Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Manual of Style. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

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Archive 5

Aug 23, 2002 – March 15, 2004.

Various proposals have been floating around for a while that Wikipedia discuss and present some stylistic conventions for the consideration of Wikipedia participants.

No one should feel obligated to follow such (stylistic) conventions--it's important that we stress this lack of obligation, because one of the things that makes Wikipedia so active is precisely that people feel so free to input information in whatever format they feel comfortable with.

Well, we already enforce/strongly encourage Neutral point of view

I think we can begin by assembling some links here to some of these existing discussions.

Commas and quotation marks

The WikiProject concept is probably appropriate here. (If you disagree - then hey, just delete the link)

Wikipedia commentary/Use pinyin not Wade-Giles -- (Warning! Discussion in progress as of 1 October 2001) (I.e,, don't poke your head in unless you're willing to get it shot off. :-) )

Link to How does one edit a page/Quick reference or not?
It seems to me as if how to put tags into the document, falls under the category of Manual of Style. That's where I looked for this information, rather than at How does one edit a page/Quick reference. In fact I can't even find How does one... when I'm looking for it (How to...). Maybe I'm wrong. Seems like having a link here doesn't hurt tho. --justfred

There probably is a better place for it, but "Manual of Style" most definitely isn't it. Or maybe it should just be linked more prominently from the homepage. "Manual of Style" means something very specific to most writers, namely, a list of editorial decisions made for a particular publication. The technical details of how two write something are, by definition, not editorial choices, they're technical requirements. --LDC

I will concede this, style is style not details. On the other hand I find lots of "HTML Style Guides" that tell you how to write HTML... --justfred

I'm sure you have, and they are mostly worthless. Anything called an "HTML Style Guide" shouldn't tell you what the tags do, it should tell you why to use certain tags for certain purposes. Believe it or not, the art of writing English prose effectively existed long before the web, and even before computers...:-)

All right. I'd like to see Wikipedia standards for:

weights and measures

Nondiscriminatory language.

There are no such standards, and I encourage our not even trying to adopt any. --LMS

Please, let's not just reproduce the content of other Wikipedia pages here. There's no point in doing that, and it "forks" the content. I'm going to delete this unless someone can explain why I shouldn't (or, if someone else would like to delete it (or the copied parts of it), that would be grand. --LMS

You're right. Removed copied parts. justfred

This page isn't just about style, is it? It looks like it's a summary of links about policy. Doesn't this just duplicate Wikipedia policy? --LMS

It _is_ really close. It seems there should be a distinction made between policy and style. Let's see if I can articulate:

Syntax is what you must do. How does one edit a page/Quick reference
Policy is what you should do - standards and rules and the like. To keep people from stepping on each others toes and screwing things up really badly. naming conventions and neutral point of view are policy.
Style is how you should do it. Much more nuanced than Policy; things like British vs American spelling, what to subpage and what not to, etc. To make the encyclopedia have the right "flavor" (or is that "flavour"?). Rules to consider seems to be more about Style than about Policy.

Articles like those in the Content and Commentary sections are more about style and less about policy. So maybe this should evolve into the pages that are about style, and point back to Policy for the articles strictly about policy?

I know I inherited this idea just by writing about it; I was trying to answer a question to myself about what style to use (well, originally I was also trying to figure out Syntax - which I think of using the Chicago Manual of Style for...)

I do know I strongly believe that whatever it is we're talking about, if anywhere, should be in Wikipedia Manual of Style rather than Wikipedia/Manual of Style where it was originally created. At least I think I believe that !) -justfred

Fire away

I've just set up a bunch of targets. Fire away. Organization, content, examples, everything is up for grabs. As I say on the page, let's keep it simple here and farm out the complexities to other articles. Ortolan88 22:35 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)

Birth & Death Dates

Much talk deleted, settled

This conversation should be old and dead, but I'm starting to think that we shouldn't put "Month date" in the parentheses either. The years that a person was alive are vital to establishing a context for who they were, but the month and date can safely be relegated to the paragraphs describing thier births and deaths, just as the locations of those events can be. (Of course, nationality is also vital to establishing context, but we do that with an adjective in the first sentence just outside the parentheses, so we don't need birth place for that.) "Name Name (Month date, year - Month date, year) was a ..." is just too cluttered, even without the words "born" and "died" (which I still think read better). — Toby 14:12 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)

Yep, the "born, died" is better, but if we are going with the present form we should keep the day and month for consistency with the entries for "what happened on this day", which all have "born" and "died" sections. Ortolan88 17:47 Dec 2, 2002 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Biography standards and its talk page for a discussion of a rigid regular format for presenting biographical information. Ortolan88

Citations

I'd like to see some sort of standard set forth for citation signals, legal citations, and style manuals in general. To wit, whether citation signals should be italicized, what signals are used in what situations, and what style manual should obtain in a particular situation. As far as legal style manuals go, the Harvard Bluebook is used by most law reviews and federal courts, but state courts typically have their own style manuals and do not follow the Bluebook's guidelines. The same sorts of conflicts in re proper style probably exist in various other areas of writing, such as newspaper journalism, medical and scientific publishing, and technical writing, but I am not familiar enough with these areas to offer intelligent commentary. --NetEsq

I hope that as it stands this article will do for general writing of the average article. We do suggest UofChgo Manual of Style, college handbooks, and Fowler, which should be enough for anyone.

As for medical, scientific, or legal styles, perhaps those should be referenced from here to their own pages so as not to intimidate new writers who are guided here. Ortolan88 09:50 Aug 24, 2002 (PDT)

When I was trying to create something like this page on Meta, I wrote an introduction to the effect that "good content is more important that presentation -- a style guide is not an imperative, rather a reference for Wikipedia's many copyeditors". Feel free to grab that from there for here. :-) -- Tarquin 09:53 Aug 24, 2002 (PDT)

Numbers

Large numbers: is it fair to say large number should be written thus: 1,234,000 when not using exponential notation? -- Tarquin

One disadvantages of using commas is that some people are used to seeing these in place of decimal points. One disadvantage of using spaces instead is that browsers might wrap a number over two lines, which is really nasty. -- Matthew Woodcraft

One solution is to use " ", but the drawback to this is that it looks ugly in the wiki markup (which is why I've stopped using it in mathematical formulas). — Toby 10:57 Nov 11, 2002 (UTC)

Units

See Wikipedia:Measurements Debate for lengthy discussion of the superiority of metric (granted), the depravity of American measurements (granted) and the need to communicate with depraved Americans (grudgingly granted).

2.3 km (1.4 mi) seems to be the method of choice for lengths.Sebastian 07:21 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)

Formulas

Mathematics an Physics

I found the following in inertial mass:

m_i×a_i1 = m₁×a_1i,

My question is: Should we really use the × (×) symbol for multiplication? To me this looks rather like a vector product.

Sebastian 23:42 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Well, I do have a lot of articles that say "In topology and related branches of mathematics", since the basic ideas of topology are widely used in other branches. But how does it work for homotopy theory? "In the mathematical field of topology's subdiscipline of homotopy theory"? We could say "In the mathematical field of homotopy theory", since mathematicians know that homotopy theory is topology and nonmathematicians only want to know that it's math.

OTOH, consider "In the mathematical theory of buildings". Had I read that last year, I'd have had no ideas what buildings are in math; they're not so well known. I would have understood "In the group theoretic theory of buildings", but then the nonmathematicians would be lost. So we would only have complete context given for everybody by saying the loquacious "In the mathematical theory of buildings, used in group theory".

Anyway, the point of this note is to say that giving complete context will sometimes be quite wordy. But I do agree that we should give as much context as concise sentence structure allows. So basically I agree with you. — Toby 13:40 Sep 24, 2002 (UTC)

BTW, I thought topology had something to do with geography? Jeronimo

I thought that this was the same as topography, but the OED disagrees. Now who wants to go through 93 links to Topology and disambiguate them? — Toby 13:40 Sep 24, 2002 (UTC)

At first sight, they're all right (just did a checking of the page titles, and looked at those I was least sure of) Andre Engels 13:46 Sep 24, 2002 (UTC)

Just stepping in to point the way to the policy page Wikipedia:Establish context -- maybe add all these ideas there & move this talk to its talk page? -- Tarquin

I'd say do it the other way round. This page collects all kind of style guidelines, so we should include it here. That way it is easier to get an overview for new - and old (I still find new Wikipedia guideline pages) - users. Jeronimo

My idea was that this page will need splitting at some point anyway. If guidelines on this page already have pages elsewhere, we might as well use the other pages & link to it from here. -- Tarquin

I agree with Tarquin on this one. When I did the first draft of MOS, I assumed there would be separate pages on layout and on scientific articles and suggested separate pages on hairy subjects like tables. There's a list of other pages at the bottom (the only thing left of the "old" MOS). I think we should keep the MOS simple and unimposing and put the philosophy and special cases on links. Ortolan88

Hmmmmm. One of the problems I have with this is that, as so often happens, the two articles start to live separate lives. However, at the least, these style guidelines should be mentioned, a link will explain the specifics and the ideas behind it. Jeronimo

I agree with Ortolan88. This should be like Wikipedia:Naming conventions in that regard. — Toby 09:03 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, that's probably the best. We should take care however that both pages state the same, and link to each other. Jeronimo

They seem to be keeping things together with the naming conventions page, but it probably helps that the subsidiary pages' names have the format [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (...)]]. Should we do similarly here? That is, if we adopt a previously existing style page as a subsidiary page to the MoS, then should we rename it [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style (...)]]? — Toby 01:43 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable to me. We could do the same thing with the talk page and stash all that maundering about hectares and poods and versts and furlongs out of the way. Ortolan88 01:49 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I was planning on moving dates, numbers and units onto a separate page once the orders of magnitude links are all ready; the relevant talk would be shunted across too -- Tarquin 08:45 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Pronunciation

What about pronounciation rules? Some pages (Guernica, for example) have a pronunciation guide. In the current format, these usually clutter the first (definition) sentence, and it looks ugly. A common practice in encyclopedias is to put the pronounciation in italic immediately after the word is first mentioned. In our case, we'd have to link it as well, so something like s{mpA:? Any other suggestions? Jeronimo 14:05 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

Including pronunciation is quite hazardous, I think. Whose pronunciation do you use? - Khendon 14:16 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

I don't find SAMPA the least bit communicative, but people have complained about the handmade phonetics, as in Guernica (which I added). I prefer the latter, as communicating more information to more people despite the issue raised by Khendon. Look at the SAMPA and concise SAMPA and see how much you get out of it. I don't think SAMPA is all that well known, either. Ortolan88

The problem with "handmade" phonetics is that there's no standard. Different writers will split different phonemes and transcribe them differently. I agree that SAMPA isn't very well-known. I would much rather have IPA, which is -- all British dictionaries use it. However, AFAIK, we can't display IPA in HTML. :( The advantage of SAMPA is that it is one-to-one correspondance with the IPA -- so when one day HTML can do IPA, it won't be hard to convert it. -- Tarquin

We can display IPA in HTML, using numeric character references. [1][2] But, it's A) ugly in source, B) not easy to type, and C) they don't show in all browsers; a lot of people don't have the fonts, or don't have them configured. --Brion 20:24 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

The "handmade phonetics" (as at Guernica, indeed) are ugly and often far from correct. Pronounciation should be denoted in a correct way, and an informal method won't do for that I guess. I don't care which method is used, as long as there's a page where I can find what the signs mean (you have to do that as well with your dictionary, so this shouldn't be a problem). If SAMPA's easy to display, let's go with that. Jeronimo

My opinion is that it should depend on what sort of word we're "pronounciating". If it's a difficult English word, then we should use handmade English "phonetic" spelling, taking care to include exactly the same dialectical ambiguity in our phonetics as in the word itself. For example, if there's a question about whether a certain /r/ should appear in the word, then we should spell it phonetically with an "r" whose possibility of pronunciation in a given dialect would match. OTOH, if it's a foreign name, then we should use IPA (or an ASCII equivalent such as SAMPA) to render the phonemes of a standard dialect associated with that person or place. — Toby 14:04 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)

Punctuation Style

When punctuating quoted passages, put punctuation where it belongs, inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on the meaning, not rigidly within the quotation marks. This is the British style.

This sound appealing; even as an American, I have never quite accepted the idea that punctuation should go inside the quotes as often as style manuals seems to insist. I'm not clear what the British alternative is, however. Are there any links here, or could someone provide a brief set of examples? --Ryguasu

Example added. Ortolan88

Thanks. How about punctuation for As John Doe points out, "The man with the most cheese molds the least." Americans would obsessively put the period inside the quotation marks. Is this true for British folks as well? --Ryguasu

Um, there's no obsession about it. If it is a complete sentence, the punctuation goes inside in both countries. The MOS has always said that. Ortolan88

Ortolan88 is right. If you were to be perfectly logical about it, you would write

As John Doe points out, "The man with the most cheese molds the least.".

because there the quotation is a complete sentence (requiring a period) while it sits at the end of another complete sentence (requiring its own period). I will often use just this style, since I'm a hyperlogical person, but most people regard it as too ugly, so the usual style convention is to keep only the period inside the quotation marks. (It might just as easily have gone the other way, however.) What distinguishes the two countries' systems is:

John Doe called him "the man with the most cheese".

Here the quotation is not a complete sentence (thus requiring no period), so the style above is the one demanded by pedantic logic. Since this style is not ugly, we can use it in ordinary writing, and the British do; the Americans, however, move the period inside the quotation marks, because ... I dunno why, they just do. — Toby 09:14 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

As I understand it, it is a prejudice of American printers that little bits like periods look "bad" hanging outside the "quotes". I don't agree and I have to catch myself when I'm writing commercially to do it the American way, but in everything I write for myself I do it British style and I was delighted to note when I was working up the Manual of Style that British was already the convention in Wikipedia. Ortolan88

Caption question. Most graphics don't seem to have captions, but the issue came up in blackface as to whether captions should be italic or not. For myself, I find it confusing, since if the caption, as in the case in the blackface article, includes something that would normally be italicized, it becomes non-italic in the caption itself. That is, which is preferable:

17-year cicada

or

17-year cicada

Or, in the tougher case:

Al Jolson, in The Jazz Singer

or

Al Jolson, in The Jazz Singer

So, here's a proposal for discussion:

Captions

Photos and other graphics should have captions unless they are "self-captioning" as in reproductions of album or book covers.
Captions should follow the style of article text, using italics only for normally italicized material.

Ortolan88 18:46 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

I like the proposal. Instead of italicizing the caption text, I'd like to see a smaller font size. Mrwojo 06:53 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

I'd like to see a caption style and let the CSS decide what to do with it. DanKeshet 16:30 Dec 12, 2002 (UTC)

That's what I was hinting at. As a downside, it would pretty much rule out setting the caption style in italics and trying to un-italicize book titles (etc.) with HTML (such as '' produces). Mrwojo 05:50 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

Added to Manual of Style. Ortolan88 06:12 Jan 25, 2003 (UTC)

Names & Acronyms

The first time you introduce a person, use the person's most common complete name. Thereafter, use their family name. For example, say Ronald Reagan the first time, then Reagan thereafter. Or , say Vicente de la Fox the first time, then Fox thereafter. It is unneccessary to say Vicente Fox Quezada except for in the article on Fox himself, as that is not the common form of his name.
The first time you introduce an acronym, spell out the acronym in full, followed by the acronym in parentheses. For example, Central Processing Unit (CPU). Thereafter, you may use the acronym.

What about situations where the acronym is more common than the full term? Should we do CPU (Central Processing Unit) and IBM (International Business Machines)? To me, using the acronym first and expanding it in parentheses makes it apparent that the writer isn't just abbreviating a long-winded term. Mrwojo 05:50 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

A commonly-used acronym should have an article to itself anyway (or rather, a redirect to an article). I think it's fine to write only "CPU" as long as the first instance is linked "CPU". So I would say either link the first acronym, or explain it: "IBM (International Business Machines)" (bad example, since that one in particular should be IBM but I can't think of another acronym...) Tarquin 13:18 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

There are also "disappeared acronyms and initialisms", like SAT which has been declared meaningless by its owner, YMCA, which no longer expands to Young Men's Christian Association, or JayCee, which no longer expands to Junior Chamber of Commerce. In those cases, the article should note the origin of the acronym or initialism, but not use the expansion as the title.

In all other cases, it makes sense, and is the most common publishing practice, to say "International Business Machines (IBM)". (My father called computers "IB Machines" in the 50s!") I think it would be pretty rare for an acornym or initialism to deserve an article of its own in addition to the article about the expanded form., except for redirects, of course.

BTW, while we're on the subject:

Acronym -- pronounceable word formed from the letters or syllables of a phrase, such as radar or InterPol.
Initialism -- unpronounceable collection of initials, such as CIA or FBI.Ortolan88 17:04 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

I've been caught out. I hereby ban from Pedants' Corner for a period of one week. *hangs head in shame*. My basic point was that given a commonly-used acronym or initialism, we should be able to turn it into a link which the reader can follow for an explanation. (what the name of that explanation page is has probably been discussed and decided on Naming Conventions) -- Tarquin 17:11 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

TakuyaMurata just added a style recommendation to use European naming convention for Asian names, even in kanji. Call me sentimental or backwards, but I must say, I like the Asian way of going from big to small. It is a wonderfully consistent system that encompasses everything from date/time to addresses. Maybe Murata-san was just accommodating. I think it would be more confusing if we reverted the kanji, because my impression is that this is unusual, but of course he should have the last word on this. All I can say is that for someone with a basic idea of Kanji it is not a problem to reverse them in mappin one to the other. It would be a trifling compromise in deference to a great cultural heritage. Sebastian 07:00 Jan 25, 2003 (UTC)

I agree, and I've removed it. Here is what was added:

Stick to the first then last name order. It is common in English writing. For example,

Basho Matsuo (芭蕉松尾, 1644 - November 28, 1694)

The Japanese characters should correspond to the order of an anglicized name. While it seems weird, it is much less confusing.

It seems to me that this is at odds with the anligcisation naming convention, which says to give things the name most commonly used in English. In the case of Basho, I believe this would mean Matsuo Basho, not Basho Matsuo; and in general, it means we can't have a hard and fast rule about whether to put given names first or second. We put them wherever they are most usually put. That's the right way to do things, I think. --Camembert

First of all, this problem is so difficult to make a standard. I am totally aware that people often put Matshu Basho or Miyazaki Hayao. In fact, Google returns "Basho Matsuo" with about 2000 pages and "" But in the same time,

I am sorry I did without any suggestion. I concluded that first of all, this is English encyclopedia then stick to English convension. For me, as native Japanese, 芭蕉松尾 looks extremely odd. But the basic principle is a least surprise and common standard. I bet the majority of English speakers assume when they see "Matsuo Basho" Matsuo is the first name. How about Japanese character order? Again this is English encyclopedia. If someone sees,

Basho Matsuo (芭蕉松尾)

he/she probably thinks 芭蕉 is Basho. It is confusing that the order in the real name is different in the English name.

Also there is another much difficult problem. What about Chinese name? What about Arabic name? I have no idea at all. But we have to settle a convension as soon as possible. -- Taku 16:35 Jan 25, 2003 (UTC)

Style of "External links"

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump

I would like to add something to the style guide Wikipedia:Manual of Style, but am not sure how to do this and with whom I have to discuss this. My question is about "external links": sometimes it is handy to add additional information than just the URL. Unfortunately there is no standard about that and at the moment I am aware of three different methods:

Adam Bede
http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/qt.php -- History of Qt and Harmony
City's own website: http://www.hannover.de/

examples: George_Eliot, Harmony toolkit, Hannover

-- mkrohn 23:05 Apr 7, 2003 (UTC)

I think the Adam Bede method is the preferred method. See external links on this page: [3] -- Notheruser 23:13 Apr 7, 2003 (UTC)

#1 is the standard. Note that the "printable version" of a page reveals the URL. --mav 23:49 Apr 7, 2003 (UTC)

I object very much to the proposal suggesting two different styles for "External links" heading. Wikipedia is far too confused as it is wrt. the style of the external link heading, and it certainly does not help to confuse the matter further by having two different styles in the "Manual of style". If it is believed that a smaller font size is suitable when there are no other headings in an article (something which in my view looks odd and inconsistent, but that is another issue), then that must certainly be handled by the Wiki markup to html converter. The Wiki markup *must* be consistent. -- Egil 18:55 Apr 8, 2003 (UTC)

I agree, and I've changed it to say that two equals signs should be used, not three apostrophes. The external link header is just like any other header, so this is how it should be treated. I've very rarely seen "external links" marked up any other way, and I change it if I do. --Camembert

Agreed. -- Tarquin

Large image links

Can we devise something better for these than "Click here for larger version"? (http://www.w3.org/2001/06tips/noClickHere ) How about "See a larger version"? -- Tarquin 12:26 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)

On Rachel Corrie I just used "larger version", which is nice and short :) Martin

Or "See also larger version". Additionally, put the large image on the image description page of the small version, because it is common and intuitive to click the thumbnail itself to get the larger version. See also [4], [5] - Patrick 13:35 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)

I used to do that, but I was told off - see wikipedia talk:image use policy. Martin

It may be "common and intuitive" but in the case of Wikipedia all images are clickable and only a very few of our images have larger versions. Therefore the user has no idea without clicking the image if that image has a larger version. That is why media links are used in the caption area below images which directly link to the larger versions. Our users should only expect to see image meta data on an images description page unless the caption area below the image in the article says otherwise. BTW, I use "larger image" for the displayed text of media links. "Click here" bugs the hell out of me and I try to avoid using those words. But I must admit that when there is a substantial description on an Image's description page I will often write "Click image for description" (see Saturn (planet)). It would be great if somebody could think of something better to say. --mav

Okay, I see. But it is a bit confusing: normally, the text that pops up at a link describes what you get when you click; so when xxx.jpg pops up you expect an image; may be the pop-up text should be "description of xxx.jpg". - Patrick 00:21 Apr 10, 2003 (UTC)

That's a very good idea - I suggest you make a feature request. --mav

Well, I just saw a great example of how not to do it, at wasp. :p -- John Owens

let's see if we can't make life easier for ourselves: m:Image pages -- Tarquin 08:51 Apr 10, 2003 (UTC)

Links within headers

Depending on settings, some users may not see them clearly.

I put this earlier, rephrasing "They seem to get buried by the bold type.", but is this really so? Normally links are underlined and/or a different color, so bold links can be distinguished from other bold text. Sometimes the words to be linked are not in the text itself, so links in headers can be convenient, avoiding cumbersome duplication. I agree that links in headers must be avoided if they distract from the meaning of the header as a whole, but I like them in headers like "Transportation in Azerbaijan", where they are the two main generalizations of the subject. - Patrick 11:29 Apr 13, 2003 (UTC)

I really dislike links within headers, because I think the bold interferes with the underline and colour change. I prefer to have them as free links in the first sentence. Or, if it's an important link, to use a "Main article" style to really draw attention to it. Martin

I agree. I think really look terrible and should be avoided if at all possible. --Daniel C. Boyer 19:04 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

My 2c: links in headings are ugly. Avoid where possible, unless all the headings are links in that particular section of the entry. Mixed colour headlines look really amateurish. Tannin

It should usually be possible to write the first sentence of the section to mention the heading. Eg: "== Foo == \n The

were prominent in the bar region...." -- Tarquin 13:14 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

Names of people - first names or surnames?

When writing about people, we obviously use their full name (+link) the first time it appears. EG "Saddam Hussein is a very naughty boy". However, later in the article is it correct to say "Hussein did bad stuff" or "Saddam did bad stuff"? I thought I saw advice to do the former, but I can't find it, and I can't recall what the reasoning was... Martin

Just my 2c. In general, use the more formal last name. But there are common sense exceptions - consider, for example, trying to write anout the Wright Brothers that way! Tannin

Well usually the surname. But in this case, "Saddam" is his surname; Hussein is his given name -- Tarquin 13:14 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

Righto - thanks for the help :)

Explanatory text

What's the policy on articles containing explanatory text, e.g. "This article will detail how one goes about proving that all cows are green." Is it bad? Good? Uncertain? Graft

It's useful in certain articles, such as anarchism -- the explaination helps people find what they're looking for much quicker. -- Sam

I agree it's useful, but we don't always operate based on what's most useful... I am wondering more if people think (or have thought) that this violates some sort of encyclopedia etiquette, or if it munges with the "voice" of the encyclopedia in some taboo way... Graft

An alternative would be to have some sort of stub text (maybe links to other sites if available) then put the explanatory text on the talk page. Personally I have nothing against explanatory text on pages for a short time though -- Chris Q 09:26 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Whitespace under headings

The chapter "Headline style" says: "Note that with the == brackets used, no space under the headline is needed. The space should be removed.", but if one looks at the source code, not putting an empty line after the heading will result in the first paragraph of the text not being marked with the <p> tag, and for this reason there will be no whitespace rendered under the heading (In my browser anyway). So, in order to make the markup to be produced correctly, it is necessary to put an empty line after the heading. (IMO, this makes the text look somewhat cleaner in the edit window as well). Timo Honkasalo 09:15 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

our parser doesn't use P tags correctly anyway, since they are never closed. -- Tarquin 11:56 14 May 2003 (UTC)

So, it's more of software rather than style issue. After all, the ideal would be that the empty line wouldn't make any difference, because the users are not going to be consistent with it anyway. Timo Honkasalo 13:20 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Indeed. I've raised the matter with the mailing list a few times ... -- Tarquin 14:54 14 May 2003 (UTC)

Question re: quotation marks

In transcribing the words, for instance, of hymns or poetry, it is frequently necessary to use a single quotation mark to indicate a missing letter, o'er, or o’er, for scansion. My preference is for the latter, as, given the context of the usage, it runs together better. Nevertheless, I can see that someone a little more experienced in Wikipunctuating may be able to offer guidance. Ought I change my solitary submission thus far to the general style of ', or is ’ acceptable? Wooster 11:01 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

’ is an HTML entity, and will not show on all systems. Best to stick to ' , for the immediate future at least -- Tarquin 11:10 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

There is an alternative; ’ as in "o’er" is more acceptable as an HTML entity. But I'm still in the "o'er" camp myself. -- John Owens 11:40 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Longer Articles and references

Comments please:
First let me apologize for going over some old ground, but I'd like to suggest an approach that seems better to me. The subject is the bottom of article references. I prpose to expand or adjust the style manual. First, for short articles with one or two references, I see no problems with the current general approach of *See also: [[article]], [[article]]. For mega-articles such as countries, I also really like the Main article: [[Article name]]. under a subheading. Enough preamble, I propose that long articles with several references get an ending structure like:

==Additional information== (we could be folksy and use ==To learn more==)
===Wikipedia articles===
*[[article 1]]
*[[article 2]]
===Reference material===
* Book 1 citation (ISBN nnnnn)
* Book 2 citation (ISBN nnnn2)
* Periodical reference
* CD, DVD, VHS tape, etc.
===External links===
*[URL1 description]
*[URL2 description]

I haven't adopted this yet, but the idea was prompted by two articles. Daniel Morgan is already too busy at the bottom of the page. I've also got material to update the Battle of Trenton which would make it as bad or worse. The material is in pages of stuff on my growing to do list, ;-). ....Lou I 18:03 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I don't see the point of adding another level of hierarchy; I don't think anybody capable of reading the article is going to have trouble understanding that the different kinds of end material are for "additional information". I could go with merging external links with references, since there are now many websites that are as good as or better than printed works as authoritative sources. For my part, I would abolish "Further reading" and just use "References", can't see any useful difference between the two. Stan 18:24 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You're right, I like your proposal better than my own. I've tried it at the Artemas Ward article. ....Lou I 08:33 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ah, but "references" are works that were actually used for developing the article. "Further reading" is more comprehensive works that can be read by the reader to get more information. Very often a reference is from a textbook or part of another work that doesn't focus on the subject of an article. So many times all or most of the information that is in the reference has been inputed into an article. But a "further reading" selection should always have way more information than is in the article. So we need both sections. --mav

Thanks, Mav. I agree about Further reading, unless of course the reference is to a video, ;-). Also, I think that if we need the references I'd just as soon call it Sources, since many times you can't take everything in them at face value. I may need to see some longer lists before even having an intelligent preference, so I guess this subject will stay open a while longer. Lou I

To me that's a distinction without a difference. By nature an encyclopedia article is supposed to be a condensed version of the original material, so a reference used to build the article is also legitimate as "further reading", irrespective of whether it's a complete work or not. Conversely, what kind of valid "further reading" would there be that is not also a useful reference? Consider the case of a relative newbie like myself - if I see an existing article mentioning a book in "further readings" that happens to be on my bookshelf, I then dig out the book and add a missing factoid or two, does that mean the book now has to be moved from "further readings" to "references", or do I instead list it in both sections? A distinction based on how the material was used originally becomes pointless after several generations of edits. If a reference work is recommended as an better-than-average read, then just say so in a comment. Stan 21:09 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You missed my point. I said that often most or all the good information in a particular reference has been incorporated into the article. There is no reason to direct our readers to those sources when that is the case. What I often do when a reference also happens to be a good choice for ==Further reading== or ==External links== is I place the reference only in one of those two sections and then after the listing (in parenthesis) I say "also used as a reference." That prevents the need for a double listing. --mav

Ah, I see the sentence now. Perhaps it's just my style, but aside from lifted PD text, I rarely run into a reference that I use everything from. Stan 04:16 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Mixing Article introduction (bold) and Title style (italic) to boltalic

I have the feeling, that this two things should not be mixed. Other people seem to think, they should. I think there is some clarification needet to make it clear, that Article introduction is not italic but bold (at least the article says so!). Thanks for comments, Fantasy 20:16 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I've given my opinion elsewhere, but I'll repeat it here for completeness: The MoS says "All articles should have the title or subject in bold in the first line" and "Use italics for the title or name of books, movies," ... The two are not mutually exclusive. If the words in question are the article title or subject and the name of a book, movie etc. then both rules apply. The words should be bold and italic. -- sannse 20:58 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I think this is wrong. Why should Matrix be bold and The Matrix be Boldalic? I guess, you are confusing a title in an article with the title of the article.

Maybe an example can help you understand the difference: The article Keanu Reeves contains a reference to the film The Matrix. THIS LINK should be in italics, not the introduction of the article about The Matrix.

And: As long as the user manual says: All articles should have the title or subject in bold in the first line it is wrong not to do so. There are two ways: We change this text or we do as it says. Fantasy 21:16 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

PS: If there would be no difference between Title style and Article introduction, why should there be two extra paragraphs for the same thing?

Humm, we are really managing to misunderstand each other. I'm sorry I'm not being clearer. I'll give it another go :)

"All articles should have the title or subject in bold in the first line" - agreed. But something being bold doesn't mean it can't also be italic and still be bold. An object can be large and red.

Any time the film title The Matrix is mentioned it should be in italics. So the italicised link in the Keanu Reeves is correct. If it is in the first sentence of The Matrix article then it should also be in bold. The reason matrix is bold and not italic is because it is not a film title.

I agree the paragraphs on title style and article introduction are talking about different things. But in this case The Matrix is a film title (and so the "Title style" paragraph applies) and is part of the article introduction (and so the "article introduction" paragraph applies). One says bold, the other says italic - so we use both and the words are written in bold and italic.

I have to go to sleep now, apologies again for not making my point clearer. Regards -- sannse 21:57 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I don't see a reason, why film titles should be italic. What is the advantage? In normal text, to make it visible, ok. But in the Article introduction, it is already visible. So WHY? Fantasy 06:48 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Because by convention all film titles are always in italics (this is a standard English convention far bigger than any conventions we have for just Wikipedia). And we have a convention to bold the subject of an article the first time it is mentioned. So we bold and italicize movie title the first time they are displayed in an article. --mav

ok, this makes it clear. I did not know that this is an English Standard (I am not a native english speaker). Thanks for pointing this out, Fantasy 07:50 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Lovely to wake up and find this sorted - thanks mav and Fantasy -- sannse 08:17 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

External links

or

External Links

-- 136.152.197.237 06:28 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

My impression is that the general convention is not to capitalize subsequent words in section headers (unless they're proper names, of course). I suppose it doesn't really matter, but "External links" etc fit in better with the house style. --Brion 06:32 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Wikifying?

move to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Do I have to put blabla on the See also list when I have wikified the blabla already in the text? --webkid 05:45 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I never do Theresa knott 07:10 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You don't have to. If it's a really important link, you may wish to.

I tend to think we shouldn't, because it's already linked to, and often remove those from see also lists. Vicki Rosenzweig 02:53 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I agree. It makes the "also" meaningless; how would it be "also"? --Daniel C. Boyer 19:05 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Wikifying (part 2)

When we have an article which has a lot of years in it ( for example the Erich von Manstein article ), do we have to wikify all the years ( of course, I won't wikify one year twice, but there are at least 15 years in this article ). webkid 17:49 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Automated Table of Contents

In many Wikipedia pages there are Automated [Table of Contents]. But I can't see, from an editing view of the page, how this is done. Can we please have some instructions somehwere on how to put an Automated Table of Contents into a page. Thanks. RB-Ex-MrPolo 09:54, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)~

See Table of contents. - Patrick 11:43, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

em-dash and en-dash

Question on Style. I recieved the following comment on a page I edited: (&am; "#151;" is not a valid HTML entity... it should be & "mdash;" or & "#8212;"). I think & "#151;" is perfectly valid for a "printer's em or em dash" Anyone know why it is not? Also, should not the em be separated by spaces from the rest of the text, since it is NOT an ordinary dash, but a device for redirecting rthouyght within a sentence? Anybody know about this? Marshman 04:47, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

In ISO 8859-1 and Unicode, code point 151 is reserved as a control character. It is not an em dash except in Microsoft's proprietary code page extensions, and any program that displays an em-dash for "" is doing so either erroneously or in deliberate emulation of common bugs in Windows. Relying on buggy behavior is not recommended. :) Please use the standard, either — or —. --Brion 05:02, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks I will use — in the future. Coffee-Cup Software HTML Editor inserts "" for an em-dash and it certainly displays that way on browsers. Why the confusion? 24.94.86.252 05:36, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)me not logged inn Marshman 05:38, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

please don't! — looks very ugly in wikisource and some editors may not know what it is. Stick to "--". I know it's ugly, but in future our parser may turn that into mdash automagically. -- Tarquin 12:17, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Does hardly look more ugly than L&uoml;beck.

"--" gets really ugly when broken between lines, " - " would be a better advice.

-- Ruhrjung 12:42, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

— is the only form that renders correctly on the largest possible number of browsers. — is almost as good. No other form renders correctly, except by mistake. Always use — or —. Tannin 14:07, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Use of %

I was going to rattle on at great length about this, but I'll be brief: I'm not really happy with disallowing the use of the % symbol - I think in lots of scientific contexts, spelling out "percent" would look considerably stranger than just using "%". --Camembert

(I've fiddled with this now, and am less unhappy, though I still have a nagging doubt (I have a predilection for nagging doubts, though...). --Camembert)

It was a bit of a unilateral decision by me so I fully expected to have it reverted! It was just based on the house style I am used to using, but I'd be glad to hear comments from others on whether they regard its use as correct. It is most often in the geography related articles (like the rambot city ones) that I have noticed it. Angela 06:19, Sep 15, 2003 (UTC)

Hm, the %s don't really bother me on the rambot pages - I think it's largely a matter of taste, which is probably why I have this nagging doubt. Still, having slept on it, I've decided I don't really mind the rule in its current form. By the way, for the sake of comparison, I think the Chicago Manual of Style says to use % in scientific copy and "percent" in humanistic copy, which is more or less what we've got here now. I don't know if there's anything on it in Fowler. --Camembert

You write: 10% and ten percent. 10 percent is as silly as ten %. Here on the 'pedia, our policy is to always use numbers instead of words, even for single-digit quantities. (I don't happen to like this policy, but no matter - it's the policy we have.) In consequence, we don't have to ponder this question: it's always % Tannin

That makes sense to me, but I think Chicago says to always use numerals in percentages, but use "%" or "percent" depending on context (I know Chicago isn't the last word, but it's widely used). I think the whole thing is probably too fiddly for us to be offering advice on, to be honest - it's a matter of taste, and I think we should just let people handle percentages how they see fit. Do we really have a policy that says always use numbers instead of words, btw? If so, where is it? --Camembert

I'm willing to let the percentages thing go, especially as the Americans will spell it wrong anyway :), but I think the numbers rule is important. Numeric values less than ten look unprofessional IMHO, so I'd like to leave that one in there. Angela 19:28, Sep 15, 2003 (UTC)

I agree, Angela. I'd prefer to see numbers smaller than ten be written out rather than done in numeric values - it does look unprofessional. But (unless someone has changed things while I wasn't looking), that's the Wikipedia rule, so I try to remember to respect it. Tannin 14:23, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

But where does it say that is the rule? Angela

Good question. I've certainly seen it somewhere, because I know perfectly well that I didn't much like it but figured I had to respect it. I'll have a hunt around. Tannin 00:14, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)

BTW re the % versus percent debate, there is another complication. Many users of British English and Hiberno-English use per cent and see percent as an annoying americanism to be resisted on pain of death. One English teacher I know tells students that Americans use percent because they are in too much of a rush to bother writing two words where they think one will do. The 'rush' argument is also used jokingly used to explain the American 'inability' to spell colour properly, the u just being too much hazzle for all the lazy yanks! :-) Oh the joys of English (or as a surprised American commented - I had the pleasure of hearing it and laughing for days - on having to make an emergency landing at Shannon Airport, the first airport one meets when travelling from the US to Europe, and hearing Irish people speaking in English, "Gee, these guys speak American too!" An Irish traveller responded rather cuttingly, "the difference is, we can spell it too." Meow! lol FearÉIREANN 02:06, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Bah. I dream of a world where the Americans learn to speak properly, and the English learn to spell sensibly! (Alas, I confess that I usually spell color as colour, but that's probably just habit. Or general laziness. Or something.) On the numerals vs spell-it-out thing, I can't find that rule anywhere. Maybe it has been changed? Tannin

Aha! Another (partial-)convert to the true way of spelling! :-)

On-topic, I would suggest that Angela's suggestion should stand; on whether we should use 'percent' or 'per cent' or, indeed, ' per cent ' (as one would use id est or ejusdem generis), I would be more for either the first or last, but more so for the former due to inertial difficulties in converting the dratted Americans ;-)

James F. 14:13, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I am not native (although I use English more than other languages in my work), and I do most definitely don't argue that I represent anyone except myself, but let me tell that I as a foreign reader of English texts find that the guidance against the use of percent signs decreases the readability and the scanability of the text. I hold, firmly, that percent signs are superior to any of the two(!) spellings per cent and percent in most contexts where it at all is meaningful to speak about percents, as when the sizes of population minorities are given, or successive changes of something from year to year. On the other hand, there are other and better ways to express that roughly 25% or 50% or 60% is something, or goes somewhere... ;-)
--Ruhrjung 18:29, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)

IMHO, using % instead of per cent increases readability if several percentages are mentioned. -- User:Docu

I favour % over percent, spelling out numbers smaller than ten, and never spelling out percentages (1%, five, 14, 12.5%)

This should be at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). Martin 10:09, 24 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Spelling Style

I fail to see why the spelling Anglicization might jar (Wikipedia Manual of Style). My understanding is that the suffix -ize (and thus -ization and -izing) is normal in American English but in British English one has a choice betweeen -ize and -ise. However, the Oxford English Dictionary and its offshoots strongly recommend -ize, and the OED presents a good argument in its favor. Since this spelling convention is compatible with American English it would make sense to employ it consistently in preference to -ise. To quote the OED: "as the pronunciation is also with z, there is no reason why in English the special French spelling should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic." Shantavira 11:21, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Quotes and foreign language words

From the village pump

I remember having seen guidelines and/or discussions relative to:

Quotes should be avoided as the opening pararaph(s) of an article, but rather be placed below in the article body or at the end.
Foreign language words should be italicized. What about places' and people's names? What about titles? What about the translation/transliteration/original wording of the title in a foreign language within the definition paragraph?

With the multiplication of guideline and talk pages, I cannot find these references. Could anyone help me spotting them? If no such discussion/guideline really exist, where should they be started? Thanks. olivier 13:36, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

So far as I know from the books, loan words in English should be printed in italicized while underlined when handwriting. Since we can do nothing about the titles ( can we change the style of titles? ) I think it's alright for titles not to be italicized. But inside the articals, all foreign words should be in italicized, be they definition or anything ( it maybe troublesome, but makes them look more standard ). Like the people's names or places' names from foreign languages ( like from Chinese or other ) should be in italicized. --Gboy 14:37, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

The trouble is some foreign words are so adapted that they are treated like English words like kamikaze, tyhoon, samurai and so on. -- Taku

For titles: ==Titles <i>can be italicized</i>== or in text:'''''Italicized'''''. Alex756 15:27, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think Olivier means the title of the page. --Gboy 16:00, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think you might be looking for the Wikipedia:Manual of style. --Camembert

People's titles in article intro

Really trival question here, but it wouldn't hurt to have an answer, and I've failed to find it so far.

The article about a person generally leads off with the person's name and a brief description of who this is. Sometimes the name as given here includes an honorific title, such as Sir or Dr. or Baron. Sometimes not.

My inclination would be to use the title for [Sir] Francis Drake or [Baron] Manfred von Richthofen, but not for [Dr.] Dorothy L. Sayers. This is current usage in those three articles, but has not always been. My choice is not because of the silly Victorian convention that physicians, having adopted a title that belongs to learned people qualified to teach others, are entitled to exclusive use of the title in preference to inferior beings such as Dr. Samuel Johnson and Dr. Benjamin Franklin; it's personal whim. But is there a stylke on it, and should there be?

Unambiguous depictions

I fully expect argument on the point I added with regard to captions for graphics, and I'm very open for discussion. My take on the matter, though, is that when an article has, for example, "George Patton" in big h1 type right at the top, and the first sentence has "George Smith Patton" in bold, when I then see a picture of some guy in an Army uniform, my first thought is not "I wonder who that is, maybe it's Omar Bradley."

And I admit I'm prejudiced in this respect because it was the common style of a now-banned user to put these in. I think it's redundant. I'm open for comments. - Hephaestos 00:59, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I agree. It's obvious the picture is of the person concerned by the article. Now if it's a group shot and we need to say which person is George Patton, a caption is needed -- Tarquin 09:14, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Yep. Makes good sense to me. --Camembert 12:20, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Sure, but one still may want to add an alt text ;-) -- User:Docu

Phonetic spellings

On Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, Ruhrjung wished for SAMPA to replace all of the various non-standardized phonetic spellings used to indicate the pronunciation of words. I think he has a point. Jtdirl wanted no part of this, observing that SAMPA is much too complicated for use outside of a linguistic context. I think he has a point.

I have put together the rough draft of a proposed new standard, much simpler than SAMPA and based partially on English spellings, partly on the Italian or Spanish values given to the Latin alphabet letters, which appears now at Wikipedia:English phonetic spelling. I am posting about it here to call attention to it and invite everyone to tear it apart.

I will put it out in the open that my chief concern right now is to avoid the confusion that inevitably arises when the Received Pronunciation of British English is taken to be a universally accepted and understood norm. -- Smerdis of Tlön 22:45, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Nohat would be a good person to talk to about this. I would recommend leaving in the standarized pronuciation guides so as not to irritate the linguists. Paullusmagnus 01:47, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think it is a very bad idea to invent our own system. We will eventually upgrade SAMPA to IPA. They are both international standards, and IPA is commonly used in dictionaries and encyclopedias around the world. -- Tarquin 09:38, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I will cheerfully agree that in an ideal world, IPA would be the way to go. It would be entered easily, without having to have constant resort to a table of numeric codes. It would display accurately on each browser. Perhaps some markup language similar to the <math> label could be devised so that IPA could be easily edited and read, and this added to the software. This is well beyond my limited abilities.

Even IPA has some problems; you run into issues with too-precise descriptions of dialect forms and so forth. Most readers need not be confronted with an unusual character because this is the precise way IPA represents a standard English /r/. But yes, a subset of IPA would be ideal.

Until the millennium, we have fewer options. We can continue to struggle with systemless ad-hoc representations like tee-shogh or YUR-a-nus. These are not always helpful to non-native speakers. We can confront people with scarcely intelligible strings of SAMPA, which may be useful in a linguistic context but is hard on the general reader. Or we can devise our own system. -- Smerdis of Tlön 13:53, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think that SAMPA/IPA is incomprehensible to most people. (It certainly is to me.) But making up our own system can't be the best solution. Is there not some other system in use that's easier to understand than SAMPA? Axlrosen 15:42, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

A Google search for English phonetic spelling systems will yield dozens of proposals, all of which seem to be idiosyncratic performances, just like mine. None seems to be in wide use. Dictionaries that don't use IPA all have their own proprietary systems, most of which seem further to be based on diacritical marks --- hard to type or edit, even if used. A subset of SAMPA might be more useful, or at least more readable, with some standards (avoid non-rhotic transcriptions, don't worry about the quality of intervocalic /t/, a standard representation for syllabic liquids). But then it ceases to be SAMPA and becomes yet another idiosyncratic performance. The differences conveyed by SAMPA uppercase and lowercase letters (e.g. /sh/ is /S/, /dh/ is /D/ in SAMPA) are non-obvious to the neophyte, and a large factor in its unreadability. I fear that if a standard is desirable, we're on our own. -- Smerdis of Tlön 17:16, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

"See also:" formatting

Michael Shields just made me aware of the fact there are two different styles advised for formatting the "See also:" section. In Wikipedia:Manual of Style, a simple, unitalicised version is 'declared' the standard. While Wikipedia:Boilerplate text advises to italicise "See also:". We should definately have one standard. What are your preferrences? Why? What about bullet lists? (I don't like them but quite a few people use them) --snoyes 22:26, 9 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Agree, we should probably standardize this. I like the bullets, both in lists and elsewhere. My preference for "see also;" is one of these:

See also: plants

See also: plants

but I'm easy - Marshman 02:31, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

An example of what I meant when I said bullet list can be seen on Chinese written language. Every article in the "See also" list is a bullet point. --snoyes 03:34, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

If there's only one or two items in see-alsos, there's no point to list-fy them. It looks ugly. --Menchi 03:48, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I don't see any reason for it to be different than the "External links" section, which has a subheading and a bullet list. That is what the manual of style already recomments for multi-section articles, but it says the section should be called "Related topics" instead of "See also". I'd probably suggest deprecating inline "See also" paragraphs in favor of using a "Related topics" section for all articles. --Michael Shields 05:25, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

What do other encyclopedias do? If you'll notice, most of them have different styles of "See Also/Related topics" formats depending on the importance and length of articles. For example, in the World Book Encyclopedia, major articles have a full-blown Related Articles section with articles listed under appropriate subsections. In minor articles, related topics are listed inline in a separate paragraph as in "See also ..." --seav 05:32, Nov 10, 2003 (UTC)

I would like to note that the style exemplified on Chinese written language is the most consistent one, with "external links", "references" and "see also" in similar formats. Also, it offers enough structure for the reader who wishes to look up something quickly. Whether it is called "related topics" or "see also" does not make much difference IMO, but it might be desirable to be keep this consistent throughout Wikipedia. Kosebamse 07:41, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I asked this question a while back here (can't find where it ended up now). Since then I have decided to use bullet lists on a separate section for See also to make stand out and uniform. I think it should be a separate section because it "moves" readers to a different page. Therefore you need the bullet list to make it look cleaner. Also, it should probably be near the end (the only thing I could see after it would be an External links section). Dori 07:58, Nov 10, 2003 (UTC)

Personally, I prefer this:

See also: plant, tree

for short lists. For sections that have numerous entries (i.e. over four or five entries), I prefer the seperate section with a list afterwards. But I really don't like the latter "secion-ified" version—it's ugly and obstrusive. The only reason I use it is because with numerous entries, the former version looks worse. But I agree that the "see also" section—whatever the format—should appear directly before the External links section. If a See also item pertains to only one section of a very long article, however, it can appear at the end of that section. Just my $.02... :^) —Frecklefoot 17:36, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I confess I've personally slid towards using the sub-heading and bullet-points format even for just one entry on the list. My thinking has been that the format is more encouraging for others to add to the list, and is easier for the reader to grasp visually. But that is just me; I'm not bothered if someone reverts them. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick

I think it depends upon the number and the emphasis needed for the "See also's". My suggested style(s) (above) would be for one to several links. If the links are pretty significant and there are many of them (often the links are to rather dubious connections), then a bulleted list seems appropriate and most helpful to the user. Order at the bottom (IMHO) should be "See Also", External Links", "References" - Marshman 19:18, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Actually I would do References, See also, External links because the references are usually about the content (text) above and have nothing to do with the see also and external links (if you are including an external link about the references, it would probably go in the references section). That's what I've been doing anyway. Dori 23:35, Nov 11, 2003 (UTC)

(from Talk:Post-structuralism) I think using bulleted lists for "see also" links wastes screen space and requires too much scrolling. We could get a higher information density, which is almost always a good thing (see Edward Tufte's writing), by running them together in lines. Better to have one screenful of text hold more reference information whenever it can; this is wasting whitespace and not providing better readability. Commas don't provide enough separation in a line of links; how about slashes(/), pipes(|), or dashes(--)? I like dashes best, because they provide good spacing, e.g.

Rbellin 16:44, 19 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The current "See also" Manual of Style entry works pretty well for Wikipedia, and in my opinion should NOT be changed to weaken its support for the list style, unless a majority of ALL active Wiki authors votes otherwise. Apart from the many merits of the list style that have been mentioned here and elsewhere, stability is also a significant consideration at this point. Certainly, any change that is likely to be undone again should be avoided.Peak 05:02, 20 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I also stand against bulleted "see also" lists because they take up so much darn space. I don't even think they should be a separate header, like External links. Way, way down at the bottom under a horizontal rule:

See also: (Yes, bold!) Alphabetical order, with commas, yes!
Disambiguation: Galileo is also a satellite and a drink.

I realize this is terribly radical, and I know it's a lot of change, but I say we do it at 180,000 articles instead of at 1,000,000. :) jengod 20:51, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Articles with only links

Re: "an article with only links is actively discouraged"

I'm sure this has been exhaustively discussed but to me the first step in writing an article is to research information available on the web and make a list of links.

So I did this and put the links on a page.

Unfortunately it seems "actively discouraged" means "people are encouraged to blow it away".

Next time I will keep a copy at home (Duh. Well, there weren't that many, I can find them again).

But supposing I have done a lot of research and collected a lot of relevant links and then I have difficulties actually writing something. Shouldn't I be able to make my collection of links available to others as a starting point? Perhaps I could make a "stub" page which mentions that links are availabe on the "talk" page?

But, you must see that an article with just links is not really an article at all and says near to nothing about what the article should be saying. An article about eggs with just links to eggs sites doesn't say what an egg is, how it is important, and so on.

If you like, add perhaps a 1 to 2 sentence description to start with (a stub), then the links. This way the page becomes instantly functional, and you can help it grow by adding information later (Of course not by blind copy and pasting! :) Dysprosia 06:34, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I think the reasoning behind this is that something that is linked is already available on the web (and, for instance, already comes up higher on a Google search than a brand-new Wikipedia article). I "blow these away" quite frequently; I wouldn't, however, if the least effort were made. An article consisting of simply a link to another site with an page about George Washington isn't going to cut it; a stub article that said "George Washington was a U.S. president" and then listed a link, I'd leave alone (except of course we already have an article on Washington, that's just a hypothetical example). - Hephaestos 06:38, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)

US or U.S.

US

Lirath Q. Pynnor The .s are superfluous and annoying.
Angela (I don't like dots)
Martin
FearÉIREANN The dots are annoying and re-Mattworld's and Hep's comment, whether the US (opps, U.S.) uses dots or not is irrelevant, as US/U.S. is used in contexts far beyond American topics. If US/U.S was only used in American topics, then it would be OK to use American english. But a universally common form is needed in this specific case (or else we will have endless edit wars between AE and BE), and that international usage is US, so it is the logical choice. Anyway, what happens when articles are written in neither of the above but Hiberno-English, Indian English, Canadian English or (god forbid) MTV-english? :-)
Stan dots, bleah - I think it's becoming an initialism by analogy to military terms - seems idiosyncratic to write "U.S. Navy" and "U.S. Air Force" one moment, USN and USAF the next, and going by Google, lots of AE writers agree
I hate the dots, but for titles at least we should use either "United States" (for when it is part of a noun) or "American" (when an adjective is needed). --mav 06:51, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Viajero (cleaner-looking)
Ryan_Cable
Fizscy46 (People are more likely to search for things without dots or most other punctuation marks. So it's more user friendly.)
MadEwokHerd (dots don't belong in titles unless they are important to the title; these are not)

U.S.

Mattworld (more accepted way in United States, IMHO). Of course, I know that the English Wikipedia is not just for people from the U.S.; I agree with Hephaestos's comment below. -- Mattworld 22:17, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Hephaestos (this is fairly straightforward to solve, it should be US in articles where British English is used, and U.S. in articles where U.S. English is used.)
James F. (agree with Hephaestos)
VerbalHerbal Even the Chicago Manual of Style, which eliminates periods in abbreviations wherever possible, makes an exception in the case of "U.S.", saying it must "bow to tradition".
Daniel Quinlan More accepted in the U.S. and clearer than "US" which seems somewhat ambiguous to me. I think U.S. is even better in British articles. USN, USAF, etc. are okay without periods.
Fuzheado being pedantic is often good, especially when searching and parsing.
Minesweeper This is what I prefer, and the Random House Handbook puts it this way: "In general, you can feel safe in omitting periods from abbreviations written in capital letters, provided the abbreviation does not appear to spell out another word. Thus USA needs no periods, but U.S. does, since otherwise it might be mistaken for a capitalization of the pronoun us."
Peak: Minesweeper's quotation from the "Random House Handbook" is compelling; the "Compromise proposal" below is worth articulating, but it's unwieldy at best, and ambiguous at worst (when does one use "U.S." exactly?). IMO, the utility of 'U.S.' when searching makes the case for 'U.S.' in two-letter acronyms decisive.
moink I like the periods. It's nicer looking and somehow, in my mind, less Americentric. I'm quite surprised that British English uses US, Canadians would use U.S.
Jia ng Those who choose no periods are either not American and dont like our superior spelling, or just plain ignorant. Every reputable American grammar or style book will say that the periods must be used. It's not about aesthetics, it's about being right. Naturally, when we speak of the U.S., we use American conventions, not British ones. I would be reverted fast if I went along linking [[The Labor Party (UK)|Labor Party]] with the silly excuse that I'm not using it in a British context. Just as original spellings are to be respected (per our naming conventions) when it comes to names of people, organizations, etc., the same should be done with punctuation. See [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]

Compromise proposal:

When referring to the United States, use "U.S." to avoid ambiguity with "us". However when used as an adjective such as the US President or the US road system, or in a longer abbreviation (USA, USN, USAF, etc.) then the periods should not be used. Daniel Quinlan 06:03, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

USA, USN, USAF, etc are acronyms and according to style books, should not have periods. It's a matter of convention - U.S. usually has it, USA doesn't usually have it. --Jia ng 01:11, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Compromise proposal II:

When referring to the United States, please use "U.S." so as to avoid ambiguity with "us" and as well as not infuriate easily irritated U.S. copy editors. :) When referring to the United States in a long abbreviation (USA, USN, USAF), periods should not be used. Those seeking a briefer term for the United States of American, sans periods, should enjoy themselves with USA. jengod 20:46, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Agreed, are there any objections? --Jia ng 22:57, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Multiple Linking for albums

In the case of albums, especially compilation albums (In this case Echoes, is it considered OK to link out to the same word more than once.

In this case, there are many songs on the album Echoes from identical albums, especially The Wall.

It seems that in this case it would be better because then others won't have to search for another song from that album to get the link, however, another user thinks its better like it currently is (Though notice that on the second disk, for song 9 (Arnold Layne), the album it is from is left as Relics (album)|Relics, and this can be a negatice impact to not linking every song to its appropriate album. -Fizscy46 18:08, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Manual of Style or Manual of style?

Shouldn't this article be named Wikipedia:Manual of style? Kingturtle 18:29, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Manual of Style. It is the title of a particular one. Not an article about various Manuals of Style. Rmhermen 18:37, Dec 12, 2003 (UTC)

Section heading styles/sizes

I notice two styles of section demarcation in Wikipedia articles. The first being the one used in this article ==xxx== and the other that uses ===xxx=== as in Joel and Ethan Coen. Is there supposed to be a standard one to use in every article, or is the choice a matter of what pleases the last person editting the article? - Bevo 15:49, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:Manual of Style says

Start with "==" (that's two equal signs). If the resulting font looks too big (as many people feel), that's an issue for the Wikipedia-wide stylesheet, not individual articles.

so the Joel and Ethan Coen is not in compliance with this. Angela . 15:53, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Well, it wasn't, but it is now :) --Camembert

Sorry, Camembert, did you say the headers are in compliance now? Some of the middle headers are still treble ===XXX=== ones and seem oversized, if I am not mistaken. --Dieter Simon 23:15, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I also think the ==xxx== creates text in a font size that is alarmingly large. The ===xxx=== font size does seem more appropriate. I'll look over at Wikipedia:Manual of Style and see what the thoughts are in terms of style. I'm wondering if a smaller font size can be associated with ==xx==? - Bevo 16:09, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It's not just a matter of font. Each section is supposed to start at ==. If External links is used with ===, that means that it's part of another section (unless it's the only section there, or everything else is also at that level and below). The font size in an unfortunate, side-effect when there isn't much text in the article, but it is not noticeable otherwise. I assume it is for the font size reason that sections do not begin with = instead of ==. Dori | Talk 16:21, Dec 14, 2003 (UTC)

It's not font size, which can be fixed with a style sheet anyway. The reason you're not supposed to use = to mark up section headings is that that's what the article title is marked with; sections within the article should thus be marked with ==, the next level down. —Paul A 05:43, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Is there anything I can do to get the font size employed for top-level headings to display in a smaller size? There is mention above to the "Wikipedia-wide stylesheet". Is that something I can define or modify? - Bevo 20:18, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Hi, I recommend checking your web browser to see whether you can change the font size that you view, to display in some smaller size. Most ordinary (graphical) browsers have such an option in their menus. It's a handy feature for several occasions; sooner or later you're bound to surf into pages with 'too large' or 'too small' fonts here and there on the web. --Wernher 02:54, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, but it's not a matter of what font sizes are actually displayed, but more a matter of what font sizes are used for one aspect of the article, for example, the article's title, relative to the size of the article's section headings. Right now, I don't see too much difference in the font size used by both of these. I wish there were more contrast (by making the top-level section headings display in a smaller font). - Bevo 03:10, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

OK, now I understand what you meant. I have noticed it for my choice of font display size in that "==" and "===" sizes display more-or-less identically, which suggests to me that some other mode of contrast than size could be handy (but then one risks cluttering things up, I guess...). Some contributors seem to use the following, though: "==" sections have one empty line before the text, while "===" (sub)sections don't. --Wernher 09:39, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Style for words as words

Is this where I file a protest about Wikipedia's style of italicizing words referenced within a text. I realize that single quotes are used in marking up Wikipedia, but my keyboard knows as well as my computer does that a double quote is a separate thing entirely. And it is standard in written English to use double quotes around particular words that are being reference in a text. Itals are generally reserved for titles and foreign words and the like. The ital practice is somewhat jarring. Most standard guide to English style prefers the latter of these two:

The word panorama derives from the word panning.
The word "panorama" derives from the word "panning."

Is there a technical reason for this standard? jengod 21:13, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

format for quotes

I was taught that punctuation goes before the end quote, but I have seen countless times on wikipedia the punctuation going after the end quote. Was I taught incorrectly? Or have times changed?

the so called "Zagreb Bible," which
 or
the so called "Zagreb Bible", which

the inscription read "Manchu State Postal Administration;"
 or
the inscription read "Manchu State Postal Administration";

SMOP is an acronym for "Small Matter of Programming". 
 or
SMOP is an acronym for "Small Matter of Programming."

Kingturtle 05:27, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think in the US it's "blah," and in some other countries it's "blah",

I prefer the latter but use the former to be more consistent with most editors in en. Dori | Talk 05:32, Dec 31, 2003 (UTC)

Kingturtle is correct - gramatically (in the US, at least), it's preferred that the puncutation goes before the quotation mark. As a computer engineer, I cringe every time I have to write it that way. --Raul654 07:17, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think "blah," is the older and more pleasing usage, though this is only an approximation of the real typesetting solution which is to place the quotes further to the left so they're partially above the comma. In recent years, especially outside the US, the form "blah", has become more common as it's clearer from a parsing point of view, since it clearly shows whether the punctuation is part of the quote or not. I think either one is acceptable on Wikipedia, and would discourage changing one to the other. --Delirium 08:22, Dec 31, 2003 (UTC)

For me the crucial factor is whether we are talking about speech or phrase/referred word.

So-and-so said: "I think I will do this-and-that," and went on to do so.

Or the other variety of "quote", where one is just putting "quotes" around a word or phrase. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 09:38, Dec 31, 2003 (UTC)

IMO, it doesn't matter whether the punctuation is inside or outside the quotes except in cases where the "quoted" material is supposed to be exact or verbatim. E.g., "On the C prompt type ‘dir’, then press ENTER, and then you'll see a list of the files in the current directory."

It should be mentioned that even in the U.S. putting it on the inside of the quote only applies to commas and periods; colons, semicolons etc. should go on the outside regardless. - Hephaestos 17:26, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)

"blah," is correct. (Blah blah blah.) is correct. Blah blah, (but not blah blah). is correct. Blah blah; blah blah: "Blah, blah blah." is correct. I like to watch The O.C., so I've ditched Angel. I like to watch The O.C. {no period after period in itals or quotes.} Peter said, "Jimmy said, 'What the heck?' and I agree." Peter said, "Jimmy said, 'What the heck?' " {note space between single and double quote at end of sentence.}jengod 00:51, Jan 29, 2004 (UTC)

Bibliographic Citations

This is on Wikipedia:History:

The following is a formatted reference link for external links and references.

Appearance:

Doe, John, "Main page". Wikimedia Foundation, Florida, USA. January 1, 2000. Source:

Last name, First name, "Linked article name". Source publisher, Location. Month Day, Year.

Surely this is only the guideline for online resources? According to established Chicago Manual of Style practices, this is incorrect for most published print resources, which generally go something like this:

LastName, FirstName, "Article Title," Periodical Title, Date.

or

LastName, FirstName, Book Title, London: Arnold A. Knopf, 1963.

and so forth... Jengod

I generally go with "Firstname Lastname, Book Title (Publisher, Location, Date)" or "Firstname Lastname, "Article Title", in Periodical Title, Date", but it's a matter of taste, really. Anything sensible should be OK, I don't think there's a great need to standardise on one form. If you're adding something to an already-existing list, it would make sense to follow the format already established in that list for the sake of consistency (unless said format is ridiculous, of course), but otherwise I wouldn't worry about it too much. Incidentally, you may want to take a look at Wikipedia:Cite your sources. --Camembert

Could someone with experience therefore take a look at List of important publications in computer science which I just spent some time cleaning up (it had nassssty tables all over it) and reassure me that all my work making it possible for an ordinary mortal to read it without significant eye-strain has not all been in vain? --Phil 18:13, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)

Dashes

(from the village pump)

User:Wik seems to insist on replacing ndashes – with ASCII dashes -. Style guides for printed work such as encyclopedias, as well as Unicode, state that for ranges such as dates an ndash (1998–2000) and not a dash (1998-2000) should be used. One advantage of using the correct dash is that a linebreak won't occur on the right of it. Is there some official policy from the Wikipedia on this, or should I just wait until Wik tires of his game and restore the correct dashes? Jo r 01:00, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, if you're prepared to insert the "correct dashes" into all the tens of thousands of articles which now have the ASCII dashes, go ahead. --Wik 01:04, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Okay. I will interprete your quote above in that you'll start leaving them alone from now on. Jo r 01:05, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

No, only if you go through all articles and make it consistent. I will always edit the articles to fit the de facto standard. Currently, that's the ASCII dash. --Wik 01:07, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Please use two ASCII hyphens -- in a future version of MediaWiki this will be automatically converted to –. The problem with using one hyphen is that they're very difficult to find and convert once the new feature is implemented. I'd be quite happy with people using – in the meantime. -- Tim Starling 01:11, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles are about being easy to read and edit. The average non techie reader has no idea what the sequence of characters "–" is supposed to mean. It makes the article source ugly and therefore harder to edit. This kind of stuff should be kept at a minimum.—Eloquence 01:34, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

I also don't like ndashes as they make editing harder. Dori | Talk 03:14, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

An ndash and and an mdash are NOT the same thing, and a '-' is not a substitute for an mdash;. I agree with Jo. Stop putting in ASCI dashes anywhere. Or else you are going to be real busy for the rest of your days because I use only ndash and mdash and will change any ASCI dashes I encounter to the correct form (something a BOT cannot do). And a -- should become an mdash not an ndash. The look of the "source code" is not an issue. Incorrect English prevails over making editing "easier" : Maybe we should just ignore spelling too - Marshman 05:42, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) uses regular ascii dashes in dates (1999 - 2005). I don't see what the problem with them is personally. It makes editing easier and looks fine when rendered to my eyes. The manual of style isn't compulsory, but it's the only guideline that should be applied to wikipedia IMO. If it's under debate then hash it out on the talk page and modify the guidlines if necessary when a consensus has been reached. fabiform | talk 06:57, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Can anybody please explain why this matters at all? A dash is a dash is a minus sign... or not? And minus signs are far easier to use compared with some "&..." character sequence. Furthermore, it is my impression that everything else looks ugly in Mozilla-based browsers. The advandages of "&..." listed above look not too significant compared with the ease of editing that "-" offers. So, what are the reasons for using the "&..." things? Specifically, why are they considered "correct"? Kosebamse 11:19, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See Dash (punctuation), and in particular, the external link at the bottom, The trouble with EM 'n EN. While you are at it. look over Typography Matters—a short essay on the theme "Typography, at the root, is all about providing as many helpful cues for the reader’s eye as possible." Tannin

It can also be important when "viewing" pages through a different kind of browser, for example having a text-to-speech engine read it aloud. The different kinds of dash/hyphen can be used to cue different pauses or emphasis. HTH HAND --Phil 12:17, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Fair enough. Still, everything except minus signs looks plain ugly on a monitor (at least under Mozilla et al.), i.e. there is not a helpful visual cue but a distraction, i.e. it is counter-productive to use the "n" and "m" things. Is there a solution to the display problem? Kosebamse 12:44, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Get your eyes adjusted, Kosebamse. No, I'm not making a smart crack here---if proper typography looks ugly to you, you have been spending too long reading badly set web pages, or student term papers, or some such. Take a break from the 'pedia and read some real printed-on-paper things (books, National Geographic, anything you like) till your eyes adjust themselves back to normality. As for Mozilla, it is ugly. Always has been. The most stable and practical browser around but ugly as a hatful of ar.... um ... bottoms. If you like pretty, use Opera. Or, if you must, Explorer. Microsoft have always been good at pretty. Tannin 13:14, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

PS: I usually use Mozilla for most things, but nearly always Opera here (don't ask why, just habit). Looking at the page as rendered by Mozilla just now, it's fine. Perhaps your problem is the font support in Linux. Linus still has crappy on-screen fonts. Tannin 13:21, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Oh my god, please stop spewing out misinformation. First of all, Mozilla has no problem with en or em dashes, minus signs, quotation marks, or most other relatively common characters in Unicode. If your font has the character, it will be displayed in Mozilla—just like with any other graphical browser. Second of all, this has absolutely nothing to do with Linux. Linux is an operating system kernel that controls your hardware and says which process gets to run when. It does not care in the slightest about em dashes. Finally, with that said, do check out the free, high-quality Bitstream Vera font family. —Daniel Brockman 08:50, Mar 7, 2004 (UTC)

Ah well... I like to see myself as a bibliophile and book maniac and could not agree more that good typesetting is A Good Thing. The "m" dashes are displayed too long, too high and without right or left spaces on Mozilla (under Linux). It would be A Very Good Thing to fix that but on which level? Browser? Style sheet? Font? Kosebamse 13:28, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Font, I suspect. Am m-dash should be exactly the same width as the letter "m" (uppercase or lowercase? I can't remember) in whatever font you are using. The "lack" of spaces is not an error. That's the way an m-dash is supposed to be rendered. Some---mostly American---publishing houses have taken to inserting spaces on either side of an m-dash in recent years. I have no idea why. A micro-space is acceptable if desired, but a full space ... well ... what is it they say? Two nations seperated by a common language? Tannin

Quite possible it's the fonts. I have played around a little and they all look either like a minus or as described above (much wider than a lowercase "m" and too high). Kosebamse 13:50, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Automated dash conversion and digital representation

Well the new dash conversion has just gone live. One hyphen - ; two -- ; three --- ; and of course four is the horozontal rule. We've all been muttering about having confusing "&..." symbols in the wiki editing box, but it just occured to me that this wont happen with the new markup. In the editing box the n-dash (if it was entered that way) will just look like --, just as horozontal rules display as ----. fabiform | talk 12:38, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yay! Finally we can have correct dashes! No more ugly poor man's dashes! (I'm with the mdash-ndash camp on this one.) --seav 13:07, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Don't hooray too loud, as the same one breaks the new wiki table markup, where |- works, but |-- doesn't work anymore. But Tim already heard the complain on IRC... andy 13:10, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I briefly switched this on using a live patch of two lines of PHP code, which was a bit silly because it broke a few things. I switched it off when I realised it broke links to titles containing --, of which there are about 140. There was some contention on IRC as to whether -- should be expanded as an en dash or an em dash. -- Tim Starling 23:24, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Two dashes should be an em dash of course. An en dash is represented in ASCII by a single dash, and as such cannot be automatically fixed but must be done manually. Jo r 22:01, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Actually, it makes more sense that two hyphens make an en dash, and three hyphens make an em dash, for at least three reasons: (1) It enables usage of the en dash; (2) it uses only one token for the em dash (i.e., "---"), whereas two hyphens would encourage people to put spaces around the dash (thus: " -- "), which complicates parsing and takes away power from the style sheet; finally (3) this (using three for an em and two for an en) is how TeX has done it for decades.

I strongly advise that this long-established convention be adopted. The table syntax invented—what?—some momths ago?—can easily be adjusted to make this possible. I doubt that this would cause more confusion than throwing out the logical, intuitive, and well-tested TeX syntax. —Daniel Brockman 08:50, Mar 7, 2004 (UTC)

Has this also got something to do with why the "nowiki" tags are showing at the top of this page: (3) Sign your name and date (by typing "nowiki"–~~ ~~"nowiki"? fabiform | talk 13:17, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC) (not on irc).

Seems to be related - on MediaWiki:Villagepump it shows correctly, but once imported here it shows the nowiki's and there is a double - inside the nowikis. andy 13:24, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Doesn't Wikipedia use UTF-8? Can't we just insert the actual mdash and ndash characters? That would make editing much easier. 137.222.10.57 17:03, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC).

No, most English and Western European wikis use ISO 8859-1, for maximum browser compatibility. -- Tim Starling 23:24, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

OK. Now I'm confused. According to the recent additions to wikipedia:Manual of Style, one should use a single-dash-without-spaces to represent a simple hyphen (as in date ranges), a single-dash-surrounded-by-spaces to represent an ndash, and two dashes (ie, --) for an mdash. However, if I follow the above conversation correctly, it seems that the software will convert a double-dash into an ndash and a triple-dash into an mdash. Am I misunderstanding, are there two incompatible standards being developed, or has something changed? -Rholton (aka Anthropos) 23:51, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

OK, you confirmed what I suspected--that I thought it was resolved but there is in fact no clear statement to that effect. I'll try to rouse up a clarification of what's really going on. Elf 01:44, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

When the automatic conversion was briefly turned on, a - remained unaffected, -- turned into a dash (an n dash I assume) and --- turned into a longer dash (an m dash I assume). I have nothing to do with the programming though, so you might want to talk to someone else about this, especially if you would prefer it to be done another way. :) fabiform | talk 07:27, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Not resolved. A few people involved in the field seem to find the use of the hypen by ordinary people for all of the purposes offensive. Those same ordinary people have no objecting to ignoring the attempt to prevent the language from evolving and ignore the variations in dash lengths now that normal people can easily write and publish and not follow the conventions which used to be used in the print world. Effectively, a small group is trying to enforce an undesired style rule on everyone else, when usage clearly indicates that the majority of contributors do not agree. Simply, the online style for almost everyone is to use - for everything. Since we're a wiki, we do have to accept that change in style expectations, because it's not practical for a few people to force everyone to do what they want. Just document the way most people do it - the simple hypehen - and document that it's accepted that those who are writing new text and object can do it the print way if they desire but are discouraged from changing the writing of others. Jamesday 02:46, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You are contradicting yourself. You start out by arguing that the pro-dash people are trying to “prevent the language from evolving,” and then go on to say that we should definitely use hyphens everywhere because “it’s the online style.” This begs the question: aren’t you preventing the online style from evolving/maturing?

In my not-so-humble opinion, it would be an insult to humanity—and, specifically, the people who work with on-screen typography research, Unicode, the W3C, the Mozilla Project, and others who put in effort to enable to use of good typography on the World Wide Web—to throw out the typographical lore accumulated over the course of centuries just because some PHP script can’t do this or that, or because some people allegedly can read all text equally well no matter how badly formatted. As someone else noted, you’re not proposing that we abandon other seemingly “unnecessary” and “troublesome” English punctuation rules, such as italicising emphasized words or having a whole bunch of different punctuation marks—e.g., comma, semicolon, period, colon, dash, parentheses—that all basically mean “short pause”—or are you?

Finally, yes, this is a wiki. This means that if you don’t know or care about the difference between the variously sized line segments sprinkled about the text, that’s okay, because I—and probably a hundred other people who are willing to edit your text—do. I completely fail to see the logic in arguing that the collective competence of thousands of editors of a wiki could somehow be less than that of, say, one or a few of a paper. No doubt, an article is read a lot more often than it is edited, so it makes sense to spare all the future readers some eye-strain. irritation, and confusion, at the editor’s expense of a small one-time (or more likely few-times) typing cost.

—Daniel Brockman 08:50, Mar 7, 2004 (UTC)

Daniel, please don't use HTML entities, it makes your text extremely hard to read in raw form. -- Tarquin 10:08, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

So who's going to want to read it in raw form when Wikipedia so nicely formats it for us? --Phil 10:10, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)

Your point seems to be based on the mistaken belief that the use of multiple types of dash is moving forward. It's not, it's moving back to conventions based on the limitations of newsprint and paper reproduction. The web needs to support the old print conventions, to support republication of old documents and to support those who want to apply print conventions online, because that's how they have been trained and what they are used to. We don't need to use things just because they can be used. Sparing readers and editors eyestrain, irritation and confusion is why I'm going with the usual practice here, which is the hyphen for everything. I've no problems at all with not using rules learned over centuries when rules learned over the last twenty years show them to be inappropriate. One good example of such abandonment of inappropriate conventions is the usual choice of sans- rather than serife fonts online. Since it's unlikely that those used to print will convert to other conventions - they are more likely to believe that they must be right - the leave it alone approach seems best here, so those used to print don't feel that their own writing is wrong. Jamesday 03:05, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Disputed paragraph

Evolving language and the decreased reliance on print world conventions have led to the hyphen becoming an acceptable replacement for other dashes. Where hyphens have been used in place of other dashes, you are discouraged from changing these, in the same way that changing spelling forms is discouraged. (See #Usage and spelling).

The statement that hyphens are now acceptable substitutes for other types of dashes had been added to the main page. In an attempt to avoid an edit war, I added a notation that this is disputed rather than removing it again. I just do not believe that this is the case. I don't know of any style guides or professional online publishers that have said that punctuation rules have changed. And I don't buy that, just because lots of people do it, that that makes it correct. (By that rule, "its" and "it's" would be interchangeable, for example.) And I certainly object to having the statement put into the style guide that we're not supposed to correct somebody else's punctuation when we come across it. I could live with the inclusion of the observation that some people feel that hyphens are acceptable to use for other dashes. And I expect tht in Wikipedia, people will type what they're comfortable with. And then other people will come through and clean it up. I get the impression from all of the various preceding discussions on dashes and hyphens that "hyphens-are-legitimate-for-anything" is a minority opinion, and "hyphen-once -typed-by-one-person-are-immutable" is very much a minority opinion. Elf 05:48, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I couldn't agree more. I think that we should aim for Wikipedia articles to look clean and professional. This goes hand-in-hand with NPOV. There is plenty of Internet left for those who wish to experiment with new, "online" punctuation rules. —Daniel Brockman 21:21, Mar 8, 2004 (UTC)

I've commented this out for now and just noted that the hyphen is commonly used in place of other dashes. I disagree that it should be "corrected", and I believe the safest option is to go with the same policy we have for spelling to prevent edit wars over this. I personally regard pages containing text such as "“”" to be highly unreadable. Angela . 02:33, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)

If you think it's a minority opinion, I suggest that you try the exercise of listing those who have on this talk page expressed opposition to or support for the use of different dash types. My quick count placed those opposing it in the majority, with those used to the print world being at least a high proportion of those who favor it. Jamesday 03:10, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Lots of people will find the use of hyphens instead of dashes annoying, as you say, because they are used to the print world. After all, there's a pretty good amount of people who read books. On the other hand, I suspect that very few, if not no one, will find the use of proper dashes annoying to read. Granted, some might find it annoying to type, but that's been shown to be a non-problem, as other people will later come to clean it up.

As for being annoying to read in the edit box, well, let's face it: the source is and will always be harder to read than the rendered page. I think that in this case, we're talking about a rather minor decrease in source readability (em dashes are relatively rare) in exchange for a rather major enhancement in the appearance of the rendered page:

Hey, what's—what? ⇒ Hey, what's—what? vs.
Hey, what's - what? ⇒ Hey, what's - what?

Compare, for example, to Angela's example:

He said, "what's up?" ⇒ He said, "what's up?" vs.
He said, “what’s up?” ⇒ He said, “what’s up?”.

Whether the apostrophes are a little bent makes a minor difference, since people will know they're apostrophes anyway. The length of dashes, on the other hand, makes a major difference, since a long dash carries a completely different meaning than a hyphen.

It might be possible to render " -- " or "---" as an em dash automatically, just as two apostrophes are rendered as emphasis markup. I'm all for this, since it would give us the very best of both worlds. (The new table syntax is very low-priority compared to this, IMHO.) In fact, I don't see how anyone could object to it. So what's the status on this? :-) Is it in the process of being implemented? —Daniel Brockman 09:38, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)

In parallel with the automated conversion (which I think is a good idea: I reckon "--" should go to N-dash and "---" to M-dash, just like ''' makes things bold) maybe the toolbar could be extended to add in various types of dash. If people get used to clicking a button then you just need to alter the code behind the button. --Phil 10:14, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)

The problem with having three dashes (---) go to emdash instead of two dashes (--) is that the latter has been taught as an emdash in typing classes probably since the advent of typewriters, and publishers who buy manuscripts from writers have used this as the standard for emdashes (and still do). I realize that TeK, which is a markup language, uses --- as the markup for an emdash, but that's a markup language, it's not the standard for typing. I'm going to reinsert the text that says use -- if you don't want to (or can't) use the others, because this is correct.

Wiki markup is just as much of a markup language as TeX is. Yes, representing em dashes by -- is an existing convention. But this was the case a few decades ago, too, when Donald Knuth decided to go aginst the convention, supposedly because it was too ambiguous. Today, both -- and --- are in widespread use. The former is still more common than the latter, but people who have used TeX are likely to stick to three hyphens, at least for text that is going to be parsed by a machine—as in the case of wiki markup—because they are aware of the ambiguities that would arise were both kinds of dashes represented by --. I feel confident that Knuth made the right choice, and I believe we are now facing the exact same choice. —Daniel Brockman 22:41, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)

Furthermore, I don't really care whether people use dashes or the ampersand formats or whatever. What I do object to are (1) having info in the style guide that gives misinformation (hyphens just simply not the same as em dashes and just because people use single hyphens in their place doesn't make it correct; read some style guides) and (2) having info in the style guide that prohibits me from editing what other people have done. We made a real effort to specify what the different punctuations mean, to show the markup to use if you want to use it, and an alternative using regular dashes if that's what you want to use. I think that "-" no spaces for hyphen, " - " single with spaces for en dash, "--" double with or without spaces for em dash (I understand UK publishers sometimes prefer spaces) pretty much covers those options. Elf 20:05, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I appreciate your careful efforts here Elf, but the bottom line is that using -- to represent an em dash is doing just that: it represents an em dash, it does not pretend to be a replacement for it in anything bar a typed manuscript on its way to a publisher to be set properly. Bad typography is every bit as sloppy and unprofessional as bad spelling. I don't expect every Wiki contributor to get his or her punctuation right first time, but the Manual of Style certainly should not endorse bad punctuation as the standard. If you want to abandon correct language, please first demonstrate a consensus to do so. Tannin 20:41, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I expected to be stressed about this but instead you've made my day. I really am laughing--because I'm usually known as the harridan of correct typography and punctuation. It's so weird to be accused of being the opposite! Anyway, thanks for responding and I feel much better now. Maybe I'm repeating myself: I don't see that there is a disagreement that -- is never legit for em dashes, only whether to use markup of --- for emdashes (which see above) or whether single hyphens are acceptable substitutes, or whether markup should be required (which I think is your view) or shouldn't ever be used. I'm trying to be realistic. Double dashes have been taught in typing classes for so very long (I don't instinctively type — when I'm in the throes of writing text, I type --) that it can't be eradicated. And people who don't want to muck with markup are going to type something in place of em dashes, and it just seems to make more sense to identify the existing punctuation convention than to annoy people who hate typing markup. That's how we got into this whole discussion, because not everyone likes typing markup. Elf 20:57, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This is perfectly fine with me. What I object to is reccomending that people use a single hyphen in place of an em dash, and forbid other people from correcting it (yes, I view this as changing incorrect langage to correct language). I do not expect people to use the correct punctuation all the time, just as I do not expect people to write perfect prose all the time. What I do expect is (1) the right to improve on other people's subperfect language, and (2) that someone will eventually come along and improve on my subperfect language. —Daniel Brockman 22:41, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)

Current status

OK, we've tried to add NPOV description of the various dashes that does the following:

Briefly describes the standard usage for the various dash types. (For detailed descriptions, there's a reference to Dash (punctuation).)
Shows the special markup that's valid for each type of dash and also identifies how to represent each using the hyphen key on the keyboard. (Note that I don't have final info on whether someone implemented an automated tool that changes groups of hyphens to something else.)
Gives a nod to the fact that there might be technical issues involved in using the special markup.

Elf 17:17, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Introductory quotations

It looks like we're heading into more edit wars involving introductory quotations. I have used them fairly often when they provide a familiar and immediate frame of reference to the topic, usually a topic in popular culture (e. g. mad scientist, melodrama) or when the topic is of interest chiefly because it is the subject of the quotation I begin with (Lizzie Borden, Old King Cole). If none of these quotations are appropriate, I would like to get a clear sense from the community that they are forbidden. Otherwise, I mean to begin restoring them. -- Smerdis of Tlön 15:19, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Here are my thoughts. Wikipedia is intended as an encyclopedia. In the encyclopedic style of writing, the first sentence or paragraph are essentially definitions of the entry. This identifies the topic immediately so that someone who is interested in information about a specific topic knows immediately whether she has found a relevant article--most readers are at the article because they have specifically requested to be there. Creative writing, such as for magazine articles, needs to draw in a reader who happens upon the article by chance--the reader is there by accident-- and so the article's first sentence or paragraph must show the reader that the article will provide entertainment or must draw in the reader by intriguing the reader with a mystery or a question. Quotations such as "Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks" or "They dared to laugh at my theories...!" are intriguing and are certainly relevant detailed information about a topic but they don't define the subject and hence are inappropriate as the first sentence or paragraph in an encyclopedic article. (And although Old King Cole presumably exists only because he's the topic of a nursery rhyme, still, the rhyme itself does not define who he is.) Elf 16:19, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think they should be included, but not in the first sentence. That really needs to be kept for defining what the article is about, and a quotation is not going to do that. Angela . 03:03, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

I agree. Is Lizzie Borden about the woman or about the poem? In fact, even if it were the latter, it would still be more felicitous to have an introductory sentence before sailing into the verse. --Phil 16:50, Mar 1, 2004 (UTC)

If formatted right, an introductory quotation does not read like the first sentence, even if it is, sequentially. I think of them more as illustrations in text rather than with a picture. -- Smerdis of Tlön 16:00, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Copyediting article

This is really minor, but if you're interested, I'm looking for input on "copyediting" vs "copy editing" vs "copy editor"; see Talk:Copy editing. Elf 18:02, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

New section proposal

I'd like to propose a new section on image/article integration. In particular, I'd like it to be official policy that first image (IE, images at the top of an article) have to go on the right. →Raul654 20:31, Mar 13, 2004 (UTC)

Picture Alignment

For picture alignment in article, Docu said that for pictures where the person is facing right, they should be left aligned. I totally disagree. To me, regardless of which way the person is facing, the picture should be right aligned. So let me make a proposal - that we horizontally invert pictures where the person is facing the to the right (so that they are now facing left) and we put them on the right side of the article. Does that sound good? →Raul654 09:17, Mar 14, 2004 (UTC)

I'd prefer if the photos are not edited too much. Next thing, some may want to change the background to match one of the stylesheets. Maybe we should simply drop the part on alignment. -- User:Docu

I'd prefer dropping the part on alignment. It makes more sense for a picture at the very top of the article to be on the right--has to do with people reading from left to right--but I don't feel that it's something we need to mandate. Certainly don't want to mandate its position by its content. I understand that the human eye is drawn subconsiously in the direction of a person or animal's gaze, but I wouldn't want to have to put all the right-facing dog breed tables on the left side of the articles while the others are on the right. And I really don't like the idea of flipping photos; this distorts reality in some way that we might not even be able to anticipate (e.g., someone doing a study of how often photos are taken of people facing the right rather than the left--I dunno--) Elf | Talk 16:01, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Ok, let's compromise on the wording. We agree that pictures where the person is facing left or out (into the camera) should be right aligned. So let's put that in. Also, we need to decide how to do articles with multiple pictures. Library of Congress and Dormitory gave me lots of problems in this regard. →Raul654 17:50, Mar 14, 2004 (UTC)

I don't agree with a policy of always right-aligning pictures. The option to use a variety of alignment of images is used effectively in many articles. Sometimes I've used borders to get a pleasing text wrap. - Bevo 18:22, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I don't think I said that I agree with requiring left-facing photos to be right aligned. I said I understood why that's appealing. I *did* say that I don't think we should mandate the alignment of images based on their content. If a particular project wants to mandate that a certain thing always goes right/left at the top of the article (again, like dog projects have the dog breed table on the right), that's fine, but otherwise I disagree with mandating any alignment. Elf | Talk 19:09, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Always right-aligning=boring, boring, boring. (To me anyway.) Mirror imaging the pictures is kind of dishonest too (which side was Lincoln's big wart on?). Although I think left-aligned pictures shouldn't be at the top; the first line of the article should be left-justified. - Hephaestos|§ 19:12, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'd say this is a judgment call. A lot depends on the flow of paragraphs around the picture; my chief concern, esp. with a left-aligned picture, is that the picture doesn't leave a line of text extending beneath it; that affects readability. OTOH, left alignment makes a quite nice effect for example on Harrowing of Hell, where the picture is an old manuscript illustration. Smerdis of Tlön 20:28, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Ships as "she"

I find it mildly offensive to refer to ships as "she" rather than "it." As one example (of many) see USS John S. McCain (DD-928). Does Wikipedia have a policy on this? moink 21:38, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

As an ex-sailor, I find it mildly offensive that this is found mildly offensive. PC overkill, at its worst.

The tradition goes way back in history. Other non-living objects are personified, countries are usually "he" or "she" ("Fatherland, Mother Country"). Objects of nature and religion are often assigned gender: Venus (love) is female, Zeus is male, "Mother Nature." In languages that have gender (most) lots of items are so identiified. I recall when Japan had to decide on how the country name would be transliterated into roman characters on stamps, they had to choose between Nippon (male) or Nihon (female). What is it you find particualrly (if mildly) offensive about referring to ships as "she"? Cecropia 21:51, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That is Nippon (masculine) or Nihon (feminine): Grammatical gender≠Sex. Jo r 21:56, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I understand the tradition. I'm not objecting to the poetry of much of language... though I am objecting to it being included in the Wikipedia. That is, it would be fine to call Venus she, but not love. Germany should not be referred to as he, though "The Fatherland" should be mentioned in the article. My objection has to do with the association between women and objects, particularly objects used mainly by men. Sailors have traditionally been all male, but now there are some female sailors as well. I'm having a hard time explaining myself... I'll try to get back to you when I can think more clearly. moink 21:59, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Actually, Germany had a sex change after losing World War II: Die Bundesrepuplik Deutschland is feminine. Mkweise 23:13, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That's because it is "Die Republik" (feminine), but was "Das Reich" (neuter). Neuter words are often treated as masculine when personified. Jo r 23:58, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

At the time of the ancient mariners even as far back as 500 BC, most were 'married to the sea' due to thier love of the ocean. The ships were their liveihood, their home and their love. As a compliment to the woman they loved they named their sailing vessels after them, telling them that it would remind them of the ones they left behind for the months and sometimes years they have would be gone. This caught on. The 'she' was also given for things of great beauty found in the sea.. ie "Thar she blows!" depicting the massive water spout seen by whaling ships of old which almost all had female names. Even when ships stopped being given feminine names they were still referred to as 'she', but basically this analogy was due to a captain's love for his ship. "Shes a fine ship, Captain" etc... Matt Stan 22:15, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That's my point exactly. Ships are female in order to be the counterpoint of the male sailors. I'm not saying that we should excise it from all creative works, or that we should stop sailors from saying it. But it has no place in an NPOV encyclopedia.

No, ships are feminine, period. To force a neuter gender on them is just incorrect. Jo r 22:47, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This is simply standard English, no more, no less. In English, ships are always "she". In Russian, they are always "he". It has nothing whatever to do with hidden gender or sexuality issues, it's just the English language. Tannin 22:16, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I don't know Russian, but I understand that French and other languages need to assign grammatical gender to objects. But in English we have a quite useful neuter pronoun. If you refer to things in English by a gendered pronoun, it means they're connected to the sex. moink 22:38, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Please do not push a sexist view on a linguistic matter. Neutering ships as you propose is sexism, as by doing so you imply that this is a matter of sex, and not a language tradition or grammatical gender. Jo r 22:31, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

English does not have grammatical gender. We have a neuter pronoun, it, which seems to do quite well for us in other contexts. moink 22:38, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

English used to have one. Distorting the language to alleviate perceived sexism which does not exist is political correctness gone overboard. Jo r 22:47, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think I understand your point, Moink, but I don't see any denegration implied in the usage. To ban such a long tradition unless there is an observable problem seems to me to be a little politically correct, and I don't think encylopedias should vote on such issues. Having said that, I remember when hurricanes became "he" and "she" instead of just "she." But I understood that because YV weathermen always used to explain that hurricanes were "she" because of "their tempestuous nature." I mean, how silly can you get? For my mind, putting people's names at all on such a horribly destructive force is asinine. They should just call them "Hurricane A", or "Hurricance 1" with the year noted. Or, if you must use names for ease of memory and description, use the phonetic alphabet: "Hurricane Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo," etc. Cecropia 22:34, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hurricanes are good! At least, cyclones (which is what you call a hurricane if it occurs in this part of the world) are good. If it were not for cyclones, large areas of arid inland Australia would never get any rain worth talking about. Sure, they cause grief and destruction on the coast, but if they move inland they bring life and growth and renewal to vast areas. (Err ... am I off-topic yet?) Tannin 00:22, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No, encyclopedias should not vote on the issue, either way. We should be NPOV. But I don't think it's offensive to anyone to refer to ships as it? Or am I wrong? moink 22:42, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Calling ships "it" is offensive, as it implies calling ships "she" as English does is sexism, which it is not. Jo r 22:47, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

To follow standard form is NPOV. To make a conscious decision to ban a particular usage is POV. If society changes and calls ships "it", then Wikipedia should follow. I don't Wikipedia should be in the forefront of that kind of thing. If you want to write about a ship, and say "it" I wouldn't stop you. Cecropia 22:48, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)~

The Chicago Manual of Style 15th Edition, 8.126, suggests "it" rather than "she". Tradition notwithstanding. -- Nunh-huh 22:50, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Moink said "My objection has to do with the association between women and objects, particularly objects used mainly by men." I disagree. Calling a ship "she" is personifying the ship, not objectifying women. fabiform | talk 23:34, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

A ship is an it as long as it's just a generic object. When a ship is chistened, however, it becomes a she. The same applies to animals and even babies: an anonymous creature is an it, but naming bestows gender. Mkweise 00:08, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Surely usage determines everything? Take French la lune is feminine, le soleil is masculine. In German it's exactly opposite: der Mond is masculine, die Sonne is feminine. Are we suggesting that we should rewrite grammar because of gender politics? In German it is das Vaterland because in German compound nouns it is always the second of the components which determines the gender of the compound word, as -land is a neuter word as in das Land so the whole becomes a neuter noun. German ships' names, too, as in English usage, take on the feminine, as in die Graf Spee. Usage is everything, therefore to use it for the Titanic would if anything be drawing attention to sexual and gender politics, rather than her tragic story. --Dieter Simon 01:04, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Shouldn't we then call the USS John McCain a he then, instead? :) Dysprosia 03:05, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Very interesting discussion so far. Here's my $.02 (FWIW I'm an extreme nautical illiterate). First, no disresect to our non-English colleagues, but there is no grammatical gender in English. Using the pronoun she with a ship has nothing to do with grammatical agreement. it is simply tradition. Now, whether we want to perpetuate that tradition, that's another matter. Without getting into issues of political correctness, I would suggest the best course would be to follow one of the standard references on usage, such as the Chicago Manual of Style that Nunh-huh cited earlier. Bkonrad | Talk 03:24, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I feel that this is becoming to PC. If in the English language she has alway been used, keep on using it. I know a ship is inanimate, so an "it" but still. I do not feel that the using of male or female nouns is sexist, that is realy pushing it in my humble opinion. Waerth 13:58, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, Dysprosia, the fact that a ship's got a male name, such as USS John McCain, doesn't really matter , as I was saying about the Graf Spee (male name). The Germans would also call her the equivalent of she.

As Bkonrad said it is a matter of tradition - or usage in a language. I think if you wanted to change that kind of tradition, you'd a hell of job to convince the person in the street, or the "Man on the Clapham Omnibus" as we Brits would say. And try as we may, people would still carry on using the phrases they have always used, so it's not a matter of political correctness, you'd never succeed. I don't really see why a tradition should be changed only because it might favour the female of the species.;-) --Dieter Simon 15:49, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think this should be treated in the same way as British and Americal English spelling-- do whichever you like, just be consistent within an article and don't change articles just for the sake of it. WRT the Chicago manual, aren't there other style guides that disagree with that? What about older (and newer?) versions of the handbook? Couldn't it be a case of PC itself? Mr. Jones 15:55, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure why I've taken an interest in this, having nil nautical background. But looking around on the web a bit, it seems clear to me that referring to ships as feminine appears to be standard for both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy. In fact, it looks as though that is an official Royal Navy position. I found no such official pronouncement for the U.S. Navy, but the usage is clearly established throughout the Navy's web site. For other types of vessels, there is more variation. Lloyd's list (apparently THE standard for shipping vessels) decided to start using "it" rather than "she" in 2002 [12]. This article tends to support that change in the context of sailing vessels. Here are a few other interesting tidbits I came across: The Naval Historical Center on why a ship is referred to as she; Naval Glossary entry for "Ship" suggests ships were originally referred to as masculine in English but became feminine by 16th century -- shows traditional usage can change; Linguists discuss this usage. Bkonrad | Talk 17:14, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Bkonrad for doing all that research! It seems the conclusion is that right now this particular part of language is in the midst of change, that during the transition period either pronoun is acceptable, and that few people find either offensive. I think Mr. Jones might be right about doing the same thing we do with British vs. American spelling. moink 02:22, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Reference to a ship as "She" is a personification of an object, not an objectification of women. It is one used in reverence, for example as in "Mother-ship" exempifying the nurturing role of a ship to the safety of its crew. It bestows an empowering rather than derogatry idea of feminity to counterblance what was traditionally mascualine world. Like in all things balance is required. Would the objection of use of gender have been raised in the first place had ships been traditianlly referred to as "he"? I personally think not. :Dainamo march 15, 2004

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 1

Fire away

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Ships as "she"