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French Spacing

I moved this here from my talk page so that everybody can discuss. This comment refers to my recent revert. PizzaMargherita 07:23, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi,

I was a little bit confused about your revert of my edit on French Spacing in the Manual of Style. Your edit summary didn't provide much guidance as to why you were reverting, saying only that it was "not what the manual of style was for". I was attempting to make the guideline clearer by making sure that readers understood what the issue in question was. I'd be happy to make a less prominent link, or a link to a different article, but I think that the current section is inadequate to help users who aren't already familiar with the issue of spacing at the end of sentences. Users may have been taught one method or the other as "correct", and not be aware of the stylistic issues involved. Would you feel comfortable with:

There are no guidelines on whether to use one or two spaces after the end of a sentence (French spacing), but it is not important as the difference shows up only in the edit box.

Thanks, -- Creidieki 23:39, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi. That's a lot better, thanks. Although "French spacing" is ambiguous because it may refer to spaces around punctuation, and anyway I still feel that it's unnecessary background information for a MoS, which is different from a WP article. Anyway sorry I wasn't being rude, just lazy. PizzaMargherita 07:23, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Seems to me we might point out that there's no sense in putting more than one space after a period, because it will be ignored (as it is in HTML in general). Double-spacing after sentences is a pointless holdover from the typewriter days. ProhibitOnions 11:45, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

But it is also harmless (or unhelpful, depending on how you look at it), not changing what we see, and therefore unnecessary instruction creep when it comes to the MoS. Gene Nygaard 17:28, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I will note that I have noticed of late many, many AWB-automated edits that are doing nothing but "fixing" invisible spacing issues, such as "French spacing" and blank lines after headers and between bullet points. This is really starting to annoy me; it pollutes my watchlist, requires my attention to scrutinize the edits to be sure they aren't changing formatting, and diminishes the capacity of the servers for edits that do not affect the visible encyclopedia. Perhaps we should be more explicit about do not "fix" this, à la dialects of English? --TreyHarris 19:30, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I think you're right. If bots are going to go round fixing trivial issues, they should at least do several of them at once. ProhibitOnions 21:05, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Another thing, I noticed the phenomenon you describe had happened to an article I had written, and the bot had left a rather arrogant-sounding edit summary along the lines of (Fixed various formatting errors and other mistakes). It had... removed a single space. ProhibitOnions 21:16, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Maybe we should formalize a "shoot on sight" rule for those people cluttering up our watchlists with those pointless, often invisible AWB changes. Gene Nygaard 17:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

We need a "really, really minor edit" status. · rodii · 21:17, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

A special status for edits that affect white-space only? Perhaps a status which allows one to hide the edit, but which should be available to admins only? —Michael Z. 2006-03-28 21:26 Z

It should be fairly trivial to implement this in WikiMedia itself; if the edit only alters whitespace (a la "diff -w"), mark it as "really really minor" and don't display by default in a user's watchlist. Add a preference option to override it, but its still visible in the history anyway. dewet|™ 10:37, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Please, see the "rules of use" on the AWB page, it already says "Avoid making extremely minor edits such as adding or removing a single space". People should not be making stupid edits with the software. If they are doing it regularly, then the software can be disabled for them. Martin 10:45, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

ALL CAPS redux

Please take a peak at the New York Times abstracts I have copied for article: Martin Beck (vaudeville). Does it really look good this way as opposed to the Title Case used by the New York Times when they transcribe an article? These are just raw OCR dumps. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 06:13, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Uh, dude, you can pull PDF files with actual images of those articles as scanned from microfilm out of the ProQuest database at any decent public or academic library. They've scanned in the NYT back to 1850. Once you have the images of the original articles, then it's much easier to see which lines were the actual headline and which were the blurbs below the headline (which usually don't need to be included in the citation). --Coolcaesar 06:36, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

You can skip the "Uh" when your leaving messages for me please. "Blurbs" and "headlines" if they are there, I quote them, and in all caps too. I am asking do they look nice or not nice?

You simply want to know if they look good? I don't think they do. I think they look fairly nasty. --maru (talk) contribs 01:05, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Varieties of English

With regard to the recommendation: "If there's no strong tie, try to find synonyms that can be used in any dialect." — aren't common synonyms the better option even when an article is strongly tied to a certain form of English? After all, we're concerned with communication, not with pandering to chauvinism. If I'm writing an article about the seventh Earl of Ilkeley-bar-Tat, and I refer to his need for a lot of rubbers because he was always making mistakes, I don't see that the fact that he's English justifies insisting on the confusing word "rubbers". Could this recommendation be changed to: "Where varieties of English differ over a certain word or phrase, try to find an alternative that is common to both"? --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 20:56, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you. Using neutral synonims should be preferred at all times, and therefore should be moved up the list of rules—should I say, the two lists of rules.

I think that the "National varieties" section is atrociously ambiguous and ineffective. And given how frequently it is discussed in this talk page, I'm under the impression that I'm not the only one.

I have made a proposal that some people support and some others oppose, although the latter are unwilling to discuss it beyond a drive-by opposition (producing arguments that have already been addressed in the proposal itself) and do not propose an alternative solution. PizzaMargherita 22:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Mel, that is a good point, and the wording could be altered, although in some cases it may be difficult for many people to really determine a neutral word or phrase.

(Pizza, I think there is also a vast majority who doesn't really see a problem requiring a "solution" at all. The concern that dozens or hundreds of occurrences of new markup in an article would needlessly clutter up the wikitext has not been addressed by the proposal at all.) —Michael Z. 2006-03-24 23:13 Z

Plus there's the "let sleeping dogs lie" factor. If you think we have a lot of arguments about this now, just think what is likely to happen if PizzaMargherita's proposal brought this to the forefront in thousands of articles. Gene Nygaard 00:35, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Michael, I replied to your comment. I think your estimate of "dozens or hundreds" occurrences in an article is overstated. And even so, it is in contradiction with your understating the size of the problem—and you say you do trip over "US" (vs "U.S.") when you read it, right?

Gene, could you please share the apocalyptic scenario you have in mind if the proposal passes and is implemented?

(Please let's continue in the appropriate forum. Thanks.) PizzaMargherita 08:23, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

I, for one, will concern myself with how it looks to the thousands of readers who are not logged in, who do not have preferences set--and will argue if someone wakes this sleeping dog up by pointing it out to me by making such an addition of the markup, where I might let it slide otherwise (actually, I often don't notice varieties of English spellings any more). And, I do like a good argument now and then. Gene Nygaard 17:43, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I have replied in the appropriate forum. PizzaMargherita 18:38, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I should have said this earlier; I've changed the wording, and moved the advice slightly further up, so that it's more general. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:57, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

You would think so, right? And yet some would argue that your change had absolutely no effect. This is because of the following weasel-clause

They are roughly in order; guidelines earlier in this list will usually take precedence over guidelines later

and the fact that the order has not changed in either list of rules. Why we have to maintain two lists, I really don't know.

For another discussion on how ambiguous and useless this section is, please read this, or in general stay tuned on this page and watch people fight. PizzaMargherita 10:42, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I created the first list as a simple summary of the basic idea behind the policy. Someone said the rules were too complicated, so I pointed out that there are really only four rules; the second list is just examples and special cases. — Omegatron 23:22, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Capitalizing animals

There is a situation in the Dire Wolf article where capitalization of animals is very inconsistent. My interpretation on the style for capitalizing animal names is that the animals' article titles should be capitalized, but the animals should be mentioned in lower case in the body of the article. I applied this to the article, mainly because it needed extensive disambiguation, but another editor undid the capitalizations and restored the amiguations along with them. I reverted his revert and gave my reasons in the talk page, but he recapitalized the animal references again, but as haphazardly as it was before, so it looks ugly and unencyclopedic. (He did leave the links disambiguated, per my request.) I want to make sure that it's all consistent and uncontentious, so what should the policy be on animal capitalizations? Coyoty 04:26, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Apparently capitalization of common names is "hotly debated" for some reason, but I can see no rationale whatsoever for mixing styles within a single article. To follow other cases where the MoS has chosen to avoid some protracted dispute, it should probably be first editor's choice, then all other references within a given article should be made consistent with that choice.

But I'm unable to ascertain from the pages linked to from here whether the debate over capitalization style is over an intrinsic property of animals' names, or an orthographic rule. In other words, is the debate over whether all animals' common names should be capitalized or not, or is it over whether certain animals (e.g., Dire Wolf and Coyote) should be capitalized while others ("dog") should not? If the debate is the former, then by all means, make them consistent within articles (capitalize both Dire Wolf and Dog in Dire Wolf but neither in Dog). If it's the latter, then I think you have two choices: put up with the orthographic ugliness so long as each reference to a given animal is consistently capitalized, or try to resolve the dispute so that first editor's choice no longer rules.

Or is there another aspect to this debate that I'm missing? If there's a rule whereby some animals' names are capitalized and others' are not, then the first editor's choice may be between rules. This is how we handle Commonwealth versus American spellings: if an article about some non-localized phenomenon has not yet used any words that differ in spelling between variants of English, then the first editor to do so makes the decision for all future words. For example, if an article doesn't yet have any such words, and I add the word capitalization, then you may not later add harbour, because I've already "locked you in", so to speak, to harbor. If there's a similar style rule for animal name capitalization (for (contrived) instance, between "do not capitalize any common names" and "capitalize any common names longer than three letters"), then the first editor to make a choice "locks in" later choices. I'm sorry if this all sounds messy, because it is. --TreyHarris 05:12, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

The capitalization was originally jumbled in the article. I made it consistent and disambiguous. He jumbled it up again. I pled in the talk page for consistency. He has haphazardly edited the main article but not replied yet in the talk page. Coyoty 05:29, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

City, State/Region linking

Most articles link to the city and its state or region separately, e.g. [[Chicago, Illinois|Chicago]], [[Illinois]]. Is this an official Wikipedia style specification? Should articles where the city and state are a single link be fixed? --Jonathan Kovaciny 17:24, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I would say that it is less than once in ten times when this is done that it is really appropriate. I really dislike that practice. Most of the time the U.S. state or whatever secondary administrative subdivision elsewhere has no particular relevance to the article in which that link appears—and the city itself should have links to the state or whatever, if after getting there someone wants to go on. It is also not usually of any utility in the other direction, either. People will use "what links here" to find information relevant to a city; because this is so often done with things so trivially related to a state, that option is next to useless in that case. Gene Nygaard 22:13, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

I concur. --Coolcaesar 23:52, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree as well. If the state is relevant then it should probably be mentioned separately. If there is ony a single link then it is more obvious that we are only referring to one place. I even once saw something like, "The mission culture was important in Santa Barbara, California, and San Jose", where it wasn't clear if the reference was to two places or three. A local placename, in the U.S. taxonomy, generally has two parts. Linking the two separately is a bit like linking the first and last names or a person separately. "Henry Jones". -Will Beback 07:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Nerdy style question

I've been cleaning up some articles about certain real-time strategy games, especially Starcraft. Often, articles refer to "spell-casters" or "spell-casting units" when they actually mean units with special abilities with an associated pool of energy/mana/whatever that needs time to regenerate. This seems to also happen in other cases such as articles on Warcraft III. This terminology is standard in the gaming world but could lead to confusion if a reader is not familiar with the term (and doesn't know for example that the spy unti Ghost (Starcraft) or a Science Ship are classified as spell casters. So should the term spell casters be used?

Why not stub out an article at spell-caster and then link to it when the term is used? If it's used as widely as you say, it's as encyclopedic as any other article in the video game genre. --TreyHarris 06:24, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. Will do. JoshuaZ 19:37, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Quotation marks and bolding in summaries

I've just added the folowing text to the Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Quotation marks section:

Similarly, when the title of an article requires quotation marks in the text (for example, the titles of songs, poems, etc.), the quotation marks should not be bolded in the summary, as they are not part of the title:

"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.

I've often noticed that there's no consistency with regard to this (admittedly minor) matter, and today an editor asked me for advice on the issue, as he'd been unable to find anything in the MoS.

I don't think that this will be controversial, but if it is, please remove the text and we can discuss it here. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 08:28, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Lexins (different words, same meanings)

When writing an article, should the dialect be geared towards North American, Brittish/Australian/New Zealand/Other, or should it depend on the audience of the article (or should it not matter at all)?

• For example: I translated Jose Cardona from Spanish to English, and I used my US dialect in regard to the word "soccer." When a user edited to add some information and change the grammar, he changed "soccer" to "football" because he is from the UK. I feel that because American "football" is not the same as the Brittish/Australian... "football," "soccer" should be used.

--Kmp589 01:08, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Generally, the only guidance is that you should consider what the subject of the article is. However, I would say that it's more important for you to write whatever is comfortable for you, and for everybody to accept that different folks will use English differently (if you're editing an established article, though, you should make some effort to conform to the existing style). In the specific case of football/soccer, I think it's definitely better to use soccer in most situations, because football is ambiguous, but soccer is not. There are many styles of football. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 01:44, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

On the other hand, only in North America is the word soccer used, so using it in a non-North American article is arguably POV. Consider that everywhere else in the world, football is not ambiguous because the term American football is commonly used to denote the NA sport. — Saxifrage ✎ 18:59, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

What about Australia? I was talking to a guy just the other day who used to be a professional footballer, and he didn't mean soccer. The U.S. + Canada + Australia is a large chunk of the English-speaking world. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 07:06, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Since the article is about someone from Spain and since you'll never heard the word soccer used in Europe, I suspect applying the Canadian-American-Australian usage would be Canadian-American-Australian-centric (if there is such a thing :-). — Saxifrage ✎ 07:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

What was the orginal spanish text?Markb 06:44, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Loan words, foreign or non-english?

I'm not going to make a fight out of it, but I personally think foreign is a bad choice, as the word unnecessarily implies nationality (the dic. def says "Of, characteristic of, or from a place or country other than the one being considered"). While English is used by many, many native speakers, it is also the current lingua franca of the world and loan words aren't necessarily "foreign" to a non-native english editor. That said, I won't revert Gene Nygaard's change back to foreign, but I hope he and others can be persuaded to see my reasoning :-) Henrik 08:49, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree with your reasoning. WLD 09:16, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I'd tend to disagree. What's your definition of the widely used expression "foreign language"? I wouldn't say Canadians speak a foreign language from an American point of view, and yet they are different countries. PizzaMargherita 09:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, I'm not sure what I would say instead, I think that's a phrase to avoid as much as possible in Wikipedia (even though it is widely used) but I can't think of a good alternative right now. The problem is that Wikipedia is a global project, and term 'foreign' always implies a viewpoint. Henrik 11:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

The term 'foreign' is not only subjective, and implies nationality, it's also redundant. This is a trivial fix, since it's easy to phrase this in a way that doesnt need to use 'foreign' at all. --Barberio 10:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I like your attempt at circumventing the issue, Barberio. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it does the trick, as there are a huge number of words not in common use that are indeed recognised as English, e.g. sesquipedalian, quincunx, uxorious, fletch and also non-English words used more commonly, such as latte, gestalt, entrepreneur, junta - I don't think any of the latter have made the transition from 'foreign loan-word' to English yet, unlike say, 'hinterland', 'cafe', 'pork', 'beef', 'mutton'. I would suggest that where a word is generally recognised as being 'non-English', it be italicized. I've not made an edit to the article itself, as I think the debate should reach a conclusion first. WLD 11:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Nice job. I rephrased one last foreign in that paragraph. (85.235.1.20 is me, apparently my cookie just expired) Henrik 11:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

It wasn't a "nice job", not if the intent here was to keep the same meaning while avoiding the objectionable word "foreign". See the diff. By the new text prior to my reversion, technical articles would have to italicize unusual specialized words, neologisms would have to be italicized, and see also WLD's examples. Italics are used for loan words, not all words not in common usage. --TreyHarris 15:14, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

You are glossing over the presence of 'In other languages', which made it clear the section applied only to words and phrases from other languages. The section was functionaly identical to that it replaced. Unless you can think of any other objection, I feel the changes should be restored. --Barberio 16:31, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, look at the diff again. "In other languages" was used only for the first sentence of the paragraph. "Foreign" was simply deleted in the second case, which was fine, since a word with "common use in the English language" will not be a foreign word. It's the third case I was referring to, which substituted "that are not in common English use" for "foreign". "Psychoacoustics" is not at all common in English use, but it shouldn't be italicized. --TreyHarris 19:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Note also that the word "foreign" encapsulates the idea of "strange and unfamiliar" along with the meaning "of a language other than one's own". Any restating without "foreign" needs to encapsulate both those factors; recall that 80% or more of English's words are loanwords, so if you try to restate the idea of foreign words, you may unintentionally end up requiring that an enormous proportion of words be italicized due to non-English origins. --TreyHarris 15:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, this is an absurd objection. "Common English use" is pretty clear, and would not be subject to the problem you state. In this case 'Foreign' was not only redundant, but in its self needed to be explained. Since we have to give a clearer term than 'foreign', there is no need to actualy use 'foreign' anyway. Using a word that gives a 'sence' of that, is not as good as explicitly stating it; and if we explicitly state it, there is no need to use 'foreign'. --Barberio 16:31, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Back to my earlier example, there's no way you're going to convince me that "psychoacoustic" is in "common English use". I'll happily go find a corpus and see exactly how common it is, if you want to argue with me here. Foreign-language words borrowed, but not yet incorporated, into English get italics; native words, no matter how rare, don't. --TreyHarris 19:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Ok, fair point. It seems that this is not a page to be bold on. What does the panel think of my original suggestion: "non-English"? Henrik 16:14, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

(Proposed replacement text) Wikipedia prefers italics for isolated words and phrases in other languages, that do not yet have common use in the English language. Use anglicized spellings for such words, or use the native spellings if they use the Latin alphabet (with or without diacritics). For example, "Reading and writing in Japanese requires familiarity with hiragana, katakana, kanji, and sometimes rōmaji." Words or phrases that have common use in the English language, however—praetor, Gestapo, samurai, esprit de corps—do not require italicization. If looking for a good rule of thumb, do not italicize words that appear in an English-language dictionary. Per the guide to writing better Wikipedia articles, words from other languages should be used sparingly. Include native spellings in non-Latin scripts in parentheses. --Barberio 16:31, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

This sounds appropriate, and avoids calling words like latte or gestalt non-English words (which I would disagree with heartily were it written into the policy). — Saxifrage ✎ 19:03, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

That's just fine. As I said, my objection was to replacing "foreign words" with "words that are not in common English use"; those are two very different matters. I would suggest inserting "unitalicized" before "in an English-language dictionary". Many dictionaries list words one might come across that are still not considered incorporated into the language. --TreyHarris 19:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I suspect that such italicised-in-dictionary words would be eventually removed from any prose in Wikipedia just because they're obscure and editorial standards would warrant their replacement, so the policy doesn't need to mention them. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:27, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I'd be careful with that kind of talk if I were you. You don't want people to accuse you of trying to "dumb down" Wikipedia. (For reference, I completely agree with the sentiment that obscure words should be replaced with well-understood synonyms. Using fancy words in articles for their own sake does not advance the purpose of building an encyclopedia that can be used by everyone.) Nohat 20:36, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Serial, Oxford or Harvard commas

The question of Oxford ('serial') commas is surprising complex. What constitutes an ambiguity also depends largely on what convention you are accustomed to. Whoever contributed to the main Wikipedia serial comma article understood this pretty well.

My revision suggested that

The author would like to thank her mother, Sinéad O'Connor, and President Bush.

is ambiguous. In fact to me, one meaning is stronger than the other, that Sinéad O'Connor is the author's mother, and that is a subordinate clause in the middle, delimited by commas on either side as is conventional. However, if you are expecting the Harvard/Oxford comma, then you would expect a comma before the conjunction in any case, so you are unable to tell if it is a list of two items or of three. Removing the comma makes it clear that it is a list of three items.

There is a common assumption (which Fowler may have started, and is continued by Teresa Nielsen Hayden among others) that adding extra punctuation always removes ambiguity. Whoever wrote the main Wikipedia article has done us a favour by analysing that assumption more closely.

The present indeterminacy is actually the best of both worlds, as commas can be added or removed to make something unambiguous. If Wikipedia did ever adopt a convention, I would say the most sensible one would be that of the Australian Government, i.e. do not enforce artificial inflexibility that is the actual source of ambiguities. Cedders 20:01, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Maybe it's a regional variation in my English (or, more likely, the fact that I've spent far too many years staring at weird sentences), but "The author would like to thank her mother, Sinéad O'Connor and President Bush." is still not unambiguous to me—it's semantically unambiguous, but it's still ambiguous. It reads as you say, but it also reads as if the author is thanking her mother, who is named "Sinéad O'Connor and President Bush" (a syntactic ambiguity) or maybe her mother is an amalgam of Sinéad O'Connor and President Bush (a pragmatic ambiguity). These leads to what in linguistics we call the "garden path", or just the "boggle reaction". :-) "The author would like to thank Sinéad O'Connor, her mother and President Bush." is unambiguous to me; so perhaps just reordering the items would be sufficient. In speech, ordinarily prosody will save you from ambiguity, but that doesn't work on the printed page. (Sorry, I can never stop being a linguist... :-)

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." Or should that be, "time flies like an arrow; time mosquitos like a bullet"? Or maybe "time flies like an arrow, if you can find an arrow willing to teach you how to time them".... Once you start looking for ambiguity, down that path lies madness. :-) If no one else is bothered by the ambiguity, leave it alone. --TreyHarris 22:57, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Argh, of course "The author would like to thank Sinéad O'Connor, her mother and President Bush." is not unambiguous either—is she thanking her own mother, or Sinéad's? Sigh. --TreyHarris 22:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Had the sentence been written with 'mothers' in place of 'mother' there would certainly still have been a syntactic ambiguity. A singular noun phrase that includes 'and' is possible ('Strunk and White is the foremost authority') but can produce other pathological cases. I think your final example just goes to show how hard it is to prescribe easy rules. Perhaps the importance of this section in the style guide is to show that editors have already thought about it quite deeply, and, in the end, clarity of expression is a more important consideration than rigid consistency, much as the introduction to the manual implies. Cedders 08:41, 14 April 2006 (UTC)