote}} (which supports the parameter he mentioned, and which we already explain will do this markup for you), or <blockquote>...</blockquote>, which does not (thus the explanation). {{Quote box}} isn't one of our standardized quotation templates, but old detritus that should probably be merged out of existence, or at best confined to use outside mainspace, like on people's talk page or whatever. We don't have a reason to use it in an example. And {{in5}} isn't "debris", it's one of the recommended ways of indenting, unlike abuse of : description list markup to produce a broken d-list just to get the visual appearance of an indentation.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
  • There certainly are times articles fitly use {quote box} but it doesn't matter to me -- I was just looking for a use case to exemplify hairspace.
  • Where would we ever use {in5}?
  • Since {quote} has the |author syntax which does all this formatting, and < blockquote> doesn't, then let's just tell people to use {quote} with |author and drop this stuff about hairspaces and so on.
EEng 16:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
There is no {{Quote box}} usage in any article that could not be replaced with another template that behaved more consistently. We would "ever" use {{in5}} any time we wanted to indent a short line (there's another template, {{block indent}}, for larger material); this is covered at MOS:INDENT. We don't have any reason to try to force people to use templates when HTML <blockquote> works fine and is easier for some of them and more flexible in some situations (various block templates don't behave well inside other blocks, next to images, etc.). I.e., basically you're doing WP:CREEP to try to avoid doing WP:CREEP. :-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SMcCandlish (talk • contribs) 16:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
Well, mystery person, what template would we use instead of {quote box}, and please give an example of a use if {in5} in an article. Oh, and I believe the problem with quotes and images was fixed long ago. EEng 13:08, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
That was me. For other quotation templates, see Category:Quotation templates; AFAIR, only {{quote box}} has inconsistent output (if you want to cite the source below the quotation, you have to manually include the em dash, and this makes it difficult to convert between quotation templates, requiring manual re-editing, not just a template replacement. [I think the fix for this would be to create a temporary copy that auto-dashed like all the rest of these templates, then use AWB or something to first point all extant calls to the new copy, then change then original to use the same in-built dash code as the other templates, then tediously replace all the extant calls to the temporary template to now not have manual dash markup and to call the (repaired) original template again, finally redirect the copy to the original (or just remove the copy). That would fix the issue without there ever being instances of in-article content both having a manual dash and a template-provided one, and it would preserve the page history of the original template. More of a pain in the butt than I would take on personally.] Articles with {{in5}} include: Lyndon B. Johnson, Supreme Court of the United States, Methylphenidate, Community (TV series), 2017 NFL Draft (and other articles in that series), 1966 FIFA World Cup (and other articles in that series), Bengal cat, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, O Canada, San Francisco, DNA virus, Mars Science Laboratory, etc.. There's still lots and lots of abuse of : (i.e, of <dd>...</dd>) for visual indentation to fix in mainspace, and that might be something a bot can do. It needs to be fixed since it generates invalid markup (as in actually fails validation). A perhaps simpler fix would be to have MediaWiki generate different HTML when : is used, depending on whether it's preceded by a ; (<dt>...</dt>) line, but over a decade after the devs were asked to do this, zero progress has been made, and we're left with working around it directly. Talk pages are pretty much a lost cause, though fixing this at the MW level would also make our talk pages much more palatable for blind editors.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:44, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
I meant, give an example of in5 used in an article for a quotation. And if you'll tell me what to use instead of {quote box} I'll be happy to start using it. EEng 16:58, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Requested move: Chairman

For anyone interested, please see Talk:Chairman#Requested move 22 March 2019. SarahSV (talk) 20:56, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

MoS relevant discussion

There's a discussion at Talk:Chairman#Requested move 22 March 2019 in which one issue is how to interpret or apply MOS:GNL, so it may be of interest to editors here. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:23, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Italicized publication names

Why don't the standards for italicizing publication names (such as The New York Times) appear anywhere here? Am I missing something?--MainlyTwelve (talk) 19:52, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

MoS has many sub-pages. Including every detail from all of them would basically be merging them all into one monolithic page. Title formatting is in MOS:TITLES.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:22, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Thanks!--MainlyTwelve (talk) 13:50, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

I ran across Template:Goshen, New York today with images and have never seen such a Navbox before. My first inclination was just to remove them as distractions that have nothing to do with the navigational purpose of the box. The closest policy I could find was WP:Navigation template#Navigation templates are not arbitrarily decorative and the "implied" standard format from the examples and common usage. Any other comments? MB 23:07, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

I agree. IF the town had an official (free) symbol/coat of arms/etc. that could be used as identification, (eg like Template:California) but random photos that at that size make it unclear what's being shown do not help. --Masem (t) 23:27, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
Agree with Masem. And in practical terms, even on my big browser pane the pics are so small they may as well be abstract art. And they certaintly should be bigger. So let's rid ourselves of them. Tony (talk) 00:47, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
 Done MB 01:10, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

MOS:GENDERID and death

There's a discussion over at Talk:Sonia Burgess.

Sonia Burgess was a trans woman who it seems had started socially transitioning - among friends and family and in public. At the time of her death she was still presenting male and using her old name at work. Her friends and family used her new name and pronouns when quoted by the press after her death.

Some are arguing that the article name should not be changed because she continued to use the old name at work, and that she hadn't made a statement herself in a reliable source about which name she preferred to be called.

I believe this to be abiding by the letter but not the spirit of MOS:GENDERID, and I wonder if the guideline could be improved to account for situations like this where the wishes of the article subject are obvious and clear but they never made a "self-designation" in a reliable source. --Wickedterrier (talk) 12:10, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

The key here is the concept of Recognizability... we need to ask: which name did the subject use in public? And: Which name would a reader searching for information about the subject expect us to use. Blueboar (talk) 12:43, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Not the overriding concern for BLPs, in this case Burgess lived their life as Sonia Burgess and at the time of their death, appears to have only used the name David Burgess when working at the legal practice. The "most correct" and "most respectful" self-identification should default to "under what name did they live their life", not what name did they write under, or what name did they use to avoid discrimination. --Fæ (talk) 14:27, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
And why does Burgess have an article at all? Because of their professional life, in which he was David Burgess, not their personal life, in which she was Sonia Burgess. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:08, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Exactly. We use the name readers are more likely to recognize -- for example, stage names for actors, pen names for authors. EEng 15:12, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Off-topic flame-fest that's all predicated on a mistaken assumption about who created the article:
"why does Burgess have an article at all?" - Let's be honest, because we all know the real reason... the article exists only because of their trans status, in violation of WP:NOTMEMORIAL by trans activist editors. Otherwise this is WP:ROUTINE tabloid coverage of the murder of a WP:RUNOFTHEMILL lawyer. --Netoholic @ 16:41, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
This isn't really the place to talk about the Sonia Burgess article, but I'll say one thing: if you look through the page's history and talk page, you will see that the person who created it (and has made the most contributions to it) has, over the years, successfully resisted any attempt to have the article use the name Sonia or female pronouns. There might be genuine cause to question the subject's notability, but this idea that the article only exists because of some sinister cabal of trans activists reveals a pretty warped perspective. WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 23:27, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Collegiate discussion on tangents
What a bizarre personal attack to make against all editors with an opinion different from yours. Are you really stating that those of us that write about how GENDERID should be used respectfully for transwomen, is now condemned as a "trans activist editor"? Classic WP:BATTLEGROUND behaviour which, "let's be honest" increasingly looks like lobbying to knock collegiate discussion off on tangents. --Fæ (talk) 14:12, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

That's a rather startling statement given so many of your comments at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour. EEng 15:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Are you really subscribing to the conspiracy theory that the article exists only because of their trans status, in violation of WP:NOTMEMORIAL by trans activist editors?
There is a definite battleground environment being created here, a pattern established by the same old suspects trying to provoke and trigger editors with opinions they do not like to see freely and logically expressed so that their targets fall foul of Wikipedia policies. If you love free speech, why not try letting others express their views without making hostile personal attacks and scaring away anyone that might feel differently, that would be a good start. --Fæ (talk) 16:12, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
No, I'm not subscribing to any conspiracy theory. I am saying that for you to complain about "personal attacks ... against all editors with an opinion different from yours" is laughable. Stop trying to control everyone. EEng 20:19, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
If you love free speech, why not try letting others express their views- that's a bit rich considering that you just tried to remove harmless picture illustrating "tangents" on this page on the grounds that it was "hostile".Removing others' contributions on talk pages is against WP:TPO,do not do that.Smeat75 (talk) 16:44, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Actually, I was illustrating the difference between collegiate and collegial. EEng 20:19, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Especially amusing, too, since it appears to be a classroom lost in a bunch of tangents (discussion-wise) even if they really are talking about tangents (in the maths sense).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:16, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Trimming an irrelevant and deliberately sarcastic image from a discussion, is not against TPO. However precisely following those guidelines I have converted the image to a link, as per TPO the only purpose of which is to take this discussion off on irrelevant tangents and was never the subject of this discussion. Thanks for the advice. --Fæ (talk) 16:54, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
See, here you go again with the "only purpose" mindreading. What a narrowminded scold you are. Wherever you work must be one sad and dreary place. EEng 20:19, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Again the word "scold", being provocative by using language that has a long history of degrading women. It appears that you know exactly what you are doing, you have encouraged me to take better look these patterns. --Fæ (talk) 20:50, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Oh my fucking lord, you really are completely off your rocker. [7] EEng 22:08, 14 March 2019 (UTC) P.S. Watch it with the comma splices.
Please show where I have stated I am mentally ill, or retract your statement. Your macho locker room "jokes" appear to be thinly disguised personal attacks intended to drive people away from sensible discussion about gender. --Fæ (talk) 22:30, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
If the shoe fits, wear it. EEng 03:02, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
EEng: "scold" absolutely has a gendered meaning. Regardless of whether that was your intent, your comment there was an unambiguous personal attack that added nothing to the discussion. I think you should strike through it or another uninvolved editor should do so and/or hat this portion of the thread. Nblund talk 22:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
I will not. If scold offends you I invite you to mentally substitute kvetch. Shouldn't you two be at a seminar somewhere? Oh, sorry... an ovanar? EEng 03:02, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Seriously? WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 03:10, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Obviously not. EEng 03:16, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
It is worth highlighting that Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions applies to this page and this discussion, which includes "discretionary sanctions may be used against editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process." --Fæ (talk) 04:18, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Yes, especially given why you ended up at ANI and ArbCom recently. LOL.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:29, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
I think you're missing this line from GENDERID: This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the subject has indicated a preference otherwise. This subject clearly had a delineated preference - private vs. professional. This means that in the portions of the article which discuss their professional setting, we should firmly use the male name and identification. In sections about their personal life, we use the female. And in portions which are mixed, we can avoid awkward constructions - like using only their last name, etc. As far as the title, it should be based strictly on the context of their most solid basis of notability and most likely search vector - in this case, their professional legal identity. -- Netoholic @ 17:23, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Is there a source for the claim that Burgess indicated some other preference? Coverage at the time refers to Burgess's previous name, but calls her a woman and uses female pronouns when discussing her. And the BBC says Burgess "wished to be known as Sonia and dressed as a woman." So the most up-to-date reliable sources indicate that Burgess lived as a woman and wanted to be called Sonia. I don't see much ambiguity as far as WP:GENDERID goes. @Blueboar:: I think the "recognizably" argument could apply to anyone who became famous before transitioning. That's what redirects are for. Nblund talk 23:59, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Yes, it certainly does apply to anyone who became notable under one name, and then (subsequently) changed to a different name - regardless of the reason for the name change. Blueboar (talk) 16:31, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
And MOS:GENDERID clearly applies in those cases (e.g. Chaz Bono, Caitlyn Jenner, Chelsea Manning), so how is it not a spurious argument to say that the key question is recognizability when that appears to be contradicted by both practice and by the explicit wording of the policy? Nblund talk 16:53, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
I am not familiar with the history of the Bono article, but I am familiar with the Manning and Jenner articles... in both of those cases we actually delayed adopting the name changes until it was clear that the majority of reliable sources had adopted the “new” names. In other words, we waited until the subject could be considered notable under the new name. In both cases, the “new” name was initially rejected... then (as more sources used the “new” name) it was adopted here as a redirect while the article stayed at the “old” name... and finally (as the number of sources using the “new” name increased) the “new” name was adopted as the article title and the “old” name was shifted to being a redirect. In the Manning case, this shift happened somewhat quickly (over about a week)... Jenner took longer (a few months). The key was that those who supported change were able to demonstrate that both Jenner and Manning were now just as Recognizable under their “new” names as they were under their “old” names. It also helped that both Manning’s and Jenner’s transitions were two of the first very public cases of transition. They both could claim that their transitions were a second claim to notability - beyond their original deeds. One last comment... Today, transitioning isn’t viewed as being such a big deal (the general public is much more used to the idea than it was back when Manning and Jenner announced). What this means is that an announcement may relult in less press coverage. Paradoxically, the more people accept transitioning as a concept, the longer it will take for a specific person’s transition to become recognizable. Blueboar (talk) 18:07, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
That's explicitly not what MOS:GENDERID says. It says that we should defer to the most recent self-identity regardless of what most sources say. Perhaps the Manning case predates the consensus on this. In Jenner's case, I don't see any serious debate about how to do things: this RfC, in which an editor argued that WP:COMMONNAME applied to the bio in was snow closed just over a week after Jenner came out on 20/20. Editors unanimously cited the MOS:ID text to note that there was no reason to wait to rename the article, and I don't see any pushback on that point. That seems to fly in the face of what you're saying - can you cite some kind of recent discussion on this? Nblund talk 19:22, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Just wanted to reiterate that there is a RM discussion happening right now over on the Burgess talk page: Talk:David_Burgess_(immigration_lawyer)#Requested_move_12_March_2019 WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 18:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

  • MOS:GENDERID is not about article titles. And it states, "The MoS does not specify when and how to present former names, or whether to use the former or present name first." And MOS:IDENTITY, which MOS:GENDERID, is a part of, states, "Disputes over how to refer to a person or group are addressed by Wikipedia content policies, such as those on verifiability, and neutral point of view (and article titles when the term appears in the title of an article)." Even if MOS:GENDERID stated something about article titles, the guideline can't override what the WP:Article titles policy states. As for previous cases pointing to MOS:IDENTITY to rename articles, it's not the first time that MOS:IDENTITY (now known as MOS:GENDERID for the gender aspect) has been used more broadly than it should be. And the Chelsea Manning article title case was a huge case that made the news; news articles were talking about Wikipedia editors debating what name to use with regard to Chelsea Manning's article title. Some editors felt under scrutiny, which led to them voting the way they did. As for pronouns in the Chelsea Manning article, while some editors were wanting to only use feminine pronouns for her, it was noted that she supported "female pronouns [being] used for only post-announcement material" after being asked "Should the female pronoun be used throughout, for all life stages, including childhood? Only for post-announcement material? Or not at all?" Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 06:49, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
    • @Flyer22 Reborn That's a good point, but I'm unclear on what that sentence indicates. I read that policy as saying that we don't outright prohibit mentioning a person's former name, but it's hard for me to imagine that we would say "use the preferred pronouns/gendered nouns but not the preferred name" - e.g. "Bruce Jenner is a woman". Is there some record of how that sentence came about? Nblund talk 15:03, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
      Nblund, I'm not clear on what you mean regarding what the guideline is saying. As for how that piece came about, I'd need to check the archives. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 09:02, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
      In other words: I read that policy as saying that there is no consensus on whether or not to mention former names in some fashion. E.g. there is no consensus on whether it is appropriate to present Manning's name in some places in the article. Nevertheless, presenting a former name is not the same as actually using it to refer to a person - using the former name as the article title is more than just presenting the former name - it is sort of abrogating the existence of the new one. I can't think of any examples of articles where someone has transitioned where we still use their old name for the article title. Nblund talk 15:38, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
      edit User:Genericusername57's comment below is probably a clearer rendition of the point I'm getting at: it's a use-mention distinction (a thing I just learned existed) Nblund talk 15:51, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
      I actually don't think that that distinction is the answer to this question. MOS:MULTIPLENAMES provides guidance on whether to mention non-primary names, and that bit in MOS:GENDERID explicitly says there's no guidance when and how to do so; but neither helps with the question of which name is primary in difficult cases like this one. I'd lean towards keeping "David" and "him" (but still mentioning "Sonia" in the lead): if the person chose to publicly maintain a male identity, I don't think we should second-guess that after his death. gnu57 17:30, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
      Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth - I realize this doesn't settle the core question of which name is "preferred" in this case, but it helped clarify my question about whether MOS:GENDERID meant to indicate that previous names were treated differently from previous pronouns. If we agreed that "David" is the preferred term, then the title, pronouns, and primary name used would all need to line up, and vice versa if we decided "Sonia" was the preference. In other words, we wouldn't leave the article title as "David Burgess" but then use Sonia/female pronouns in the body. Right? Nblund talk 17:44, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
it was noted that she supported "female pronouns [being] used for only post-announcement material" This comes from one single statement from Manning's lawyer, while she was still imprisoned, and the lawyer prefaced it by saying Here is what I would recommend and not, say, "here is what Manning has told me she prefers". WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 17:29, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Are you doubting that Manning's lawyer presented the matter accurately? That it wasn't also Manning's view? If it wasn't also Manning's view, why would the lawyer state that? Maybe SlimVirgin, who reported the matter, has more insight on that. And Manning is not the only case of a famous transgender person preferring different pronouns for two different phases of their life. In Jenner's case, Jenner originally preferred to be called Bruce, and to be referred to by masculine pronouns, for her life before her transition. I'm not sure if she still does this, but there were a number of times that she talked about her life as Bruce as though Bruce is a different person. She saw Bruce as a different person and referred to Bruce by masculine pronouns. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 09:02, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
Are you doubting that Manning's lawyer presented the matter accurately?
I think it's a possibility.
And Manning is not the only case of a famous transgender person preferring different pronouns for two different phases of their life.
If that is someone's clear preference, based on one or more reliable sources, sure, let's go with their preference. In a case like that, though, there should be a clarifying aside that says something like "So-and-so has stated that they prefer..." etc. with a source to back it up. WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 00:41, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
There was no indication from Manning that the lawyer got it wrong. As for clarifying text, we did that for Jenner. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 10:53, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
Another example of a transgender person preferring different pronouns for two different phases of their life is Janae Kroc. I meant to mention Kroc earlier, but I couldn't remember the name. Just saw Kroc on my watchlist with this edit. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 13:35, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
Certainly a useful example, though the sources need careful review. In the most recent interview I can find (Oct 2017), she states "As far as how to address me (and this can be different for everyone) I prefer the name Janae and female pronouns at any time but when I present as male (or a gender blurry version of male these days) many of my male friends and family still refer to me as Matt and use male pronouns and while I don't prefer it I'm not offended by it either. I have always been easy going and if it makes it easier in that situation then whatever. The only thing that would make me uncomfortable would be to be referred to as Matt or have male pronouns used when I'm clearly presenting as female." On this basis the current article lede is incorrect as pronouns for a woman should be used. In terms of style the article appears to emphasize pronouns, when for many of the paragraphs they would be written without any gendered pronouns. Anyway, a bit off topic for a discussion about BDPs. --Fæ (talk) 13:57, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
Apparently, Kroc has stated different things on the matter and has indeed used masculine pronouns for pre-transition. We see this indefinitely blocked account stating, "Janae is genderfluid and has indicated a preference for using male pronouns for pre-transition life as Matt, please respect this." We see Ahecht stating, "Janae has used male pronouns when referring to Matt in the past tense." We see the IP stating, "Kroc's pronouns are she/her, though she sometimes refers to herself in the past as 'he.' I changed male pronouns here to her last name so as to avoid misgendering." There's also been discussion on the talk page about it. Editors should figure the matter out and stick to it. If the article is not to mismatch, then oh well. The article mismatching will be confusing for readers anyway, unless a preference for mismatching is clarified early on. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 15:47, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
From the article talk page, all discussions are years old. It seems unreasonable to rely on interviews pre-transition as evidence that a transwoman identifies as a man, that is the very nature of transitioning. Similarly we should prefer and respect recent sources post-transition for self-id over sources during somebody's transition or recent transition; again there very nature of a person transitioning is to discover and define their self identity. I have added a few sources on the article talk page from late 2017 and 2018, which all so far support Krocs preference and use of female pronouns exclusively and show journalists for reliable publications consistently using female pronouns. If you know of other recent sources, please do add them. --Fæ (talk) 16:04, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
"Trans woman identifies as a man"? Huh? Jenner was not truly identifying as a man by using masculine pronouns and the name "Bruce" to refer to her pre-transition life. Like I stated above, "there were a number of times that she talked about her life as Bruce as though Bruce is a different person. She saw Bruce as a different person and referred to Bruce by masculine pronouns." There are a lot of trans people -- including trans men -- who use the previous gender pronouns and previous name to refer to their pre-transition life. As I've stated on this site more than once, not all transgender people are the same. Not all of them think alike. If they did, Jenner would not have gotten the various criticisms she's gotten from the transgender community. Kroc's article, with sources, currently states, "In July 2015, Kroc came out as both transgender and gender fluid. Janae is living as both genders, describing often feeling like two completely different people trying to share a body, fighting for control. After a solitary use of 'her' in an open letter (misrepresented plurally as 'pronouns'), HuffPo interpreted this as a preference. Janae has used male pronouns when referring to Matt in the past tense. Kroc has written of picking a gender to identify with 'more' in the context of hypothetically being 'forced' to." Those sources are from 2015 and 2016. Unless Kroc has come out and stated that she is no longer genderfluid, or no longer prefers to use the name "Matt" and masculine pronouns for her pre-transition life, we shouldn't assume that it's no longer the case. Again, the IP stated, "Kroc's pronouns are she/her, though she sometimes refers to herself in the past as 'he.'" That Kroc uses feminine pronouns for her true gender identity doesn't mean that she no longer considers Matt a different person/no longer uses masculine pronouns when referring to that person. The article also states, "In October, Janae referred to an interview where male pronouns are used to refer to Matt as 'one of my best interviews'. In the interview Janae mentions being 4 weeks into estrogen therapy, and taking a testosterone blocker." I'll repeat this on the talk page. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 17:08, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
I don't know what I was trying to do with that edit, as what I said and what I did appear to be opposite. I probably accidentally reverted to the wrong revision. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:10, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
Ahecht, like me, I think you were going by what the sourced article states. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 17:15, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

When should Wikipedia respect a trans person's identity? Always and without exception.

Re "Are you doubting that Manning's lawyer presented the matter accurately?" being answered by "I think it's a possibility." That's what we call original research. Lawyers making statements on behalf of their clients are presumed to be representing those clients' wishes and interests; that's their job, and they can be disbarred for failing to do it. To suggest it didn't happen in this case is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary sources.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:37, 2 April 2019 (UTC)


That doesn't mean that Wikipedia should never repeat a trans person's deadname. In order to fufill its mission of being a comprehensive, neutral, and uncensored encyclopedia sometimes it needs to repeat deadnames, in the same way that sometimes it needs to repeat other unpleasant or offensive things like racist or queerphobic slurs.

But a trans person's preferred name should always be the primary way an article refers to them. That goes for for biographical articles, non-biographical articles, titles, infoboxes, prose. Everything. If that contradicts Wikipedia's current policies and guidelines then the policies and guidelines need to be changed.

The 1976 Summer Olympics article should say that Caitlyn Jenner won the gold medal for the decathlon. But that's falsifying history! No it's not. Referring to someone's past using their current name is a normal practice. There is nothing incorrect or weird about the sentence "Michelle Obama went to Princeton."

My position on this is perfectly mainstream and middle-of-the-road. Go ask Google or Wolfram Alpha "who won the 1976 olympic men's decathlon" and see who pops up in the infobox. Look at what the Reuters style guide says: Always use a transgender person's chosen name....If you are not sure which gender pronoun to use, ask. If you can't ask, then use the one that is consistent with the way a person presents himself or herself. Look at this New York Times Insider piece which talks about how the Times is a perfectly boring and mainstream publication that is not looking to lead the discussion, set the rules or break new ground and yet chooses to use people's preferred pronouns and names when reporting on transgender subjects.

Earlier someone complained about trans activists, but who are the real trans activists here? Mainstream publications decided years ago it's not acceptable to misgender transgender people. Calling trans people what they want to be called is mainstream. Finding any excuse to misgender trans people is activism. WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 07:41, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

  • Identity is a constant negotiation - it is never to one-sided. You would not accept if I declared my identity as Godking over you. You would not accept if I declared my identity even as User:Jimbo Wales. To think of identity as one-side declaration which must be abided "always and without exception" is not only arrogant and authoritarian, its fruitless. Are you naive enough to think that newspaper style guides accommodate that out of a bounty of compassion? No. They fear call-out culture. They fear mob justice. They fear, ironically, "bad press". Your Obama example is simply not equivalent because if a newspaper had written "Michelle LaVaughn Robinson went to Princeton", it would not cause a social media flurry among a vocal and aggressive population of "marriage tradition" activists. But using a trans person's "deadname" as you call it would fire up trans activists immediately. And now here on Wikipedia, a very accommodating guideline has been implemented, but you want more. You want, in the case of David Burgess, now to ignore the repeated preference of that person to be identified as male in their professional life. They certainly did not consider it a dead name, so why are you pushing to do so? You're past the point of wanting individuals to be respected for their choices... you've already abandoned any consideration for the preference of non-trans people to have some continuity and WP:VERIFIABILITY in Wikipedia articles... but now you are willing to sacrifice even a trans person's (Burgess') preferences for the sake of some even greater demands. That doesn't show respect for the preferences of individuals, not at all. -- Netoholic @ 09:20, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
    Here's a thought experiment, where you make there are inflammatory statements about trans people, try writing Jews instead and see if it looks like an attack. Would you write that Jews control newspapers by using "mob justice", or does that you think now read as a conspiracy theory defaming Jewish people? How you we write about trans people should require the same level of respect and adherence to verifiable fact. Using Wikipedia to promote your own fantasy anti-trans conspiracy theories is not appropriate on any talk page. Certainly not on this page which is subject to Arbcom discretionary sanctions. By the way, deriding a transwoman's self identification by comparing it to calling yourself "Godking" is not a joke, it is an deliberate attack against trans people. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 09:42, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
    If you believe the concerns I raise are any kind of "deliberate attack" on any population and not made in good faith, then you should raise that elsewhere. That is a very serious accusation and demands serious consideration. But I feel I must caution you not to fall back into the pattern of conspiratorial actions documented in Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fæ#Findings of fact: 7) Fæ has responded to good faith concerns by attempting to link the people with concerns to the campaign against him.. -- Netoholic @ 10:01, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
    6 years, 7 months, 26 days ago? How about you take 10 minutes to understand why Arbcom DS apply here, and whether you have already broken them, today, not 6 years ago.
    As a general antidote to heated discussion, how about everyone takes a chill pill and consider Arbcom's reminder to everyone in a very similar case, more than 5 years ago: "All editors [...] are reminded to maintain decorum and civility when engaged in discussions on Wikipedia, and to avoid commentary that demeans any other person, intentionally or not."' ref
    I promise to stick to this, and if everyone else could we might get to a sensible conclusion a lot faster. In this spirit I have struck a few words from my thought experiment paragraph, showing that I have taken time to hear you. --Fæ (talk) 11:59, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
    I'm not sacrificing anybody's preferences or ignoring anything. Just today I weighed in on an article about a living trans person who came out as a woman and then, apparently, decided to go back into the closet and actively revert to their male name. I argued that their article should respect their wishes and should no longer refer to them as female.
    In the case of Sonia Burgess, I weighed what the sources said and made a determination. Her close friends and family made it clear she was living as a woman and would want to be remembered as a woman. The BBC referred to her as a woman when they reported on her death and so did the prosecutor for the trial of the person who killed her. It would be nice if Sonia Burgess was alive and could tell us how she wants her Wikipedia article to refer to her, but since she's not, well, we have to make a choice one way or the other, and my choice is well supported by the facts. WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 11:51, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
    Since I talked about activism I feel I should add: while I agree that Wikipedia articles should be middle-of-the-road and not activist, there is nothing wrong with activism and I do not consider it to be a dirty word. Social change does not happen without people getting "fired up" and "vocal" and "activist" and "aggressive". WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 23:43, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
    Social change does not happen without people getting "fired up" and "vocal" and "activist" and "aggressive". Making this remark here looks like a logical fallacy. When some people are "vocal", "activist", "aggressive", this doesn't prove that said people are concurring to any valuable social change. This only proves that they are "vocal", etc. while trying to play a trump card. Going back to what is discussed, one can see that the wp:en article is less and less about the professional accomplisments of lawyer David Burgess, and more and more about his private life. But if you really want to put the focus on the said private life, you will have to discuss how a distinguished transgender 63 years old British lawyer was behaving towards an 35 years old Sri Lankan person, poor and isolated, whose capacity to have an educated consent was questionned in court (diminished responsibility). Moreover, you shouldn't forget that Nina Kanagasingham ended found dead in her cell with a plastic bag on her head, and each hand tied to the bed frame... and doesn't got a funeral service in any impressive, grey-stone, porticoed place overlooking Trafalgar Square. Indeed, some social changes are long overdue. Pldx1 (talk) 10:31, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
    I don't completely understand what you're trying to say, I'm sorry, but I agree that not all activism is good. A civil rights march is good activism, a KKK march is bad activism. My point is that there's nothing inherently wrong with activism. As for Sonia Burgess, if you think there are details that aren't being covered in her article that should be covered, by all means add them, provided they're relevant and well sourced and aren't just speculation. WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 14:07, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
    While there is nothing wrong with activism in general, We do have a policy that notes that Wikipedia is not the right venue for it (per WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS). Blueboar (talk) 15:23, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
    To date there is no evidence that reliable sources are not being carefully examined, that BLP is being ignored, or that anyone who is concerned for the respectful handling of biographies of trans people is out to disrupt Wikipedia or misunderstands why it exists out of either incompetence or "activism". Theoretical activism seems a pointless discussion to have here. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 15:33, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I would think the compromise position is this: Keep the article at the common (masculine) name, note in the first or second sentence that the subject's gender identity changed, and they used the feminine name in private life, and thereafter either use "she/her/hers", or avoid pronouns entirely.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:39, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Abbreviation of "Saint" in British church articles.

I am wanting some clarification from the Wikipedia community on an aspect of the MOS which, in my view, is in some confusion and conflict. Another editor has been changing the article names for some British churches to include a full stop / period with the abbreviation of "Saint" ("St." instead of "St") on the basis of both MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH. However, as POINTS states, full stops at the end of contractions in British English is "optional". It has also, in my experience, long and overwhelmingly been the usual style in modern British English to not use full stops in common contractions such as "St". Both POINTS and CHURCH seem to me to reflect a North American bias about such abbreviations which has not considered the fact that contraction abbreviations without a full stop is not only optional but also the much more common modern use in British English. I would appreciate other editors views about this and the application of the MOS to British church names in articles. If this is not the correct place to discuss these matters then please advise me where this is. Thank you. Anglicanus (talk) 00:50, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

This should be simple... as POINTS says, it’s optional. So, if you are starting a new article, you can use the point or not - as YOU think best. If you are editing in an existing article, it is polite to defer to the punctuation choice that exists. If that existing punctuation really, really bothers you... go to the talk page and ask politely whether anyone would object to a switch (90% of the time no one will... but the remaining 10% can be a doozy of a fight). Blueboar (talk) 01:09, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Thanks Blueboar : I also found this in the MOS which I believe supports my view : "An abbreviation may or may not be terminated with a full point (also called a period or stop). A consistent style should be maintained within an article. North American usage is typically to end all abbreviations with a period/point (Dr. Smith of 42 Drummond St.) but in common British and Australian usage, no period/point is used if the abbreviation (contraction) ends in the last letter of the unabbreviated form (Dr Smith of 42 Drummond St) unless confusion could result." Anglicanus (talk) 01:15, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
I'm travelling & mouseless, so can't copy the link but there is long discussion touching on this at pump policy talk, archive 137. I can't see it supports what WP:CHURCH currently says, which User:SilkTork (for it is he) is relying on. Certainly in the UK, usage varies, and how the church spells its own name should usually be decisive. Maybe someone could add the link. Johnbod (talk) 01:34, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Agree with Anglicanus. "Optional" seems like an oversimplification or misunderstanding of the British rule, which both my own understanding and the sources I can find suggest is as Anglicanus says ([8][9][10][11]). I'd argue therefore the full stop should not be used for British institutions, and elsewhere, the 'first use' rule should be kept, as usual for linguistic variations in line with WP:ENGVAR. TSP (talk) 01:57, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
It may be worth pointing out that using a period after abbreviations works well if you have a wider space between sentences than between words within a sentence (the old double-space style used with typewriters, or at least the space-and-a-half or so used by LaTeX). Unfortunately HTML collapses multiple spaces, which means that periods after abbreviations — especially when the next word starts with a capital letter, as in this case — tempt the reader to think that the sentence is complete.
This is why I personally have adopted the "British" style in online communications, in spite of being American myself. The "American" style is problematic in the context of the HTML convention, and forcing it into British-related articles seems especially strange. --Trovatore (talk) 02:15, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Calling the convention to drop the full stop at the end of abbreviations "British" is an over-simplification. It is a recent trend brought on (I strongly suspect) by headline writers and other journalists. Certainly the British convention when I was at school was for titles such as "Dr." or "Rev." to have full stops after them. Turning back to saints, I would strongly recommend following the style the particular church itself uses; after all we allow other bodies styles (such as iPlayer or eBay) which fit no known stylistic rules. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:02, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

I hadn't realised what I was doing was likely to be controversial, as it appeared to me that I was following consensus as outlined in MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH. Indeed, I explained to a user who had moved St. Paul's, Deptford to St Paul's, Deptford, why I was restoring the page to St. Paul. For me this is like the disagreement over using The Beatles or the Beatles. Either way is fine, and neither way alters meaning, but is purely stylistic. Such stylistic usage will vary with time, location, editorial and publication preference, etc. Given the guidance in MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH I had assumed that the community had settled on using St. Paul rather than St Paul, especially as St. Paul is widely considered outside of Wikipedia to be the modern usage, and is used, albeit inconsistently, in the UK. It is useful to have a house style, and to stick with it. I don't think it is helpful to say that whoever first writes an article gets to determine future punctuation or layout as that leads to inconsistency. And I would much prefer there were a central guideline that people could follow, rather than having random ad-hoc local discussions, let alone having to wait for some kind of response from people on articles which don't get much editorial attention. Personally I'm OK with either St. Paul or St Paul. But I would rather it were consistent. I'd rather we said all such usage should be St. or St across Wikipedia as that is our house style (and once that was established there should be no need for anyone to make any page moves let alone ask others for consensus to make such moves), or we established clearly in guidelines that we use St. for all articles other than UK articles where St would apply. Actually, my real preference would be for the Foundation to write software that allowed UK readers by default to see St Paul (and colour) and non-UK readers by default to see St. Paul (and color), and allowed users to over-ride those defaults if they wished. SilkTork (talk) 09:56, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Common modern British usage is not to use the full stop. If you look at British church categories, the vast majority of the articles therein (and there are many hundreds) do not use the full stop and this has been our clear convention for years. That is our house style with regard to Commonwealth articles (except Canada, of course). If we had consistent house styles for everything across Wikipedia, then we would doubtless use American English for everything; we do not per WP:ENGVAR. House style depends on the national origin of the article. What we do want is consistency between classes of article (i.e. all British articles should use common British style, which is obvious from looking at the relevant categories). These edits should be ceased and reverted immediately and the relevant guidelines rewritten to rid them of the American bias that seems to have crept into them. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:31, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Whatever house style is used should be supported by a guideline that others can refer to. At the moment the guidelines that we have (MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH) support using a dot/period after an abbreviation, and MOS:POINTS is vague on UK usage, and actual UK usage is inconsistent, with different editors using the period or not either through personal taste or different interpretation of existing guidelines. If people want UK abbreviations to be shown without a dot/period, then that should to be written into a guideline rather than left to random choice. We could set up a RfA to see what the wider consensus is. The RfA could ask if the abbreviation period guidelines (MOS:POINTS and WP:CHURCH) should be:
  • a) left as they are, with users deciding among themselves to use the period or not in UK articles
  • b) adjusted to make reference to the guidelines at MOS:ENGVAR, bringing abbreviations clearly under that guideline, and updating MOS:ENGVAR to include the use of abbreviation periods as a regional variation, which would more clearly and firmly allow editors to use abbreviation periods or not in UK articles depending on circumstances such as local usage in reliable sources
  • c) adjust guidelines to specifically make UK articles exempt from using the abbreviation period, which would grant consistency across all UK articles in line with UK spelling
  • d) adjust guidelines to make the abbreviation period the standard Wikipedia house style for all articles, UK articles included.
I'm not entirely sure at the moment which option I would favour, though I feel the current situation is not clear, so I would be unlikely to support a. In essence, I don't much care if we use the abbreviation period or not, as long as it is clear to everyone what we should do. SilkTork (talk) 11:22, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Note that it's not just UK articles. Australian, New Zealand and South African articles are also among those that generally use this style. This suggests that Commonwealth English as a whole favours non-use of the full stop. I would therefore favour (c), but with the expansion to most other Commonwealth countries (with the usual exception of Canada) and probably Ireland too. As I said, the vast majority of these articles already omit the full stop, so for consistency's sake (a), (b) and most definitely (d) don't work for me. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:52, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
I think MOS:POINTS needs to be adjusted one way or another in any case, because it is currently self-contradictory.
"Modern style is to use a full point (period) after a shortening ... but no full point with an acronym." vs "Contractions that do not contain an apostrophe almost always take a period in North American English, but the point is optional in British English: Doctor can be abbreviated Dr. in American and Canadian English, but Dr. or Dr in British English."
Unless British English is not modern, these can't both be correct.
I think there's reasonable evidence that omitting the period in this case is most usual in British use - I provided four sources above. (I didn't cherry-pick these, they were simply the first four guides I found giving any guidance at all.) TSP (talk) 12:33, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Yes, the "modern style" comment is a bit bizarre. I would have actually said it was quite archaic in British English. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:11, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Do folks feel there is enough interest to open a RfC? And, if so, are the options I listed the appropriate ones? SilkTork (talk) 13:38, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

I would say that it is unnecessary, given we already have hundreds of articles titled in this way and the convention has existed for many years. If it ain't broke, why waste energy trying to fix it? We just need to reword the guidelines to make it clear. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:51, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
That's what the RfC would be about - rewording the guidelines. Getting in enough people to form a consensus. SilkTork (talk) 16:23, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
We don't need an RfC about this "St. Foo" is normal in American (and much Canadian) English; "St Foo" is normal in British and most Commonwealth English. ENGVAR works fine here. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Where we have an actual problem is "sloppy British" style, in which all the dots are dropped, even from non-contraction abbreviations (e.g., you'll see some British people write "eg" and "ie" and "aka" and "Prof Smith"). This should be fixed on sight to conform to MOS:POINTS – and to major British style guides like New Hart's Rules (AKA Oxford Style Manual AKA Oxford Guide to Style), Fowler's Dictionary of English Usage (the last several editions), etc. Where the "eg" style is coming from is particular British newspapers doing it out of expediency and to make headlines slightly smaller (they all have their own conflicting style guides, unlike US newspapers which are overwhelmingly dominated by a single style guide, Associated Press Stylebook), plus people just being confused/lazy and forgetting that the British dot-dropping rule applies to contractions that start and end with the same letters as the whole word ("Dr" for "Doctor" but "Prof." for "Professor").  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:51, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Change MOS:SCAREQUOTES shortcut to here

I came across a particular egregious case of mass scarequoting and wanted to reference the MOS, but found that the most complete treatment (with examples), here at Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation point of view (new anchor I added to avoid linking to only the subsection "Point of view"), was not the target of MOS:SCAREQUOTES. I would like to change MOS:SCAREQUOTES to link the same place as MOS:QUOTEPOV, the section here. Seems like if the main MOS covers it in most detail, that should be the location of the shortcut. Objections? —DIYeditor (talk) 05:07, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

I think you're headed in the right direction, but the QUOTEPOV and the Typography section below it both have mentions of usage scare quotes. Scare quotes are used for doubt or to disparage, and so favor keeping the redirect as it is. Senator2029 “Talk” 15:51, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
I combined the different treatments of this in User:DIYeditor/sandbox/Scare quotes, what do you think about moving that to Wikipedia:Manual of style/Scare quotes and pointing both redirects to the unified location? Potentially this could have an even more detailed discussion of the different ways this could be acceptable or not. —DIYeditor (talk) 02:44, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
I'm not too happy about creating yet another MOS subpage. We've got more than enough of those already. EEng 03:00, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
I thought that might be a response. How about making that text into a new and consolidated section on the MOS, rather than in 3 separate places? —DIYeditor (talk) 03:07, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Agree with consolidation but not with a tiny subpage. We have many that need to merge out of existence.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:20, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Beginning a sentence with a lowercase letter

Is this appropriate on Wikipedia? It seems wrong to me, so I changed a sentence here to avoid it beginning with ka. I've tried searching for any mention of this here, but it is difficult to parse any discussion of this topic from the many other capitalization discussions.文法楽しい (talk) 22:14, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

In my opinion, never. That edit looks fine to me; it would also have been acceptable simply to cap the K, but recasting avoids any possible confusion with a proper name or the like.—Odysseus1479 22:29, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
"iPhone sales have been flat since the product launch in 2018." Not based on expertise in the MOS, just my two cents. —DIYeditor (talk) 18:32, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
"The sales of iPhones have been flat since the product launch". The number of instances where you can't reword the sentence to avoid the issue is vanishingly rare; this is a situation that should ordinarily never arise. The relevant (admittedly well-hidden) guideline is at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks#Trademarks that begin with a lowercase letter. ‑ Iridescent 19:15, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
Then iPhone needs to be fixed, or can it not be reworded? - iPhone (/ˈaɪfoʊn/ EYE-fone) is a line of smartphones designed and marketed by Apple Inc. —DIYeditor (talk) 04:36, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
I've literally just given you the link to the relevant guideline. The boldface title recapitulation at the start of the lead is treated as a special case. ‑ Iridescent 08:25, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
Sorry, my mistake, I did not look at that link at all. Makes sense. —DIYeditor (talk) 17:30, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, just rewrite to avoid it (and same for trademarks starting with numerals). A lot of journalists have given up, and will start sentences with lower case if they feel they have to because of the extreme pressure they're under to save column space. But WP is under no such editorial thumb, and we have no reason to use an awkward construction just to save a few characters.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:08, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

MOS:ENBETWEEN: Remove a confusing assertion someone added, which conflicts with the rest of the guideline

I proposed this cleanup at the end of a longer thread on hyphens and en dashes, and confusion about place-naming. It was not opposed, but was archived not long after, so I'm re-opening it for discussion rather than just doing it:

It looks to me like "Wrong: Austria–Hungary; the hyphenated Austria-Hungary was a single jurisdiction during its 1867–1918 existence" was added by someone to encapsulate some kind of personal opinion or to rationalize an existing article title instead of moving it, and without any consideration of conflict with the rest of the dashes guideline and with actual practice (virtually all of our articles on places that are merged polities and whose names have a horizontal line in them separating the two formerly separate place names use an en dash, and RM regularly moves them to do so). All such places are "single jurisdictions during [their] existence" under the compound name, so the rationale in that quoted bit just doesn't work.

I think this line should simply be removed. I'd been wondering why we keep getting recurrent confusion about dashes and hyphens in place names, and this is clearly the source of it. (Or most of it. Odd cases like Guinea-Bissau, "the Guinea of Bissau", and Wilkes-Barre, a town named in remote honor of people with no connection to the place, generate some questions. However, they reflect patterns of hyphen usage that no longer survive in contemporary English. They're nomenclatural fossils, like all the "St James Church"-style locations in the UK and Ireland without a possessive apostrophe or apostrophe-s.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:35, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I noticed the Austria-Hungary entry once and reacted the same way. I don't understand the reasoning for preferring the hyphen or prohibiting the dash. Jmar67 (talk) 14:39, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Does a DMY date establish British English for the purposes of MOS:RETAIN?

MOS:RETAIN and MOS:DATERET say that the initial variety of English and the date format, respectively, should be retained. Assuming no national ties or special circumstances, does the initial use of a date format establish the variety of English for an article, and vice-versa? Does the first use of a DMY date require subsequent use of British (or other Commonwealth) English? Does the use of American spelling preclude or discourage the use of DMY dates? If an article is found to have developed a mix of American English with DMY dates, assuming each is consistent, does that justify changing one of them to comply with the other? If so, is this explained somewhere in the MOS? I've read various style articles and template documentation, and found these discussions: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers/Archive 151#DATETIES: Is DMY format now acceptable for the U.S.? and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 195#Question about ENGVAR, date formats, and metric vs. imperial, but it's still not clear to me. Are there other discussions, principles, or consensus that are easier to understand?

An example case is Sahle-Work Zewde (let's leave aside national ties to Ethiopia). The first version of the article had a DMY date, but no other identifiable variety of English. Several years later, someone added the word "center". Several months later, someone else changed "center" to "centre". Despite my revert on the basis of MOS:RETAIN, they reinstated the change and added a "{{Commonwealth English}}" template on the basis that the DMY date had established it. I haven't commented yet on the talk page there, because I'm not sure whether it's usual practice or not, so I wanted to ask here.

My personal preferences are:

  1. Don't go around changing date or English varieties unnecessarily. If you see someone doing that, revert and explain it politely to them.
  2. Dates in the format: "1 January 2019" are acceptable enough with American spelling (at least in articles that are not about American subjects) that going around changing one or the other is unnecessary.

The first is mainstream - am I in the minority on the second? --IamNotU (talk) 15:24, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

The establishment of DMY does not mean that BritEng should be applied. While most Commonwealth countries will follow with both DMY and BritEnglish, there are non-Commonwealth countries that use dmy but would not use BritEnglish (like many South American countries). Date format and English variety are treated very separately, and one should not go to change one based on the state of the other. --Masem (t) 15:30, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Agreed per argumentation by Masem above: DMY is not a basis for establishing BrE. Nor is MDY a basis for establishing AmE; the very British publication The Economist uses MDY format. Doremo (talk) 15:59, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
The Economist may be very British, but it sells more in the US than UK & obviously can't be bothered to vary its date format. Johnbod (talk) 16:38, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
It's hardly surprising that an internationally targeted British publication sells more copies in a market of 327 million (US) than 66 million (UK). Doremo (talk) 16:50, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
And your point is? In fact it is probably the only one that does. On the last figures WP gives, only 14% of sales are to the UK, which is certainly unusual. Johnbod (talk) 16:57, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
The point is that you seem to be claiming that The Economist isn't really a British publication because it doesn't have a majority of UK subscribers. I'm certainly not convinced of that. Doremo (talk) 17:06, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
I suggest you read what I said more carefully. Actually I don't think the Economist does use MDY number dates, or not in the UK - what version are you looking at? Johnbod (talk) 17:27, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
  • If it is a case of establishing priority, I would say the date format is usually going to be quite strong evidence, unless say there is a Latin American subject or editor involved. Johnbod (talk) 16:38, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Dates are a favorite of pedants, and there's plenty of variation in how people like expressing dates, especially on the internet. I wouldn't say the use of a dating scheme should count as establishing Engvar for our purposes. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs(talk) 17:24, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Agree with David and Masem here. There's insufficient one-to-one correlation between engvar and date format to use the presence of one to definitively determine the other. oknazevad (talk) 17:49, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Which is why we have separate WP:ENGVAR and WP:DATEVAR. --Izno (talk) 20:49, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Date formats are the tools of Satan. EEng 20:59, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
  • No. We've been over this about 1,000 times at WT:MOSNUM. Date formatting is generally a per-publisher matter. For example, the US military prefers DMY format, while various non-American publishers, especially online news sites, use MD,Y format (likely because their CMS came configured that way by default and they didn't bother changing it).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:26, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

MOS change re independence of dates and ENGVAR

Labeling images as "Figures" in captions

The article Seabee previously had its images labeled as figures with "Fig. #" in each caption, with references to them in the text. This is not explicitly mentioned at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Captions but it is clearly nonstandard. I see this as quite unnecessary if the images are appropriately placed in the relevant section. My removal of these apparently "amounts to vandalism" because one must be "academically advanced" to understand the relationship between an image and the adjacent text it relates to. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 11 is another example, and Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133 shows how easily these can get out of order when images are reorganized. This is a rare enough case that the MOS doesn't appear to explicitly mention this, other than perhaps "The text of captions should not be specially formatted", but does anyone have thoughts on it? Reywas92Talk 23:59, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, not our style, except in a minority of cases where a set of similar images is needed, and needs keying from the text. Not here. Johnbod (talk) 00:03, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Looking at Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 11 and Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133, it's really hard to follow. The references in the text to figures interrupt the reading flow, and for most of them I have to scroll to find the correct figure (then try to find my place in the text again). And some figures aren't mentioned in the text at all. When they are called out, the image is seldom necessary to the understanding of the text (here's a picture of the ship). MOS says "Avoid referring to images as being to the left, the right, above or below, because image placement varies with platform, and is meaningless to people using screen readers; instead, use captions to identify images. The first image in Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133 doesn't even have a caption, just fig 1. Not helpful to those who use screen readers. Schazjmd (talk) 00:13, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
And figure properly refers not to photographs, but to illustrations. And it sounds a bit Victorian. And it's ambiguous with other uses of figure (e.g. to mean 'numeral').  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:49, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
It's common in U.S. publications to designate any illustrative material, including photos. I very frequently employed it in my work writing software documentation. This article was apparently based on such a publication. Jmar67 (talk) 02:43, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
"Someone somewhere in some field does it anyway" is a poor rationale to do something unhelpful. And screenshots from a program or OS are technically illustrations (digital ones) not photographs anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:38, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Due to the length of the article, I can't determine whether numbering is useful here (I edit with the mobile version). If the text needs to refer to specific illustrations, then some sort of numbering is helpful. In publications, numbering also permits a potentially useful list of figures as part of the table of contents. Jmar67 (talk) 12:14, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I also object to figure-numbering unless there is a very compelling special-case reason, and I would put it in the MOS, as I do see both new and old editors doing it. Same topic came up in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry#Figure numbers and MOS recently, where nobody supported figure-numbering but several opposed it. DMacks (talk) 06:46, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I also encounter it frequently enough (not just lately, but in my entire tenure here) that I also think we should address it, but at MOS:IMAGES, not in the main MoS page, which is already really dense.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:54, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I agree that it should go in an image/caption-specific subpage in the set of MOS pages. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Captions and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images#References_from_article_text are the two sides of this equation (writing the caption and referring to an image from the prose). Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Captions is a bullet-point summary of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Captions and I'm not sure this is important enough to include there. DMacks (talk) 18:04, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I believe the distinction made between "figures" (diagrams, "graphics", etc.) and photographs (images, etc.) is an older one, arising from technical aspects of printing, also evidenced in the older practice of printing photographs on separate stock that was then bound in a book. Modern printing technology does not require such separate handling, and the modern practice is, as Jmar67 says, to simply and generically call all non-text illustrative material "figures". On that basis I see no objection to calling an "image" a "figure".

But the issue raised is not so much the term used – would "images labeled as figures images with "Fig. Images #" in each caption" not be an issue? – as the labeling of each image, and particularly, labeling with a serial index number. While images generally stand apart from the text (with any explanations needed done in the caption), occasionally there is a need to refer unambiguously to a specific image (such as a map), and therefore some kind title or label is needed. It might be helpful to provide some guidance on this, perhaps with a suggestion that labels can also be anchors.

Journals and technical documents routinely serially number all figures (a serial number being easier to locate than arbitrary text). The problem with doing this with explicit numbering is that additions or deletions of figures may require extensive renumbering. Note that there is a similar situation in regard of numbering equations. For equations we have the {{NumBlk}} and {{EquationRef}} templates, which provide automatic serial numbering of equations similar to how the <ref> system handles notes. I don't know that we have anything similar for figures. In lieu of some similar automated system (and at the risk of establishing a "customary style" such that future editors will object to any other way) I think we should provide some guidance for labeling or titling figures ("images"). ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:02, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I concur that the numbering is an issue, but the WP:SELFREF practice of unnecessarily "talking at" the reader ("see Fig. 2", "as shown in the image to the left", etc.) is also problematic and should be avoided when possible. So, when is it not possible? Doesn't proper captioning always make it possible? Isn't context otherwise going to resolve it? When would one need to tell the reader that something is shown on a map, when it's obvious the map is included to show it? While using non-numeric labeling,, and anchors, is more sensible in this medium that numbering or referring to layout position, I'm skeptical we should encourage people to do this. If there really are good use cases, how to we distinguish them from crappy ones?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:19, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
When the text addresses some point that is identified on a map, why should we not specify which map?
A topic often warrants multiple maps, often overlapping in scope but at different scales, with different but overlapping sets of elements. If the maps are more than mere ornamentation they likely contain elements the text addresses, and the reader may be seriously confused if he looks at the wrong map. Generally we rely on adjacency: there is an implication to refer to the nearest map. However, this does not always work. In particular, there is a problem with mobile devices: they don't properly display a lot of maps, leaving the reader looking at the wrong map.
Note that I am not saying we should encourage people to label and/or title their images (though that seems to be a good idea). I am saying that given certain cases where it would be useful, should we have some guidance. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:44, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Question on MOS:CONSECUTIVE

I requested a change to the MP for a sentence ending with "Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.." (quotation marks just to highlight the string here), asking to eliminate the second period and citing MOS:CONSECUTIVE. The admin challenged the request by saying that the first period was "abbreviation punctuation" and not "terminal punctuation". Surely the intent is to cover this situation as well, i.e., do not duplicate a character (period) that serves as terminal punctuation, regardless of the character's function. At least that was what I learned in school. Does anyone think that the quoted phrase is correct and should not be changed? It definitely looks strange. Jmar67 (talk) 02:58, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I just fixed it, as I have done for years, even though that guideline says "word or phrase" not abbreviation. Chicago Manual reference Art LaPella (talk) 03:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
It seems impossible to believe there was any question about this. EEng 19:16, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Yes, and abbreviations is a subset of words, so there is no problem in the guideline phrasing (here, or in Chicago, which we don't follow, though it has informed a lot of what MoS says).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:54, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
"The admin" is wrong (and being an admin doesn't give anyone more authority over a content or style matter; it's unrelated to adminship tasks).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:54, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
The admin challenged my request in good faith based on his interpretation. He did not claim that he was right or refuse to make the change. Based on the MOS wording, I could not immediately prove that I was right (although I was convinced I was) and decided to ask here to gain some support. Jmar67 (talk) 02:30, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
It would be good to add an example of an abbreviation ending a sentence. Jmar67 (talk) 03:03, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
It has one (the "... Sammy Davis Jr." example).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:04, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
It was added after my post and apparently in response to it. Jmar67 (talk) 11:13, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Yar. Just noting that it's resolved.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:12, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
It was I who added it, but in retrospect I realize I was unthinkingly violating my precept that MOS should not speak to points which are universal to all good English writing, unless they have for some reason been a repeated problem here at WP. EEng 14:27, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
Adding the example was useful because it illustrates a case the other example did not, that of consecutive periods. I agree that we should not have needed to point that out because the majority of editors would have seen it as an error and fixed it. However, when an editor has to have someone else make a change (in this case the admin), it helps to provide an MOS link that provides clear guidance, ideally with examples of what is wrong. I was reluctant to justify the change by saying "It should be obvious that this is an error." I never anticipated that someone might object to the request. Jmar67 (talk) 21:33, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

First-use acronym expansion within a quotation

Unless this is handled somewhere in the MoS I haven't found, I propose that we add to the MoS that if the first use of an acronym occurs within a quotation, the "expanded" acronym should be added in brackets after the acronym; and that if a link is appropriate, that the link occur on the expansion rather than the acronym. As an example, taken from this article section I've edited, the first-use acronym "CRM" would look like this:

"...resulting in a loss of control and their failure to abide by CRM [Crew Resource Management] principles of mutual support..."

This proposal resolves a discrepancy between:

  • The MoS rule here that "The abbreviation style used in quotations from written sources should always be written exactly as in the original source"; and
  • The MoS rule here that "When an abbreviation will be used in an article, first introduce it using the full expression".

Supporting my proposal:

  • I believe it's important to expand first-use acronyms for the lay reader, per the above policies
  • I believe we should not put words in the mouth of the original speaker or writer by just substituting the expansion for the acronym, particularly because browsers' in-page search will not find the quotation if we change it silently with a straight substitution
  • I believe in-quotation expansion is better than defining it before or after the quotation, for understandability as the reader reads, and also because doing so would be very clunky
  • I believe it is widely understood that in English, brackets indicate words not spoken or written in the original.
  • My proposal to link the expansion rather than the acronym is only because to me, it seems more apt because the expansion within brackets is a definition, and a link dives even deeper on the definition.

(I originally posted about this at the help desk here, where User:Teratix suggested I bring this up on an MoS talk page.) On Sober Reflection (talk) 12:19, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

No need for anything new in the guideline. The use of brackets to explain something unfamiliar in a quotation is, as you note, well established; linking here is completely natural; and this isn't peculiar to acronyms. What you did makes perfect sense. EEng 13:50, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
I'd just like to say that this is one of the most clean proposals that I've seen in a long time.Naraht (talk) 14:01, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
I agree, but there's still no need for a change to the guideline. EEng 22:11, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Huh? I'm replying to the OP. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:49, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Ok, now I get it. Quote. Disregard. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:52, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Well, you're onto something. The cleaner approach is to mention "crew resource management (CRM)" in the introductory material before the quote, so that "CRM" in the quote needs no explanation. That's much smoother than injecting a square-bracketed editorial explanation in mid-quote, when this "pre-mentioning" tactic is practical in the context. When it's not and an insertion is necessary, I agree with EEng that our existing rules already permit this, so not guideline change is needed. PS: It's not a proper name, so "crew resource management" not "Crew Resource Management".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:25, 2 April 2019 (UTC); revised: 02:09, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm against altering an original quote to add an expansion. While adding it in introductory material is cleaner, I'd take care to ensure that the source clearly specifies the expansion somewhere in the text, if not in the quoted part, to ensure that Wikipedia editors are not making an assumption about what the expansion means. Most of the time, there's no issue there (as in the CRM example). Although even here, absent a positive statement in that source, are you 100% sure or just 98% sure it's crew resource management and not cockpit resource management (a redirect in this case, but different words nevertheless)? If it's not expanded somewhere in the source, we shouldn't either. Mathglot (talk) 23:26, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Yes. Brackets are not for augmenting quotatons. I disagree that "in-quotation expansion is better" than anything. If the quoted material includes an expansion, but for some reason it is not suitable (too cumbersome?) for direct quotation, then brackets might be used for a summary paraphrase. But if the expansion was elsewhere in the source (or nowhere), then it should be presented prior to the quotation. Surely there are very few cases (if any) where this cannot be done. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:54, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Spin-off of MOS:GENDERID into its own sub-guideline

Please see

MOS:GENDERID is the focus of intense discussion in many places. This topic is overdue for having its own subarticle in the Wikipedia Manual of Style.

To establish this article, I attempted to avoid even presenting guidance, and instead compiled a list of many prior discussions on which basis we will collectively establish consensus.

If anyone has something to say about this then please comment on the talk page there at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Gender identity. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:36, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Bluerasberry, I question the title of the page since that page, in its current state, is not actually a guideline and Wikipedia:Gender identity is more of a guideline page than that one is. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 00:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
It was also tagged {{Essay}}, which would definitely mean move it somewhere else, like under Wikipedia:WikiProject Gender Studies or something. I've changed this to {{Draft proposal}}, since the intent appears to be actually drafting new language and proposing it, after the listed discussions are analyzed. I could see that living under "WP:Manual of Style" temporarily (several other draft proposals have).

However, only about a year or two ago we had a discussion about another draft of an identity-related MoS addition (which actually had a lot of input into it and substance to it, unlike this one). I even proposed integrating parts of it into MOS:IDENTITY, but the entire thing was rejected, moved somewhere else, and tagged with {{Failed proposal}}. A repeat is fairly likely. Back around 2016 or so there were also a slew of competing "harassment"-related proposals (all also deeply entwined with gender-identity politicking), and they all also came to nought. I don't think this will work either, because it's yet another attempt to WP:POLICYFORK instead of to propose a small incremental change to the existing guideline, and see if the community will accept it, and whether it has any longer-term fallout; then propose another small change. This kind kind of "suddenly remake Wikipedia in my own image, as drafted off on some other page by me and my buddies" stuff never works.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

@Flyer22 Reborn and SMcCandlish: At Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Gender_identity#Recommendations it says, "there is not yet identified consensus to make recommendations", which I think is where consensus for the Manual of Style is right now. I favor centralizing conversation on this topic in one place, and I think many people would watch and reply if conversation progressed there. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
The page at which to do that is this one, since people watchlist it and it's where MoS changes get hashed out, by people who actually have some experience thinking through what unintended effects any changes to these guidelines may have. Perhaps also later at WP:VPPOL, if the change seems major and also well-developed enough that the entire community needs to look it over. Some page no one's ever heard of isn't going to be very effective for this, and is apt to fall into WP:FALSECONSENSUS problems. (See, e.g., all the various "harassment"-related proposals a few years ago; they all turned into half echo chamber and half flame war, with no consensus emerging for any of them.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC); note added: 02:06, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Bluerasberry, yes, I saw that. Per what I stated above, I still don't think that the page should be titled as though it's a guideline. The page is not really a proposal. At least not yet. And we already have enough newbies and other less inexperienced editors confusing essays and other pages for guidelines and policies. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:10, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
I kind of agree with SMc. The MoS's guidelines on gender identity do need to be reconsidered and updated, but if the goal here is to come up with a whole page's worth of new guidelines and then get the community to agree to them, I am a little skeptical.
I do think the page is useful in the form it is now, however, with its annotated discussion timeline and its links to gender identity guidelines and essays. I could also see its talk page becoming a central place to talk about gender identity guidelines. I assume if, in the end, the page wound up as more of a link repository and discussion hub, rather than a set of specific recommendations, that it would have to be considered an "essay" and not an official part of the MoS? But I wonder, in that case, if it would be appropriate for the MoS to still link to it. WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 14:47, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
A few MoS pages have informational supplement sub-pages (MOS:ACCESS has several). However, an index of previous discussions (which is all this is at present) really belongs as a subpage of Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive index, and wouldn't have its own talk page. However, about three years ago, a conceptually similar set of pages – hand-maintained sub-indexes of topics of particular interest to particular editors – was deleted at MfD (I think one of them got user-spaced by request rather than deleted) as basically a canvassing and PoV-pushing factory, since the exercise naturally involved a lot of cherry-picking of what to include, and the few people who were (and in this new case, are) creating and maintaining those pages are all of a single mind-set with a single goal of changing an extant guideline (an extant consensus) to something else. It has WP:NOT#ADVOCACY issues.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
As another approach, you could have a seperate guideline page that is wholly subservient to GENDERID, designed to provide more explanation and considerations into how to apply, rather than trying to define any new rules that GENDERID does not already say. It is like how WP:NFCC is a policy page on non-free content, whereas WP:NFC is meant more of a guideline and explanatory. Not only could this be done for GENDERID but also for issues related to dead naming, etc. since these all are closely linked. AGain, the new page should not be "new" rules, but how to interprete the existing ones, provide examples and guidance, etc. --Masem (t) 14:45, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Possibly, yes. This is basically what all the MoS sub-guidelines are. However, almost all of them are old, and were spun out out simply for length reasons (WP:SUMMARY, WP:SPLIT). Getting the community to accept new ones is very difficult. After 18 years, how much new style guide can we possibly need? Most proposals to change or add to MoS at this stage are poorly reasoned (and PoV-pushing), and are rejected. I'll come back around to where I started on this: It's more practical to suggest specific, incremental changes, right here, and see if they get accepted, and to submit any really substantive changes as an RfC at WP:VPPOL or a WP:PROPOSAL at WP:VPPRO, and cross-reference from the other VP page, and use WP:CENT, and so on. No section of MoS has been subject to more heated debate and outright strife. The idea that we can just draft a sweeping change and everyone will go along with it is pure fantasy, I'm afraid. Changing a single word in this section is a challenge.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm curious why this is called Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Gender identity rather than simply Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Identity, where we can document all of the various ways people self-define and self-identify and how we should defer to those. Gender, sexual orientation, racial identity, ability status, political persuasion, social class, religion, and so many more ways that people can identify which may contradict older reliable sources. To devote a MOS guideline to only one aspect of intersectional identity is exclusionary. -- Netoholic @ 19:26, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Whether the scope of the page should be expanded is worth considering, but I disagree that focusing in on one particular group is necessarily "exclusionary". Gender identity seems to generate an especially large amount of argument and confusion on here, so it's easy to understand why it might get special attention. WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 23:00, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) See previous comment; exactly what you suggest (a general identity guideline page) was already drafted, hashed out in great detail by many people, left stable for a while, proposed for formal adoption here, and ended up a {{Rejected proposal}}. (It began as "WP:Naming conventions (identity)" which now just redirects to MOS:IDENTITY. The draft is archived at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Identity (failed proposal); the discussion about it is archived at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 194#Merge draft WP:Naming conventions (identity) to MOS:IDENTITY?). Even MOS:IDENTITY's material on Arab/Arabic/Arabian and other such terms was relocated to MOS:WTW, and only after a lot of wrangling to keep any of it at all. There's a general community hostility to "legislating" about this stuff in the guidelines.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for the links. Certainly if a broader identity guideline has failed to gain consensus, then its probably a waste of time and resources to deal with a more specific subset of identity, as it involves all the same issues. Should we mark Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Gender identity as a WP:REDUNDANTFORK of a {{failed proposal}}? -- Netoholic @ 02:19, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
if a broader identity guideline has failed to gain consensus, then its probably a waste of time and resources to deal with a more specific subset - This makes no sense to me at all. In general, broader proposals are naturally going to be harder to get consensus on than narrower proposals. WanderingWanda (they/them) (t/c) 15:40, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
We don't need a broader MOS guideline for identity in general because gender identity presents special style considerations, especially with regard to gendered language (i.e. he vs. she pronouns, etc.) that other forms of self-identity (race, ethnicity, linguistic, national origin, sexual orientation, etc. etc.) do not necessarily present. While those topics may have content-based considerations, and may need guidance in other parts of the Wikipedia help system, those considerations are not style considerations. The Manual of Style deals primarily with how to properly use language like grammar and spelling and the like, and not with the myriad other issues regarding identity. Of the various expressions of identity, gender itself presents a style concern, such as "which is the correct pronoun to use". --Jayron32 16:23, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
The other identity categories also have their own special style considerations, such as what term(s) for ethnicity someone may want to identify with ("Black" vs. "African-American"). Likewise, what terms they want to use to describe their ability status (ex. "deaf" vs "hard of hearing"). Certainly people want to define how to classify their political ideologies ("alt-right" vs "conservative"). And obviously sexual orientation has a myriad of terms across a spectrum. It seems incredibly narrow and dismissive to only focus on one class of identity (especially, and not being dismissive, trans status which applies to a much smaller set of articles than some of these other considerations). -- Netoholic @ 10:58, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
Those are important decisions to make, and perhaps Wikipedia should deal with them, but those are not the bailiwick of the style guide, which should deal with issues of grammar and spelling and punctuation and capital letters and the like. The MOS is not designed for handling every aspect of editing Wikipedia, merely those aspects that deal with style. --Jayron32 14:09, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_212&oldid=1255174645"