Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Titles of works/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Memes and aphorisms as titles

This has come up at Talk:Finland_does_not_exist (a talk page liable to be deleted any time soon). There are articles titles by the meme or aphorism that is the topic of the article. Finland_does_not_exist and There are no atheists in foxholes, for example.

Should these be considered composition titles? As they stand, I think they are unencyclopedic, inaccurate or misleading, if not just confusing, to a simple reading of the title. The first sentence of these articles explain, but the first sentence is not available to readers of urls, hovertext, or Wikipedia-category listings, for example. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:26, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Memes seem similar to folk-sayings, to my mind, which is to say, not capped. Primergrey (talk) 16:01, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

That's right. They are not capped by Wikipedia, nor capped usually. The question is: Should they be?, or: Should memes, aphorisms, folk-sayings, proverbs, etc, be somehow marked so that they can't be misread as a descriptive title? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 19:58, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

No, they're not titles of published works. They're just labels for ideas. A meme is an idea that gets around. I have the idea that "my cat is fat and funny-looking". If I get a bunch of people to talk about how fat and funny-looking my cat is they get other people talking about it, then the idea has become memetic. But it's not a work with a title. PS: This sort of thread really belongs at WT:MOSTITLES.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  20:47, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

OK, let's go to WT:MOSTITLES. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 20:54, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. OK, they are not to be considered composition titles. To be a composition title, it has to be published, and should have an author. No crowd sourced works thanks?

Is there any agreement that some are easily misread to a simple reading? Encyclopedic titles should not be misleading about a statement of fact? Composition titles have some subtle identification as a composition title, but memes, no.

"There are no atheists in foxholes". It's probably not the worst case. As a descriptive title of a topic, it is clearly odd. But what is odd to the educated can be extremely confusing to others.

The CONCISE fanatics may go apoplectic, I am not particularly keen, but are these possible:

• There are no atheists in foxholes (aphorism). (not a disambiguator, but a caveat)
• Aphorism: There are no atheists in foxholes.

--SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:04, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

There's no need for over-disambiguation. This isn't any more "confusing" than thousands upon thousands of song titles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:15, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Is this what everyone else thinks? Is there ever a "need" to not be "confusing"? Yes, song titles, and many other composition titles, all being unable to be rendered in italics in category lists, hovertext and urls, if not distinguished by capitalisations, are quite "confusing" to be read at face value. However, as a pretty good rule, composition titles that read as an assertive statement of a fact contain multiple words to be capitalised and thus distinguish the title from a non-composition title. This is where sayings are quite different. --SmokeyJoe (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 08:00, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

We cover very few sayings. If they're notable enough to be covered they're probably already familiar to the average reader. To the extent they're made up nonsense we shouldn't be covering them (thus the AfD of the Finland thing, and various other neologistic Internet memes). The capitalization you want to depend on isn't consistent. Various works are not known by actual titles, but by incipits, which are not capitalized like song/book titles. If we've learned anything at all in MoS circles, it's that the average person has no solid concept of how capitalization works; due to the influence of marketing style, it's primarily seen as a form of emphasis to be employed to "Stress that which I Am Certain is Really Important". We have no actual evidence that capitalization has any effect on perception of whether or not something is being asserted in Wikipedia's own voice. The frequency with which we have to resist new editors' (and often non-new ones') urges to overcapitalize innumerable things across all topics, we actually have strong evidence there's no connection at all (especially since various editors want to capitalize all WP article title simply because they're article titles – a frequent WP:RM/TR type is moving titles to sentence case per our norm for that, which isn't what non-academics are used to). I think what's happening here is that you're "terriblizing". Not having any proof that an article title like There are no atheists in foxholes is any more confusing or misleading to real, live readers than one like Jesus Built My Hotrod or You Must Be Prepared to Dream, you're imagining that it must be, and terribly so. There is no limit in the imagination to how serious or bad a situation can be, so it seems worth arguing about strenuously, yet "there's no there there", no demonstrable problem to fix. It would be great if there were a universally accepted expanded markup for things like these, and perhaps more than just italics and quotation marks for different kinds of works, and successively increasing capitalization levels per size of work, and whatever. But there's not. It isn't WP's job to try to invent and impose a new system. PS: You call adding "(aphorism)" to be "not a disambiguator, but a caveat". That's another word for disclaimer, and WP doesn't use those.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  18:15, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Well, we could return to blink and marquee. What about small caps? SCNR -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 18:30, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Thanks SMcCandlish. I feel better that Finland_does_not_exist was deleted, I was thinking for a short period that it might not be. Disclaimer, not caveat, yes I couldn't find the right word. None of the titles you've mentioned are close to terrible. "Finland does not exist" was terrible. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 20:16, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Twitter accounts

Should WeRateDogs (and any other similar Twitter/social media entities) be in italics? --LukeSurl ^{t c} 12:36, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Nah. That appears to be pseudonym, a personal account used for a particular purpose. Facebook has some forums and groups with multiple moderators, which are more of the character of publications (though most are not and are just Web forums). I think one should look at the nature of the material rather than the site (i.e., the content not the medium). It would be possible via Twitter to do an e-newswire consisting of tightly compact story abstracts and links to more detail, and one could argue that this was a publication rather than just an account, if it were consistently and professional produced as such, and never used as someone's personal tweeting account (and this would be a |via=Twitter not a |publisher=Twitter, since it's not under Twitter's editorial control). Is there such thing yet? Do we care? I.e., would we actually have sufficient information on it to be certain it was a reliable source like AP Newsire or Reuters, versus some schmoe's micro-blog? I would remain skeptical. There's lots of this sort of thing via YouTube, and we rarely cite any of it here because it's just not WP:RS, but WP:SPS.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  18:25, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Merger of scattered and redundant material to MOS:TITLES

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Merger of scattered and redundant material to MOS:TITLES for details.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:53, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

Substantive revision of capitalization-and-hyphenation advice

I've WP:BOLDly made a substantive revision to the advice on what to do about capitalization after hyphenation, to replace poor and confusing (virtually meaningless) material with actual practice, also consistent with MoS's approach, throughout, of "don't do something unusual unless most of the reliable sources treat the name that way".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  00:16, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Substantive revision of subtitles advice

After years of sporadic conflict about this material, and few Wikipedians actually following the advice (even rebelling against it), I've replaced the line-item about subtitle capitalization with a substantive revision that describes actual practice at WP:RM and elsewhere. I think it covers all the bases that typically come up, and it doesn't repeat anything, like a pointless example of a subtitle starting with "(A ...)" or "(The ...)" at the start of a title, since that would already be capitalized under the "first word of the title" rule.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  00:19, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Italics for legislation

There seems to be some inconsistency as to whether laws are italicized. For example:

• Australia
  • Judiciary Act 1903 is not italicized in the title, is italicized in article body.
  • Intelligence Services Amendment Act 2004 is not italicized, but the title of the original bill is italicized in the article.
• Canada: Clean Water Act (Ontario) is not italicized in the title and first reference, but is italicized on every reference thereafter.
• Sri Lanka: Ceylon Citizenship Act is plain, but uses italics for all other legislation titles.
• UK
  • Act of Supremacy 1558 uses plain, italicized and boldfaced text for various titles in the same article
  • Registration of Political Parties Act 1998 is plain, but uses italics for the full name of the act.
• US
  • Civil Rights Act of 1866 uses plain text, but double quotation marks and italics for the bill's full title
  • Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 uses plain text, like most articles on modern legislation
• Vanuatu: Wantok Blong Yumi Bill is plain text.

I don't see any guidance from MOS:T or WP:NCGAL. Can we put together a guideline? Ibadibam (talk) 17:36, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

• Not italicized; legal cases are. See any/all legal style guides. More below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  08:13, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

As much as I hate to suggest adding something, we may actually need to. Ibadibam is correct that style is wandering all over the place, including italics inside quotation marks, etc. Key points (and three probably covers it):

• Titles and common names of laws, legislation, regulations and the like take neither italics nor quotation marks, and are written in title case.
• Incipits (sometimes treated as long titles), as well as sentence-case titles of sections, may be placed in quotation marks or parentheses for clarity, including when in noun-capitalizing case: In long form, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 is "An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their vindication." The action was illegal under Section 1956 (Laundering of monetary instruments). This is not needed when already in title case (since it will not be mistaken for Wikipedia's own description). Incipits and section titles should be given in the case in which they were published, like any other quotation, except for all caps.
• Words like act, law, bill, statute, oath, reading, house, are not capitalized when used in a common-noun sense: The law passed both houses, after a second reading in the Senate, on 3 March. See was convicted under § 1956 of the statute. The acts of Parliament are classified as either public general acts or local and personal acts (also known as private acts).

Articles like Acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom are veering around, overcapitalizing most of the time, but overall just a random mixture: "Public General Acts proceed through Parliament as a public bill ... Private Acts are ... Private bills are ... Hybrid bills combine elements of both public and private Acts ... It is important not to confuse private bills with private members' bills ... a Second Reading date is set ... bill is returned to the original House", and so on. It's just however someone personally felt like capitalizing in a particular phrase at the time.

I'm all too aware that if we had a guideline listing everything to not italicize or captalize, it would be never-ending. This, however, seems worth covering because of the number of affected articles, the fact that they're a delimited category, and the clearly random treatment presently being applied.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  08:13, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Ampersands discouraged?

Are ampersands discouraged or prohibited in titles? I can't seem to find anything in the MOS that says so. I just want to check before moving Emory and Henry College to Emory & Henry College. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 19:55, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

Discouraged. See MOS:AMP and interpret title as a type of heading. Dicklyon (talk) 17:44, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

On its own web site the college styles itself using the ampersand. We could go either way on this. The question should probably have a move discussion. It's not easy to compare frequencies using Google because Google seems to collapse together the occurrences of '&' and 'and' when presenting search results. WP:MOSTM says "choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner". But MOS:AMP refers to the ampersand as sometimes being 'a legitimate part of a proper noun'. So, is "Emory & Henry College" a proper noun? EdJohnston (talk) 18:37, 28 February 2018 (UTC) Withdrawing my comment in the light of the Google Trends data below. EdJohnston (talk) 18:05, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

After noticing that we accept Procter & Gamble as an article title (instead of Procter and Gamble) I have concluded that moving the college to Emory & Henry College would be acceptable. It would be a harder question if somebody were to count up the number of references to each form of their name by third parties and see that the '&' isn't a majority usage. I'm not aware that anyone has done that yet. EdJohnston (talk) 17:58, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

hmmm.... Here is a google trends comparison for "Emory & Henry College" vs "Emory and Henry College". It does seem that the sources are mixed in usage... but favor "Emory and Henry". Blueboar (talk) 18:53, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Yep. If the sources don't overwhelmingly consistently use a divergent style, WP doesn't either, so stick with "and".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:02, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

I wouldn't read too much into that Google trends comparison that says "This comparison contains both Search terms and Topics, which are measured differently." But yes, use "and" in preference to ampersand when usage is mixed. Dicklyon (talk) 03:49, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

"On its own website ..." – See MOS:TM and WP:OFFICIALNAME. WP doesn't mimic logo stylization.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:02, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Mentions of other Wikipedia articles

It was recently suggested to me that this guideline requires that in-line references to Wikipedia articles (as distinguished from normal wikilinks, in which the concept is what's being referenced) should start with a capital letter. I find this plausible, but I also don't think it is at all clear in the actual statement of the guideline. Can anyone confirm? Thanks, JBL (talk) 14:13, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

@Joel B. Lewis: In such a case, more common as something like "For more details, see Jotunheim.", that's an explicit WP:SELFREF, and to an article title, so it should be capitalized and also marked up as a self-referential cross-reference: {{Crossref|For more details, see [[Jotunheim]].}} It's basically an inline WP:Hatnote (and, in fact, uses {{inline hatnote}} as a meta-template). This applies the proper CSS classes and so on.

However, these can usually be avoided by better wording, to work the link into the prose: "... based on Jotunheim in the Norse legends", or whatever. This is what to do at the Exponentiation article probably, though just marking it up as a crossref would work, too. I don't see that it adds much value in this form. I would do: "The case of 0⁰ is a special case with a disputed value." Tell the reader the gist, and let them look for more if they want, rather than force them to look for more to understand.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:06, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Glad you pinged -- I had just (perhaps an hour before your message) removed this page from my watchlist, thinking no one would ever respond! Your example is maybe not totally clear to me because the subject of that article is a proper name and so would be capitalized in any case; but I think I understand the substance. I also agree that a more detailed explanation in the pointer would be better, I'll try something now. --JBL (talk) 12:56, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

@Joel B. Lewis:: Well, look in the wiki source; what I've suggested is: The case of {{math|0<sup>0</sup>}} is [[Zero to the power of zero|a special case]] with a disputed value. I.e., embed the link to the article in the wording rather that tacking it on as a cross-reference. :-) [Though maybe try to avoid saying "case" twice; I didn't catch that the first time. Maybe "The case of ... is an unusual instance"?]  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:19, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Sorry, I meant the first example, with Jotunheim. Anyhow, I've cooked something up, feel free to tinker as desired :). (I actually like the explicit pointer better than the somewhat hidden pipe -- I think it is clearer about what the purpose of the link is.) --JBL (talk) 13:43, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Website titles in italics

Is it possible to amend the rules to allow this? One reason is, when citing a websclusive (web exclusive) source, it should be cited like this: . If you are viewing this in source mode, you will see that the value entered under the "website" field in the "cite web" template becomes italicised, like it would if something is entered under the "work" field in the "cite news" template. Also, italicising a website's name sets it apart from regular text. --Kailash29792 (talk) 04:05, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

References

What are you asking to change? Yes, the |work= a.k.a. |website= parameter will italicize, and that's the intent, because it's a major work being cited. If you're citing a website, use its displayed name (Salon not Salon.com). If it literally is something like "Foo.com" then that is the title as well as the domain name, and should be italicized as a publication title, when used as a publication title. I'm not sure why people have difficulty with this. "She writes for Foo.com" is a reference to a publication (if it actually uses Foo.com as the publication name; it might be using Foo, so check). "Foo.com suffered a three-day outage" is a reference to a server. "He is the human resources manager at Foo Publications Inc. d/b/a Foo.com" is a reference to a business entity. Only one of these takes italics, but it does take the italics. This is not any different from "She writes for The New York Times", "NYTimes.com suffered a three-day outage", and "He is the human resources manager at The New York Times Company".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:40, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I see the problem. Our current (daft) wording is this:

Website titles may or may not be italicized depending on the type of site and what kind of content it features. Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized (Salon or HuffPost). Online encyclopedias and dictionaries should also be italicized (Scholarpedia or Merriam-Webster Online). Other types of websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

"Other types of websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis" = "fight about trivia forever and do inconsistent stuff for no reason at all." This doesn't match the reality of our usage, and should change to reflect actual practice: Italicize it as a publication; do not italicize it as a server/address, a business entity, or a piece of intellectual property. This really isn't any more complicated than whether or not to italicize "Ant-Man": italicize it as a comic book title (or film title); do not italicize it as a character or as an intellectual property ("Marvel sold the rights to Ant-Man to Dynamite Comics in 2019") (nor as a business entity, e.g. if Marvel spun off an Ant-Man Media subsidiary).

PS: WP really, really does not care whether this other publisher or that one over there has some house style rule to never/always italicize website names regardless of context. We aren't following their style guide, and trying to do so would not be practical even if we were that crazy; we'd have to have our citation templates completely recoded to try to detect when something is or isn't a domain name and do other weird, pointless crap. No reason to ever go there. A title is a title is a title; treat it consistently.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:48, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I meant, when writing it should be something like, "She said this, reported Deadline Hollywood". Kailash29792 (talk) 16:59, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Should definitely be in italics. Otherwise we'd be using ''The New York Times'' in reference to the printed version and The New York Times in reference to the Web copy of the same article.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:20, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Discussion on fandom-based over-capitalization

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 206#The endless "fan-capping" problem
How are MOS:TITLES, etc., failing to get the point across?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:37, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

"Typographic conformity" section

I realized that we were not dealing with the special considerations that apply to doing MOS:CONFORM stuff with titles of works (including factors that can actually break citations), so added a summary of that at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Typographic conformity (MOS:TITLECONFORM). I also cleaned up MOS:CONFORM itself a bit; it was out-of-step (for many years now) with two points of actual practice, and the section was also mix-and-matching grammatical structures in its list items.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:38, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Australian legislation short title italicisation

I don't think the current guidance provided by MOS:T#Neither allows for typical legislation citation in the Australian context. It is standard practice for the short title of Australian statutes to be italicised, e.g. Transport Integration Act 2010, Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. The Australian Guide to Legal Citation, the usual standard for legal citation in Australia, recommends the same, in contrast to SMcCandlish's suggestion here that "any/all legal style guides" disavow the practice.

I don't know what the best solution is, and I'll leave that to more qualified MOS watchers to discuss. My own suggestion would be that articles should be internally consistent, and prefer regional practice in articles with strong links to a given region - essentially like ENGVAR. Triptothecottage (talk)

References

Wow, a style guide I didn't already have! I can see italicizing them in reference citations, if the article is consistently using AGLC citation style, but not otherwise. WP main article content is not written in legal style or any other specialized style, so should not be borrowing quirks from regional or national specialized style guides, unless more general-audience ones feature the same "rule". A quick Googling around shows strong evidence that this italicization is not normal practice in Australian writing – not in news, not in academic material, not even in official government sources on the legislation in question (e.g. here).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:50, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Revisiting exhibitions

I'd like to revisit previous discussions of italicizing exhibitions (previously mentioned but not discussed in 2011 and 2007). I can appreciate that this might be a niche topic, but you're watching a MoS page so bear with me. Chicago is the odd man out in that its 16th edition added a new rule to italicize art exhibitions. For example, a show at X museum would be italicized instead of put in quotation marks. Other style guides, including the MLA and APA appear not to handle them this way, nor is it how websites like Artsy, the New York Times, Frieze, Art in America, etc., handle exhibition titles... Italics are usually reserved, especially in context of discussing exhibitions, to describe creative works, such as individual artworks or installations, and I'd argue that the italics for exhibition titles appears strange when juxtaposed with "creative works" in this regard, against both the precedent of the style used in our reliable sources and our standards for italics. So I don't see why Chicago was privileged all other standards, given the drawbacks. Thoughts? czar 01:57, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

See the thread on concerts and tours below; same issue, really. Yes, Chicago is weird on this, and the world knows it's weird, and isn't following it on this point. I just got the new 17th ed., and am curious to see if they've dropped this nonsense.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:56, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

I would expect exhibition titles to be italicized - they look odd if they are not. In my experience, most of our FAs capitalize them. I would except things like "2017 Summer Show" I suppose. Of course any published catalogue will be italicised, and it can sometimes be ambiguous whether it is the exhibition or the catalogue that is referred to. It is not at all the same issue as concerts and tours. I note all your examples are American. Johnbod (talk) 12:27, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

The first part is just subjective personal preference. They look odd to me when they are italicized or put in quotation marks. Real world style on this question is not consistent, but on average exhibition names are just given in title case without further stylization. The general MoS rule across all style matters that are dubious is not not add style that isn't consistently applied by reliable sources. The second part is just an WP:OTHERSTUFF and WP:CONTENTAGE argument. Our FAs do all sorts of stuff they shouldn't. Often, they pre-date MoS having more specific advice on the matter, but no one has bothered to fix it in those articles, in part because of the "revert all changes on sight" behavior at a lot of FAs that have WP:OWNers, and in part because there's more important things to do like make terrible articles not terrible instead of great but imperfect articles perfect. In other cases, where the matter at issue isn't covered by any guidelines (because most editors have WP:COMMONSENSE enough to not do whatever thing it is), WP:FAC has a local "tradition" of encouraging the primary author of an FAC-candidate article to do as they like in any regard that isn't already covered by a WP:P&G page, and will go to some lengths to defend their imaginary right to do so. FAC regulars tend to react with hostility to anyone who tries to contradict such an author's personal preferences, since WP:VESTED isn't treated as if applicable in that magical little fiefdom. More to the point, it's against WP:EDITING and WP:CONLEVEL policy. When it comes to style questions, FAs are meaningless, because they're either intentionally and sometimes WP:POINTily divergent (there's a large anti-MoS contingent at FAC, despite MoS compliance being one of the FAC rules), or they've simply been ossified since being labelled FAs in 2008 or whenever.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:23, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Dearie me, picking this up after 8 months for a rant on your new pet subject! "I would expect exhibition titles to be italicized" because that is how I normally see them in books etc. Johnbod (talk) 12:55, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

That was completely non-substantive. Not liking [your perception of] my tone doesn't rebut anything I said, and handwaving about sources without providing them is meaningless. Show us style guides (even arts-specific ones) dictating that exhibition titles go in italics. If you can find any at all, I bet you as much money as you like that I can provide an order of magnitude more style guides laying out what to put into italics, without exhibition titles being in their lists. Style disputes of this sort (i.e., to determine what MoS should advise) are ultimately a statistical game. If you wanted to devise a formula for it, it would look something like what I put up at Wikipedia:Reducing consensus to an algorithm, with "sources relevant to the argument" mostly being reputable style guides.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:48, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Gettin' In Over My Head

May it be noted that SMcCandlish intended their comments in the "Stand by Me or Stand By Me?" discussion above (i.e. those commencing "Rehashing prepositions in titles is a perennial waste of editorial time") also to be directed at this discussion. Pololei (talk) 23:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Our article on the 2005 Brian Wilson album is at Gettin' In Over My Head. At one point, it was moved to Gettin' in over My Head. In the body of the article, it's referred to as Gettin' in Over My Head. I think all of these are wrong and it should be Gettin' In over My Head, on the theory that "In" is part of a phrasal verb but "over" is just a regular preposition. But I'm not confident enough that I'm correct to go ahead and move it. Wanted some other opinions.

In any event, of course, the capitalization in the body should match that of the title, so I'll fix that even if a move isn't warranted.—Chowbok ☠ 01:21, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

I agree with you, the correct capitalization is Gettin' In over My Head. Darkday (talk) 23:35, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes; getting in[to] is a phrasal verb. Kind of a strange one, if you think about it. To get is to obtain, to come into possession, so get in[to] doesn't actually make any sense when broken down to constituent parts as if it were a verb+preposition (as in jump into the lake or run from the bear), rather than a seemingly arbitrary verb+particle phrasal compound (like call off your dogs, or look up something in the dictionary – contrast look up the hillside, presumably at the bear, chasing you into the lake, ha ha).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:07, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Get in isn't a phrasal verb—at least not the sense alluded to by SMcCandlish above. The verb get has several meanings. One of them is put oneself (in a place, position or state). It can be used, with the same meaning, with other prepositions: get on, get over, get around, get across, etc. Over one's head means beyond one's understanding. The in of the title—on the face of it—functions as a preposition and should therefore be lower-case. Pololei (talk) 05:19, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Pshah. A ton (or perhaps a tonne) of sources disagree with you [1] – quite specifically about get in[to] (in this sense in particular, versus "get into the car", which is literal and prepositional, not figural and phrasal).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:15, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Stand by Me or Stand By Me?

In the capital letters section it says that "words that have the same form as prepositions, but are not being used specifically as prepositions [should be capitalised]", such as particles of phrasal verbs. The article on phrasal verbs mentions in the example of verb + preposition:

You should stand by your friend. – by is a preposition that introduces the prepositional phrase by your friend.

I'm confused. Does that mean stand by is a phrasal verb, but the by is still a preposition in the sense not to be capitalised in a heading? Is that why Stand by Me is written with a non-capitalised by in title case? invenio tc 02:46, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

I think what is causing confusion here is the fact that people use "phrasal verb" in two senses. From the Cambridge Dictionary:

Multi-word verbs are verbs which consist of a verb and one or two particles or prepositions (e.g. up, over, in, down). There are three types of multi-word verbs: phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs and phrasal-prepositional verbs. Sometimes, the name ‘phrasal verb’ is used to refer to all three types.

When the Manual of Style states that particles of phrasal verbs should be capitalized, this refers to phrasal verbs in the narrower sense (i.e. verb + adverb particle), not to prepositional verbs. In "Stand by Me," stand by is a prepositional verb, so by should not be capitalized in this title. Darkday (talk) 16:50, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. So how do I know if/when I'm dealing with a phrasal verb, a prepositional verb or a phrasal-prepositional verb?

Also, into which of these categories does the to be capitalised verb + adverb particle fall into? invenio tc 13:51, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

verb + adverb particle is a phrasal verb in the narrow sense. Regarding how to identify phrasal verbs: If the verb doesn't take an object, it's a phrasal verb ("Shut up and dance", "Sign up now!"). If the verb does take an object, and it can be put both before and after the particle, it's a phrasal verb as well ("Take off your coat" <-> "Take your coat off"). This doesn't work with "Stand by me" (you cannot say "Stand me by"), because "stand by" is not a phrasal verb here. On the other hand, "stand by" without object is a phrasal verb ("Stand by and watch"). Disclaimer: I'm not a grammar expert, and English is not my first language. Darkday (talk) 22:29, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

Having read over this discussion, I'm wondering whether the manual might benefit from a slight rewording.

As invenio notes, the guideline states, "Words that have the same form as prepositions, but are not being used specifically as prepositions [should be capitalized]". I had originally read this as meaning that if a preposition forms part of a phrasal verb then, since it's being used to convey a different meaning (i.e. that evinced by the phrasal verb), it should be capitalized. For example, the word by in "Stand by Me" is being used not to mean next to but (along with stand) to mean support. However, if I understand this discussion correctly, the guideline is actually referring to the literal or compositional use of prepositions (i.e. next to in the example), not their phrasal meanings.

Thus, I'm wondering whether it'd be better if the guideline instead read something like words that have the same form as prepositions, but cannot be construed as prepositions (should be capitalized)—which is more in keeping with the language used in the phrasal verbs article. Pololei (talk) 17:53, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Far too vague. We know from direct experience that people here will construe as prepositions things that are not, and will even more often construe as non-prepositions things that most definitely are (e.g. "like" in "Do It like a Dude"). This is best addressed with a footnote, and the material above already provides what to put in it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:43, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Done [2].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:57, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

@Invenio, Darkday, Pololei, and SMcCandlish:
(First of all, English isn't my first language either.) I was trying to wrap my head around this matter, and I think the wording was fine without the footnote. I read "Always capitalized: [..] Words that have the same form as prepositions, but are not being used specifically as prepositions[:] Particles of phrasal verbs (e.g. [..])" as: any 'preposition word' that is not used as a preposition (i.e. is not introducing a prepositional phrase) should be capitalized. It looks like most relevant things have been said here already, but the contrasting use of the term phrasal verb adds to the confusion. In this discussion and in the footnote, phrasal verb is used in the narrow sense (like the already mentioned Cambridge Dictionary does), whereas the article Phrasal verb uses phrasal verb in the broader sense (like Oxford Dictionaries does):

construction		Phrasal verb / Oxford Dictionaries	vs	Cambridge Dictionary ("multi-word verbs")
verb+preposition	:	prepositional (phrasal) verbs		prepositional verbs
verb+particle	:	particle (phrasal) verbs		phrasal verbs
verb+particle+preposition	:	particle-prepositional (phrasal) verbs		phrasal-prepositional verbs
		(phrasal verbs in broad sense)		(phrasal verbs in narrow sense)

It would be less confusing when the footnote uses the same definition of phrasal verb as the article Phrasal verb, which is the broader sense (and it mentions both uses in #Some notes on terminology). Both the article and Cambridge Dictionary are clear about prepositions versus particles, so we can use those words just fine either way. (The only difference is that Cambridge calls the verb+particle construction a phrasal verb, and phrasal-verb-in-broad-sense a multi-word verb. Note that Multi-word verb explains multi-word verb in a broader sense than Cambridge does, but it explains phrasal verb in the narrow sense just like Cambridge: "as in combinations of verbs and particles". Confusion galore!)

But more important: in my understanding of the matter, the conclusion/footnote is incorrect. It's not only the particles in particle verbs (verb+particle) but also those in particle-prepositional verbs (verb+particle+preposition) that should be capitalized, no? I suppose a footnote is welcome, and/or some extra examples illustrating the more confusing cases. For example, "[w]hen a particle phrasal verb is transitive, it can look just like a prepositional phrasal verb" (from #Some notes on terminology, see also Darkday's example "Take off your coat") might need some extra attention.

• My proposal-footnote, something along the lines of: "A phrasal verb consists of a verb and a particle and/or a preposition. A preposition introduces a prepositional phrase (so it should not be capitalized when it contains four letters or fewer), but when a word in a phrasal verb has the same form as a preposition but does not introduce a prepositional phrase, it's a particle, and should thus be capitalized. Note that when a particle phrasal verb is transitive, the particle can look just like a preposition, but is still a particle so it should be capitalized. See also #Examples and #Some notes on terminology."

About the "non-compositional meaning" of phrasal verbs: according to the introduction of Phrasal verb, "[t]his semantic unit cannot be understood based upon the meanings of the individual parts, but must be taken as a whole. In other words, the meaning is non-compositional and thus unpredictable." So that means not every verb+[preposition-ish word(s)] construction is a phrasal verb, right? Anyway, the "particles of phrasal verbs" rule applies to particles, so for (actual) prepositions it doesn't really matter if it's a phrasal verb or not (they are covered by the four/five-letter rule). I wonder if this needs to be expicitly mentioned in the footnote somehow, after reading Pololei's comment on Stand by/By Me and (also @Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars, Jaydiem, and In ictu oculi:) this move request in 2014, which was what triggered me to re-dive into the issue (and made me end up here). Count on Me (disambiguation) was moved to Count On Me (disambiguation) (and some linked pages similarly) because count on was considered a phrasal verb because of its "non-compositional meaning" – as opposed to trust in, rely on and believe in. Whether the latter is true or not, on and in are still prepositions in all four constructions (introducing the prepositional phrase on [someone/me] or in [someone/me]), so none of them should be capitalized, and the moves need to be reverted, no?

Like I said, English isn't my first language, so please let me know if/where my train of thought derailed! With kind regards — Mar(c). ^UTC 09:32, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mar(c): I don't have any objection to clarifying the footnote, including whatever links and wording tweaks make it work better. In the end, we just want it clear that "I Stand by My Own Power" has a preposition in it, and "Stand By Me" has a phrasal verb [of a sort sometimes given a more specific label], and the capitalization differs; "Stand By ..." is a semantic unit ("stood by me through the years", "standing by for additional input", while "Stand by ..." is two semantic units ("standing up, by means of something"). PS: Do not get mired in "on is still a preposition ..." sorts of thinking. That's a confusion. This is not about what roles a word can play and how we usually define it (there is no doubt that by is sometimes a preposition, and most commonly is one), but about what role is being played in the semantic structure in front of us. In "Stand By Me", By is a particle of a phrasal verb, no matter the fact that in most other circumstances by serves as a preposition. This whole "by is a preposition" thinking (the "is of identity") is irrational. I.e., "Count On Me" is correct, and "Count Your Change on the Table" is also correct.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:00, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I disagree. Yes, "stand by" in "stand by me" is a semantic unit (and a phrasal verb), but it's a prepositional phrasal verb as described in the article Phrasal verb. This article even features the example "You should stand by your friend" in the section "prepositional phrasal verb". So "by" is a preposition here and should thus be lowercased. On the other hand, in "stand by for additional input", "stand by" is a particle phrasal verb, so here "by" should indeed be capitalized. Darkday (talk) 22:38, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

That's also how I understand it. According to Phrasal verb, every phrasal verb is a single semantic unit (per definition). Nevertheless every (particle-)prepositional phrasal contains a preposition that introduces a prepositional phrase. The examples "I Stand by My Own Power" and "Stand by Me" contain prepositional phrases, while by in "Stand By for Additional Input" is a particle (by doesn't introduce a prepositional phrase here, but for does). Also "Count on Me" and "Count Your Change on the Table" contain prepositional phrases (but I guess in the latter count .. on isn't a phrasal verb; the sentence can be broken down to [verb + direct object + prepositional phrase]). More examples:

• Come On Baby / Come On Eileen / Dance On Little Girl ^{(Paul Anka)} / Hang On Little Tomato / Shine On You Crazy Diamond — particle verb, followed by some 'addressee phrase'. I hear an invisible comma after on (and some of the titles would be awkward if on were a preposition).
• Keep On Truckin' — particle on. (Not: Keep on Truckin'.)
• Get On Your Boots — transitive particle verb (the object can precede the particle: "get them on").
• Puttin' On the Ritz — particle on (intransitive or transitive? "put it on"?).
• Take on Me (or: Take On Me?) — from what I've read (for example here), the meaning of this song title is unclear, so it's hard to say if on is a preposition or a particle. It looks like a prepositional verb, but they sing "take on me, take me on", which makes it look like a transitive particle verb (but do they mean the same thing twice?).
• Hang On to Yourself — particle on + prepositional phrase.
• Ease On down the Road — particle on + prepositional phrase. (Not: Ease on Down the Road.)
• Can't Get over You / Get over It — prepositional phrases. (Not: Can't Get Over You / Get Over It.)
• Gettin' In over My Head — particle in + prepositional phrase. (Not: Gettin' In Over My Head.)
• Give Up the Ghost — transitive particle verb (the object can precede the particle: "give it up").

Am I correct? (Did I misinterpretate any titles?) With kind regards — Mar(c).^UTC 02:57, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree with these capitalizations, except that I rather think it's "Take On Me". It's also perhaps worth pointing out that in "I Stand by My Own Power", "stand by" is not a phrasal verb of any kind, it's just a regular verb followed by a preposition. Darkday (talk) 23:11, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes. My grasp of the guideline accords with yours, Mar(c). I've reservations about only one entry. With "Gettin' In over My head", it's worth considering how you'd treat the in in the phrase gettin' in too deep. (Whether get in is a phrasal verb is up for debate.) I agree with Darkday about "I Stand by My Own Power", assuming stand is taking a dictionary definition. Pololei (talk) 19:34, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

I, too, disagree—for the reasons given by Darkday and Mar(c) above. If I've understood the guideline correctly, and assuming the article on phrasal verbs is reliable, a word (in an English composition title) that forms part of a phrasal verb but nonetheless is still operating as a preposition is lower-case (unless, of course, it contains more than four letters). When by is part of the phrasal verb stand by (i.e. support), it's a preposition, not a particle; likewise on in count on me. The basis of SMcCandlish's position is unclear. Pololei (talk) 19:27, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Nope, that's missing the entire point. If we were to always lowercase these words simply because "by" and "on" are often prepositions, this debate could never arise in the first place. It is Stand By Me and "Take On Me", because to stand by and to take on in these senses are unitary, fused expressions with unique synergistic meanings; they are not (and differ markedly from) one arbitrary verbal expression followed by a separate prepositional expression; they are not even simple collocations, but phrases with specific colloquial meanings which diverge from the sense of the words interpreted literally as verb+preposition. To stand by here means 'to support', 'to ally', not 'to be on one's feet and physically close'; to take on here means 'to accept [as of a challenge or responsibility]', and can't actually have a sensible meaning in English as a verb+preposition combination ('to obtain or seize, while being on the surface of something' ??).

You don't need to (and probably shouldn't) trust our own article on this (and you and Darkday are misunderstanding it); just see what's written about the topic in reliable sources like major style guides and their sections on capitalizing in titles, headings, and other title-case material, and their sections on phrasal verbs and what they are. (Actually, grammars of English are a better type of source for the latter.)
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:26, 19 February 2019 (UTC); rev'd. 02:35, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Rehashing prepositions in titles is a perennial waste of editorial time

Given the difficulty that some people have absorbing this stuff, or simply accepting that we have an arbitrary rule they would prefer were different (despite it agreeing with other major style guides), we probably need a plainer-English way to express this, e.g.:
"Do not lower-case a short word that is sometimes a preposition when it is part of a phrasal verb, which has a meaning distinct from that of the words which compose it. See here [link to something] for a list of common phrasal verbs. Example: to look up something in a dictionary is a phrasal verb because it does not relate to the literal meaning, of directing one's gaze upward, while look up the hillside does, and thus does not contain a phrasal verb, but a verb and preposition. When in doubt, default to lower case.".
We waste way, way too much time arguing about whether something is a phrasal verb (probably because too few people even know what that means), and then trying to recursively argue about whether a phrasal verb's particle has transmogrified by mystical processes back into a preposition somehow. I'm not a big fan of explaining in MoS what a linguistic term means, but sometimes we actually need to do it (and it's better done by showing, as I did above, than by reciting a textbook definition).

People just have to accept that some compound verbs contain particles that are visually identical to and derived from prepositions, that discerning them requires fluency and practice, and that if they don't have the skills for this they should leave it alone, because it's really, really tiresome to everyone to keep rehashing it title after title after title. This is beyond "perennial" now. (On the flip side, over-capitalizers also have to accept that phrasal verbs evolve over time from prepositional constructions, there are many questionable edge cases, and WP's default for everything is lower case; the burden of proof is on those who would capitalize.)

But it's usually not difficult: a title of "Stand by the River" is verb + preposition + article + noun; "Stand By Me" is phrasal_verb + noun, because stand by in the first is saying where to plant your feet (stand) in proximity to (by) something else, and stand by in the latter is a fixed colloquialism meaning 'be loyal to' (or various other related senses); stand in this sense is not used without by as a particle; it is no longer a preposition in this construction. If the expression is an evocative abstraction with no close connection to the usual meaning of the two (or rarely more) words when interpreted as separate units, then you have a phrasal verb, not a verb and a preposition. You also have a phrasal verb when the meaning has not shifted but the exact construction doesn't make sense when you interpret the particle as a preposition: put on your shoes has a phrasal verb, to put on, because it's not prepositionally about putting something onto the shoes, or putting your shoes on top of something like a bench. (It's obvious what the original prepositional sense was: put your shoes on[to] your feet, but it would not be idiomatic to say that in Modern English.) Another strong signal is when the particle can be moved around: put on your shoes, put your shoes on; but this does not apply to fused colloquialisms; you can't re-render "stand by me" as "stand me by", though you can inject an adverb, "stand firmly by me") While some prepositional constructions can be position-altered, this is generally done for Yoda-esque poetic effect and isn't everyday English ("Alongside sail'd she"). But you have to unlearn some misleading, elementary-school "parts of speech" stuff to intuit this kind of stuff automatically, and that can take work at first. It's a WP:COMPETENCY matter, albeit not of the social kind that gets brought up at the dramaboards. But there's the rub.

WP is not linguistics training (WP:NOT#GUIDE). It's not the job of our MoS or our talk pages to go over this stuff a zillion times in excruciating detail until particular editors get it. Either get it or stop arguing about it. The latter is fine; it is not required that everyone absorb every nuance of everything, nor that every idea about everything be entertained indefinitely. I know jack about obstetrics, but I'm also not going to argue obstetrics trivia until I'm blue in the face, against people who know that field well. Cf. WP:SATISFY, WP:NOT#FORUM. The problem we have here, as in so many other style disputes, is that everyone who's more or less fluent has a misleading personal sense of mastery of the language which they tend to mistake for actual expertise on usage nuances, blind to the fact that they're mistaken (because it requires the same level of linguistics knowledge and absorption of major style guides to realize one is in error as to realize what that error is and thus to not make it; this is known as the Dunning–Kruger effect). It's a fairly natural behavior pattern, but one that has to be suppressed here because it sucks an amazing amount of time away from us.

Frankly, if people won't stop gnashing and thrashing about this until the cows come home, we should scrap the conventional rule and institute an arbitrary one: all short words that can be prepositions are to be lower-cased even in phrasal verbs – just so people stop going on about it. This will make the "pop songs are my whole life" people even more unhappy, but oh well. Something has to give.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:35, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Or... we could arbitrarily say they should all be uppercased (which would please the pop song people and those who want an overly consistent rule to follow... only the few who actually understand how it actually works will be displeased... but who cares about them! 😜) Blueboar (talk) 23:28, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

I actually pondered proposing that at one point, as the simplest possible solution, but in reviewing my mountainous pile of style guides, and various other sources, I can't find any evidence that "Foo Of Bar In Bazz To Quux" style in titles exists in any kind of codified form outside of marketing (advertising copy, logo and package design, etc.) and a tiny handful of news publishers with divergent stylebooks (even compared to other news style). So, pretty much everyone but the pop-culture crowd would rebel against it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:41, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Short foreign works

Should short works in a foreign language be in italics? MOS:NOITALIC makes no allowance for this, nor does MOS:ITALICTITLE, but MOS:MINORWORK includes this example (of a non-German title of a non-German song): «"Ich Bin Ein Auslander" (a song with a German-language title)» which was added by User:SMcCandlish on 23 May 2014, 19:56. I also note that WP:Naming conventions (music) does not use italics for the example "Bist du bei mir", and articles follow that guidance. I don't think any of the songs in Category:German-language songs use italic titles (and where their headwords appear in italics, it's the consequence of an ill thought-out change to {{Lang}}). So, which guide wins? My position is to retain the guidance that minor works are in quotation marks and not italicized, even when in a foreign language. The example overleaf ("Ich Bin Ein Auslander") should be removed because it's an unusual case of an English-language song using a kind-of German title where italics may well be appropriate (a bit like the quotation marks in the album "Heroes"). -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 07:48, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Looks like an error on my part, and yes, this example should be replaced. We italicize foreign words and phrases except proper names (it's Maichingen, not Maichingen). So it's "Ich Bin Ein Auslander" as a song title (and much of that song, in both bands' versions, is in English anyway). If that were also the title of an opera it'd be Ich Bin Ein Auslander for that one, because operas receive italics. English really needs additional forms of markup instead of "operator-overloading" italics for so many things; but we don't have it, so c'est la vie.

PS: There's an exception to the exception: italicize a proper but non-English name when it's used in contrast to the English version, as in 'Munich (German: München)'. The {{lang}} (e.g. {{lang|de}}) and {{lang-xx}} (e.g. {{lang-de}}) templates now auto-italicize (for Latin-based scripts); if you need to suppress the italics in a song title, do "{{lang|de|Ich Bin Ein Auslander|i=n}}":

• "{{lang|de|Ich Bin Ein Auslander|italic=no}}" → "Ich Bin Ein Auslander" (And this is presuming that the phrase is actually valid German, which you seem to suggest isn't true.)

It used to be required to also add |nocat=yes if used as link text, but this no longer seems to be the case:

• "[[Ich Bin Ein Auslander (song)|{{lang|de|Ich Bin Ein Auslander|italic=no}}]]" → "Ich Bin Ein Auslander"

We mostly don't bother wrapping things like Maichingen in code like {{lang|de|Maichingen}}, for place and personal names, unless the aforementioned distinction-from-English-rendition is being drawn, because it complicates the markup for little benefit. It's more useful for longer phrases like song titles, to give some indication what language it is, especially for screen readers so they don't try to apply English phonetic attempts. It's best to use the template in all cases, however, for non-Latin character sets (Chinese, Cyrillic, etc.), to help the user agent parse it properly, e.g. for text direction. PS: For those cases, if the title would be in italics because it's a long work, then it gets italics in that script, too, if the script has italics as a feature. All Western ones do, but some of the Asian ones don't. I don't think there's any negative effect resulting from italicizing, in wikicode, one that does not; the effect simply would have no, um, effect.

Oh, one other bit: We definitely would not use italics to show that "Ich Bin Ein Auslander" isn't real German; and this has nothing to do with the Bowie work's use of quotation marks, which are authorial intent to imply irony/skepticism, i.e. so-called heroes.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:41, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

|nocat=yes is required for [[Ich Bin Ein Auslander (song)|{{lang|de|Ich Bin Ein Auslander|italic=no|cat=no}}]] when that construct is used in mainspace because {{lang}} does not add categories except in mainspace. This requirement because wikilinks within wikilinks do not work (categories are a special form of wikilink).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:02, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

So what's the advice for short work in foreign languages? Italics plus quotes or quotes only? (PS: "Ich bin ein Ausländer" is the proper German spelling.) -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:41, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

@Michael Bednarek: Just the quotation marks, since italics-for-non-English isn't applied to proper names, and a title of work is one.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:45, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

• Until now, I understood that once we have quotation marks around the title of a short work (poem, song, hymn) we don't also need italics. We have plenty of hymns, such as "Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin". It makes for a wanted clear differentiation versus the longer work of the same title, Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin, BWV 125. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:58, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

  Yep.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:45, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

  Today, I had to correct something at A Portuguesa, and I found there an edit summary that I wrote in October 2017 which referred to guidance about this conundrum at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting/Archive 1#Foreign songs from June 2007/September 2008 where User:SMcCandlish recommended, "No [italics], just quotes". I suggest to incorporate such advice overleaf into the bullet point about song titles at MOS:MINORWORK (and remove "Ich Bin Ein Auslander"). -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 10:43, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

  Belated update: I installed that clarification as requested [3], but for that entire section, not just for song titles, since it's a general principle.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:53, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

  Yeah, using the italics with the quotes is just redundant, and interferes with the ability to determine if something is a piece/song title or a opera/album title. I'm sympathetic to the idea that if we're going to italicize non-English then it should be consistent, but it's a mistake. This is not a convention WP invented, its one we adopted, and the convention is to not do it to proper names (e.g. Charlie Sheen's birth name is Carlos Estévez, not Carlos Estévez put in italics for being Spanish). Titles of songs are proper names, ergo no italics. The possible exception is when we're illustrating the difference between the proper name in English and in some other language – as in: Munich (German: München) – which is a case of emphasis perhaps, but even this is iffy and most of us don't do it. When two forms of consistency are in conflict, go with the one that produces the most utility for the reader, which is short works in quotes and long ones in italics, not italics for non-English no matter what.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:39, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

American/British Spelling in Article Titles

I'm quite sure there is a rule/policy on this but I just can't find it anywhere, so sorry if the folks here are tired of talking about it. Anyway, for an article on a generalized topic, should the article title use American or British spelling? See Barriers to pro-environmental behaviour. I have page move authorization and can move the title to "...behavior" but wonder what the rules say. Thanks. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (Talk|Contribs) 14:56, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

See WP:ENGVAR - essentially don't move it on a whim/personal preference. Careful with that page move authorization if you don't know that! Johnbod (talk) 15:12, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

If I did stuff by personal whim I wouldn't have asked here first. Thanks for the first two words of your reply. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (Talk|Contribs) 15:17, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

The last sentence matters, too. If you don't know basics of page titling, you shouldn't've been granted the PageMover bit.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:13, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Notice of an RfC about including the word "The" in song/album article titles

Hello there! I started a discussion on the page Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Music on 7 July, and it hasn't received any responses. This RfC concerns the use of the word "The" in band names in parentheses in the titles of articles about songs and albums. Further elaboration can be found on that discussion page. I would appreciate thoughts from anyone who may be interested in the discussion. Thank you. –Matthew - (talk) 20:51, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Spider-Man: Far From Home naming discussion

Additional editors are requested to discuss if the "from" in Spider-Man: Far From Home should be capitalized. The discussion is here Talk:Spider-Man: Far From Home#From or from?. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:59, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

This is a routine MOS:TITLECAPS thing; already opened an RM on it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:28, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Apparently WP:LOCALCONSENSUS overrides policy – non consensus closure at Talk:Spider-Man: Far From Home. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:54, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Happens fairly often at articles surrounded by fandom. It gets fixed later after the fans move somewhere else.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:58, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

A new discussion has been opened. Argento Surfer (talk) 20:20, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Don't usually capitalise copula

As previously (long ago I forget), I dispute the following's final clause

Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:

• Every verb, including forms of to be (Be, Am, Is, Are, Was, Were, Been)

I think it should read instead:

Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:

• Every verb, except the copula (Be, Am, Is, Are, Was, Were, Been)

When the verb "to be", in is various forms, is used as a copula, it is not like a verb, it can be dropped without loss of meaning (copula omission), and it should not be capitalised like verbs generally should. English is complicated, sorry. Of course, sometimes the word is used as a verb and should be capitalised. The distinction is usually correlated with whether there is emphasis, but this is not the best rule. the best rule is whether the verb conveys meaning in the clause. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:14, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

A discussion at Talk:ApathyisBoring#Requested move 30 June 2019 which centers upon the above-mentioned topic may be of interest. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 05:18, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Roman for cross-linking. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:57, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

You're welcome. Since it seemed that your intention was to link to the discussion, I simply carried it through. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 06:21, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Why don't we just avoid all this confusion and capitalize all words in a title? --Khajidha (talk) 15:15, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

• Because nearly no one does this, virtually no reputable sources do this. The MOSCT is pretty good, the fine edge cases are the only issue, that I’ve seen. Copula, and 4vs5 letter prepositions. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:58, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Do I understand the proposal correctly that titles like A Star Is Born or We Are the Champions ought to be spelled A Star is Born and We are the Champions? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:28, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

That’s right. They too are examples where style guides are at odds with natural English capitalisation. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:09, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

All major style guides (Chicago, MLA, APA, AP) capitalize is, are, be etc. I don't see why Wikipedia should deviate from this. Darkday (talk) 08:15, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

Why do they capitalise copula? “They do it” is not much of an argument. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:09, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

How is it any worse than "they don't do it" (which you used against my idea)? --Khajidha (talk) 20:27, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

I am looking at what actually happens in natural English, the real world, versus the few influential styleguides that while good sometimes overreach to force a rule over a rough surface. The use of title case for composition titles is very strongly established, but it is a bit messy, not well defined, at the edges. You advocated for Start Case, where every first letter is capitalised. It would be a simple rule, but Wikipedia should not be leading the world but reflecting the world, which in this case means Wikipedia should not be leading the world with applying this super simple rule on composition titles. This thread is seeking to wind back rule simplication at a far smaller effect than the one yours would impose.

Mostly, people know title case when they see it, but few really understand it. Typically, the first guess is “capitalise every word”, followed by “capitalise every word except small words”, followed then by “capitalise important words”. The last is pretty good, but “important” is subjective, hard for an editor to apply. Mention in passing the capitalised first word last word part. Verbs, objectively, are important, if used. Note that many composition titles do not use verbs. However, when the word is a copula, it is not really a verb, and it is most certainly not an important word, as judged by the easily comprehensibility of the meaning if the copula is omitted.

This would solve the jarring result that is forced by the current rule on the titles including “A Star is Born”, “We are the Champions”, and “Apathy is Boring”. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:39, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

I like that idea. Are there any sources/guides that use that approach that we could emulate? Dicklyon (talk) 01:37, 14 July 2019 (UTC)

Not that I am finding, Dicklyon. Instead, I think I am seeing that "were" "been" and "be" are usually capitalized, and that "is" "am" and "are" are variable, maybe tending to be capitalized if associated with a reputable publisher, and not if not. There's a lot of Start Case and ALLCAPS in primary sources, I wonder if people try to avoid the question. I think this is a genuine conflict between natural capitalization, and the adherence of reputable publishers to their style guide. Evidence includes things like "A Boy Was Born (published as A Boy was Born)". Ngram data eg I think is strongly affected by the bias that it reflects more scanned books by reputable publishers than natural use. I think it more than reasonable that Wikipedia can go beyond the old style guides and not capitalize copula. Decreasing conflict with natural use will decrease the need to repeat "MOSCT is just a guideline" and will make for a better respected guideline. Note that RM has just approved Apathy Is Boring -> Apathy is Boring.

I wonder what User:SMcCandlish, possessor of a mountainous pile of style guides, would say. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:36, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

What is "natural capitalization"? It seems more "natural" to me to simply capitalize all words in a title than to create arbitrary rules about "well, capitalize all words in the title except these, but capitalize those words in these specific exceptions". As for your previous comment about "jarring results", I find the switching between capitalized and lower case words extremely jarring. --Khajidha (talk) 12:36, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

I think I am using “natural” to mean what is normally done in quality sources, including primary sources, although I have to exclude sources that are following a strong style guide. Start case is not what most primary sources do. Most capitalise important words in title case, and the question here is how to decide, at the boundary, which are important words. Given that so few composition titles include verbs, and few of them use “is” as middle words, I think it is fair to conjecture that the question of capitalisation of copula was simply overlooked by the style guides. Let Wikipedia improve on them. Accept “Apathy is Boring”. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:53, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

"Let Wikipedia improve on them". That is why we should capitalize all words in titles. It is an improvement over these vague rules that you are arguing for. "Apathy is Boring" simply looks HIDEOUS. --Khajidha (talk) 14:19, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

This form of Title case was added by Jnestorius (talk · contribs) as an example to this version of Letter case 20:22, 14 January 2009.

The Vitamins are in My Fresh California Raisins
Capitalization of all words, except for internal articles, prepositions, conjunctions and forms of to be

--SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:59, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

I merely moved the table from one article to another; the substantive content was added in 2005 by Markus Kuhn. I won't vouch for the acceptability or otherwise of "The Vitamins are in My Fresh California Raisins" in any style guide. jnestorius^(talk) 11:18, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

I oppose the change suggested by the OP. There is already way too much confusion about how to write titles of works on Wikipedia (and that's not WP's fault; the real world is headache-inducingly inconsistent on the matter). Our system is already about as complex as we can have it, and probably should be simplified further, whether people like it or not. Adding a "sometimes don't capitalize be and is" rule would cause many brains to asplode, and isn't mirrored by any reputable off-site publishers I'm aware of. Pretty much no one writes We are the Champions. It's just not idiomatic in written English, though maybe French does something like that with titles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:39, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Latin incipits

I wonder whether User:Ravenpuff was right in deitalicizing Regina caeli, Ave Regina caelorum etc., on the ground that these are minor works. I think these incipits are normally in italics, as are the incipits of documents such as Summorum Pontificum, Habeas corpus, Lumen gentium, etc. Of course, if that is what the community wants, I will lose no sleep over it. Bealtainemí (talk) 15:34, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

There was a minor discussion over at my talk page regarding the italicisation of Latin hymns, which was what spurred my edits to the above pages, if anyone's curious. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 16:19, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

The guidelines referred to in that discussion were MOS:NOITALIC and MOS:MINORWORKS which explicitly states, "a title of a short non-English work simply receives quotation marks". -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:12, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

I expected some indication of why these short non-English works, generally known by their incipits, should be treated differently from Summorum Pontificum, Quo primum, and many other short non-English works.

If, unlike other works known by incipit, Wikipedia is to present them not in italics but between quote marks (e.g. "Regina caeli") in the body of the articles, I also wonder why in that case they are not presented in the same way in the titles of the articles. Bealtainemí (talk) 06:59, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

a) WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS – clearly, the guidance at MOS:MINORWORKS is not universally observed; consistency in article titles is elusive, and there are sometimes different standards for different categories of articles. b) Some of the examples above are probably difficult to classify as "minor". -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 08:24, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

a) The question is whether not-universally-observed MOS:MINORWORKS should be clarified/reinterpreted/modified. b) I don't think Regina caeli/"Regina caeli" is minor in comparison with Summorum Pontificum/"Summorum Pontificum". c) There remains the inconsistency between quote-marking in the body but not in the title of articles, while there is no such inconsistency in articles where short works known by their incipit are italicized. I think it would be good if the community decided. My own opinion is that italicization of works known by their Latin incipit should be explicitly allowed (not necessarily imposed). Bealtainemí (talk) 09:23, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

a) What do you propose? I think the current guidance is well thought out and mainly followed. b) "Regina caeli" is certainly shorter than Summorum Pontificum. c) I don't understand what inconsistencies you mean. Wikipedia guidelines recommend that spelling and styling in quotations and cited works should modified to conform with our style guides. In fact, the first external link at "Regina coeli" that is shown in italics is wrong because the source, Loyola Press, doesn't. As for optional italic for Latin incipits: why Latin? What about other languages? "Frère Jacques", "Bist du bei mir", "La donna è mobile"? Slippery slope … Can of worms … -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:02, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

It's time to just let others speak. I've already said I think Wikipedia should accept what seems to be general use regarding Latin incipits, and I view "minor" and "short" as distinct concepts. I leave the rest to the community. Bealtainemí (talk) 13:38, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Whether something's minor or major as a work is open to interpretation (by design/necessity). That'll need to get hashed out by a consensus of interested editors at the talk page of the work's article, since MoS and its rotating editorial pool have no position on whether, say, Regina caeli is a major work or not (but MoS does care that it's an incipit and shouldn't be written Regina Caeli with a capital C). Since it's a Latin title, italicize it as Latin per MOS:FOREIGN but also put it in quotation marks as a minor work if it is one. See MOS:TITLE#Additional markup: "Titles in quotation marks that include (or in unusual cases consist of) something that requires italicization for some other reason than being a title, e.g. a genus and species name, or a foreign-language phrase, or the name of a larger work being referred to, also use the needed italicization, inside the quotation marks".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:46, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

dashes versus parentheses?

Wrong venue. Please move to WP:Requested moves

The title of these two WP:GA articles seem incorrectly formatted to me. It seems to me that the word "Women's" should be in parentheses. Perhaps they should be moved?

• Triathlon at the 2012 Summer Olympics – Women's
• Skeleton at the 2010 Winter Olympics – Women's

 ♦ Lingzhi2 (talk) 13:43, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

@Lingzhi2: Per WP:NATURAL and WP:NATURALDIS, wouldn't they be at "Women's [discipline name] at the 201[X] [Season] Olympics"? But this page is off-topic for that discussion; it's about titles of off-site works like Le Morte d'Arthur and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. WP:RM is the proper process for discussion of page renames/moves. And MoS generally isn't about title formatting, anyway, except for matters not covered by WP:AT policy or naming conventions guidelines. I would expect that at an RM, some will cite Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists) as applicable, on the theory that these are primarily list articles, and that they constitute a series of lists (i.e. a huge list split into multiple articles) arranged by discipline, season, and year, in which case " – " is permissible, just not the most common style. I'm not sure I buy that argument; I think they're separate and comparatively concise articles, and that trying to shove all women's Olympic results even for a specific year into one article would never have been done. Finally, WP:CONSISTENT will matter (a lot): what is the primary titling style across all articles on women in the Olympics? It may not make sense to move these two articles in particular if there are 100+ more of them just like that, or it may be obvious what to move them to, if all the rest are in a consistent pattern and these diverge. That's homework for the would-be mover to do.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:00, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Including the year in parentheses after the title of a work in prose

Some examples from articles I've been looking at recently:

• His eighth film, The Hateful Eight (2015), was released... from Quentin Tarantino
• Jepsen worked on her third studio album, Emotion (2015), for nearly three years... from Emotion: Side B

I couldn't find any mention of this phenomenon in the MoS here, or in subject-specific guidelines like WP:MOSMUSIC or WP:MOSFILM (though I might have missed it). Has any consensus formed around when this is allowable/desirable? Colin M (talk) 20:36, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

It's completely standard in articles about visual art, including for prose works, and pretty common in RS, I'd have thought. Seems fine to me. Johnbod (talk) 20:58, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

@Colin M: Yeah. We do this all the time for all kinds of works. I wouldn't be obsessive about it, though. E.g., it's not going to be helpful to write something like 'Client's song "Radio" (from the album City, 2004) is an homage to "Transmission" (1979) by Joy Division.' But it's often useful to mention the year of a work when writing in a chronological section about that album/artists, to help the reader understand what happened in what year (especially given that successive waves of editors may not keep all the facts in exactly the right order; my AfD-escaping rewrite of Girls Under Glass, for example, was especially difficult in that regard, and took many days of research just to get the chronology fixed). In the article on Client, if it were developed a lot more, one might have a paragraph on their album City and include the date of release, but a track from that album, like "Radio" in particular, would not need to have the year shown in discussion of it's nature and influences, since we already know it was on that album. But a complete release date might be appropriate for it as a single (I think it was one). The release date of the Joy Division track is completely irrelevant to the reader of the Client article. Release years, however, make a lot of sense at Transmission (song)#Cover versions (it actually needs more of them), and the complete release dates of various issues of "Transmission" as a Joy Division single make sense in the main body of that article, as does at least the year at the Joy Division article. So, it's basically a WP:Common sense matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:18, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Works alternatively known by informal names / nicknames

I've found that the leads for the White Album, the Blue Album, the Red Album, and the Black Album are all formatted differently. In the interest of consistency, should the formatting stick to:

• A: also known as the Color Album
• B: also known as The Color Album
• C: also known as the Color Album
• D: also known as The Color Album

? ilil (talk) 10:18, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

• Use version C per MOS:ITALICTITLE, MOS:INCIPIT, and per MOS:THETITLE, MOS:THECAPS. It's not a title, so it does not get italics, nor a capitalized "The". Like any "the Whatever" nickname or other non-"official" appellation, there is no rationale to capitalize "the", absent overwhelming reliable-source consistency in doing so. Thus 'Charles "the Eyeball Killer" Albright', but rare exceptions like 'Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson'. Most such exceptions are WP:ABOUTSELF matters of stage names, pen names, or other professional pseudonyms, with RS rather consistently going along with the subject's preference. That is, such exceptions usually are official in one sense or another and aren't really nicknames or informal labels, but actual names. This generally isn't going to apply in a case of work titles, since any alternative title that has that level of officialness is going to be an actual title, not a nickname or informal appellation like "the White Album". That said, if one or another of these things has been officially (not bootleg) re-released under such a title that originated as a nickname or descriptive label, then it is an actual title now, just not the original one.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:39, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

What Is Mr. Monk, or what is Mr. Monk On?

I ran into this while working the massive backlog at Linked miscapitalizations, a lonely task that virtually nobody else is on.

Which is correct?

• Mr. Monk Is on the Run, according to Florian Blaschke, who claims an M.A. in Indo-European linguistics (12 December 2016 diff)
• Mr. Monk Is On the Run, according to Cbbkr, a Star Trek and television fan (31 December 2013 diff and diff)

I suppose the answer depends on the question. If the question is "what is Mr. Monk (doing)", the answer is that Monk is... on the Run

But if the question is "what is Mr. Monk On", the answer is... the Run – maybe he took an enema?

I'm not an expert in these matters, and I don't like wastes of my time. I'm inclined to go with the Masters degreed guy's opinion, just checking in here for confirmation. wbm1058 (talk) 16:11, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: In view of the episode description "When Monk is arrested for murdering a man [...], he escapes the custody of a small-town sheriff [...] and becomes a fugitive on the run", don't you think we can dismiss the second interpretation (enema)? That said, on would still be considered a preposition in the second case in traditional grammar, as far as my understanding goes. To be on in the sense of "to be switched on" is considered a phrasal verb, but that's definitely not what we have here. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:23, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

That said, the interpretation of by as an adverb in she stood by me or she stood by her decision surprises me. I wonder if there is any way to distinguish between adverb and preposition in English, like through a syntactic test; I can't find anything helpful on Wikipedia. Maybe the distinction is linguistically spurious, at least in the case of prepositional adverbs. (In fact, in Proto-Indo-European, this distinction did not exist.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:36, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

@Florian Blaschke: I wasn't seriously suggesting "enema" was a correct interpretation; just sharing my thoughts on the signaling that capitalization implied to me. I confess to getting lost when thinking about prepositional adverbs, and not really caring to take more time now to try to understand. Last time I took time to research similar weeds, I found that there was disagreement even among the experts about which form was best, and just like Wikipedia guidelines, I found that "style guides can change". So, as Cbbkr last edited in 2014 and nobody else has shown up here to support their position, I'm going with "Mr. Monk Is on the Run", as that just "feels" better to me. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:19, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

I concur with Florian Blaschke; this should be "Mr. Monk Is on the Run". Just because something is a common collocation in English (like the phrase "on the run") doesn't automatically make it a phrasal verb or other such unitary phrase. ("On the run" isn't any kind of verb, anyway. Is is the verb in that title.) This is just a common prepositional phrase, which preserves a sense of on that has mostly been lost outside of such stock phrases as on the run, on the clock, on patrol, and other usages indicating an ongoing state of activity. PS: As for the preposition vs. adverb debate in cases that often involve by, as, or like, that linguistic feud has quite literally been going on for more than two centuries, and isn't any closer to being resolved. If you pick any two major, unabridged dictionaries, you'll find that they directly contradict each other. E.g., Oxford's and Cambridge's larger dictionaries (including their online databases) provide similar examples of the different kinds of constructions that use as for various distinct purposes, but they conflict at several points on whether to label a particular usage prepositional or adverbial. MoS can't really settle the question when it comes to such a squabble. We default to lower-case, and make an exception when a convincing series of arguments can demonstrate clearly adverbial usage, or just a near-uniformity of sources in preferring capitalization.

Aside: We presently have a bit of a conflict in applying this reasonably and in the spirit the guidelines and policies actually intend, in that such a question arises most often in pop-culture topics (movies, TV shows, fantasy novels, etc.), and the vast majority of the sources available, at least for the first several years, are going to be from the entertainment-news press, who pretty consistently follow an excessively capitalizing style (mimicking the marketing materials like posters and covers), when other sources, such as academic film and literature journals would do no such thing. Thus we have Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is wrongheaded. WP is not written in AP style, yet the vast majority of major English-language entertainment and new publications follow that style or an in-house variant of such news style (e.g. Guardian style, Economist style, New York Times style, etc., almost all of which do exactly the same thing on this point); for answering the style question, they're all effectively a single source, the AP Stylebook, or at best a handful of news style guides, in conflict with all other style guides and all other publishing. This is problematic in that it's a form of WP:CHERRYPICKING and it also defies the "Wikipedia is not written in news style" policy at WP:NOT#NEWS. Aside from that, there can be exceptions that are less problematic, more legitimate, like Star Trek Into Darkness; the sources tell us the title is a play on words, serving as both an evocative phrase ([a/the] Star Trek into Darkness), and a conventional title and subtitle (Star Trek: Into Darkness), just with the colon omitted. If the colon were present, there is no question that "Into" would be capitalized, and we also know from reading around that it's generally interpreted as a subtitle; a colon (or dash, or comma) is often actually inserted by fans, reviewers, etc.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:07, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

MOS:COLON entry

I invite editors to look in on the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#MOS:COLON entry to confirm that a consensus has been reached. In the opinion of the last two posting in the discussion, the proposed changes amount to "a clarification of the wording and a merger of colon material into a single place (from MOS:TITLES to MOS:COLON)", to use the words of SMcCandlish. Absent further discussion in the next week, I plan to make the changes proposed by SMcCandlish. Sincerely, HopsonRoad (talk) 16:45, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

 Done I made the changes, per consensus at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#MOS:COLON entry. HopsonRoad (talk) 15:31, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Alphonsine tables....or Alphonsine Tables?

This article is currently in sentence case...but according to Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Titles#Capital_letters should be in title case? Personally not fussed....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:26, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Y tu mamá también

There's an ongoing discussion at Talk:Y Tu Mamá También#Requested move 3 May 2020 that might be of interest to watchers of this page. El Millo (talk) 18:22, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Minor works mentioned within quotations

I think § Quotation marks should be amended to mention that the double quotation marks should change to single when nested in a quotation. (For instance: Flansburgh said, "So I think 'Dr. Love' was kind of the springboard for the idea behind 'Dr. Worm'.") This is the usage prescribed by MOS:QUOTEMARKS, and that page mentions that its guidelines apply to "titles of songs, chapters, episodes, and so on" as well as quotations. Here there's no mention of that, and an editor reading this page might wrongly assume that minor work titles should always use double quotes. — Ardub23 (talk) 05:59, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Request for comments

Greetings to all,

A Request for comment has been initiated regarding RfC about whether to allow use of honorofic 'Allama' with the names or not?

Requesting your comments to formalize the relevant policy @ Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles

Thanks

Bookku (talk) 17:54, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Revert, or clarify at least, MOS:FOREIGNTITLE

See above RM mentioned by User:Facu-el Millo . This section of MOS:T is needless instruction creep as it stands and is at variance with other parts of the MOS. Even if there's consensus to keep it, it should be clarified as to its scope; however, I would be inclined to just roll it back to an earlier version at first preference. Looking at the history, most of the relevant history is at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) since this section was merged over here in 2017. It seems that:

• There wasn't any direct guidance in MOS:T itself until 2017's merge of the Naming conventions (capitalization) section over here in this diff.
• The 2013 page doesn't say anything about titles, and notes for phrases that if there's an accepted English language capitalization, use that, otherwise use the language of origin's rules. Simple. Perfect.
• The February 2016 version does include a bit for works of art, but basically restates the above advice: "usually the capitalization found in English-language reliable sources is recommended, but when such sources use different capitalizations there is some leaning towards the capitalization rules valid for the language of the creator." Sure.
• The November 2017 version after SMcCandlish makes a series of edits is what creates the modern guideline, which I think has gone at least somewhat unnoticed? But came up in the above RM. Now, rather than "follow the sources", we have the "retain the style of the original for modern works. For historical works, follow the dominant usage in modern, English-language, reliable sources."

First off, what does this even mean? What counts as a "modern" work? Is this just for things not localized into English yet, i.e. extremely recent, or are we talking about modernism as in art, so the 1960s and forward? If the latter, why exactly should the style of the original be retained, anyway, if there's a clear English-language style in reliable sources? This is especially important for when capitalization essentially makes a different word. If we're willing to translate titles to English words (Instructions Not Included rather than No se aceptan devoluciones), there's really no difference when the "translation" is sometimes just adjusting the capitalization. (Ping for @SMcCandlish:, since you added this section, for your view on what this modern / historical distinction means exactly.)

Second of all, how does this work with MOS:TM, which encourages ignoring "official" stylization and using what's in reliable sources? If we throw reliable sources out the window, it sure seems like this guideline should cause an avalanche of moves back to original / official titles. The largest offender here is surely Category:J-pop songs and the like, so Speed Star (song) should be moved to its original Japanese capitalization of SPEED STAR★ since it's a modern work by MOS:FOREIGNTITLE. Move Die Tageszeitung back to die tageszeitung, and so on. I briefly brought this up in the RM, and Facu's take was that the guideline referred to the "general grammatical rules of the language" which I don't think is what the guideline says, which is "retain the original (capitalization)." I'm not sure that would be a useful standard anyway - titles routinely aren't doing grammar at all, they're just names or sound cool.

Titles of works are not Wikipedia editor's creation or Wikipedia running descriptive text. They're made by people external to Wikipedia. It's fine for Wikipedia to set style rules for internal text, but Wikipedia MOS should not be in the business of "fixing" somebody else's work title, in the same way that Wikipedia shouldn't invent names for people either. If a foreign title has a known translation agreed upon in reliable sources, that translation should be used, style & all. It's fine to mention, as in the 2016 version, that consensus usually errs on keeping the original capitalization when sources are split, but if sources are not split, it is not a matter for the style guide then, it is rather a matter of avoiding original research and respecting what sources say. SnowFire (talk) 09:40, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

@SnowFire: Is there a potential case that you would be especially against apart from one where stylization would be something like SPEED STAR★? I mean, I would be against a title like that too. But having a foreign-language title use the grammatical rules of that language? I find it quite reasonable. Perhaps there should be a small change to clarify that it is grammatical rules only, if that's what concerns you the most. Then, we can properly discuss the rest of your concerns. El Millo (talk) 12:36, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

"If a foreign title has a known translation agreed upon in reliable sources, that translation should be used, style & all" Of course, and that's what we do. But and what I argued on the RM is that that title is not a translation, but the title in its original language. In case the original title is used, I think the grammar rules of that language should apply, the same way that English rules apply to English-language titles. "there's really no difference when the "translation" is sometimes just adjusting the capitalization" I think that is somewhat disingenuous. To me, it's clear that it's just custom for English-language reliable sources to use title case, and they don't take into account that it is a title in a different language. The translations we use are official, and they're actual translations that the studio chooses to use to market the film to an English-language audience. If the studio had decided to use And Your Mom Too or something like that and reliable sources had used it, then that would be the correct title to use. But that wasn't the case, and I think it makes sense to follow English-language reliable sources up until the moment in which they use the original name, and then we apply that language's grammar. El Millo (talk) 12:49, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

I think the guidance is useful, and a plain-language reading of it is fairly straightforward. How exactly to reconcile with MOS:TM is an issue that may or may not ever come up. My two cents on the examples you raised is that "Speed Star" is not a foreign-language title, so MOS:FOREIGNTITLE wouldn't apply, and that Die Tageszeitung is the appropriate title. Where something has an unusual stylization in the foreign language, MOS:TM would apply to use something more standard. But those or similar situations can be worked out when and if they organically arise. Not every possible situation should be addressed in the MOS; that would be instruction creep.

As for why to retain the original capitalization, I would argue it is because it is more accurate to reflect the original language's capitalization. As was pointed out in the Y tu mamá también move discussion, arguably the best English sources (scholarly articles and the Criterion release) used the original Spanish capitalization. WP:COMMONNAME says we can avoid an inaccurate name, even if it is more frequently used. The advantage of using an English translation (e.g., Pan's Labyrinth rather than El laberinto del fauno) is improved recognizability for English-language readers. But there is very little difference in recognizability when capitalization is the only difference, so the increased accuracy of retaining the original capitalization outweighs it.--Trystan (talk) 13:42, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

I would be in favor of simplifying this to following the style of the origin language. Trystan hints at this but I'll say it outright: most sources on recent works are not high-quality sources, like film and literature journals are; they're low-end entertainment journalism that explicitly follows house-style rules that are nothing like our own; WP is not written in news style as a matter of policy.

As for the present wording: I did my best to merge not-crystal-clear material in multiple guidelines, which was collectively trying to advise about the same thing but in conflicting ways. In doing so, I followed what the dominant patterns of extant article titles were doing (in particular, there are fairly strong conventions in literary criticism, historiography, music history, etc., favoring following the conventions of the origin language, while these tend less often to be applied to modern pop songs and movie titles. This is "following the sources" in a clumsy and WP:UNDUE manner: when most of the materials about a 16th century work are found in academic works, they will follow capitalization-unfriendly journal habits, which are also persnickety about non-English rendering; this precise and down-casing style is also what is recommended in major style guides (including all of those that MoS is heavily based on: Chicago Manual of Style, New Hart's Rules, Fowler's Modern English, Garner's Modern English, etc.). Meanwhile, when most of the materials about a 2020 TV series or video game are found in the entertainment press (and mostly in online sources), the titles are apt to be rendered in "just capitalize everything" style following the habits of news websites, which tend to be both lazy and jingoistic (e.g., most of them drop diacritics from most names, impose Western name order on Asian and Hungarian people who don't use it, etc.). They not only follow in-house style guides of their own devising that conflict between publications, to the extent they exhibit consistent trends they are markedly different from encyclopedic writing.

This is WP, and we write our own style manual, so we can come to whatever consensus we like to do whatever works best here. I've long said that having a single style for any particular kind of thing is generally the best idea, the most practical approach. However, what we have here is an intersection of work titles and foreign-language strings, so there isn't one "kind of thing" at issue. We can either have a rule to follow the style of the origin language, which creates a non-English exception in our normal title-case rendering; or we can have a rule to always apply title-case rendering, creating a work-titles exception in our treatment of non-English strings. I favor the former, because we already have a large contingent of people insistent on other title-case exceptions (e.g. titles of articles in journals; they are in most journals rendered in sentence case, and many editors impose this in citations and in mid-paragraph mentions of titles of such works). So, "always use title case" is going to get push-back from multiple directions.

What we definitely don't need, however, is a difference depending on source age. We should just ignore entertainment journalism's over-capitalization bad habits, and always render non-English titles in the style of the origin language, even for stuff that was released this week, and even if Entertainment Tonight or The New York Times Book Review over-capitalizes it. We need to not care. They don't dictate our style manual to us, and it exists to produce consistent output in our material (and to reduce recurrent editorial strife over style trivia), not to align with particular off-site publishers of news, marketing, or other non-encyclopedic writing. And yes, of course, if a work has a common name in English, like Pan's Labyrinth, then prefer that over El laberinto del fauno, though do render the latter in that Spanish capitalization pattern when mentioning the Spanish title. "El Laberinto del Fauno" is simply an error, even if you can dig up a Spanish website somewhere doing that. You can also find an English-language news site that writes "Do It Like A Dude". That is, "I found some sources that capitalize every single word, even 'a'" is meaningless (well, it means one thing: there are some sites with bad editors).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:26, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Replying here.

• Facu-el Millo: What do you think the title of L'Auberge Espagnole should be? The English title is capitalized as it stands. The French title is l'auberge espagnole. The standard French grammar for "the Spanish apartment" would probably be L'auberge espagnole. To me, following French grammar rules makes no sense - that's describing something qualitatively different, about some Spanish apartment, not about the movie that was released. The movie would either be all capitalized (English sources) or not capitalized at all (retain original). Going by "what if it was French running text" essentially invents a new capitalization, which (IMO) is against fundamental Wikipedia ethos.
• Trystan: If "Speed Star" is too close to English for you (which... I disagree with... it'd be more clear when it's mangled / weird spellings of English, something like Brain Powerd), then there's plenty of other titles that mix English snippets with native language snippets, and then the problem comes back. If hypothetically Jama Shinaide Here We Go! was spelled Jama Shinaide HERE WE GO! in the original, but without caps in most sources, then I'd think the sources should win (to be clear the real song is just Here We Go!, I just grabbed a random exmaple). I guess I just disagree it's possible or useful to make this distinction at all. Either there's the original title, or there's the title in reliable sources. There is no middle ground with custom Wikipedia MOS styling, and attempting to create one results in novel titles that don't show up anywhere else, which is very bad. I also disagree that titling is solely a matter of "recognizability" for readers. It's also a matter of being accurate. If somebody picks up a book that says "Don Quixote" on it and reads a journal article about "Don Quixote" and then writes a paper about "Don Quixote", then that is Actually The Title for English readers, not merely the "recognizable" title.
• SMcCandlish, part 1: You brought up a lot of points but let me focus on the important one. Thanks for clarifying why this distinction exists at all - because you don't like modern sources? Okay, whatever, I disagree, but that's still useful to clarify - that means "modern" is "1 year old or less" because we'll certainly have more than just the entertainment press you dislike in that amount of time. Would you have objections to editing the guideline to say this more explicitly, that "modern" is more like "in the news right now", and "historical" is more like "has established, published dead tree sources"?
• SMcCandlish, part 2: I'll try to handle the other stuff you brought up here. I've disagreed with you before about sources (NOTNEWS has nothing to do with anything in MOS matters) but I don't think that's actually relevant to this discussion, any more than your comments about "what if we could impose One Awesome style everywhere". You also seem to be misreading my point: I am certainly not saying "always use Title Case", and doubly not suggesting that original language titles be modified (so sure, El laberinto del fauno for the Spanish title obviously). I am saying "use either the English form whether it be title case or not, or use the original capitalization, based on what the sources say." Sometimes the English form won't be vanilla title case, sometimes it will. This is what worries me when you constantly bring up "over-capitalization" here and elsewhere - that's starting with a result. The guideline should describe a procedure to get the answer, and let the chips fall where they may on capitalization. Anyway, going back to the Requested Move, to the extent that the argument was "real" sources used lowercase for YTMT - sure, whatever, where every Wikipedian draws the line of what counts as a real source will differ, although I would point out that it's equally likely the journal article was simply acknowledging the film's Spanish name which wouldn't mean much. That said, I'm not opposed to this style currently described for "historical" works of "check the sources, but maybe only use high quality ones." What throws me is that this is not what you seem to be advocating. If you think we should just go with a rule to follow the style of the origin language, great, but this is gonna cause all sorts of ALL CAPS or wEiRD caps cases which you seem to also think won't happen. If you think we should go with a rule of "impose my favorite capitalization, we set the rules around here" then I don't think there's consensus for that nor is it the Wikipedia way to handle this, per above comments: is is inaccurate at some level. Again, to some extent titles are like people's names - even if a person's name is "weird", it's a name, you can't just "fix" it yourself. SnowFire (talk) 01:22, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

  @SnowFire: The English language has certain rules when it comes to titles of works, the Spanish language has different rules, the French language has different rules. What I'm saying isn't to stick to the specific style the guys that designed the poster used. That would be, no ALL CAPS, no wEirD caps, nothing of that sort. For titles in English, title caps. For titles in Spanish, sentence case. For French titles, whichever rule applies (I'm not familiar with French grammar). El Millo (talk) 01:59, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

  Taking SnowFire's points in the same order presented (and this will be long, because each of those bullet points has several actual points embedded within them):

  • The proper French title by most conventions would be L'Auberge espagnole (both among French publishers – Académie française, Imprimerie nationale, Le Petit Robert, Le Quid, l'Dictionnaire de citations françaises, etc. – and in major English-language style guides' advice on treatment of French work titles in English). The convention is to capitalize the initial letter, and if the first word is L'<nowiki>, Le or La, then capitalize the noun phrase that follows it. Basically, capitalize up to and including the first noun then use lowercase afterwards (other than for any embedded proper names). French does not capitalize adjectival forms of proper names, thus espagnole ('Spanish'). A few camps on en.WP are strangely resistant to this (see, e.g., Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/France and French-related articles#Proposed simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS, which is more than a decade outdated, and Talk:L'ange de Nisida#Requested move 8 December 2020). This appears to be entirely tied to the preference of a handful of specific, topically-focused English-language works, especially Grove Book of Operas / The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. I.e., it is a WP:Specialized-style fallacy of topical editors cleaving to the preferences of a specific off-site publisher.
  • Your points to Trystan are largely reasonable, except MOS:TM applies. We would not write "HERE WE GO!" unless virtually all reliable sources did so (including in media beyond entertainment journalism). Second, your final point in this section is fallacious. The fact that a particular person has an edition of an originally non-English work with Title A, and chose to write about it as Title A, and found a reliable source who also called it Title A, is meaningless (other than the last of these points being evidence that at least a redirect should exist for Title A). What matters is what the WP:COMMONNAME in English is, across all reliable sources. Has nothing to do with some random person's writing or reading habits, or one edition publisher's title choice. A much more useful example that Don Quixote is probably Tao Te Ching, which remains most commonly known in English by that title than by the modern pinyin spelling Dàodé Jīng, or approximations of it like Daode Jing or Dao De Jing. The fact that this causes various people some consternation is unfortunate but is not going to result in a page move. The fact that modernized spellings have become accepted for some other things, like Beijing instead of Peking, is immaterial. It'll remain Tao Te Ching until that is provably no longer the most common name in English RS.
  • Straw man. It has nothing to do with the publication date, but whether a particular group of publishers produce output consistent with our titling practices. I even explicitly stated "What we definitely don't need, however, is a difference depending on source age." That it's mostly very recent online publishers, in the "entertainment news" sector, who are over-capitalizing things like song and movie titles (often against the norms of their own language), is incidental. What matters is that they're using a non-encyclopedic "news style". We not only have no reason to imitate it, we have an explicit policy (WP:NOT#NEWS) that we don't.

    Also, if you know anything about blog software and other CMS systems, you'll know that a lot of this is caused by default text-processing scripts in such systems, that people simply have not bothered to override. E.g., you start an article on a movie titled A Boom with a Thrill (or in the 4-letter-propositions capitalization system, A Boom With a Thrill) and your text gets rendered "A Boom With A Thrill" to capitalize every single word, then you copy-paste that and work from there (and may even have macros running that "suggest" that over-capitalized spelling because it's already been used), ending up with over-capitalization throughout. This is also why so many minor non-American news sites, blogs, forums, etc., strangely use US MDY date format despite it being foreign to the norms of their own country's mainstream publishing. Most of the software is American and comes with MDY as a default; lots people without IT departments never get around to changing it). You can see similar scripted effects do other dumb things; e.g., one or another editing system has an option to downcase all words of two letters or less (intended to stop capitalizing "a", "an", "of") other than the first letter, and it regularly results in things like "it" and "is" being lowercased, despite no style guide in English ever recommending doing that in titles (other than as part of downcasing all words, in sentence case). But this "style" (despite being codified nowhere) is rampantly common online. Its commonness doesn't matter in any way for how WP should write.

    The problem with a few that "WP should write A Boom With A Thrill because lots of the sources do" (to summarize a common argument of this sort) is that all those sources about this new movie are all entertainment journalism sources all following essentially the same over-capitalizing style (either by intent or by not giving a damn), and an soon as the film attracts coverage in better sources like books and film journals, that apparent "source preference" will vanish, which necessitates a move to A Boom with a Thrill, which is where it should have been on this site the entire time.

  • "NOTNEWS has nothing to do with anything in MOS matters" is just completely incorrect. "Wikipedia is not written in news style" was added explicitly to stop people trying to write WP like journalism (including topic-specific journalism). That goes for wording style, orthography, and article structure. It has stood the test of many years, and has served us very well. "[W]hat if we could impose One Awesome style everywhere" = more straw-man nonsense. "[U]se either the English form whether it be title case or not, or use the original capitalization, based on what the sources say." Yes, we can agree on that, in principle (and if you felt I was straw-manning you, I apologize; I may have misapprehended your intended meaning). But my perception is that you think this means "ape the style of one genre of sources, no matter what" any time something like, say, entertainment sites are the only sources we presently have, or are nearly all of them. That's not going to fly. When all the sources are following a particular non-encyclopedic way of writing, we are not tied into some suicide pact that forces us to use that style, when the style question is simply arbitrary. (There are cases when it is not; e.g. a particular text string might be capitalized in a song title because it is an acronym, and it may take research to determine that it is one.) You don't have to believe or agree with my reasoning on any of this; our individual interaction won't matter much. I'm just telling you how WP does observably actually work when it comes to such matters, based on thousands of RM discussions. When exceptions get made on a supposed "local consensus" basis (usually a WP:FALSECONSENSUS of vote-stacking by topical fanbois), they generally do not last, because as sourcing becomes broader and extends beyond entertainment journalism, the "style hegemony" that seemed to support something awful like A Boom With A Thrill just disappears. Exactly this happened with "Do It like a Dude". The early sources wrote "Do It Like A Dude" out of copyediting system dumbness and out of mimicry of the cover art; later sources (especially real news organizations with actual style guides of their own) knew that looked stupid to everyone, and started mostly doing "Do It Like a Dude" (as most of them were four-letter-rule publishers – capitalize any preposition of four or more letters), then over time as writing about it exceeded blogs and news sites, we ended up predictably with "Do It like a Dude" showing up with increasingly frequency (5-letter rule, the dominant pattern in book and academic publishing, and the one WP uses).

    "The guideline should describe a procedure to get the answer" – it already does, but all of MoS (in concert with AT and naming conventions) is the procedure; something in, say, MOS:TM or MOS:CAPS isn't magically inapplicable because it wasn't redundant copy-pasted into MOS:TITLES. "[C]heck the sources, but maybe only use high quality ones" – Sure, but that's already what WP does about everything. You seem (I don't want to misinterpret) to be wanting to draw a distinction here between very recent subjects and "historical" works, but there is not a policy basis on which to apply different sourcing standards. The fact is that most entertainment writing is poor-quality sourcing (the vast majority of it is primary-source reviewer opinion and interview material, and even when not it is subject to very little editorial control, by publishers that are marginally reputable). Regardless, it is not a reliable source of any kind for how to write an encyclopedia. This is the WP:CSF and WP:SSF central point that some people just ever don't seem to absorb. It just doesn't matter if a particular article is a very reliable source on when production wrapped on a TV show, and why a particular casting choice was made. That has no impact on WP orthography matters. How to write even the finest pop-culture journalism for Rolling Stone or E! has no implications of any kind for how to write an encyclopedia.

    Finally, back to non-English work titles: "If you think we should just go with a rule to follow the style of the origin language, great, but this is gonna cause all sorts of ALL CAPS or wEiRD caps cases which you seem to also think won't happen." That doesn't track. I think you are confusing "follow the style of the origin language" with "follow the style used by the publisher's marketing department on the original-language cover". They're not related. That is, if some French comic comes out and the title looks like la renoncule AGONISÉE de malheuR, most French publications of any quality are going to render this La Renoncule agonisée de malheur, and that is also the style most often recommended by English-language works for rendering French titles. It just does not matter that some low-grade publications (in English and in French) may give it literally as la renoncule AGONISÉE de malheuR; we would not, per MOS:ALLCAPS and MOS:TITLES and MOS:TM at all once. Our hands are not tied into doing the weird version unless virtually all sources ever, across all genres, do this with nearly no exceptions. And this nearly never happens. Even major TV shows and films with all-caps marketing titles, that fans like to render all-caps, are not rendered that way on Wikipedia, because we can always find reliable sources that, like us, do not feel a gun to their head forcing them to slavishly mimic marketing bullshit. For every instance of something odd like "Deadau5" and "iPhone" in WP titling, there are a thousand cases of "Kesha" instead of "Ke$ha" and "Macy's" instead of "macy's" and "Sony" instead of "SONY". It is extremely difficult to get WP to accept a marketing-gimmick stylization of any sort; the independent RS usage of the unusual style has to be near-unanimous. And that applies to titles of works, like everything else. Cf. Gangsta (manga), which is not (any longer) at GANGSTA., and never should have been. It only ever was because very early on there was little coverage except in anime/manga fandom outlets that mimic goofy title orthography without question. Your analogy to personal names is both faulty and on-point in different ways. There is much greater buy-in on the part of independent RS to go along with unusual personal name stylizations (and even some kinds of corporate trademarks, like "runtogethernames"), and for that stylization to become so ubiquitous in sources that we would end up with a WP:RECOGNIZABLE problem if we did not go along with it. You're right in that this standard applies to personal (and corporate/product) names as well as to work titles. Unfortunately for your stance on this stuff, the frequency of sources going along with weird styles in titles is markedly lower than for going along with things like "danah boyd" and "CCH Pounder" and "DaimlerChrysler".

   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:33, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Better Than Working

Should the "than" in this stub be capitalized, or not? My gut says "not", but wanted to ask before requesting a technical move. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 15:43, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

The word than is a preposition when preceding a noun phrase (as apparently here); this is clear because it assigns object case, like other prepositions (than me, for me, to me, etc.). (Before a clause it functions as a conjunction: than I am, etc., which also applies to elided clauses: than I am.) In either interpretation, preposition or conjunction, it ought to be lower case. Doremo (talk) 03:31, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Italics for holy books

Even though our guidelines say you should use italics for "books, multi-volume works (e.g. encyclopedias), and booklets", it seems that holy books are rarely italicized on Wikipedia: Torah, Pentateuch, Quran, Book of Genesis, Gospel of Matthew, all the other books of the bible, Old Testament, New Testament, Bhagavad Gita, Lotus Sutra, Charge of the Goddess, etc. Anyone know why that is? Should they be changed to italics or should the guidelines here be modified? Kaldari (talk) 03:17, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., § 8.102) states: "Names of scriptures and other highly revered works are capitalized but not usually italicized (except when used in the title of a published work). the Bhagavad Gita ... Koran ... Talmud ..." § 8.104: "The names of books of the Bible are capitalized but never italicized. The word book is usually lowercased ... Genesis; the book of Genesis ... Job; the book of Job ..." Doremo (talk) 03:26, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Yes, it's just a convention. I'm not so sure it's common for the Buddhist & Hindu ones. Johnbod (talk) 18:12, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

See RfC on changing DEADNAME on crediting individuals for previously released works

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#RfC: updating MOS:DEADNAME for how to credit individuals on previously released works
This potentially would affect a significant number of articles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:21, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Italics in citations (again)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 74#Italics 2 – another round of recurrent dispute over what to italicize in citations, and whether to cite just the publisher if the work title and the publisher are essentially the same. This was addressed in a previous RfC fairly recently, and many prior discussions, but there still seems to be some doubt among some editors what the answers are.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:22, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Update and simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS proposed

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/France and French-related articles § Proposed simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS, which is more than a decade outdated

Also has some implications for MOS:FOREIGNTITLE. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:06, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Translations of titles and capitalization

In English, titles tend to capitalize the first letter of proper nouns and adjectives, but this is not true for all other languages, for example Polis. I.e. this newspaper article in Polish has the title "Koniec mitu Westerplatte" which translates as "The End of Westerplatte's Myth". So the word myth is capitalized in English but not in Polish. In a recent A-class review a reviewer, User:Sturmvogel 66], said that "MOS:CONFORMTITLE says that the translated title should conform to the usage in the rest of the title, and MOS:CAPTITLE all translated titles should be in title case.", which I take it to mean that they want to see the Polish word capitalized in the reference. I think this would not be correct, as I don't think MoS demands that, and further, it would be plainly wrong, as it would change the Polish title from what it is to a Wikipedia-only version that is not grammatically correct (in Polish). Comments? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:48, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Jeez, MOS:CONFORMTITLE refers you for foreign titles to MOS:FOREIGNTITLE just below. This starts "Capitalization in foreign-language titles varies, even over time within the same language. Retain the style of the original for modern works. For historical works, follow the dominant usage in modern, English-language, reliable sources. Examples: Les Liaisons dangereuses (French; the English title is Dangerous Liaisons) ....." Johnbod (talk) 03:23, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

No, that's not what I meant at all. The translated title, and only the translated title, needs to use English title case. I have enough of a problem keeping track of the capitalization rules in languages that I sort of understand, much less ones in which I haven't a clue.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 03:27, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Ah yes, that's right. Johnbod (talk) 03:32, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

A translation of a title that doesn't exist in English is not a title. Titles of newspaper articles even in English often (mostly?) use sentence case. There is no reason to cap a translation from a Polish newspaper article. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:30, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Following the not-a-title logic, one would write: "Koniec mitu Westerplatte" (the end of Westerplatte's myth); that is, with an uncapitalized the. Doremo (talk) 07:16, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

If it's not a title, it uses sentence case, not all lower case. A separate question for the translator in this case is whether to include "The" at all.

Non-titles use all lower case, like this: "Koniec mitu Westerplatte" (an article published in 2005). In the example above, using sentence case to mark the parenthetical means considering it a title rather than a common noun phrase, and it simply expresses a personal preference for sentence case over title case for titles. Doremo (talk) 03:30, 17 December 2020 (UTC)