Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

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

Do you think there should be a section like this:

Don't get fancy

Deleted moved to article

Birth & Death Dates

I'd like to make a comment in favour of phrasing like "Name (born Month date, year, died Month date, year)", rather than "Name (Month date, year - Month date, year)". There are several reasons, of which the last is the big one:

It looks nicer if meaning is put into words instead of symbols.
The hyphen is too short to look good, and is technically wrong in favour of the en dash ("–"), but the en dash doesn't appear so well in all browsers.
There are no arguments over whether to put spaces around the dash.
If we establish using "born" and "died", then nobody will write "Jacques Chirac (November 29, 1932 - )" again; it will clearly be "Jacques Chirac (born November 29, 1932)", as we want.

— Toby 13:22 Aug 24, 2002 (PDT)

It makes sense to me. And, as someone (you?) pointed out, these are guidelines that copy editors can use to fix up articles much more than they are for original authors and the birth and death stuff is all over the map in existing articles and could be consolidated. Even when I was putting the first examples together I had some twinges about deleting the words born and died. I should have obeyed the twinges, but I didn't have this clear an idea what to do. Ortolan88

What would be the best way to incorporate the place of birth and death into the above? Eclecticology

Good question. I'd been rewriting around it. The dates are pretty solid and little disputed, the places may be unknown, variously stated, or irrelevant. I can't think of a standard way of doing it, which is why I didn't put anything in here. Ortolan88

IMHO birthplace should be stated separately. "Bob Roberts (born January 1, 1900, died January 1, 2000) was a famous bilge pumper. He was born in Swansea and died in Bognor Regis." reads far cleaner to me than trying to stick Swansea and Bognor Regis into the born / died block somewhere...you'd just end up with bad sense or excessive punctuation if you tried. AW

I've experimented with putting the places in the "date block", but it ends up being too much information and clarity is lost. Plus there's the agony of whether to put "Fiddleby" or "Fiddleby, Essex", or "Fiddleby, Essex, England" or even more. I'm not sure myself on putting "born" and "died" in, but if that's the general consensus I can't think of any rational onjections. This thread section has been sitting here dormant for a few weeks -- is it fair to say a decision has been reached? -- that is: "Bob Roberts (born January 1, 1900, died January 1, 2000). I'll leave this for a week & then put this on the subject page. -- Tarquin 20:37 Sep 7, 2002 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm confused about what's going on here. The above format (born date, died date) used to be recommended in the MoS. Now I look, and it recommends dashes (date - date); apparently Mav changed this about a week ago. Mav, as I recall you were a while ago running around changing open dates for living people from dash format (date -) to word format (born date), I note there's no note on this subject at all. --Brion 23:38 Sep 7, 2002 (UTC)

Yup. What you say is correct. The dominant style I've seen here in wikiland is to simply have {YEAR - YEAR) and by extention, (MONTH DAY, YEAR - MONTH DAY, YEAR) for people who have both come and gone. However for somebody who is still alive it is a bit too morbid to have a dash after somebody's birth date as if we are anxious to fill in the info after the dash or that it is otherwise simply a missing piece of information that we havn't found yet. Thus I have for months now have been changing (YEAR - ) to (born YEAR).

This may be part of the reason why some people are now doing the unnecessary (born MONTH DAY, YEAR, died MONTH DAY, YEAR) and the absurdly unnecessary (born MONTH DAY, YEAR in BIRTHPLACE, died MONTH DAY, YEAR in DEATHPLACE), which crowds out the all-important definition of who a person was (Birth/death-place info should come later as somebody already has suggested). What else would a range of dates in parenthesis after someone's name be other than birth and death dates (before anybody mentions it, years ruled would be after a title and not a mere name)?

Less is more and changing the "officially sanctioned" style to something that most current articles do not follow is just asking for much needless confusion and much needless work. --mav

Great. The "officially sanctioned" style now notes this distinction. --Brion

Thanks mav & Brion -- I knew there were good reasons against "born", "died", but I couldn't think of any. As far as I'm concerned, discussion closed. :-) -- Tarquin

I don't see why the place of birth/death should not be included in the parentheses. The only reason to put in the birthdate and deathdate in parentheses is to prevent awkward sentences like "John Q. was an English scientist. He was born on January 1, 1952 and died on December 31, 1999." However, now we we get "John Q. (January 1, 1952 - December 31, 1999) was an English scientist. He was born in Dullville, Essex and died in Boring, Sussex.", which is just as awkward. I'd say that either we are consistent and put all factual data in these parentheses, or we leave it completely free. Jeronimo

Because it crowds out other far more important info that should be on the first line - namely the definition of who a person is. --mav

As long as the definition is still in the first SENTENCE, what's the problem? The definition of first line is not objective anyway. If I would want to read the definition of some person, I would at least read the first line. By the way, the birthdates and places give me just as much information of who a person is than just his nationality and profession. They tell me whether he was person from this or a previous century, if he's already dead or not, if he was born on the east coast or west coast, or in a different country than where he lives. Jeronimo

"Line" was a poor use of words on my part. "Sentence" would have been better. As for birth place names, they should be at the beginning of the paragraph that talks about the person's childhood. Death place names should be at the end of the paragraph that talks about the person's later life. However, most stubs don't have these pargraphs yet so you get sentences that mention both of these together. All will be filled-in in time. Now I must go off to bed. --mav

If a birthplace must be mentioned in his "childhood paragraph", and his deathplace in the paragraph concerning his death, why shouldn't the dates be there as well? Like I said, this is not a very consistent style. Good night, Jeronimo

Birth/death dates firmly place the individual in time and thus in relation to the rest of history. Birth/death places aren't as effective here; you can travel far and wide over the whole world outside of a direct line between your birthplace and your deathplace, but never outside your birth and death dates. The birthplace/deathplace don't define the person's sphere of influence much more narrowly than the nationality, which is frequently already cited in the first sentence ("John Q (1952-1999) was an English scientist."). You may freely argue that the month and day are unnecessary precision for this purpose and should be abolished to "childhood paragraph"s etc along with the places, but the years are significant. --Brion

There's no rule against mentioning the dates of birth & death in the main body of the text, together with specific details on place: "he died on January 14, 1846, in mysterious circumstances involving a donkey, a cabbage and a fox in a brothel above a pawnshop in Southwark." -- Tarquin

Citations

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

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

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

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

URL and World Wide Web Style

Proposal on web stuff. I wasn't sure about future features and exactly how to put the discouragement of run-in web references. Ortolan88 10:51 Aug 25, 2002 (PDT)

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Numbers

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

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

Units

What's the preferred style for units? In your example for numbers etc. you use both m (metre) and kilograms (kg). I'd say the abbreviations for SI units are quite well established (well, outside of the US anyway) and are hardly seen written in full, but I'm not sure about the imperial units, one sees 10 yard, 10 y, 10 yd, 10 yards, etc. Any rules for this? Jeronimo

I think we should prefer metric / SI over Imperial / US. -- Tarquin

I know, but they will be used in many articles no doubt, if only as a secondary to the SI units. Jeronimo

Expressing inch-pound units: As in so many other cases, the metric is a clearer system -- m, cm, k, kg -- while there are many ways in the US system-- 1", 1 inch, 1 in -- and so forth. Since the main purpose here is consistency, how about in=inch, ft=foot, yd=yard, mi=mile, pd=pound, gal=gallon, pt=pint, qt=quart, etc--a regular set of two-letter abbreviations?

Such abbreviations of the US units are unlikely to be familiar to people from "the SI world". Can't these units just be written in full ? That's not much more characters to type. -- FvdP

Value of inch-pound units in Wikipedia:Despite the superiority, on paper, of the metric system, the world's largest economy, with the great majority of internet users, uses the metric system only in limited ways. I tried to lay out some reasonable rules:

For common weights and measures, animal sizes and the like, give both, but don't bother with going to decimal places on most conversions, unless precision is an issue, such as the area of Paris, Texas.
For things that are always metric, give metric
For things that are always inch-pound, give inch-pound

I am familar with the metric system and its merits (except for temperature, where I think for measurements in everyday life Fahrenheit rules), but I have a hard time making the conversions in my head (except, ironically, for temperature). Obviously, in the Wikipedia, if a writer doesn't put in the "other" measurement, someone else will probably come along and do it, but it would be irresponsible and a disservice to readers to state in the style guide "metric is always preferred".

And, anyway, one measurement is better than none. There are still lots of articles with no measurements given at all, Hummingbirds for instance, are famous for being small, but we give no dimensions at all. Ortolan88

I read once that the EU is larger economically than the US, but that is by the by... Metrication is an ongoing process, which won't ever get any faster is projects like this don't nudge it along a little. This is an international project, and the SI system is the internationally recognized standard. I say we drag people kicking and screaming into the 20th century. -- Tarquin

So what? North America is larger than Europe economically and California is larger than France in this regard as well. So that alone is not a good argument here. I do agree that we should err toward SI and metric though (see below). --mav

The purpose of an encyclopedia is to inform, not to make Americans do what Europeans think they ought to do. The metric system is very simple and well worked out and easier to use, but for the US to adopt it requires us to change every board, piece of steel, bottle, can, screw, bolt, nut, and measuring device in a highly developed economy. The US armed services have converted for the most part, some parts of the auto industry and others, including the US Bureau of Standards, that defines all US measurements in metric terms, but the incentive to change has to match the effort to change, and in the meantime, it will help immensely, and hurt not at all, if our articles remind people that a pound is about half a kilo and a meter is just over a yard. And I still say your degrees are just too big for ordinary daily use. All the world should be required to switch to Fahrenheit immediately. Ortolan88

"The metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the 9mm bullet." -- Dave Barry

I see the failure of the U. S. to adopt the metric system is more an issue of congressional foot-dragging than anything else. A large part of industry would be very happy with such a change; it would be a very big saving for them not to have to maintain two separate sets of inventory for domestic and export use. The soft drink industry has been ahead of the pack on this one - putting Coke in a 2-litre bottle hasn't poisoned. There's also a trade protectionist aspect to the debate. Industry in other countries is often not at all keen on the idea of a separate inventory to please the U.S.; that can be more of a bother than foregoing exports to the United States. Thus in a protectionist minded government a failure to adopt metric saves American jobs.

Even if Congress were to take the necessary measures today, it would still take at least two full generations for metric to be fully operational. Eclecticology 11:48 Aug 29, 2002 (PDT)

Out of interest - when did Britain start going metric? I was at school from 1987-2000 and I sure think in metric. Haven't got a clue what a pound weighs, gimme kilograms, and what are these "inch" things? =) AW

The UK decimalized its currency in the early 1970s, and switching to metric was a condition of entry to the EU around the same time. It's been a slow process. I remember when TV weather forecasts were in F and C, but they're now entirely in Celsius. Weights and measures on pre-packaged goods (eg packets, tins of food) went metric early on, but food measured at point of sale (markets, supermarket deli counters) have been dual for a long time -- they switched to metric only around 2000 (2001?), it's now indeed illegal to sell in pounds and ounces. Some imbecillic traders are taking the issue to the European court of Human Rights, but they're not the only chumps to make a mockery of the recent Human Rights legislation in the UK for their own ends and publicity. ... where was I? metrication has more info: "UK policy is to eliminate almost all nonmetric units by 2009, except for road signs." -- Tarquin

I simply use SI or metric and link to the appropriate unit article -- many of which already have conversion factors and links to a great online converter. See square kilometre. This is one of the way we were able to reduce the hideously wide countries tables to their current much leaner state. If and only if there is room, it seems appropriate in context and if it doesn't confuse things, should we use the American system (So long as links to the right unit article are included of course). See the boiling/melting point part of the barium table for an example of this. --mav

(cough) point of information :-) Canada is metric, and California state highways use km, at least that's what metrication says -- Tarquin

Double cough -- the km/mile experiment failed badly and new CA highway signs only use miles and the above was just to point out that comparing an entire continent to one country is not a valid comparison. Canada and the US do work together in a way very similar to the EU when it comes to economics. The Euro may strengthen economics ties between European nations to similar levels seen between US States in the future though. Also economics isn't a reason for this at all -- there are 280 million native English speakers in the US. How many native English speakers are there in Europe? --mav

The California km experiment probably had more to do with Mexico being metric than Canada. I suspect that there are still signs in kilometres in the southern part of the state, especially on the northbound side of the highways. (Bigger signs give better cover for hidden INS agents. :-)) The number of English speakers in Europe is not a significant fact because metrication is not a language issue. The history of this subject in the US is bizarre. For a chronology see http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/dates.htm Eclecticology

The number of English speakers that use one system vs another is at the heart of the issue. But now you are having me argue against a position I hold: that, here at least, we should use SI and metric most of the time and have units linked to articles that have conversion factors and external links to online converters. --mav

BTW, there are non-native english speakers, like me, on the English wikipedia. I think in SI units. --FvdP

I'm with mav on this one. The SI unit pages like metre give conversion into feet, yards, chains, furlongs, miles, etc -- Tarquin

Linking units is a good idea, but I am against preferring SI over imperial (even though I'm a European). It is like preferring UK spelling over US spelling or v.v.: we don't do that here either. The rules for the spelling are: use it consistently within one article and use it where appropriate. In scientific articles, it will be appropriate to use the SI units. However, if the subject is typically US or even UK (which if formally also a SI country, but in pratice far from it) imperial units may be more appropriate. If another reader feels it needs clarification with SI units, I don't care about how he does it. I DO want to have a "preferred style" for displaying imperial units. What is the most common convention for that? Jeronimo

We can all understand the words "color" and "colour". Having two types of units, however, can be a source of confusion. (NASA, anyone?) -- Tarquin

Using a form of measurement that I never use and despite intellectual admiration probably won't ever use is more confusing that courteously filling me (and my metric counterpart) in on what exactly is the measurement being presented.

Also, neither "SI" nor "Imperial" are familiar terms to me, and I'm better informed than the average dude. Ortolan88

Imperial / US units / whatever -- that only goes to show that they are non-standard. The rest of the world and the scientific community worldwide uses the SI system. Why not use the standard? -- Tarquin

Much of the above discussion seems to imply that Imperial and American Customary units are the same, which they are not. If you say a litre, everyone agrees how large that is, whereas a pint is different in Britain and America, and in America there are different volumes for wet and dry measures. Similarly an ounce could refer to a fluid ounce, a troy ounce or an avoirdupois ounce. Even the mile has statute and nautical variants. The advantage of the metric system is that it is unambiguous. Chris Q 10:13 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

Discussion copied from Talk:SI for wider circulation here, giving once again reasons for using the common US system and showing confusion between SI and metric:
<begin>
I have a friend who was raised in France, speaks French and is a college-educated automobile mechanic who in 25 years went through the transition from Imperial to metric system with several lines of cars, including teaching it to other mechanics, and he has never heard the expression SI. Hence, I added the word "metric" to this article. Ortolan88

Wait a minute here. I thought that the cgs system is what is commonly called the metric system and SI is simply the International Standard used by scientists (based on m, kg, s)? I also thought that most nations use a hybrid system made up of SI and cgs units. If the opening paragraph is correct then temperatures in Europe are measured and displayed in Kelvin and not degrees Celsius. --mav

I was going by the metric article and the metric-fan additions to Wikipedia:Manual of Style. It seems both these articles are wrong, from what you say. Every time I try to speak up for the 260 million non-metric Americans, I am treated to a condescending lecture on how superior the metric system is. I have never said it isn't superior (except for temperature), but that isn't the issue. The issue is ease of use of the wikipedia by the world's largest internet nation. It is too damn bad the US has been so slow and reluctant and whatever to adopt the metric system, and it is slowly coming in now, but we still don't use it in everyday life, so if we want to know how tall a hippopotamus is, someone is going to have to help us out. It is with some schadenfreude (delight at the discomfort of those you disagree with) at this indication that even metric enthusiasts are not sure what the difference between metric and SI is. Ortolan88
<end>

No, that isn't the issue. The issue is an international encyclopedia, usable by people around the world. Like it or not, English is the lingua franca, and the SI system is the lingua franca of measurement. The reason that the average Frenchman doesn't know the name "SI" is that there is little reason to know the name of the system used in France, since it is the only system is use.

Hippopotamus: that's what all the orders of magnitude pages are there for. I have endeavoured to put links to those pages wherever there is a measurement.

As for the "metric", "cgs", "SI" thing: AFAIK, "metric" is the generic term for the system as a whole, though to some extent the term "SI" is used as it's less ambiguous. "cgs" specified certain multiples as the base units ( the centimeter, gram and second) -- the idea being that in scientific work, one works with a base unit and exponential notation instead of using prefixes. (eg 4 x 10^4 g instead of 40 kg). "SI" is partly a change in base units (metre and kilogram), but also a redefining of the entire system, (with the wavelength of light being used instead of the Earth's circumference for the metre, for example), a setting out of 7 base units. -- Tarquin 09:30 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

The part on external links proposes to use a heading for such a section, but does not use a wiki-heading (with the = signs), while another part explicitly mentions those wiki-headings should be preferred. I'd support the latter and could fix the inconsistency in that way, but there may be other opinions on the matter?

I agree. It should be "== External Links==". -- Tarquin

I was the offending typist. A pure brain-o on my part. It should be == Ortolan88

I just put it in, but mav changed it to ==== on the grounds that == is "way too big". I submit that == is

way too big

for any purpose whatsoever. The reason I made it == was my belief that the subheads are hierarchical and may have other functions, including identifying which articles have external links. It is a violation (to use a harsh word, perversion would be another) of the idea of generic markup to use a different markup just to get a different appearance. If == is way too big, let's shrink it, but ==== should only appear after === and ==, so says longtime generic markup guy, Ortolan88

Yes, == and === produce "H2", "H3", etc. Those are structural markup tags. That is, they are tags that say "this is a second-level heading", "this is a third-level heading", etc. (the article title is an H1). How the browser chooses to display such a heading is up to (1) the browser, (2) the user's default stylesheet, and (3) the wikipedia standard stylesheet. We have control over #3, so if people think second-level headings are too big, we can tell the stylesheet to make them smaller, and it will (though it may still be overridden by the browser or user stylesheet). One should not change to incorrect markup just because it doesn't look good--we should fix it so that correct markup looks good. --LDC

they may commonly BE === , but they SHOULD be ==

Level-two headers (==) are virtually unused; three (===) in practical usage seems to be the default section header. Maybe that's wrong, but that's usage on this wiki. --Brion 22:12 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, it's wrong. The entry on headings on the MoS aims to correct this usage: it's prescriptive, not descriptive. I do agree that what is produced by "==" is too big. As LDC says: that's an issue for the stylesheet, not for markup. -- Tarquin 22:25 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

I totally agree with Tarquin and LDC. Those who know both MS Word (and the like) and (La)TeX will know the difference as well: you can make a word bold and size 16, but that doesn't make it a heading. It is a heading when you say it is a heading. If you don't like how your heading displays, then change the way headings are displayed. Jeronimo

A lot of articles contain "See also" on the bottom linking some related topics. Some of these links are unnecessary, as they are already linked from within the article, but some are not. How should these be presented? In a similar way as the External links, as give below, or are there better ways?

See also (or Internal Links?)

Jeronimo

The most used style I have seen is simply;