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::::::Then I guess if we end up in court over this we're screwed. [[User:EEng#s|<b style="color:red;">E</b>]][[User talk:EEng#s|<b style="color:blue;">Eng</b>]] 18:28, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
::::::Then I guess if we end up in court over this we're screwed. [[User:EEng#s|<b style="color:red;">E</b>]][[User talk:EEng#s|<b style="color:blue;">Eng</b>]] 18:28, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
{{outdent}} lol. [[User:CookieMonster755|<span style="color:#0099ff">cookie monster</span>]] [[User talk:CookieMonster755|<span style="color:Orange"><small>755</small></span>]] 18:44, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
{{outdent}} lol. [[User:CookieMonster755|<span style="color:#0099ff">cookie monster</span>]] [[User talk:CookieMonster755|<span style="color:Orange"><small>755</small></span>]] 18:44, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
:This seems to be a litany of people not getting the point, which is, in the context of hyphenation, that these children are four-year (in that they are studying four-year courses) and old (as children go). Mildly humorous things like this lose most of their effect if they have to be explained, but it seems that it is necessary to do so. [[User:Phil Bridger|Phil Bridger]] ([[User talk:Phil Bridger|talk]]) 20:33, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Revision as of 20:33, 1 July 2022

WikiProject iconManual of Style
WikiProject iconThis page falls within the scope of the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, a collaborative effort focused on enhancing clarity, consistency, and cohesiveness across the Manual of Style (MoS) guidelines by addressing inconsistencies, refining language, and integrating guidance effectively.Manual of StyleWikipedia:WikiProject Manual of StyleTemplate:WikiProject Manual of StyleManual of Style articles
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This page falls under the contentious topics procedure and is given additional attention, as it closely associated to the English Wikipedia Manual of Style, and the article titles policy. Both areas are subjects of debate.
Contributors are urged to review the awareness criteria carefully and exercise caution when editing.
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For information on Wikipedia's approach to the establishment of new policies and guidelines, refer to WP:PROPOSAL. Additionally, guidance on how to contribute to the development and revision of Wikipedia policies of Wikipedia's policy and guideline documents is available, offering valuable insights and recommendations.

Welcome to the MOS pit


    Style discussions elsewhere

    Add a link to new discussions at top of list and indicate what kind of discussion it is (move request, RfC, open discussion, deletion discussion, etc.). Follow the links to participate, if interested. Move to Concluded when decided, and summarize conclusion. Please keep this section at the top of the page.

    Current

    (newest on top)

    Capitalization-specific:

    This section is an excerpt from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters § Current.[edit]

    Move requests:

    Other discussions:

    Pretty stale but not "concluded":

    Concluded

    Extended content
    This section is an excerpt from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters § Concluded.[edit]
    Capitalization-specific:
    2023
    2022
    2021

    Non-breaking spaces with written-out units

    As a follow-up to topic-specific discussions at Talk:Hassium and User talk:DePiep#MOS and NBSP, it seems that the current MOS guideline on the usage of non-breaking spaces when separating numbers from written-out units (e.g. 5 kilometers (instead of 5 km); 118 elements) is open to interpretation. It advises to use non-breaking spaces when line breaks are awkward, which they seem to be in this case; however, implementing this would apparently require making heavy changes to lots of articles, as it is not strongly established as are the examples given in the MOS section.

    I thus ask, should the same guideline for quantities and abbreviated units be followed for fully spelled-out units? Should non-breaking spaces be used only with abbreviations, or always with units and quantities? I would like to establish a more definite MOS guideline, in which one or the other is widely agreed upon as common practice. ComplexRational (talk) 00:46, 10 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    • I really, really wish people would stop jumping straight into a project-wide RfC before working with other editors to frame the questions to be posed. I urge you to withdraw this. And MOSNUM is probably the right place for this. (Main MOS vs subsidiary pages is a longstanding problem.) EEng 01:26, 10 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Where else would you suggest discussing this, seeing as its outcome is not specific to the articles for which this was discussed, and the question is pretty straightforward from these discussions? If it can be held elsewhere, I will withdraw; however, I don't think that place is MOSNUM because this issue pertains to MOS:NBSP, which is not its own MOS sub-page. I'm open to ideas. ComplexRational (talk) 02:02, 10 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      I'd suggest discussing it right here (or at Talk:MOSNUM, but since ultimately it's an aesthetic, not technical, issue I guess here is fine.) There are plenty of people here who have thought a lot about formatting issues, and many have outside professional experience, and with their participation I suspect the issue can either be resolved or boiled down to a clearcut question. Open-ended RfCs like you've started, which pull random people from all over into an unstructured discussion, just end up a mess. EEng 03:28, 10 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Okay, I withdrew it as an RfC. Let's play it out as a regular discussion now; I apologize for being unaware of this potential complication. ComplexRational (talk) 09:53, 10 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Ping to prevent archiving. EEng 12:49, 27 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      I don't see the "jumping into an RfC" that EEng is referring to here. I do see a reasonable description by ComplexRational of a MOS detail to be clarified somehow. Do I miss some invisible redacted editing? Please clarify. As it stands now, the OP is correct and relevant to me. -DePiep (talk) 00:01, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Yes, obviously, like the OP said: he had set this up as an RfC but later withdrew it at my urging. EEng 00:28, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Eh, that 'obvious' part is not visible then?, like in an talk edited afterwards (ouch)? Must I do homework research to see it? -DePiep (talk) 00:34, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Jesus Christ, the OP wrote, just above here: Okay, I withdrew it as an RfC. 01:46, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
      I think the point that is puzzling both DePiep and me is there seems to be no trace of the !RfC for us to see what issues had been raised. Starting an RfC and then withdrawing it should surely leave something in a history somewhere. There are no links, nor anything in contributions that I can find. What am I missing? --RexxS (talk) 14:11, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      The most recent diff before I withdrew upon EEng's suggestion was [1]. All that changed since then was removal of the RfC template; the content of my original post is the same now as it was then. ComplexRational (talk) 14:43, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    In traditional typography, typesetters would ensure that sentences didn't break onto another line at a point where the result was a new line starting with something that didn't make sense alone, or where the break would produce a semantic dissonance. So they would avoid lines starting with an abbreviation:

    • something something ... a distance of 15
      km

    as well as lines that changed meaning when the next line was read:

    • something something ... a cost of $5
      million

    In electronic document processing, when line length can change with screen resolution or window size, the non-breaking space was used to prevent those sort of breaks from happening. I don't believe there has ever been any rationale for placing a non-breaking space between numbers and normal recognisable English words, because those don't produce problems, other than in cases like the second example. There is really nothing wrong with seeing:

    • something something ... a distance of 15
      kilometres

    and it is especially ludicrous to extend the fetish for non-breaking spaces in quantities to normal counted items. There is nothing wrong with reading:

    • something something ... a squad of 24
      football players

    The examples at MOS:UNITNAMES reflect these simple principles, and I can't see what other interpretation could be made of the present guidance:

    • Use a non-breaking space ({{nbsp}} or &nbsp;) between a number and a unit symbol, or use {{nowrap}} ...
    • ... and a normal space is used between a number and a unit name.

    If somebody wants to change those guidelines, then they really should be proposing what changes they want made and the reasons for them. --RexxS (talk) 19:07, 27 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    Just for the record, I wasn't proposing a change. I was merely asking for clarification, and if any disagreement were to arise, then firmly establish one way or another. What is written here makes sense, now I only propose that it is made crystal clear for other (copy)editors in the MOS:NBSP section (to use only with abbreviations). ComplexRational (talk) 00:10, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    (ec) @RexxS:, these examples are undisputed, and are clear by WP:NBSP and WP:MOSUNIT. Minor detail: your example of 15<regularspace>kilometres is not in the MOS explicitly, but well observed, also by {{Convert}} — end of detail.
    Note: for simplicity, an "_" (underscore) says NBSP.
    A question arose when reading in MOS:NBSP: It is desirable to prevent line breaks where breaking across lines might be confusing or awkward. -- note the criterium "awkward". The examples given are (1) unit symbols - no problem, see before, and (2) exampes of number-in-proper-name (Boeing_747).
    Some editors state that the "awkward" situation may also occur in situations with a number inline, i.e. in running text. Examples (in here): element_114, the expected magic 114_protons, ....
    My (opposing) point is that such number-word combinations are not awkward, can reasionably occur in any running sentence, are part of a reading habit, and so are not 'awkward' and do not allow an NBSP. Otherwise, this whole enwiki could require a MOS-change in ~every article, or have inconsistent styles between articles re this line-breaking.
    So, first question: do we recognise this is a Good MOS Question to discuss? -DePiep (talk) 00:25, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    There's long been a need for the nbsp/nobreak guidance to be improved. I've never done anything about it because I realized some cases would need a discussion. EEng 00:28, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @DePiep: It certainly seems that something ought to be done to educate editors about when to use (and not use) non-breaking spaces. I just looked at the Island of stability article you pointed out. Over 200 non-breaking spaces. Seriously? I've just removed four that you could see at a glance occur at places where the line could never break. No doubt somebody will revert me, citing MoS instead of thinking for themselves. I'm not sure repeating the already crystal clear guidance in MoS is the solution though. Either they never read MoS or they don't understand what a line break is. Either way, tinkering with the MoS won't have any effect on them. As for your actual examples, I've long ago given up trying to convince others that there's absolutely nothing wrong with reading
    • Flerovium, with the expected magic 114
      protons, was first synthesized in 1998
    Although to get a line break there, you would have to be viewing on a screen with a maximum line length of less than 40 characters. Even my 1978 vintage TRS-80 could manage that. --RexxS (talk) 03:06, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • If 114 protons can't be broken, then you may as well say that every number has to be followed by an nbsp, always, and that would be silly.
    • I do think Z = 112 shouldn't break, though that would be better coded as {{nobr|Z = 112}} than the current Z&nbsp;=&nbsp;112
    • I'm not sure that all the examples at MOS:NBSP belong there, and I wonder if there shouldn't be some other cases listed.
    EEng 04:20, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    User:RexxS: that is my understanding of MOS:NBSP too, including its background (typography). It's just, I stopped editing because of EW, started a talk, and involved editors correctly started a wider talk here. But I see no need to admonish other editors, instead we could use a clearer MOS text and explanation here, for fellow editors. -DePiep (talk) 08:28, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I now see that the section title here is a much narrower issue than the wide one ComplexRational and I were discussing/editing. As the Island of stability example show, it was and is about all of MOS:NBSP. This complicates/disturbs this talk flow, I must excuse. (how to proceed?). -DePiep (talk) 08:32, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @EEng and DePiep: Apologies, I was too focused on the quantities issues and not enough on the general nbsp guidance, which does seem to be missing. IMHO, we should have a guideline that says something like
    • Numbers followed by an ordinary English word (not an abbreviation, or similar) do not require a non-breaking space between them in normal circumstances.
    There are also many circumstances where a non-breaking space is unnecessary because a line break can't happen there. There are three examples in Island of stability: in the caption of the infobox (the width is fixed, regardless of window size); in reference number 5 (too close to the start of a line for a line break to be possible); and in the table caption "Most stable isotopes of superheavy elements (Z ≥ 104)" (the table can't become narrow enough to wrap the caption onto another line). I've tried pushing the zoom up to 250% and narrowing the window to its minimum, but I can't find a setting that could cause a line break where one had been placed. Nevertheless, I don't suppose that is anything we can, or should, try to give guidance about in MoS for fear of causing more confusion. --RexxS (talk) 14:06, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    In the first image, a line break appeared at 70% zoom on my computer screen, and indeed was awkward. What exactly are you suggesting would risk more confusion? The MoS is supposed to make things as clear as possible, and I wouldn't have started this thread had it been clear from the beginning (echoing EEng – There's long been a need for the nbsp/nobreak guidance to be improved.). ComplexRational (talk) 14:40, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for explaining how you got the line break in the image caption; I hadn't considered zooming out that far. But do you think anybody actually reads Wikipedia at 70% zoom? I can't even get any of my browsers to zoom at 70% to see the effect. Still, it's possible, so best to leave in the {{nowrap}} in that case. The general point about infobox images with captions shorter than the image width is worth understanding, though.
    What I am suggesting is that there are many cases where we simply don't need a non-breaking space, i.e. whenever it's not possible for the line to break at that point, but that it's difficult to try to give foolproof guidance to cover those cases, so I don't think we can come up with a form of words that would be helpful. Can you?
    Do you agree with my suggested clarification above: Numbers followed by an ordinary English word (not an abbreviation, or similar) do not require a non-breaking space between them in normal circumstances. and if not, why not? --RexxS (talk) 16:33, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Makes sense, I understand what you're saying about captions. Would it then also be better to use {{nobr|1=''Z'' = 114}} (for example) throughout the article, if this would be preferred to a pair of nbsp's? (On an unrelated note, maybe a new template should be created following whatever this discussion establishes, as this is pretty common in chemistry and physics articles.) ComplexRational (talk) 18:18, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with this wording, it addresses the elephant in the room and is easy enough to follow. I would specifically use it as an antithesis to the MOS points advising nbsp with units (70_km) or parts of the name (Airbus_A380), though I suppose saying "not an abbreviation" already addresses that. The only thing that may raise questions is "normal circumstances" – I'd rather leave that out and add an additional bullet point saying something along the lines of Non-breaking spaces are not required in fixed-with table cells or image captions, especially when the text is not long enough to wrap., or else work out through discussion what the most common exceptions would be (that would otherwise confuse editors unfamiliar or too familiar with MOS). ComplexRational (talk) 18:18, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Most editors, in my experience, prefer {{nowrap}} over multiple consecutive non-breaking spaces in a phrase. It makes the wikitext more readable for other editors (the same reason we prefer to avoid html entities where possible).
    The "normal circumstances" would be to cover exceptions like
    • ... his fee for the service was $50
      thousand.
    where a non-breaking space between the number and the next word would avoid giving the reader the impression the fee was $50 until they read on to the next line. But I'm happy to accommodate other views such as giving examples of specific exceptions instead of stating "normal circumstances".
    While I think about it, there is a good case for what I called the "semantic dissonance" to be noted as a rule in other places as well:
    • ... the great-grandnephew of Queen Mary
      II
    To anyone familiar with Tudor/Stuart history of England, it first reads as Mary I of England, then as Mary II of England when the next line is reached and obviously should be avoided. That represents one of the very few phrases where I would have no hesitation in recommending the use of a non-breaking space for cogent, rather than aesthetic reasons.--RexxS (talk) 19:26, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    This is already covered at MOS:NUM, to the extent any of this needs any rule-mongering. It advises using non-breaking spaces in strings like 5 cm, but it does not advise doing this when using spelled-out words. It doesn't advise against it, either. Like most things, it is left to editorial discretion. Nothing is broken. No, we do not need another template, since {{nobr}} and {{nbsp}} work fine. So does just using &nbsp;. Yes, it is WP:Common sense to non-breakify certain strings like "$50 thousand", and "Mary II". No, we don't need a rule about it, or we would've already had one by now. No, we do not need anyone going around inserting non-breaking spaces robotically in proximity to every number they see, per WP:MEATBOT ("ain't broke, don't 'fix' it").  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:29, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    NBSP for numeric followed by words

    Hi all, I recently put up Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/1985 World Snooker Championship/archive2 for FAC. SandyGeorgia commented that there should be some additional non-breaking spaces for items such as "15 seeds, 103 entrants, 32 participants". I don't really mind putting these in, but wanted to clarify our MOS, and how it effects these types of phrases. My understanding at WP:NBSP is that we should use these on names, such as World War 2, and measurements, such as 10 Miles. However, should we also use these on regular expressions, such as "20 people"? I don't mind either way, but wanted to clarify before I do wholesale changes. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 14:19, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    The guideline gives patchy and somewhat conflicting advice on this entire subject. I'm going to give you what I think will be useful guidance, but we must brace ourselves for people to leap out at us from all corners of the project to denounce what I say as at best the product of unfathomable ignorance, and at worst detrimental to the moral fiber of the nation.
    There are two (maybe more, but two I can think of offhand) things we're trying to prevent:
    • (1) You don't want tiny fragments that look odd alone stranded on the start of a line. Thus World War{nbsp}2 and Henry{nbsp}VIII.
    • (2) You don't want two things separated by a linebreak if the reader, seeing just the first part, will be momentarily misled and have to back up and rethink when he sees the bit on the next line. Thus $2{nbsp}million, because if the million goes on the next line the reader first thinks "Two dollars", and then when he sees the million he has to back up and think "Oh, wait, Two million dollars". (This is a peculiarity of the fact that money symbols go at front of quantities rather than at the end as with other units. Can anyone think of a similar example not involving money?)
    (3) Notice that the logic of (2) doesn't arise with normal quantities like 15 seeds or 2 million dollars (i.e. no nbsp used in these cases) because as the reader scans "15<linebreak>seeds" there's nothing misleading about 15 alone at the end of the line, and the same for scanning "2<linebreak>million dollars" or "2 million<linebreak>dollars". When you think about it, if you required nbsp in constructions like that, then you're pretty much saying every number anywhere must be followed by an nbsp, and that can't be right. So I would not put {nbsp} in your examples.
    (4) Units of measure are a special case. By the logic of (3), there's no {nbsp} in 10 kilometers. However, I think the guideline does recommend an {nbsp} in the case of 10{nbsp}km, because at the start of a line km looks weird in a way kilometer doesn't. (km is what's called a unit symbol, whereas kilometer is what's called a unit name, and there are several other ways in which unit symbols and unit names are treated differently, so there's nothing odd about treating them differently here.)
    Perhaps the principles laid out above can be the start of a revival of this thread. EEng 03:04, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Or perhaps not. In the meantime, here are some other places I think (comment invited, of course) nbsp would be needed or not needed. Probably some or all of these are give by others in the posts above but I want to get them down while they're on my mind.
    Needed:
    • In DMY dates e.g. 28{nbsp}May or 28{nbsp}May 1935, because at least some readers will find separation of the day-in-month from the month odd. (Further explanation on request as to why this is different from the case of 10 kilometers.)
    • In MDY dates e.g. May{nbsp}28, 1935, because "28, 1935" looks ludicrous at the start of a line.
    • He responded, "Better you than{nbsp}I." or The smallest reading was{nbsp}5.
    • 9:30{nbsp}a.m. because I think it's somewhat analogous to a unit symbol (see above); and definitely 9:30{nbsp}am, because "am" alone and separated from the "9:30" could cause the reader to trip and fall.
    • several{nbsp}.22 shells, because starting a line with a . looks weird
    • <certain image caption situations, details to be supplied (centered captions, left-aligned captions)>
    • Ellipsis or other fragments at the start of a quotation: He listed them as "1.{nbsp}Good goals, 2. Good planning, 3. Good execution; or The torn fragment read, "...{nbsp}for the love of God!"
    • July{{nbsp}}28, 1942 ????
    Not needed:
    • 123 Main Street
    EEng 00:48, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • I ask people here: how often have you struck a dangling numeral at the end of a line? Me: not that I can recall. Tony (talk) 07:08, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      By struck do you mean "run into/happened to find" or "struck out/had to get rid of"? EEng 16:14, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Perhaps that was meant to be "stuck", the synonym for "put". —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:58, 13 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • I could see having a summary section somewhere (hopefully not in the main page, maybe in MOS:TEXT) about "Appropriate uses of non-breaking spaces" or some heading title like that, in which we could suggest these sorts of cases, without implying that they're required. People already rankle at the currently fairly-strongly-recommended ones in MOS:NUM and a few other places. So, there's opportunity to cry "WP:CREEP!" here if this discussion produces more rules, rather than optional tweaks for polishing up text for maximum usability.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:30, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Definitely for FA-level polishing, mostly, but there's one situation where I've found it worth the trouble to apply nbsp/nobr fairly liberally: in image captions, because their short line length means bad breaks do occur now and then unless you prevent them. EEng 03:45, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm surprised to see the above quote from MOS:NUM (WP:UNITNAMES): "a normal space is used between a number and a unit name". Personally, I would find a line break within the example's "29
      kilograms" rather ugly. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 00:05, 14 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      Me, too. The position "you're pretty much saying every number anywhere must be followed by an nbsp" that EEng spoke against earlier actually seems to me to be the best practice. Your example of a break between 29 and kilograms not only looks "ugly", but makes me think that there has been a misprint of some sort causing me to have trouble understanding what is written. --Khajidha (talk) 19:38, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Somewhat related, but since the discussion here is almost-exclusively referencing insertion of NBSPs, I wanted to re-raise this previous discussion where I advocated for using Template:nowrap instead of NBSPs. The simple reason being that (at least on my system / in my browser) {{nowrap}} has the same effect as the insertion of NBSPs, without affecting spacing of the text the way NBSP does (again, at least on my system). Here's the example I presented:
    Bare Wikilinked
    Using {{nowrap}} World War I World War I
    Using &nbsp; World War I World War I
    Looking at that on my screen, the &nbsp; version has a much larger — in fact, uncomfortably large — space between "War" and "I", whereas the {{nowrap}} version is spaced normally. If we can protect phrases against wrapping without making the formatting look weird, I figure that makes the decision on when/whether to do so a bit less fraught. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 02:52, 15 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

    Something from somewhere else

    From User:Tony1/Monthly_updates_of_styleguide_and_policy_changes / WP:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-07-07/Dispatches --EEng 15:34, 18 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

    Non-breaking spaces. The narrower scope for using non-breaking (i.e., "hard") spaces was significantly clarified. They should be used:

    • in compound expressions in which figures and abbreviations or symbols are separated by a space (17 kg, AD 565, 2:50 pm);
    • between month and day in dates that are not autoformatted (August 3, 1979);
    • on the left side of spaced en dashes; and
    • in other places where displacement might be disruptive to the reader, such as £11 billion, 5° 24′ 21.12″ N, Boeing 747, and the first two items in 7 World Trade Center.

    Improve Controlling line breaks section

    It seems that it would be good if the example markup of 5° 24′ N included a non-breaking space between the 5degrees and the 24minutes and the N. DGerman (talk) 21:18, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

    Does this still need to remain unarchived?

    EEng? valereee (talk) 17:20, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Along with patrollers reflexively responding to edit requests with "Get consensus first", it's one of those things I plan to get to sometime between now and when I die. EEng 17:31, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    It's been here for two years. I say let it archive. If people want to raise it again, and maybe get a clearer consensus, then okay. But this isn't attracting new meaningful commentary.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:37, 25 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    But it acts as a mute reminder that I need to get back to this someday! Isn't that reason enough for keeping it here? EEng 02:08, 26 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Using "who/whose/her/him/hers/his" in the context of named individual animals

    It seems that there is a strong tendency for Wikipedia articles to use "who" and "whose" and "him" and "her" (e.g., rather than "it", "that" or "which") when discussing named individual animals. It seems pretty consistent. I first noticed it for racehorses. I recall being a bit disturbed when someone changed a phrase like "Fast Filly was a racehorse that won the 2018 Kentucky Derby" to replace "that" with "who", but that seems to be our general convention. For examples, see the opening sentences of Secretariat (horse), Seattle Slew, War Admiral, Whirlaway and Rombauer (horse). I asked about it at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Horse racing#"Who" versus "it", "that" or "which", and apparently the issue has been discussed before and this convention has been generally agreed. I noticed the same phenomenon in articles about several other types of animals as well – orcas, giant pandas, apes, bears, dogs, cats – I found it everywhere I looked. I suggest describing this convention in the MoS grammar section. Has this been discussed as a MoS matter before? Is it already documented somewhere? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 00:29, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    • I don’t recall it being discussed before… but my initial reaction is “meh”. Blueboar (talk) 00:41, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Its rather a common feature of the English language that individual animals who have close relations with humans will start to be referred to using the pronoun appropriate to their gender (since animals are usually male or female...). This kind of language is usually frequent in informal settings, but it can also be seen in more formal settings, for ex. race horses, [2]: Lively Citizen (2.25), the star of David Jeffreys’ small yard near Evesham, is a prime example. He is two-from-three since 7lb claimer Archie Bellamy took over in the saddle, and the race in between was a non-event as his saddle slipped early on. He is just 4lb higher after another battling success at Leicester in February and with many firms offering six places, he looks an excellent each-way bet at around 20-1.. However my reaction is otherwise pretty much like Blueboar's. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:51, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • There's a good account of the matter at Why Writers Fight Style Guides. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:30, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      In the early 1960s, Jane Goodall turned in her first paper about the chimpanzees of Gombe, only to have it returned to her with official instructions that each he, she, and who referring to a chimp be replaced with it or which. (“Incensed, I, in my turn, crossed out the its and whichs and scrawled back the original pronouns,” she writes in her memoir Through a Window).

    • If a living beings sex can be determined then 'him' or 'her' seems accurate. "It" sounds like a mechanical toy. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:17, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Agree with Randy Kryn. On the who vs that issue, I likewise think it's fine to use 'who' for most individual animals, but also noting that 'that' is nearly always an acceptable alternative to 'who' in these contexts (it may not always be best, but I don't think it would ever necessarily be wrong) - even for people, 'that' and 'who' have been used interchangeably since time immemorial. 2600:1702:4960:1DE0:5CAB:B9C5:3234:C105 (talk) 15:16, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I recall some time ago when editing a racehorse article there was some editor who jumped in just to change "that" to "who". I don't remember whether I started edit warring with them or not. But the practice is so highly consistent in racehorse articles that it cannot be accidental. There must be some people who are actively changing "that" to "who". —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:41, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • why no “whom’s”? Blueboar (talk) 15:18, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      That's another discussion, but "whom" has fallen into disuse in favor of "who" in mainstream American English, and Wikipedia should reflect that. We are not linguistic prescriptivists or elitists. We follow mainstream usage. MarshallKe (talk) 16:57, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Um, no. It has fallen into disuse in informal English everywhere, but WP is not written in informal English, so continue to use whom when appropriate.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:33, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Excuse me, there are many of us whom still mark the objective case even casually, so be careful for who you speak! SamuelRiv (talk) 03:11, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • If writing about an individual animal of known sex, "he" or "she" seems appropriate. This would also be the case when writing about a generic animal in a situation where the sex is relevant. But when writing about a generic animal in a context where the sex of the individual is not relevant, "it" seems appropriate. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:22, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • At least the animals of which (whom?) we are talking usually have a sex, which has replaced grammatical gender in English, so there is some sort of case to be made. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:01, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Taking the perspective of the dominant attitude towards the concept of gender in this community, the argument could be made that because an animal cannot communicate their preferred gender, a default should be used. Also taking what I presume to be the dominant attitude against anthropomorphizing animals, an argument could be made against the use of "who" in favor of "which" and "it" instead of "they". My personal opinion? This conversation is a waste of time. It's not that important. MarshallKe (talk) 17:00, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, there's very slightly more chance of a primate communicating its (their/her/his) preferred gender than there is of a means of water transport doing so. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:09, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm going to keep making my transoceanic vessels joke over and over and over until someone acknowledges how brilliant it is. EEng 20:22, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Perhaps take the comment to a sandbox where you can keep writing until someone finds it funny or appropriate. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 20:27, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    No, I'm just going to hold my breath right here until I turn blue. EEng 17:37, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I tried it once and it didn't work. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:56, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    References

    1. ^ Note: Recycled joke

    Split out the "Gender Identity" subsubsection from the "Identity" subsection

    Pretty much the title. Right now MOS:ID is a level 2 heading, with the "gender identity" subsection being underneath it as a level 3 heading. I believe "gender identity" should be level 2 on equal footing with "identity". The status quo would seem logical as they're both types of identity, but they differ in a few key aspects.

    • Wrongful gender identification is a BLP issue in a way that other forms of wrongful identification aren't. If we use the word Prince to refer to the singer instead of the symbol (or the term "the artist formerly known as Prince") or call someone by their real name instead of a stage name, that's not going to ruin their lives or anything. However, if we misgender a living person, that is triggering and uniquely offensive in a way that other forms of wrongful identification aren't.
    • Making it a subsubsection reduces it in importance as some ancillary issue to other forms of identity. MOS:GENDERID goes to a massive subsection in the biography part of the MOS which has its own explanatory supplement. In terms of importance of the issue, this is probably something we've written more on about than all other forms of identity combined.
    • We don't want people to compare or consider the idea that gender identity is a subset of other forms of identity. Some people may be tempted to make the argument in discussions that "gender identity is a form of identity we have a specific exemption for, why don't we make another exemption for this other subject?" The project considers this sort of argument in disputes to be wrong, so we should make it clear that gender identity is a sui generis classification that we do not want to be compared to other forms of identity as the situation surrounding gender identity is unique.

    I was wondering what people thought of this proposed change and if we can gain consensus to make it. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 22:41, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    The section structure is there to make the maze of twisty passages that is our MOS more navigable. It's not a measure of how important this or that is, and I strongly object to adding such a concept to the already-large pile of unimportant stuff we already have available to fuel endless, pointless argument. EEng 04:46, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I oppose for much the same reason. This is an instruction manual, and should be organized by topic, not importance. Magnolia677 (talk) 10:59, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with EEng and Magnolia, for some similar reasons, and would also add that if people believe that we should treat people with courtesy and decency because of other identity-related issues like race, ethnicity, sexuality, language, place of birth, etc; then that's not exactly a bad thing. The standards we use for gender identity are not exactly bad if we also apply them to other identity issues. --Jayron32 11:54, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Well...I do suppose any kind of self-identification for which absolute acceptance is mandated is susceptible to abuse by players acting in bad faith (including gender), and one could possibly argue that the more types of identity are treated in that fashion, the greater potential for abuse is created. (e.g., say, a white person claiming black racial identity in attempt to take advantage of programs intended to support disadvantaged peoples, when that person actually has no such disadvantage). That is not my position, by the way..I agree with what you said entirely. I also think that if we were to start enshrining in PAGs which social categories are more important than others, that that sets a potentially very dangerous precedent..because then we are basically deciding which groups of people are more important than which other groups of people. (And "gender identity" is already increasingly starting to be seen by many gays and lesbians as an existential threat to their own civil and human rights; whether there's base to those concerns is irrelevant, the project has no business making rulings at a project level over which groups' concerns and interests are more legitimate or important than others). 2600:1702:4960:1DE0:1BB:1B9C:92AB:34C7 (talk) 23:14, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @Jayron32: I recently participated in an ANI thread about someone who said we should extend the standards for gender identity to royal pretenders and got blocked for it. If we are to say that this identity standard should be extended, we should consider delineating the boundaries because the community likely won't allow anyone to self-identify as a monarch, will probably have a murkier time with ethnicity, and would likely allow people to self identify their sexuality/etc. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 22:43, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Oh, I never said we should extend the definition to include people who use the identity issue to mock those who are legitimately under societal assault for their identity issues; people that mock others by saying stupid shit like "I identify as a monarch" are not extended the grace that is given to those that are actually discriminated against because they are of a different race, sexuality, gender identity, ethnicity, language group, etc. You know that's bullshit, and so did the person who made that argument. What I am saying is that people from discriminated against groups should be extended a baseline level of respect and dignity, and that perhaps raising the bar of dignity is not something we should argue against. --Jayron32 11:01, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    But what if they say they identify as a queen? Then what?[FBDB] EEng 21:39, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I think I literally just answered that. We extend grace and courtesy to people who are parts of groups or have traits that are currently being discriminated against by society. If a person is transgender, we extend to them due courtesy by recognizing their status in the appropriate manner. A person who mocks transgender people by saying "I identify as a <insert ridiculous thing here>" are no so afforded that courtesy. They're just being assholes, and saying that a person who does that is equivalent to someone who is genuinely transgender is intellectually dishonest, and just plain rude. --Jayron32 18:43, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Think, Jayron, think. It's me. EEng 20:08, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    There is a difference between "is foo" and "identifies as foo". We should be respectful of people's beliefs about their identities, even when they aren't persecuted, but we should also be respectful of those who don't share those beliefs. That's not just gender, it's also, e.g., geography, religion. Issues like male athletes who have hormone treatment and join female teams need to be addressed in a courteous, neutral and respectful manner. My inclination would be to use the term identifies as foo for anything likely to be controversial. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 20:37, 30 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    We also want to be careful about the derogatory or pejorative use of "identifies as" rather than just "is". The former is often used in a way that casts doubt on the earnestness of the person in question, as though it is some kind of arbitrary choice, rather than being a core element of their selves. Terminology that highlights (falsely) the identity as a choice is wrong, also is terminology that treats people's identity as non-normative; that there is an expectation that a person is a cis-hetero-white-male-protestant or whatever, and that all else is variant from that normative state. We should avoid language that treats people that are not that as somehow lesser, deviant, or outside of the norm. --Jayron32 13:33, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Exactly. The opinions of those who refuse to accept facts because they don't fit their prejudicial programming don't matter. A trans identity is not a matter of opinion, it's a fact that must be stated plainly. And, absolutely right that white cis hetero male is not some sort of default setting for humanity. We need to avoid any such implication. oknazevad (talk) 21:05, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You are correct to a certain extent, but wrt gender identity I don't think it's always possible to avoid "identifies as" type language, as...well, that's what an identity is, how a person identifies. Some want to redefine the gender categories to make them completely based on a person's identity and completely independent of biological sex. Many women (and gays) have strong objection to that, because females, regardless of their gender identity, are also an oppressed class of people; furthermore, (biological) women face certain adversities that are entirely due to biological reality, not culture or society, and those will not change until we evolve into another species. Those adversity no male, including no trans woman, will ever be subject to. E.g., no trans woman will ever have to experience having an unwanted pregnancy imposed on her forcefully via rape, possibly being made to carry it to term against her will, possibly dying in the process. Many women feel that shared experiences such as those and others are what distinguishes their sex from the male sex. This is not to say that individuals should not be respected, but that redefining 'woman' to mean something other than the type of human that is subjected to those realities erases their existence as a group. Likewise, to many female homosexuals, when they are told that "lesbian" also applies to heterosexual males that identify as lesbians, and that if they don't submit to penile-vaginal intercoarse with those individuals that they are 'TERFs', that feels a lot like compulsory heterosexuality to them. (See the article lesbian erasure for more on this subject). So, point being, all things within reason. We should write respectfully about all peoples, but it would (in my opinion) be wrong for us to declare that, e.g., gender identity is of higher priority than discrimination due to biological sex, or that a gay person's exclusive oppositesame-sex attraction does not have to be respected when heterosexual members of the opposite sex who are trans. (Yes, the trans person's identity should be respected, but their identity doesn't entitle them to compel a homosexual person to engage in sexual activity that is contra to their orientation, and we should not be writing article text that suggests it does). 2600:1702:4960:1DE0:4D69:F0F8:A0CA:5BC (talk) 07:46, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Nobody writes article text doing what that last bolded line states - that is a complete red herring. And even apart from that obvious point, people being told that if they don't submit to penile-vaginal intercoarse with those individuals that they are 'TERFs' is one of the major urban legends of the internet age - or perhaps moral panic is the better term. Certainly not a social phenomenon.

    Also, I don't know any AFAB people of any gender who interpret pregnancy as a defining element of rape/sexual assault in the way that the IP editor attributes to many women, here. The IP appears to hold FRINGE, "gender critical" views and to be presenting them as mainstream. While this is interesting for future anthropology and all, it isn't really relevant for this Talk page and guidance for writing about gender identity on WP. Newimpartial (talk) 12:32, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    @Jayron32: What about transracial people? We have Rachel Dolezal. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 03:13, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    We're not going to play the "whatabout" game. We're going to treat people with due dignity. That is all. --Jayron32 11:18, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Singling out one type of identity as more important than others will engender endless debates over relative importance. Like most people, I have multiple identities:
    • Age
    • Avocations
    • Cultural
    • Educational
    • Family
    • Gender
    • Gender orientation
    • Genetic
    • Geographic
      • I was born in Detroit
      • I live in Northern Virginia
    • Linguistic
    • Marital status
    • Religion
    • Vocations
    You could make a case for any of these, or some that I didn't list, as being more important than any of the others, and I wouldn't see such debates as being productive. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 13:57, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    But we already do single out gender identity. It is the only one to have its own subsection (for reasons that are more or less outlined above; it is generally more sensitive and more likely to fall under disputes, which led to more policies existing to govern how we approach it.) I don't think Chess is saying that it is more important in an overarching cosmic sense, but it is more important in terms of how many policies there are to consider when writing articles here that touch on it. --Aquillion (talk) 09:52, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    As far as I can tell, the manual of style is not organized in terms of importance. I do agree that the importance of the gender identity section extends beyond mere stylistic concerns. In my opinion, a better way to communicate that would be to promote it into an actual policy page like WP:BLP instead of merely a guideline page like WP:MOS. PBZE (talk) 23:41, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Actually, I agree that the destination for most of the GENDERID/DEADNAME guidance ought to be WP:BLP, since it has already a high-level of site-wide consensus (through well-publicized, highly participated processes) and because some of the "enforcement processes" related to the guideline - like removing non-notable deadnames and misgendering in article space - are clearly BLP/WP:3RRBLP actions. But the required RfC looks to me like a lot of work. :) Newimpartial (talk) 12:22, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Leave it as is. One identity doesn't take precedence over other identities. GoodDay (talk) 14:16, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Concur with GoodDay. This proposal makes no sense to anyone familiar with sensible document organization, which any serious Wikipedian should be.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:26, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    MOS:ERA: dispute over what "established era style" means

    Hi all, I know that this has been a perennial source of discussion, most recently here.

    An editor (courtesy pinging Ficaia) changed CE/BCE style at Josephus to AD/BC style a couple months ago on the grounds that the original change was never discussed on the talk page. In this talk page thread, I pointed out that the CE/BCE style has been relatively stable since 2015, but the editor has continued to edit war over it periodically, insisting that the language of MOS:ERA referring to an article's established era style refers to the era style used when the article was created, and that even a 6+ year status quo does not imply consensus.

    Perhaps there should be some refinement to the language to make clear whether it is me or the other editor who is mistaken here? It seems that we both believe our interpretations of the guideline to be obvious. Generalrelative (talk) 23:15, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    The wording of MOS:ERA seems very clear to me: no change without consensus at talk. Ficaia (talk) 23:33, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Right, but you have insisted on changing the style back to the way it was in 2015 without consensus on talk. To my mind, it seems obvious that this change is a violation of the guideline's language about established era style. Since you appear to think otherwise, I am requesting additional clarification. Both here and on the article talk page, I linked to a previous discussion a few years ago in which several editors made clear that they considered changes such as you insist upon to be contrary to the guideline, and your response was to say that this discussion is not policy.[3] No, it is not policy, but it is guidance, which we should respect. I have posted here in the hopes of gaining additional guidance, hopefully specifically targeted at resolving our dispute. Generalrelative (talk) 23:43, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You seem to have a problem with the actual wording of MOS:ERA. So do several editors in that discussion: one even boasts about switching the dating style in articles and just hoping he doesn't get reverted, which is a violation of the policy as written. Ficaia (talk) 00:12, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I do not. My argument is that a 6+ year status quo fits the common-sense definition of "established".Generalrelative (talk) 00:27, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I would take 6 years of status quo to be implied consensus. If somebody objected to the change then it would have been raised long ago. This is in spite my personal preference for AD/BC.  Stepho  talk  00:06, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    WP:MOS says nothing about "implied consensus". It says an editor should seek consensus on the talk page before changing the style. Also, if you look at the article history in question, you'll see that the dating style has been changed back multiple times since 2015 and in each case was swiftly reverted. Ficaia (talk) 00:12, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Stepho-wrs didn't invoke WP:MOS. "Implied consensus" is a longstanding tradition on Wikipedia. See WP:IMPLICITCONSENSUS : "An edit has presumed consensus unless it is disputed or reverted." and generally, the longer it is not disputed or reverted, the stronger the consensus is perceived. Like Stepho-wrs, I also am an advocate of AD/BC. I am always on the lookout for a reason to convert the "oh noes, we can't refer to Jesus!" way back to the traditional way, and have done it dozens of times, but I agree with them in that 6 years makes it firmly the consensus version in this case, unfortunately. Le Marteau (talk) 00:34, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't see how an edit can ever have implied consensus if it was made by explicitly breaking a tenet of the MoS. It's like arguing: "yeah, the edit was wrong, but it's been here for a long time so we'll just let it stand." If that's the case, the instruction in MOS:ERA to seek consensus in talk before making any change is only really a "suggestion", because you can just go ahead and change the style and if no one reverts you, then your edit sticks. Ficaia (talk) 00:44, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    WP:MOS is a guideline, and some flexibility is allowed. It says as much on the banner at the top: This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. I'm applying my "common sense" here. Le Marteau (talk) 00:58, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Agreed that the change 6 years ago should not have happened as it did. However, people had the chance to revert it or query it at the time. That didn't happen, therefore there was implied consensus - or at least no-one cared enough to challenge it. The point of MOS:ERA, WP:DATERETAIN and similar is to avoid flip-flopping due to opinions and local customs. If we have to troll through every edit since 2002 and the corresponding talk page comments to find what is legal or not legal then we are expending a lot of energy for very little or no gain. The community seems happy with the status quo. Which means you have to provide a reason to move from the established consensus.  Stepho  talk  01:03, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    If the article has been in one style since 2015, that is where it should stay. The point of WP:ERA is to avoid disputes over two valid style options. That end is not served by delving into decades-old edits to justify a change to the status quo.--Trystan (talk) 00:23, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Good point. Intent matters. It was enacted to prevent Wikilawyering, not to be used as a basis to Wikilawyer. Le Marteau (talk) 01:42, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Okay, you folks seem to disagree with me, so I'll drop it at Josephus. More generally, I'd be interested how long roughly you think such a change should have to stand in an article to have assumed consensus. Would I be right to revert within 1, 2, 3 years? Ficaia (talk) 01:54, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    It's going to matter how active the page is. For an obscure article with only a dozen page watchers, my dividing line would be over a year. But the Josephus article has over 500 page watchers, and is very active. In a case like that, my dividing line would be in the area of maybe half a year, maybe less. I'm sure others will have wildly different dividing lines, which is why we use consensus, but that's about where mine are.Le Marteau (talk) 02:14, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Putting a one-year timeline on this effectively makes the instructions in MOS:ERA meaningless imo. Why bother having a discussion at talk at all when you can just change the style and hope no one notices... Ficaia (talk) 02:21, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The instruction on MOS:ERA are in no way "meaningless"... I have invoked them many times to revert to AD (and even to CE... I apply it fairly as any search of my edits will show). I have never seen a case like this happen in my almost twenty years here. This is an outlying case and an exception... guidelines are guidelines and not policy because they allow for exceptions. Peace out. Le Marteau (talk) 02:27, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Tumulus is another example. The dating style was changed gradually 2-3 years ago without any talk page discussion. I think this is more common than you think, as evidenced by the discussion linked by Generalrelative in which one editor openly admits to changing articles in this way. Ficaia (talk) 03:13, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    If you want to make a case out of Tumulus, be my guest. Le Marteau (talk) 03:26, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You are probably seeing a lot more of this than I am, because you seem to work on articles involving topics where the distinction between AD and BC needs to be specified. I have no topic I concentrate on here other than general Wikignoming and helping out whenever I think someone is getting screwed, so I only stumble upon such articles. Le Marteau (talk) 03:30, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Repeating my arguments at the older discussion linked, I think 6 years (now less than a third of the lifetime of an older article) is too short - a year is certainly waay too short. Ficaia's "Putting a one-year timeline on this effectively makes the instructions in MOS:ERA meaningless imo. Why bother having a discussion at talk at all when you can just change the style and hope no one notices..." is correct. If someone feels strongly about the matter, the policy is clear - they should start a talk page discussion. On obscure pages they only have to hope one or two people seeing the matter the same way as they do will turn up & then the new style is unchallengable, short of opening another discussion. I also agree this is very common; annoyingly changers to "CE" often use an edit summary including "correct", despite the fact that vast numbers of our readers don't even understand "CE". Johnbod (talk) 03:54, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      When I encounter a CE or some such, I don't know how it got there, and I don't actually care unless it comes to my attention through someone changing it and I see it in recent changes, or when someone complains. I am guessing both you and Ficaia proactively look into how it came to be in the article which is something I have never done, which would account for our differing experiences with its ocurrence. Le Marteau (talk) 04:03, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      God, no, I only look at them when they come up on my watchlist, which is 33k+ & history-heavy, & where I see an ERA change perhaps every 2 days. Or if I notice split usage reading an article. Changes to CE, rather than to BC, are far more common in my experience, & I've no doubt there are masses of illicit ones hidden in the histories. I never look at recent changes at all. Johnbod (talk) 04:11, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Alright, time for me to retire the Sherlock Holmes routine and call it night. I never look at recent changes at all. I do, all the time. For whatever reason, I don't see conflicts such as Ficaia's here often at all, you see it all the time. I'm going to leave further exposition of the issue to those who perceive it as a problem, i.e. not me. Le Marteau (talk) 04:17, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think at this point it may be warranted to ping those involved in the previous discussion –– one reason being that this thread appears to have evolved into a rehash of some of the same themes, and another being that an accusation of wrongdoing appears to have been leveled above against an unnamed participant in that previous discussion [4]. If I've missed anyone, please help me out: EEng, Doug Weller, A D Monroe III, SMcCandlish, Johnbod (already here, I know), Richard Keatinge, Sweet6970, Jc3s5h, El C, John M Wolfson. Apologies to anyone who may have wished not to be bothered. Generalrelative (talk) 15:29, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      ....or is recovering from an operation, as one of those is. Anyway, let me help you with the mysterious "unnamed participant" who was SMcCandlish, as will be obvious to anyone who reads the discussion. Johnbod (talk) 15:41, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Sure, I apologize to Doug specifically if he is annoyed by my ping. But I strongly suspect that he is not, given our other recent interactions. Wishing you strength and joy, Doug. Generalrelative (talk) 15:56, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I don't think I have participated in any recent discussions concerning MOS:ERA. But maybe I'm forgetting, Generalrelative...? It isn't something I have a strong opinion of, in any case. El_C 15:55, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      You only made a brief and rather neutral statement in the previous discussion, El C. I included you here for the sake of including everyone. Thanks for taking the time to pop in. Generalrelative (talk) 15:58, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I too feel that the main use of WP:ERA is to avoid Wikilawyering. Does anyone wish to propose an actual change to the wording of WP:ERA? If not, I don't think that this discussion will be a profitable use of anyone's time. Richard Keatinge (talk) 16:14, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      The meaning of "established" could certainly be clarified, and quite easily (in either direction), and maybe this is no bad thing. As the top of the section shows there are regular sincere disagreements as to what this means. Johnbod (talk) 16:24, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Agreed. That was my intention here. Whether this is best accomplished by clarifying the language of the guideline or simply by establishing a consensus on this talk page I'll leave to the wisdom of the community. Generalrelative (talk) 16:33, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I’ll be home at a proper keyboard in the next couple of days. I’ll try to remember to participate then. Doug Weller talk 16:17, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Much appreciated, and no stress. Generalrelative (talk) 16:30, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      It's hard to give a definite period of time for a style to become established. It depends on how long it takes for someone interested in style to notice a change. When a substantial numbers of editors, or readers who will become editors if sufficiently motivated, have noticed a change and decided to do nothing, it becomes established. This in turn depends on the number of readers, and the frequency of era mentions in the article; it takes longer to notice one mention of "AD" or "BC" in a 5 page article than if there are 30 mentions of "AD" or "BC".
      Once the change has been noticed and the editor decides to see if the correct style is being used, it's harder to check an active article, especially if there is a lot of vandalism, because it's harder to find when strings were really first inserted, and what the status of an article was at any point in time. You pick an arbitrary edit to check the status of the article at that time, and get a blank page, and have to try again.
      For most articles, I think 1 year is not enough time for an ERA change to become established. Four years might be about right. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:39, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I agree that MOS's phrase when the article was created for when ERA is established for an article cannot be fully justified in all cases on all articles; strict application of this results in obvious lapses in fairness in at least some cases. But I would not change this. I think the goal is to have a standard determination of established that keeps personal opinions and time-wasting debates to the minimum possible; this means it's much better the determination be simple and unambiguous than fair, or reasonable, or even logical. If any change to MOS:ERA is to be made, I'd support only ones removing some of the ambiguity elsewhere that could be used to undermine the phrase in question. For the record, I have reverted CE/AD changes specifically because of this phrase's wording, even though the change stood for many years, and my revert made the article's ERA counter my actual strong personal preference for "AD". --A D Monroe III(talk) 20:43, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      @A D Monroe III: Thanks for weighing in. I am, however, confused by your statement since the phrase when the article was created does not appear in MOS:ERA. Could you clarify what part of the MOS you're referring to here? Generalrelative (talk) 20:55, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      The actual wording is "An article's established era style should not be changed without reasons specific to its content; seek consensus on the talk page first"; it doesn't say "when the article was created". But it's more or less what is meant. When a dispute becomes intractable over any WP:*VAR matter, we revert to the style established in the first non-stub version, and have a discussion from there, with advocates of each style presenting their rationales. In this case, someone changed away from the established style without discussion and now editors who favor that style are trying to claim it's the "established" one, to thwart someone reverting back to the original. That's not how it works.

      There's any confusion at all about this because this section could use some clarifying wording, which can be borrowed from MOS:ENGVAR or some other passage. The mistake here was in assuming that everyone would absorb, as if by osmosis, that all the *VAR rules operate the same way. They do, but this is not obvious to people who don't pore over MoS and discussions about it.
       — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:01, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      Huh, I'm genuinely surprised that this is your interpretation but I'll defer to your judgement. See below. Generalrelative (talk) 23:10, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Well, a style can also later become established through other means, like an RfC. But "I didn't get caught at violating MOS:ERA for a few years" doesn't make for a new "establishment".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:18, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      To be clear, I wasn't editing Wikipedia back in 2015 when the change in era style at Josephus was implemented. Until I noticed edit warring about it I'd never even had cause to check how long the style had been in place. Disruption caused by ERA activists like Special:Contributions/49.199.142.135 brought my attention to the matter. Generalrelative (talk) 23:25, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    The article in question was created more than 20 years ago and until 6 years ago, it used BC/AD and the change was made without discussion or consensus. I think BC/AD should be restored and then a discussion had on its talk page to determine which era to use going forward. To me, at least, that's how the MOS:ERA reads. Masterhatch (talk) 21:37, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Agreed. The idea that a style which was wrongfully inserted into an article (in direct violation of MOS:ERA) can become the "established style" if it stays in the article for long enough is ridiculous. A mistake is a mistake, no matter how old and "established" it is. The argument that our side is just "wikilawyering" is also stilly, when it is the other side of this dispute arguing that MOS:ERA doesn't actually mean what it clearly states: a lawyer's argument if ever I heard one. MOS:ERA states that the established dating style cannot be changed without consensus at talk. So "CE" cannot be the established style here. How is there debate about this?
    Also, it seems to me the best way to avoid disputes in this area is to have a clear, literal interpretation of MOS:ERA. Otherwise we are opening up the possibility for endless arguments such as the one at Talk:Josephus. The simplest solution is to say, quite simply, that the "established dating style" in an article is either 1) the first style used consistently in the article, or 2) the style decided upon by consensus at talk. That interpretation would kill any disputes such as this, which would be a bloody good thing. Ficaia (talk) 22:38, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I also concur (and I helped write these guidelines, so I know what their meaning and intended application are). This would mean reverting back to BC/AD, then having a pro/con discussion on the talk page with regard to using BCE/CE.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:00, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm genuinely surprised that this is your interpretation but I'll defer to your judgment as one of the authors of the guideline. As a show of good faith I'll revert Josephus to AD/BC era style. If others decide to argue for a change to CE/BCE in this case I'd support that, but I don't think I need to be the one leading that charge. Thanks, all, for the thoughtful discussion. Generalrelative (talk) 23:10, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Proposal

    I do agree with Ficaia that WP:ERA, as written, engenders editing behaviour that can appear to one side in a dispute as hypocritical. That disputes over its meaning/the intent of its meaning don't come up very often is only a reflection of the fact that a relatively small fraction of articles even include mention of AD/BC/CE/BCE. So, I propose the following:

    1. Rework the wording of WP:ERA and have it reflect the same principles that are used in WP:ENGVAR. ENGVAR, unlike ERA, is relevant to every single article on enWP, and when it comes to preventing disputes, it works.
    2. A caveat similar to ENGVAR'S STRONGTIES can be made for ERA: if an article subject has STRONGTIES to the Christian religion, that is a case for using AD/BC. If it has STRONGTIES to another religion, that is a case for using CE/BCE. The guideline will not take a prescriptive approach, but will allow for an existing style to be changed on those grounds.
    3. For all other articles that have no ties to any religion, or with equally strong ties with Christian and non Christian religions or peoples, WP:RETAIN applies, i.e., use the style that was used in the first non-stub version of the article.

    What do you all think of that? 2600:1702:4960:1DE0:48C0:967D:8F03:E2B1 (talk) 22:55, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    • I can get behind no. 1. Nos. 2 and 3 are problematic, and have been discussed before. We don't already have rules like this for reasons. They can be revisited, of course. But the most obvious problem is that most proponents of BCE/CE do not believe BC/AD should be used at all, or that it should never be used for topics with strong ties to science, or that it should only be used in entirely Christian contexts, among several other variant arguments. So, by writing a guideline with the above wording, you are strongly favoring a BC/AD position and gutting many arguments that would be presented on a talk page. That won't do. You're also misundstanding RETAIN principles. We don't default to a style used in the first non-stub version except as a last resort, i.e. during intractible dispute, and even then reverting to that style is a set-up for further discussion of why to potentially change to the other style. And a style can become the "established" one through mutiple means, including previous consensus discussions. The first non-stub style choice was the first (but just in some case the only) established style.

      I think I could get behind this entirely if we said in point 3 (whatever the final wording) that RETAIN applies, i.e. do not change away from the established style without consensus, and if dispute becomes intractable then revert to the style used in the first non-stub version of the article, pending a clearer consensus through continued discussion.
       — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:15, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      PS: Actually, it would be better to put verbiage of this sort at MOS:RETAIN MOS:VAR [I sometimes get these two confused], then just cross-reference it from here and from other *VAR passages. We need not repeat the same principles in detail at all of them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:17, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    • I agree with SMcCandlish's counter-proposal. The established principle is that if it was changed and no one objects for a month or longer, it can be assumed that a new format has been established. Ties to an era format are more difficult to support. Walter Görlitz (talk) 00:35, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      @Walter Görlitz: That was my understanding too when I started this thread –– maybe not the specific time frame, but the basic sense of what "established" means. However if you read above you will see that SMcCandlish objects to this reading of the guideline. In this case, the article Josephus, he and a few others are arguing that an era style which has been relatively stable for 6+ years is in fact not established because there was no explicit talk page consensus accompanying the transition. Perhaps we need to go back to the drawing board to come up with language that makes it less likely for misunderstandings of this nature to occur? Generalrelative (talk) 01:08, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Agreeing with SMcCandlish, MOS:ERA should definitely not be tied to whether the article is religious or not. There are many non-Christian's who prefer AD/BC and many Christian's who prefer CE/BCE - and vice versa for both positions. There is no link in either direction. Also agreeing that established could be defined as a change that has lasted for a month without being challenged. Of course, if an editor makes a change and somebody notices then it can be challenged and reverted - as long as it is within that month.  Stepho  talk  10:30, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I agree that ENGVAR produces fewer disputes, especially given it is relevant to all articles, but I think that this is because all but the most ignorant or chauvinist editors accept that there are different varieties of English that WP in general does not choose between. You very rarely see editors systematically going through an article changing to/from American English, unless they are claiming to restore from a mixed style. But we have loads of editors who have obviously been told at school that only CE is "correct", & see BC as a mistake, or political or religious conspiracy. Changing the ERA is almost always much quicker, & they will do that. Using some of the ENGVAR language would probably help for ERA, but not I think the "strong ties" bit. Most smaller Hindism articles evidently written by Hindus use BC because that is what all Indian books, websites and newspapers use, except scholarly academic ones addressing an international market (and not all of those use CE). Most of the puzzled talk page requests for help as to the meaning of CE come on Indian articles. I suspect something similar is true for articles on Islamic topics, where AH dates are often also used. The trouble is there aren't really any good arguments for either era style, except for Christian, East Asian and Jewish topics - maybe Pre-Columbian ones too. People have preferences, often strong, but that's it. For example, most ancient Graeco-Roman articles use BC, although they have nothing to do with Christianity. I'd very strongly object to a "everything except Christian articles gets CE" approach. So "We don't default to a style used in the first non-stub version except as a last resort, i.e. during intractible disputes" is what happens, or should happen, most of the time. What should not happen is allowing illicit POV changes to remain, even if they have been undetected for a long time. But there should be more talk page discussions - I very rarely see these in fact. And RETAIN arguments should be prominent in these, as arguing about appropriateness etc rarely gets anywhere. Johnbod (talk) 02:37, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Most of the oldest articles on Wikipedia were written by Americans, where Christian beliefs are very much the norm and thus AD/BC notation is used without a second thought. So MOS:RETAIN based on "first use" is likely to favour that perspective. There is a definitely a problem if the topic is "Old Testament" [scare quotes intended] because this is Jewish tradition appropriated by Christianity. A similar issue arises with the history of North Africa and western/southern Asia. CE/BCE is the norm in most academic history and archaeology papers – I trust there is no dispute over using BP in geology articles. So STRONGTIES is certainly relevant and RETAIN should not be a trump card that a zealot can play as a hold-out to argue that there is no consensus for change.--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:17, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Not just Americans, AD/BC is the norm in the UK and most people (IME) are confused over CE/BCE. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 10:31, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Yes, I would dispute that "Most of the oldest articles on Wikipedia were written by Americans" anyway; rather I'm pretty sure that most intoductions of "CE" are by Americans. The matter has evidently become part of the strange American culture wars, in a way in has not in most parts of the world (as far as I can tell, the various local equivalents of CE have barely taken off in the other European languages). That "Christian beliefs are very much the norm" is a factor is a rather American perspective. The entire world used BC/AD for centuries, and most of it has yet to be pursuaded that it is necessary to switch to new names for exactly the same actual dating system. Johnbod (talk) 14:05, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      In most cases, CE is wlinked. Is it so terrible that visitors are introduced to other perspectives than the familiar? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:44, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      But why? Anyway, there is the principle of least astonishment. Generally we try not to puzzle our readers. Johnbod (talk) 14:05, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      BCE/CE is not a ‘perspective’: it is an era style based on BC/AD, which uses a terminology which is unfamiliar to most people. Sweet6970 (talk) 13:04, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Any new guidance needs to emphasise the policy/convention/guidance that editors should not attach an era prefix/suffix unless it is reasonably in doubt. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:44, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • ENGVAR works because no one went to war over flavour vs flavor. People take religion very seriously and sadly in the world in which we live, there is hatred and intolerance for other religions. People get bent out of shape at the mere sight of religion where they think it shouldn't be. Sometimes that spills over into Wikipedia. The problem I see with using CE / BCE and AD / BC similarly to ENGVAR is it will cause edit wars on topics that could go either way and POV will be an issue. As User:John Maynard Friedman pointed out, the Old Testament could be a problem and potential for edit wars. Someone else had suggested if it gets changed and no one changes it back for a month, then the new style is established. What if one year later it gets changed again and one reverts it? Does that mean the old style is re-established? That is problematic too because you will have guys going around and changing styles everywhere just to see how many they can change without having the edits reverted. It's gonna cause edit wars and unnecessary bickering. The current way we deal with AD / BC and BCE / CE isn't perfect, but it's been stable for a long time and there have been very few issues that aren't easily resolved. This thread is the first time there's been a serious issue in a long time. For all it's worth, I strongly suggest we keep things status quo for now as all the suggestions I've seen above (IMHO) will only cause more edit warring, not less. (On a side note, BC / AD is still the most commonly recognised style in writings and for the average English speaking Joe, so trying to eliminate it out of all non-Christian articles does not make sense. Not in this thread, but in other threads I've seen that as a "solution".) Masterhatch (talk) 10:58, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      This discussion is trying to establish what the "status quo" actually is, which is far from clear! The last big MOS discussion on exactly this issue (linked above) was less than 2 years ago, and rather inconclusive. There have been plenty of spats on individual article talk pages in the meantime. You talk about "you will have guys going around and changing styles everywhere just to see how many they can change without having the edits reverted" in a future conditional tense for some reason. Actually this has been happening quite a lot for years; I've had to explain WP:ERA to people who were doing nothing else, several times. I'm sure many don't realize it is against the rules, and think they are updating to to the "correct" style, as their edit summaries often say. Johnbod (talk) 14:21, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Since folks have mentioned that they believe BCE to be confusing, I took a moment to Google "BC versus BCE recognition" and found some interesting stuff. I hadn't been aware that the BCE system has been in use since 1708. [5] Nor did I realize that, according to editorsmanual.com, BCE/CE is now the preferred style at Encyclopaedia Britannica. Curious, I checked both the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [6] and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [7] and saw that both employ BCE when discussing ancient Greece. In terms of online encyclopedias, then, it seems that Wikipedia is the holdout. Perhaps this is well known to many of y'all, but hey we come at this project from many different backgrounds. That site editorsmanual.com also says "While the BCE/CE notation is generally preferred in scientific and academic writing, BC/AD is the more common choice in writing meant for a general audience." [8] The problem with applying a similar standard here is that all Wikipedia articles are supposed to be both scholarly/scientific and geared toward a general audience. I don't have a solution here, just thought this discussion might benefit from some outside references. Generalrelative (talk) 13:49, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      There's a ton more of that at Common Era. It hasn't exactly "been in use" since 1708; that was the first time it was used, & there was little pick-up (and that mostly confined to Jewish writing) until after WWII. To some extent you do see the scholarly/general audience difference reflected in Wikipedia articles, with the more general and basic ones more likely to use BC. There is also a considerable issue of American cultural imperialism here, which many editors are not sensitive to. Johnbod (talk) 14:05, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Thanks, I hadn't thought to check for a Wikipedia article! This controversy is (obviously) new to me. That said, it's hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that this has to do with American cultural imperialism, since clearly the issue divides the U.S. as much as it does other English-speaking countries. Sure, I suppose BCE may be more common in the U.S. than in Britain (are there sources for that?) but e.g. Britannica, Nature and The Lancet, all of which are British publications, use BCE too. And on the other side of the ledger, the American AP Style Guide still calls for BC. Is there some aspect of the American cultural imperialism argument that I'm missing? I see that below you're talking about the rest of the world, not just English-speaking countries, but surely usage by native speakers of English is the standard we should apply in an English-language encyclopedia, no? Generalrelative (talk) 14:51, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      @Generalrelative: Not that it directly impacts on the argument here, but for the record Britannica is an American publication. CMD (talk) 07:00, 8 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Why is it that Americans and Brits seem to be uniquely resistant to change? When I was at school in England in the 1960s and 1970s BC/AD was taught but by the time my children, who are in their 30s, went to school that had changed to BCE/CE, so why don't we just use it and have done with the problem? The same can be seen with attitudes to the "first past the post" voting system. When we had a referendum here to make a small change to it our politicians told us that we were so thick that we could not understand anything else, although the system on offer was still much simpler than those used in most of the world. It can also be seen in the non-adoption of the metric system. The UK has dipped its toe in the water (I buy fuel for my car in litres but measure its consumption in miles per gallon) but the US seems to have held out against it even more. Are people in the largest Anglophone countries really so less intelligent than those in the rest of the world? Phil Bridger (talk) 14:20, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      As I have more or less said above, most of the world except Russians in secular contexts, the Chinese and Czechs, many Americans and some Brits uses BC/AD, so you have the thing on its head. Look at Indian or Italian papers. See Common Era for the British school system, where things are not as you say. Johnbod (talk) 14:27, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I for one, would fully support a complete move to the Common Era CE/BCE formatting for era/years. I think it is the best, most inclusive, and more academic, scholarly, and modern usage. AD/BC is antiquated and should only be used when citing it in older usage, but not in any encyclopedic content usage. Just my point of view... ♥Th78blue (talk)♥ 17:11, 25 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I strongly oppose point 2 in the suggestion above RELIGIOUS TIES – Wikipedia articles should not have ‘ties’ to any religion. All articles should be subject to the same rules. Also, using a criterion of ‘ties’ to a particular religion would just provide further material for arguments.
      And, since this seems now to be a general discussion on Era styles, I support BC/AD because it is the most understood style, and is the standard form in Britain, used, for instance, by the Guardian and the BBC. Sweet6970 (talk) 19:47, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      In articles about, for example, Judaism or Islam, it is deliberately provocative to prefer the 'Lord' or 'Christ' of another religion. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:50, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I think it's almost funny (and certainly tragic), but for most people it's not "deliberately provocative". They've probably never thought through how that language denies other people's faith. Maybe they've never thought about it from the view of a person with another religion or no religion. SchreiberBike | ⌨  23:21, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      To JMF: Assuming you meant ‘refer’- BC and AD do not refer to the Lord or Christ of any religion – they are labels which consist of capital letters. My guess is that most people who use them don’t know what they stand for. And as for being ‘provocative’ – the article on Muhammad includes pictorial depictions of him. Sweet6970 (talk) 13:08, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Capital letters have meaning when they're consistently used in an acronym. Would you claim MOS doesn't refer to style? RfC doesn't refer to a request? MD doesn't refer to medical doctors? NASA does not refer to aeronautics and space? For that matter, is the JMF at the start of your sentence just a label, or does it refer to someone named John? --Ahecht (TALK
      PAGE      ) 15:14, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Abbreviations made up of capital letters only refer to the words if you know what the letters stand for, and think of the words when you use the abbreviation. It took me a long time to work out what ‘MOS’ stood for (because I would abbreviate it as ‘MoS’), even after I had been making comments on an MOS page. I’m not sure I would say that ‘RfC’ refers to a ‘request’ – from what I’ve seen of RfCs, it’s not a request, but a procedure which is unique to Wikipedia. I certainly don’t think of it as a request. I’m glad you told me that ‘MD’ stands for ‘medical doctor’. I thought that was what it meant, but this was a pure guess, and I would not have been surprised to hear that it was an abbreviation for some Latin expression. And I know roughly what NASA is, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across the full version, and I never think of it as anything other than ‘NASA’. It’s a very long time ago, but I think it was several years after I first came across ‘AD’ that I finally found out what it stood for. Sweet6970 (talk) 15:51, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      @Sweet6970: I'll take your word for it and believe that you don't think of words when you think of abbreviations, but that is not true for all. The idea that "BC and AD do not refer to the Lord or Christ of any religion" is simply not true. Imagine a Christian in an Islamic country being required to use an AH date, that's not so bad because AH refers to a historical event. However if it were "in the year of the Prophet (pbuh)", a Christian would know that their faith is being denied.
      That's the case for non-Christians in the West. For most it's not a big deal, it's a small insult to their beliefs that they've learned to live with, but most of us do not want to deny the faith of other people and BCE/CE is a way of doing that. SchreiberBike | ⌨  20:41, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      BC and AD refer to Jesus in roughly the same way that Wednesday refers to Odin. --Trovatore (talk) 21:20, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Well said. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 21:49, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      @Trovatore and Martin of Sheffield: You really don't understand what cultural imperialism is do you? Can you imagine how it feels to be a minority? In the West, most of us are not bothered by linguistic references to Odin, Thor or Frigg because we are part of the dominant Christian culture. Norse gods do not threaten us. Imagine what it is like to be in a minority religion. Take the example above of "in the year of the Prophet (pbuh)"; how would that make an American Christian conservative feel? The phrases BC and AD don't just refer to Jesus. They refer to a messiah and a lord.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:24, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I apologize for pushing this discussion further off track. It riles me up when I see that people understand the world differently from how I do, especially in ways that, I think, hurt people.
      But, I think we should work together on a clear definition of established and that we should not debate the merits of BC/AD vs. BCE/CE. SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:39, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I am less than impressed with the concept of "cultural imperialism", but I would allow that you had some sort of a point if we referred to years as "before Christ" or "in the year of the Lord". But we don't; we call them BC and AD. --Trovatore (talk) 22:40, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Given that no child has ever asked what the terms might stand for, your position is obviously beyond cavil. Cheers! Dumuzid (talk) 22:57, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      That is not given and, in fact, is not true. Perhaps nobody in your family ever asked as a child, but others have. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:25, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      My reply here was snarky one, and perhaps overly so--as I understand but disagree with the position taken by Trovatore. Suffice it to say, in my experience, the "what does it stand for?" question is ever-present. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 14:52, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Trovatore, expressions such as "in this, the year of our lord 2022" have a long history of usage and are even now far from unknown. At least in that part of the English speaking world I live in. (PS: this is User:Khajidha, I cannot log in at this time) --152.27.33.1 (talk) 15:37, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Khajidha, I'm aware of that. But no one is proposing that that phraseology be used in Wikipedia dates (other than perhaps in quotations), so I don't see how it's relevant. --Trovatore (talk) 03:53, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Wikipedia articles do not have ties to any religion, but the subjects of the articles do. In the same way that articles about things with ties to countries that use British English should use British English spelling, articles about things with ties to specific religions other that Christianity should use CE/BCE. --Ahecht (TALK
      PAGE      ) 22:24, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I see it as the exact opposite. BC/AD originated in a religious context but then became a broad western culture thing separate from religion - ie the typical person on the street uses BC/AD. BCE/CE tends to more of an academic thing (often including Christian theologians) and is not well understood by the average person on the street. The current use of AD vs CE is not tied to religion.  Stepho  talk  22:40, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment. Putting my cards on the table, I am a strong advocate for CE/BCE dating. Putting that aside for the moment, I think we need a clear and consistent policy on this. That doesn't mean there can't be exceptions, but when writing a new article, or revising an old one, we should start from the same stylistic assumptions. If that ends up being AD/BC, then so be it. But I think this is one where the MOS needs to be a non-persnickety, blunt instrument, with granular issues worked out as they arise. I will, however, leave the decision to those wiser than myself. Cheers all, and Happy Monday. Dumuzid (talk) 20:06, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Proposal 1 above makes sense to me. I think that when WP:ENGVAR was written, it was not seen as some wonderful solution but as a practical comprise which will keep people from fighting. Proposals 2 and 3 are full of problems. The original question above was about the meaning of "established era style". We've seen that reasonable people can disagree about that. Let's lock it down. SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:38, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment. I would support 1, 2, and 3; it is a pragmatic solution, and it makes sense for articles with strong ties to Christianity, such as Jesus, to use BC and AD. If there is a consensus for a single solution, I would prefer AD and BC, as the most recognizable style. BilledMammal (talk) 23:39, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment well as a non-Christian I don't find AD offensive at all, I just accept it as part of normal English usage and most importantly understood by all. BC is after all just a statement of fact (even if the origin is off by a few years). Likewise I'm no more offended by people referring to Jesus as "Christ", than I am by Mohamed being called "The Prophet" or Siddhartha Gautama being called "The Buddha". Accept that for those who cling to religions these words have special significance and respect them. As a secular example consider that many people around the world, particularly in the USA refer to HM Queen Elizabeth as "The Queen", yet she has never been Queen of the USA!
      You may not find AD offensive, but others, myself included, do. He (if he existed) is not my lord.
      Respect for "those who cling to religion" includes not using such language to describe them and to accept that there are markedly divergent views among them. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 13:09, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Not to mention the fact that "queen" has a real-world basis whether you are in the UK or not. The fact that I am an American and not under her rule does not diminish the fact that she is a queen. However, if one is not a Christian, Jesus was not Christ. If one is not a Muslim, Muhammad was not a prophet. It would make more sense to me for those who hold religious views to show respect to those of us who don't and not expect us to bend to their usage in language and dating and such. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:40, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Whether you are Christian or not, the fact is that we have a dating convention which counts years from a certain point in the past. That point was chosen many centuries ago, supposedly as being the year of birth of Jesus, and although both theologians and historians have since debated the accuracy of this selection, nobody has come up with any other historical event that the years might have been counted from. So we are kinda stuck with a Christianity-based calendar. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:51, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      This is precisely why I like CE/BCE nomenclature--to me, it's an implicit admission that the era is based on an agreed-upon date that really references nothing in particular (as most would now agree 1 CE was not the birth year of Jesus). As ever, though, reasonable minds may differ. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 17:29, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Exactly. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 22:17, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Keep current WP:ERA wording. There are of course going to be people who want to change to BCE/CE for certain articles but that can be addressed by trying to get consensus for change on the article talk page. There are of course going to be people who misunderstand the guideline but that can be addressed by explanation, as happened above. I oppose all the IP's proposals. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 13:40, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I think the ip's proposals have had little support above, & are sunk. But addressing the precise point the discussion began with, of what "established" actually means, could be useful. This is actually equally unclear at WP:ENGVAR, but as several have pointed out, causes rather fewer issues there (I think there are a number of reasons for this). We could just pick a time limit after which an undiscussed change of style becomes "established", or even a number of views (back as far as statistics go, to 2015). Or we could just go back to the earliest non-stub version, which is what tends to happen in ENGVAR disputes. Or something else. Johnbod (talk) 14:29, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I thought the point was addressed, earliest non-stub version. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 14:55, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Well, that's my view, but some above, and very many 'out there' don't agree, and the policy could be more explicit. Johnbod (talk) 15:02, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • No need to change the guideline. This entire thread started with a simple question: How long does a style choice need to be in an article for it to be considered “established”? My answer: If you have to ask, you are over-thinking it… just act as if the currently existing text is “established”, and go from there. Remember that a) consensus can change, and b) a discussed consensus outweighs a silent consensus. If you think the current stylization should change, just open a discussion and propose changing it. Blueboar (talk) 15:56, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      @Blueboar: That was my assumption too. The problem here is that others read the guideline and come away with an entirely different meaning, which has led to edit warring –– even in the midst of good-faith talk page discussion, since each side believes the other has the onus to achieve consensus. What the above discussion makes clear is that there really is no consensus as to what "established" means in the guideline as written. Clarifying that language, in one direction or the other, would be a solution. Johnbod and I appear to have very different intuitions about this topic on a number of levels but we are in agreement about that. Generalrelative (talk) 16:32, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I think you miss my point... if you start with the assumption that whatever you currently see on the page has a silent consensus (however long it has been there)... and open the discussion with "I think the era style currently used in this article should change; here's why..." it no longer matters whether one style is "established". You have conceeded that argument before it can even be made, and you shift the discussion away from wikilawyering and towards trying to figure out what is the best style choice for the article. If someone says "But this is the established style" respond with "yes, I know, I am arguing that we should change to a different style... again, here's why.." Blueboar (talk) 17:10, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Right, but what is your suggestion for someone (like me) who has a page watchlisted and sees that someone else has unilaterally changed the longstanding era style? Revert and start a talk page discussion? That's what I did, and it turned into an intractable dispute because the other party (the one who wanted to change from the status quo) did not behave the way you suggest. And when I brought the issue here, after an initial period when my interpretation was clearly favored, a couple of highly experienced editors showed up who said that the other party was in fact right to unilaterally roll back a 6+ year status quo. Which shows not only that there is no consensus about what "established" means, but that there is no consensus for the approach that you are suggesting (which I agree should be the norm). This lack of consensus matters. Take a look at Talk:Josephus#Era style, if you feel like it, to see how this unfolded in practice. Generalrelative (talk) 17:37, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      It seems to me: we look at the page history and find the first editor who made a unilateral change away from the first non-stub usage. Whatever the usage was before that change is the established style in the article (assuming there is no consensus at talk). I strongly oppose the idea that we just give a free pass to violations of MOS:ERA which haven't been challenged for a while. As I and others above have pointed out, editors unilaterally changing the dating style in articles is a common occurrence, so there will obviously be cases which go unnoticed for years. We should be able to correct them. Ficaia (talk) 21:35, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      We all know your opinion on the matter, Ficaia. My question was for Blueboar, who appears to have a very different take. My concerns is that the lack of clarity here might make you feel that it is appropriate to go around changing longstanding era styles while refusing to accept the onus of creating a new consensus, as you did at Josephus. In my view that would be highly disruptive, and many of those who have commented here believe as I do that it is contrary to a common-sense reading of MOS:ERA. Short of clarifying the language of the guideline, I am curious if Blueboar has advice for how to handle behavior such as yours. Generalrelative (talk) 21:49, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Well, after participating in a number of discussions on this topic over the years, I thought I had heard all possible viewpoints expressed, but Blueboar has me completely stumped! This novel interpretation would "force" anyone objecting to a very recent driveby undiscussed ERA change to go the trouble of launching and following a talk page discussion, rather than just reverting. Even the most law-abiding and saintly editors (like myself) are unlikely to follow this. Most such drive-by changes are by ip's with no watchlist, and there is rarely any reaction to a reversion. We are not talking about consensus at all in these cases. I've never heard anyone express before that this is what the policy means - if it were the word "established" would not be needed, would it? Yet it is there, and the great majority of editors think it means something, but there are disagreements as to what. We have many similar policies, and I have never heard a "last night is right" position expressed concerning them. Johnbod (talk) 22:21, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Here is an example from just the other day, which I happened upon at random: an IP which has been editing disruptively elsewhere changed BCE/CE to BC/AD at History of the Jews in the Roman Empire with the edit summary Some years ago an editor changed the dating system from what the original author wanted to use, without discussing it - I've changed it back. [9] Tgeorgescu reverted, citing WP:ERA. [10] According to SMcCandlish's reading of the guideline (and that of some others here), Tgeorgescu was wrong to do so. If very experienced editors such as this disagree as to the common-sense reading of this guideline, and it makes a real difference in practice, I would suggest that we have a problem which needs to be resolved through either 1) a clarification of the guideline's language, or 2) an explicit consensus here as to what is meant by "established era style". Perhaps some kind of RfC is in order? Generalrelative (talk) 18:34, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Indeed. That's a good example - "some years ago" seems to be June 2020 in this edit, with a dubious edit summary claiming "consistency". I think Tgeorgescu was wrong to revert, though I'm sure he did so in good faith. Johnbod (talk) 20:10, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Well, it looks like History of the Jews in the Roman Empire first used CE dates (1), so the IP was mistaken. Ficaia (talk) 20:52, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Ha, thanks Ficaia. Just goes to show how confusing this issue is for everybody! Generalrelative (talk) 20:57, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I don't think it's confusing at all. The case you cited above actually shows MOS:ERA working as intended. Ficaia (talk) 21:14, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Umm, yeah the confusion here should be obvious. Johnbod, through no fault of his own, came away with precisely the wrong conclusion even after looking through the page history. That's assuming that the style present in the stub version you've cited persisted through the earliest non-stub version. Also: while I've agreed to abide by SMcCandlish's interpretation in the short term here, I don't think we need to go so far as to take his word as gospel as to what is "intended" by MOS:ERA. It should be evident to you by now that experienced editors differ about this in good faith. Generalrelative (talk) 21:28, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Yes, I didn't look far enough back - the article "went BC" with these edits in 2011. It was never a stub imo, from the first 3 edits in 2010. Johnbod (talk) 02:17, 8 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I disagree. I did find one interesting article where the first edit was one era style, but its creator changed the era style in their second edit. Without of course any discussion on the talk page. Let's make sure any "rule" we created doesn't mean we have to stick to their first choice. I also very strongly feel that "established style" doesn't have to have been decided on the talk page if it's long enough ago, how long depends for me on how active editing is on the article. Doug Weller talk 14:29, 8 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      @Johnbod: Do you agree with my assessment that an RfC may be the best way forward at this point? If so, do you have any suggestions as to the best way to phrase it? Generalrelative (talk) 20:55, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Yes, I do. I think it needs to be limited in scope, & certainly needs careful wording, which I'll think about. Johnbod (talk) 02:17, 8 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Towards another proposal

    • Cool, thanks. It seems to me that before we even consider changing the language of the guideline we’ll need to get consensus as to what the standard practice should be. And there seem to be two clear options on the table:
      1) Whenever a dispute surrounding era style arises and there is no explicit consensus on the article talk page, revert to the style present in the oldest non-stub version of the article pending a new consensus.
      2) An era style should be seen as having implicit consensus if it has persisted in an article for a reasonable amount of time. The amount of time depends on how actively edited the article is and/or how many page watchers it has.
      Of course these are just a suggestion / first draft. Please critique! Generalrelative (talk) 14:49, 8 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      This is the sort of thing I've been supporting in the past. Doug Weller talk 10:47, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Which is, Doug? As Generalrelative says, the options are contradictory. I think it might just be possible to find a way incorporating elements of both. I'm very suspicious indeed about "implicit consensus" regularizing undiscussed changes after a certain period. This just encourages sneaky obsessives, of whom there are a very considerable number. Many articles have only one or two uses of any ERA marker, and very few readers will be upset enough to check the history. Virtually all the changes I pick up are spotted from the watchlist, or seeing two styles used (many sneaky changers only do the lead). Those above who accept the principle of "implicit consensus" have an extremely wide range of times after which this should be assumed, ranging from minutes to several years. Strangely we don't apply this principle to typos, including ignorant changes of spelling to another variety of English, or to downright mistakes. I agree any time period should vary somewhat with the obscurity of the subject, and possibly the number of times an era style is given in the article (often far more often than is needed). Believers in "implicit consensus" might ponder on the fact that History of the Jews in the Roman Empire spent nine years with BC before another undiscussed change returned it to BCE (see above). Johnbod (talk) 01:29, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I think one thing a change we could propose in an Rfc is to scotch the "only use AD on subjects related to Christianity" argument. That is held by a certain minority of editors, but I don't think it has ever achieved consensus as such, and it seems clearly against the letter and spirit of WP:ERA as it stands to me, so we would just be clarifying. This argument is essentially that CE is right and deviation from it is some sort of concession (also believed by many editors); that is clearly not the intent of WP:ERA.
      The relatively few full-blown talk page discussions tend to be rather depressing and pointless parades of personal prejudices and cultural assumptions, and I think we should aim to minimize them. In the great majority of cases, there are no killer "reasons specific to its content" (surely nearly all Jewish articles use BCE already, and I think that is very generally agreed), and beyond the single example above, I don't think we should restrict arguments used.
      So in general I am with going back to the earliest non-stub version. If people don't like that they can always launch a talk page discussion to change. If we do accept that illicit changes can become "established" I'd suggest 6 or 7 years, or 30,000 views in that period (where applicable), equalling some 15 a day over the whole period. Or one could go on some number for 2021 views. Our current "all time" pageviews go back to the fixed point of 1 July 2015, so we could take that as the start of the count, as the numbers are very easily available. My thoughts, anyway. Johnbod (talk) 01:23, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I don't have a problem with sneaky obsessives. If no one notices then obviously no one cares. If someone cares then they will raise the issue when it happens. The alternative is for other editors to have to trawl through the history. If a sneaky change was done in say April 2021, should you revert it? Perhaps another sneaky was done in Dec 2016 - in which case the last sneaky is actually right. But perhaps there was another sneaky done in Jan 2013 - in which case the last sneaky was wrong. Too much work for too little gain.
      Exact times to wait can be subjective but I'd say that if nobody made a fuss after 3 months then nobody cared about it.
      I would also have no trouble with applying this principle to WP:ENGVAR, WP:DATEFORMAT and similar.  Stepho  talk  02:31, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Whooah! Way to liven up those talk pages! "If someone cares then they will raise the issue when it happens." goes against all we know about how editors, let alone readers, use WP. In fact, establishing the first non-stub style is very easy; it's trawling through for subsequent changes that is difficult. Most talk pages are also really short, so it takes no time to see if there has ever been a discussion. Johnbod (talk) 02:42, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • No changes required 2022 AD == 2022 CE. These are both one and the same, based on the same legendary/mythical/however-you-want-to-describe-it event as the reference epoch (one could even say that the "C" in BCE/CE is just a bowdlerism and really stands for "Christian era"). Which one (including the third alternative of using +/-) is used in an article is entirely an inconsequential style choice; and there's no need to waste or even encourage a waste of editor time or efforts over it. If there's ever any doubt which format is in use in an article, people should be encouraged to just pick one, at random if must be, and go with it, not write walls of text over it. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:44, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Here is my idea for an RfC question: When an article's talk page contains no explicit consensus endorsing one era style or another, should the phrase "established era style" in MOS:ERA be taken to mean 1) the style present in the oldest non-stub version of the article, or 2) the most recent stable era style?
      Thoughts? Generalrelative (talk) 02:49, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I think you have to define "stable"; it has just the same problems as "established" - ie no-one agrees what it means (as very clearly shown above). Johnbod (talk) 02:54, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I agree that that's a possible issue, but I'm having trouble coming up with a succinct enough way to phrase the question while including that level of detail. Another possibility is to include a preamble and then refer to it in the RfC question, like so:
      RfC Preamble
      MOS:ERA states: An article's established era style should not be changed without reasons specific to its content; seek consensus on the talk page first. In the above discussion, two interpretations of this clause have emerged:
      Option 1) Whenever a dispute surrounding era style arises and there is no explicit consensus on the article talk page, revert to the style present in the oldest non-stub version of the article pending a new consensus.
      Option 2) An era style should be seen as having implicit consensus if it has persisted in an article for a reasonable amount of time. The amount of time depends on how actively edited the article is and/or how many page watchers it has.
      RfC on MOS:ERA's "established era style" clause
      Should Option 1 or Option 2 (as summarized in the Preamble above) be the standard interpretation of MOS:ERA's "established era style" clause? Let's say that Neither is Option 3.
      Generalrelative (talk) 03:05, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I think "The amount of time depends on how actively edited the article is and/or how many page watchers it has" is unclear and would be argued by the partisans so as to favor their preference. I'd suggest something like "An era style should be seen as having consensus if it has persisted for one year without challenge". That's in the middle of the ranges proposed above and seems reasonable to me. SchreiberBike | ⌨  04:16, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I obviously don't agree with any time limit. But 1 year was the lowest proposal. The range was 1 to 6 years. Ficaia (talk) 05:07, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      How about waiting a millenium? `EEng 05:27, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Fine by me! The whole "established" thing is not a necessity, and causes trouble, & I would happily propose just removing it if I thought that would succeed. Johnbod (talk) 13:35, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      That's false. Walter Görlitz and Stepho-wrs both stated established could be defined as a change that has lasted for a month without being challenged. Generalrelative (talk) 05:16, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Someone else said there was no time limit at all. But I agree that 6 months to 1 yr is the lowest period that seems to have wide support, from this and other discussions. I very much doubt anything less would get wide support. 13:35, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
      I am, by the way, against setting an exact time frame in the RfC. I believe that it's best to leave the question of how long a change needs to persist in order to be considered "stable" up to community judgement on a case-by-case basis. If that becomes unworkable, it will always be possible to settle the question in a subsequent RfC. For now I think the priority should be to sort out which of the two very different principles we should be observing –– either oldest non-stub version or most recent stable version. Of course that's just my 2¢. Generalrelative (talk) 05:21, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Well, I don't see any need for an RfC. The second interpretation you put forward completely undermines the purpose of MOS:ERA: to prevent editors making unilateral changes. Ficaia (talk) 05:28, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Simply ignoring a critical mass of experienced editors who disagree with you is not an option, even when you feel strongly that your own point of view is correct. Wikipedia works by consensus, and more than half of those who have commented on the matter above have endorsed the second interpretation. But whichever reading ultimately prevails, my fundamental concern here is that we eliminate the ambiguity which enables content disputes such as you and I had on Talk:Josephus, which end up wasting editor time. That's why I'm advocating for an RfC. Generalrelative (talk) 05:48, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks everyone for your feedback. I think at this point WP:RFCBEFORE is well satisfied so I'll open up the RfC below. Generalrelative (talk) 17:04, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    RfC Preamble

    MOS:ERA states: An article's established era style should not be changed without reasons specific to its content; seek consensus on the talk page first. In the above discussion, two interpretations of this clause have emerged:

    • Option 1) Implicit consensus is not applicable to changes in era style. Therefore, when a dispute surrounding era style arises and there is no explicit consensus on the article talk page, revert to the style present in the oldest non-stub version of the article pending a new consensus.
    • Option 2) An era style should be seen as having implicit consensus if it has persisted in an article for a reasonable amount of time. The amount of time depends on how actively edited the article is and/or how many page watchers it has. Therefore, when a dispute surrounding era style arises and there is no explicit consensus on the article talk page, revert to the most recent stable version pending a new consensus.

    Generalrelative (talk) 17:07, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    RfC on MOS:ERA's "established era style" clause

    Should Option 1 or Option 2 (as summarized in the Preamble above) be the standard interpretation of MOS:ERA's "established era style" clause? Let's say that Neither is Option 3. Generalrelative (talk) 17:11, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Survey (MOS:ERA's "established era style" clause)

    • Comment: In setting up this RfC, I have resisted specifying an exact time frame in Option 2 for determining whether a style change has implicit consensus. I believe it's best to leave that up to community judgement on a case-by-case basis. If that becomes unworkable, it will always be possible to settle the question in a subsequent RfC. And if Option 1 prevails then the question will be moot. For that reason I think our first priority should be to sort out which of the two very different principles suggested above we should be observing –– either oldest non-stub version or most recent stable version. Generalrelative (talk) 17:15, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2. Lawyers gonna lawyer; I'm not sure there's any practical way to write the rules to avoid that. With Option 1, they'd argue about what version is a stub, or the oldest non-stub would turn out not to have any instances of era markers or conflicting instances or what have you. Explain the principle and the fact that it depends on everyone applying it in good faith, then trust them to do so. They might or they might not, but this is a manual of style, not a cop. --Trovatore (talk) 18:10, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2. No novel argument to add. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:50, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option one without a doubt. Option one provides stability especially from editors who just don't like a particular style. Option two will produce more conflicts. I've seen so often many articles mix era styles. Option one allows for a quick resolution but option two will result in bickering about which style gets implicit consensus especially if there's been a lot of back and forth. I've mentioned before that moving away from the stabilty that option one provides will result in editors going around changing as many articles as possible to see if they'll get reverted before the "time limit" is up to revert back. An editor made a comment about it happening already. I agree, it does happen already but with option one, stability will win out. When there's been a lot of back and forth between the era styles in an article, using option two can get messy. Option one is clear. Masterhatch (talk) 18:55, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • Then I have to repeat what I said a few days ago. Option 1 gives precedence to whatever style an early editor chose many years ago, which (given that most early editors were from North America) means a preponderance of the Christian notation. This is particularly problematic in articles about Jewish history because of Christian appropriation. Wikipedia works by consensus and we should not give a trump card to hold-outs. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:08, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        • We should not divide this down religious lines. It will be fool hardy as editors will claim "religious ownership" over articles and that'll be particularly difficult to deal with as there are many articles that more than one religion may claim "ownership". Imagine the edit wars over that? This is an encyclopedia and we must keep our POV out of editting. Masterhatch (talk) 20:48, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
          • No, I wasn't proposing that, the reverse in fact. My point is that Option 1 provides a card that trumps consensus. In reality that card would most likely to be used by religious zealots. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 07:52, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
            • Where on earth do you get the idea that "Option 1 provides a card that trumps consensus"? This is completely wrong. Under both options, a new discussion can always establish a new consensus. In practice it is mostly secular "zealots" at work here, although it is unfair to call them that, it's just their teachers told them "CE" was the "right" era to use. Also in practice any discussion on a Jewish-related article using BC/AD that is notified to Wikiproject Judaism will produce a quick and certain result I'm pretty sure. I don't know why various people here use future conditional tenses describing era problems. If you watchlist lots of ancient history or art articles, you'll know this comes up all the time, and has done for years. Johnbod (talk) 03:28, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
              • A thought experiment: imagine a debate where someone is objecting and asserts that there is this no consensus. In the absence of consensus, they play the 'first used' clause, which provides their desired result. Trump card played. System gamed. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 13:14, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
                • That works just as well with the "established" "card", which some above interpret as taking immediate effect. In either case a new debate will settle any dispute, though obviously launching one is a nuisance. Johnbod (talk) 14:15, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
                  • Johnbod, well no, I don't think it does, or at least not as unarguably. "First use" is verifiable and defensible, no matter how long ago it was written; "established use" requires a judgement call and is thus not an iron-clad defence against a new consensus. Discussion can take place: yes, wp:status quo applies but the consensus to overturn it does not have to be overwhelming. An RFC gives added weight to a WP "guidance" so it seems important to me that we don't limit the discretion of future editors without a very convincing reason. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:08, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
              Johnbod, You and I seem to have very different experiences. I see at least as many new editors or IPs changing CE to AD etc as the other way around. There is of course no way to easily get statistics on this but I suspect that there are a lot of Christian zealots as well. I took a look at Wikiproject Judaism, this seems to have come up very rarely there but they did remove one statement from the manual of style 11 years ago saying " Gregorian calendar dates on Jewish topics should generally refer to BCE and CE for years." I don't think we can make decisions on the basis of numbers of zealots. Doug Weller talk 09:50, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
              • That might well be the case, and explained by your watchlist being, I imagine, mostly archaeology articles, where CE is more common, and mine by art and history ones, where AD still just about prevails. Also I have a lot on India, where only those with very expensive educations to post-graduate levels understand "CE" at all. I agree with you over "zealots"; that was Friedman's introduction. Yes, the issue would come up very rarely at Wikiproject Judaism, which considerably undercuts Friedman's concerns. In fact discussion sections on this, as opposed to reversions that produce no comeback, are mercifully rare these days, and we want to keep it that way. Johnbod (talk) 14:15, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
                • JB, Doug W: when I wrote "religious zealots", I really should have included so-called "militant fundamentalist atheists" too. And yes, having reverted "corrections" both ways over the past few years [most changing CE to AD], my experience has been the same as John's. But I have no doubt that the culture wars will return to this topic ere long, and I don't want to us to make disruptive editing easy. IMO, Option 1 does that. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:08, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 3 - The entire point of WP:ERA is to prevent edit warring over which dating format is used - and even reverting an undiscussed change can be seen as a form of edit warring. I would adopt a 0 revert policy as follows:
      1. If you dislike the ERA style currently on the page - DO NOT CHANGE IT WITHOUT DISCUSSION.
      2. If someone else has previously changed it without discussion - DO NOT REVERT IT WITHOUT DISCUSSION.
      This does not mean you have to accept an undiscussed change… it simply means you should raise the issue on the talk page and actually discuss it. Blueboar (talk) 19:13, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      That seems inconsistent with BRD. Do you really want to invent a whole new flow just for era styles? --Trovatore (talk) 19:18, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      See WP:0RR. I’m not inventing a new flow… just applying an accepted (albeit rarely used) alternative that already exists. Blueboar (talk) 19:33, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      The editor making the change may not be willing (or able) to discuss. WP:BRD should apply. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:45, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I would add that, in any such discussion, "no consensus" is a very likely outcome (perhaps the most likely). The advantage of BRD is that it tends to maintain a stable version over time. --Trovatore (talk) 19:52, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      If you care enough to revert, you care enough to at least open a discussion. If the other editor does not engage, you can take that lack of engagement as a silent consensus to revert. And a silent consensus established via an attempt to discuss on the talk page out weighs a silent consensus with no discussion at all. Blueboar (talk) 20:15, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Just unrealistic, as well as against WP:BRD. Most regulars know not to do an undiscussed ERA change; the people who don't are usually ip's with a handful of edits, who won't see any talk page section. In what other contexts do we apply "If you care enough to revert, you care enough to at least open a discussion"? Johnbod (talk) 20:29, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      But if only you and the other editor actually discuss it and you can't agree, that's "no consensus", which would mean that the edit would stand. But it shouldn't; there should be a preference for the status quo ante. --Trovatore (talk) 20:27, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2 as OP. It seems to me that WP:IMPLICITCONSENSUS is clearly applicable, and it is a policy. I’ve seen no persuasive reason why era style should be a special case where this policy doesn’t apply. And while I admire the collaborative ethic of Blueboar's suggestion above, it does not appear to me to be feasible in practice, nor is it based in policy. Generalrelative (talk) 19:30, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1 MOS:RETAIN: When no English variety has been established and discussion does not resolve the issue, use the variety found in the first post-stub revision that introduced an identifiable variety. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:45, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1 MOS:RETAIN, though I'm not wholly against Option 2, and regret the opportunity was not taken to try and hammer out more precisely what "established" might actually mean. I'm on the long end of the opinions expressed above. Johnbod (talk) 20:29, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      @Johnbod: I’m confused – do you mean that you’re not wholly against Option 2? Sweet6970 (talk) 18:15, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Opps, sorry - changed now You're pretty easily confused then. The present situation is a combination of 1 and 2, but if I have to choose one, I'll go with 1, although the uncertainty as to what "established" means in practice (the issue that started this discussion off) would remain completely unsettled. Johnbod (talk) 19:43, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2 There will always be arbitrary changes to article ERA styles, whether by people who are unaware of MOS:ERA or who choose to ignore it. With no general consensus as to when a given style should be used, we should have a guideline that allows those changes to be reverted quickly to a stable version, determined by looking at the recent article history. The goal isn't fairness to either the BC/AD or BCE/CE crowds, it's to make the unproductive disruption go away while consuming minimal editing resources. The guidance in MOS:ERA to achieve consensus on the talk page before changing a style is good advice, but "established style" must also be interpreted in line with the core Wikipedia policy that "Wikipedia consensus usually occurs implicitly." A change that has stood for at least a couple of years is established by any reasonable interpretation of that term, even if it didn't follow the MOS:ERA guidance when it was made. Looking at Second Temple, it was created in 2002 using BC/AD (copied from an 1897 Bible Dictionary), and changed bit-by-bit to BCE/CE in 2004 and 2005. This change was challenged in 2007, and discussed on the talk page - it is arguable whether the talk page discussion resulted in a consensus. If the article's era style were changed arbitrarily today, an editor should just be able to revert to the established style without requiring revisiting 20 years of history.--Trystan (talk) 20:59, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • Oh, then I must have an unreasonable interpretation, as I don't think "a couple of years" is long enough for little-read articles (ie most of them). Gee, thanks! I agree that the aim is to minimize editor time sorting things out, which is why it is so important that the earliest edits are very quick to find, while on some articles even going back just 2 years in the history is a nightmare, especially as ERA-changers tend not to give clear edit summaries, often just saying something like "correct". Johnbod (talk) 21:06, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1 per MOS:RETAIN - per  SMcCandlish, I believe this option is the current status quo. Further, ERA is similar to ENGVAR and DATEVAR; something that editors will disrupt wikipedia arguing and edit warring over if they are allowed to do so. Option 2 will allow them to do so, while option 1 will prevent this. BilledMammal (talk) 02:37, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2 MOS:RETAIN still applies. If an editor changes it without discussion then other editors watching the article can revert as per WP:BRD and then start a discussion on the talk page. However, if nobody was watching the page or none of the watchers raised an issue about it in a timely manner then obviously nobody cares. After a suitable time (I'm not hung up on the particular time but call it 6 months if you really want a figure) with nobody objecting to it then it becomes the "established" style. Option 1 would require tedious trawling through the history and may easily miss an earlier revert out of multiple reverts - it might also require trawling through archives discussion pages. An option 1 style revert of a change from years earlier will itself look like a unilateral change and will probably get (mistakenly?) reverted by another editor under WP:RETAIN.  Stepho  talk  03:27, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1 MOS:ERA tells us not to change the dating style in an article without discussion at talk. If we accept Option 2, we'll be telling people: "Yeah, you probably shoudn't go around changing articles in that way. But if you do and no one notices for x amount of time, then you'll get away with it." Ficaia (talk) 06:51, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1, which is just MOS:RETAIN / MOS:VAR applied to yet another style. It has served us well for 15+ years. To the extent there will be any definitional conflict over what "established" means, this should be explained at MOS:RETAIN MOS:VAR [I sometimes get these two confused], not re-re-re-explained in every WP:*VAR that is derived from it. Doing it the latter way is priming us for a pointless WP:POLICYFORK in which, over time, the standards for MOS:ERA would diverge from those of MOS:DATEVAR and MOS:ENGVAR and WP:CITEVAR and so on. To the extent MOS:ENGVAR may already be trying to define what "established" is, that text should move to MOS:RETAIN MOS:VAR, which is where we should be defining the process: 1) don't change from one acceptable style to another without good reason; 2) give that reason on the talk page and establish consensus; and 3) if consensus is so elusive even the status quo ante the dispute can't be said to have consensus, then use the style that was established in the first non-stub version of the article with relevant content. This is not rocket science and we need to stop trying to make it more difficult than it is, and stop trying to fork new (and conflicting) rules out of nowhere. See also WP:CREEP and WP:MOSBLOAT.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:38, 17 April 2022 (UTC); updated 00:52, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1 and no need to add to the good arguments above. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 15:48, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1 because this gives a definite answer. Option 2 would only amplify the possibility for arguments, because it would lead to arguments about what is a ‘reasonable time’. Sweet6970 (talk) 16:23, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2 which reflects our policy on consensus, policy normally overrides guidelines. To say that, for example, a 15 year old article that was changed 12 years ago doesn't have an established style from that time onwards doesn't make sense. Btw, I find that most editors making changes are new or are IPs. And recently a lot are calling such changes "grammar". Doug Weller talk 16:50, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2 Saying that implicit consensus doesn't apply here sounds like special pleading. Moreover, option 1 doesn't really solve anything. To paraphrase Trovatore above, "oldest non-stub version" is just as ambiguous and open to wiki-lawyering as "reasonable amount of time", and it presumes that a consistent dating style actually existed in it. Is a stub only a stub if it is tagged as such? Does a stub remain a stub if it is expanded yet no one bothers to remove the tag? For that matter, what grand principle insists that stubbiness is the crucial dividing line? XOR'easter (talk) 21:09, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • I've never seen any of those stub-related arguments raised, but I've seen quite a few disputes over "established". Obviously, if the earliest non-stub version is mixed in style then all bets are off (I don't think I've ever seen that either though). What grand principle - MOS:RETAIN. Johnbod (talk) 03:15, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment It's a significant argument for Option 1 that ENGVAR still uses "first non-stub". It would be weird to ask editors to remember one rule for spelling and a different rule for eras. But in practice, is "first non-stub" really taken seriously even for ENGVAR? If someone wrote "color" in 2007 and then it got silently changed to "colour" in 2009, and the article has been humming along tranquilly in BrEng ever since, I wouldn't feel that entitled me to go in and start changing all the spellings to AmEng. Maybe we should consider clarifying that point for ENGVAR, rather than copying the text for ERA. --Trovatore (talk) 03:58, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • Really? I do that all the time, especially where (as is normally the case for ENGVAR, and often for ERA problems) the styles are hoplessly mixed up in the article, as different editors have added over the years. The clear "first non-stub" rule is the main reason we have few protracted ENGVAR arguments, unless close national ties are invoked. Johnbod (talk) 14:20, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        • An example has just hit my watchlist at Apollonius of Tyana, which went non-stub in 2002. Despite his dates being "2-98", no one thought it necessary to add any ERA indication until 2006, when an "AD" was added, followed not long after by a CE. The article has probably remained mixed until an ip's first edit went all-AD in the last hour, saying "Changed few instances of CE into AD to conform with the overall style of the articles which primarily uses AD" which I haven't checked but is no doubt correct. So much for "established". Johnbod (talk) 14:44, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
          • That's not exactly the situation I was talking about. Yes, when things are genuinely mixed, you've got to clean them up somehow, and you might as well pick a clear rule, to the extent there is one. But if a style has genuinely become "established", it seems more rather than less harmful to stability to go change it based on being able to find a single instance from a decade ago that no one paid much attention to at the time. --Trovatore (talk) 18:01, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
            • It is more typical than the cases you have made up. What does "a style has genuinely become "established"" mean? That was the question that started this section off, and unfortunately this Rfc avoids attempting to provide an answer. No one is actually going through histories looking for the many illicit changes that have undoubtedly been undetected, except when another such raises the question. Johnbod (talk) 05:01, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
              If Option 1, or even no consensus, is decided, I've been thinking that the least time-wasting way to respond to a change might be to simply revert any changes, either way, that don't point to a discussion or something like that on the basis that it's up to the person making the change to justify it, not me to spend time searching for the first non-stub version etc. Doug Weller talk 09:36, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
              I think illicit is an inappropriate assessment here. That implies that the person making the changes is trying to "pull a fast one" or otherwise knows what they are doing is wrong, and being sneaky about it. These are good faith changes that people make; they earnestly believe they are helping improve the article when they make said change. Whether or not they are is a different story, but to call such edits "illicit" is really wrong headed, and the wrong way to approach what is, in essence, an arbitrary change. The policy exists not because one version is better or not, but that neither is, and as such, we should not be changing arbitrarily between one or the other just to change it. If what is there now is as good as what one could change it to don't change it. If it happened to have been changed (against that advice) a very long time ago, don't change it back. --Jayron32 13:10, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
              The most frequent edit summary I see by IPs or accounts with almost no edits is "grammar change" or "fixed grammar". Doug Weller talk 13:21, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
              Let's look at a dictionary: "illicit... forbidden by law, rules, or custom." Seems correct. Johnbod (talk) 15:22, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1, which has the virtue of simplicity, although I can't see it fairly resolving all cases (e.g. where major early contributors prefer one style but don't explicitly impose it, followed by someone whose only contribution is to set the other era style). Option 2 just has too much vague language that is left open to interpretation. Dhtwiki (talk) 22:20, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2. It's important to understand that both of these options are "failure states" (the ideal solution is to reach a clear consensus.) That being the case, the only overriding concern is the same one we always have with WP:NOCON - we want to maintain article stability per WP:QUO. Stability is best ensured by giving the longstanding version precedence rather than encouraging people to dig through the article history from years and years ago and make a sweeping change to it based on that. I don't really agree that MOS:RETAIN overrides this, but even if it did I'm not seeing much of an argument for why RETAIN is what it is; if there's a contradiction and people are bothered by that then MOS:RETAIN should be changed as well, since in neither case is there a compelling reason to override the much more core and much more important policy of WP:NOCON. Finally, WP:NOCON is a broader and more widely-known policy; using it uniformly as the default way to resolve no-consensus disputes makes policy simpler - it is the current wording here (and, yes, even RETAIN) that are CREEPy. --Aquillion (talk) 22:59, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • Additionally, while I don't think this is the intent, I'm concerned that the wording of option 1 could be used to argue that, in situations where, say... one editor starts an article with era type A, someone else immediately changes it to B, a clear consensus emerges for B on talk, and then, five years later, another RFC over the era ends in no consensus, the article should be changed back to A because the consensus in B is no longer valid and the first version has priority. I've seen enough policies end up in weird interpretations like that that I would strenuously oppose any version of 1 that fails to make it unambiguous that the moment a clear consensus is reached for an article's era, the first version no longer matters and will never matter again under any circumstances (ie. a new explicit consensus is needed to reverse a previous one; it is not acceptable to demonstrate that the consensus is now deadlocked and then insist on reverting to the older version over a previously-established consensus.) But in general all of these nonsense interactions can just be avoided by going for option 2, which is how we handle basically everything else - it feels like both this policy and RETAIN were from an earlier era where WP:NOCON was less well-defined, and now feel arbitrary and unnecessary. But in general, WP:NOCON is simple, easy to understand, and works everywhere; I am not seeing anyone making any compelling arguments why we should allow deviations for it here (honestly I'm not even sure we can - NOCON is policy, this is just the MOS. When there's no consensus to enforce what the MOS says, or when there's disagreement over how to apply it, we default to the current / longstanding text; the MOS can't just grant itself priority over core dispute-resolution policy.) --Aquillion (talk) 23:07, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        • I'm sure that wasn't the intent, nor would any such implication ever actually make it into the policy. Neither of the options have wordings that are suitable for just dropping into the policy, which is a pity. Johnbod (talk) 02:12, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 1: This is how I've always understood WP:ERA and read through article histories accordingly. The "reasonable time" could vary tremendously, since some articles do not get a meaningful edit for years. But in heavy traffic articles an era change can still go unnoticed for a long time, even if the change was virtually vandalism. This happens a lot, especially from BCE to BC. StAnselm (talk) 14:09, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Option 2. Just because someone rushed an article and wrote a few lines, does not mean anything. If an article has been stable after an era style changed then there is clearly implicit consensus for that change. That is especially true for articles which are actively edited by numerous editors. If after a period of time, an editor wants to challenge that, they should start a discussion and get convince other editors. If they can't they obviously do not have consensus for that style. --Gonnym (talk) 14:56, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Discussion (MOS:ERA's "established era style" clause)

    Do reliable sources play no role here at all? What if a stub (or whatever stable baseline point people decide to agree on) does it one way, but the preponderance of reliable sources clearly use the other system? We go with the Wikipedia editor's decision? Mathglot (talk) 01:52, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Not really. On most ancient subjects (which is obviously where this mostly applies) the "preponderance of reliable sources" will use BC, if only because they predate the very recent arrival of the BCE style. Working out & demonstrating what "the preponderance of reliable sources" say or use on anything is a huge effort. Under either option here, a new discussion, per WP:ERA can always change and confirm the style. Johnbod (talk) 02:31, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I concur with Jc3s5h below that this would basically be disastrous, but iff we felt we had to go in some direction like this, it would have to be like MOS:GENDERID, and only consider recent source material.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:56, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    We must not decide the era notation based on the practices of the sources cited in the article. To adopt such a guideline would create an incentive to edit war over the sources; one side will try to add sources that use BC and remove those that use BCE; the other side will do the reverse. The changes in sources will reduce the quality of the article much more than a change in era notation would. Jc3s5h (talk) 03:01, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Both of the above are correct. I'd like to add that it is not Wikipedia's practice to make style decisions based on sources. Reliable sources tend to be written for and by specialists and Wikipedia is written for a generalist audience. RS determine the facts in an article, but not what style we choose. WP:SSF talks about this (and says a lot more that I haven't read). SchreiberBike | ⌨  03:31, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, that's correct (and will remain correct no matter how often someone with a WP:Specialized-style fallacy gets bent out of shape about it).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:54, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    If you propose changing from style A to style B and you are shouted down, clearly there is an established style. If you propose a change (or propose to explicitly declare the existing style "established"), and a consensus does not form, then clearly there is not an established style. If the article has been in the same style for most or all of its existence, then clearly there is an established style. If the article has been about 50/50 between two competing styles, then clearly there is not an established style. If people have been repeatedly editwarring about it for months or years, clearly there is not an established style. If it's been the same style for most of the existence of the article and an editwar broke out recently, clearly there is an established style (though a failure to come to consensus could disestablish it). None of this is complicated. The fact that era style attracts a certain level of zealotry and related bad behavior doesn't make this *VAR "magically special" compared to all the other similar provisions, nor call for instituting weird rule forks when we already have a general rule (that WP:ERAVAR is just an application of). It means some zealots (on both sides) need to be taken to ANI and barred from changing established era styles in articles. It's a behavioral problem, not a "there oughta be a new rule ..." problem.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:53, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Several people above cite MOS:RETAIN, which is part of MOS:ENGVAR and relates specifically to changes between national varieties of English. The general guidance on retaining existing styles is at MOS:VAR. In my opinion, both MOS:VAR and MOS:RETAIN are compatible with Option 2. MOS:VAR just says not to make arbitrary changes or edit war. MOS:RETAIN says "When no English variety has been established and discussion does not resolve the issue, use the variety found in the first post-stub revision that introduced an identifiable variety. The established variety in a given article can be documented by placing the appropriate Varieties of English template on its talk page." Reverting to the first post-stub version only happens in the absence of an existing established style. I would say that an article that has been stable in one variety of English for many years, and has that style documented on the talk page, has an established style, regardless of whether it was arbitrarily changed at some point years ago. Use of a similar template to record established ERA styles might help "settle" articles on one or the other, though it would likely be a fair amount of trouble trying to apply those templates in the first place.--Trystan (talk) 14:12, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    What we may need to do is "port" some provisions out of ENGVAR/RETAIN and into VAR, so that the general principles are found there and can be referenced from all the *VAR provisions.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:49, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • They do, sort of? Remember that this discussion is just about what we do when there is no clear consensus. If there's a clear consensus for one version, then that one must be used, and sources can be used to argue for that as usual. --Aquillion (talk) 23:01, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I've no preference for any options. But, would recommend restraint on 'newbies' or IPs who've been making numerous changes to related articles. GoodDay (talk) 17:30, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Sure, but will they be aware of your urgings? Johnbod (talk) 19:45, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Honestly, thinking over it, I am beginning to feel like both the relevant parts of MOS:ERA and MOS:RETAIN are inappropriate and should either be entirely deleted or drastically toned down to make it clear that they are mild suggestions at best (while referencing or summarizing WP:NOCON for what to do when there is no consensus, ie. retain the stable version until there is a consensus otherwise - but it should be clear that the force of that comes from WP:NOCON and not from the WP:MOS.) The purpose of the MOS is to give general guidelines for how articles should read; it is not to dictate dispute-resolution, which is covered by WP:CONSENSUS and other core policies. These parts of the MOS feel like they are relics of an era when our consensus-building procedures were less well-defined and rules on consensus-building therefore ended up slipped into the MOS. If people think they are vital then they should be added to WP:CONSENSUS, but in general I don't think it makes sense for the MOS to be overtly dictating how consensus should be assessed and what to do when it breaks down - that's not its role. And I have the same problem I outlined above - why are these different from anything else that is subject to consensus? Obviously going through a bunch of articles and changing them in a chain is inappropriate WP:FAITACCOMPLI; in general it feels to me like the problems that these parts of the MOS were intended to cover have since been covered adequately by more core policy. --Aquillion (talk) 23:16, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    That's a good point, Aquillion. I would support starting a centralized discussion on the matter once this RfC is concluded, regardless of the result here. Generalrelative (talk) 00:50, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't see it this way at all. One of the important purposes of the MOS is to stop disputes arising in the first place, which is what we are after here. Long-term readers of this page will know that just about everything in the MOS is disputable, and often disputed, but the MOS exists to set out the rules and standards and stop such disputes from taking up editors' time. Plus I really don't see how the deliberately very vague WP:NOCON helps in this issue at all; that would lead to far more protracted disputes, I'm sure. It deals with what to do when discussions fail to achieve consensus; WP:ERA aims to prevent the need for discussions in most cases, and even in its ambiguous condition is fairly successful in this. Johnbod (talk) 02:13, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Lists of books about a subject in the article

    Is it normally acceptable for an article about a topic to have a list of external references about the topic? If so what guidelines apply to inclusion, exclusion, length etc? I'm asking in context of the topics Conservatism and Liberalism. Both articles contain extensive "further reading" lists [11], [12]. What policies apply here? Is there a way to decide if a book/article is acceptable or not? My feeling is such lists should be discouraged/used sparingly. If the source isn't used as a citation then it seems it may not be relevant enough to include. Also, such lists seem like they may be abused as a place to promote inappropriate works. By that I mean works that are of poor quality, not widely accepted, biased in their views etc. Thanks. Springee (talk) 14:22, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    See MOS:FURTHER. I agree that such sections do have the annoying tendency to be abused to promote marginal works of scholarship or POVs. IMO, in an ideal world, this content would actually be based on secondary bibliographic coverage of the topic. Colin M (talk) 14:35, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, they also tend to be out of date, or all in a foreign language, especially German. The German wp tends to have a long "bibliography" section, and this often gets translated over. Johnbod (talk) 14:58, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That seems reasonable but it would perhaps be helpful to know what is a reasonable number (5, 10, 20, more?). Also, is there any criteria for what is a good "further read"? Imagine if an editor added a book that promoted racism to a list of further reading about racism. Many editors may totally miss the nature of the book being added. Springee (talk) 17:12, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    WP:ELYES. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:36, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Looking at that one I don't see that a generalized list of "further reading" sources would be allowed but I'm also not certain it applies here. That link says things like an organization's home page can be linked, a link to a site with a legally accessible copy of a work in question is OK and links to sources that have usable but copyrighted material is OK. I'm not sure any apply to a further reading list since such a list isn't required to have any external links. Springee (talk) 17:12, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Indeed. On big topics such as those you mention, I think up to 10 could be ok, but many editors trim to c. 5 or 6. I'd think 20 is the absolute maximum. Johnbod (talk) 17:20, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Extensive bibliographies on a per-article basis is something the old Britannica had, and may still have; but those were classified, annotated, and didn't include scholarly monographs. There are printed books that themselves contain extensive bibliographies (e.g. each volume in the Oxford History of the United States, as far as I know). Those should be considered as suitable for inclusion before others. There shouldn't be extensive additions by people who are otherwise uninvolved with the article. Various wikiprojects might take on maintaining extensive bibliographies that would be inappropriate for individual articles. There might be websites, to be pointed to under "External links", where well curated specialist bibliographies are maintained, with convenient access via links, which might be preferable to extensive listings here. Dhtwiki (talk) 22:49, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This is really a matter for discussion and consensus building on an article-by-article basis. Regardless, it's not really an MoS matter or question. What MoS has to say is more about layout the sections. If we need a content guideline better addressing "Further reading" lists, then that should be taken up at WT:External links.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:44, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Greek transliteration

    Sorry if this has been discussed before, but I wonder if we need a policy on ancient Greek transliteration? There are three schools of thought on the matter; latinization, romanization and straight transcription. For example Ἀχιλλεύς could be treated as Achilles, Achilleus or Akhilleus. No less an authority than the JACT course (essentially Mother's knee) has this to say: "More recently it has been fashionable to keep to a spelling that is closer to the original Greek, but the difficulty with this practice is that some words and names, in particular, have become so much part of our English heritage that they look strange and unfamiliar in their ‘Greek’ form. E.g. we all recognise ‘Achilles’, but ‘Akhilleus’ comes as a shock. Editors therefore have to make a decision whether to be consistently ‘Latin’ or consistently ‘Greek’, or whether to keep the familiar words in their ‘Latin’ form while treating the less familiar words in a ‘Greek’ way. The latter course has been followed in this book." My own prior would be latinizations are "colonialist" and direct transcription is to be preferred. In Wikipedia's case there is no confusion when you can link to the relevant article. The only special cases might be familiar names, i.e. Plato rather than Platon. Thoughts?Twospoonfuls (εἰπέ) 10:37, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    • Are people edit warring over this? Perhaps we could adopt a “rule” that is similar to what we have for ENGVAR and ERA… keep whichever style was used once the article reached non-stub stage… be consistent within the article… don’t change without discussion.
    If people are not edit warring, I would say use whichever variant would be most recognizable (and least jarring) to our readers. Blueboar (talk) 11:09, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Agree with Blueboar. Remember WP:RF "If you find yourself defending something as it is the "academic standard" or because it is what you as an editor want, you know you're going wrong! Write for our readers, not for academics and not for yourself". Later in the same article: "Another group which might make a good theoretical audience are high school and college students". So where there is an English language name (Achilles, Plato) use that in preference to a Greek transcription. However ensure that the Greek transcription is mentioned, after all we seek to inform. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 11:44, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Is anyone edit warring over this? Not that I know of. I can start one if you like though! But seriously, the problem with latinization, which must be the most familiar treatment of Greek words since it's the 19th century standard, is twofold. 1) the familiarity fallacy: jarring is good if it distances us from comforting, and sometimes false, assumptions. And the past is a foreign, uncomfortable place. 2) It is assuming Latin is the standard and Greek is subordinate, the very definition of a colonialist assumption. Weren't we meant to be doing something about that? And P.S. aren't featured articles supposed to be of interest to the specialist, they can't be that and written to a high school standard. Twospoonfuls (εἰπέ) 12:05, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikipedia adheres to the 19th century standard. Looking at the exemplary list of words given by Antony Andrewes in his preface to The Greek Tyrants, I see that even words he considered ripe for a closer-to-Greek spelling are given the older latinizations first at their respective articles (e.g. hyperakrioi and Rhaikelos, the latter not even having a "non-latinized" redirect). Further, I don't believe that discombobulation is a virtue; and the number of Latin terms derived from ancient Greek demonstrates the importance and sophistication of the latter language, not the reverse. Dhtwiki (talk) 01:53, 23 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    "Don't make me think" is definitely not a virtue. And isn't "the number of Latin terms derived from ancient Greek demonstrates the importance and sophistication of the latter language, not the reverse" what we call cultural appropriation now? It is possible to both profess admiration and be condescending and belittling. Twospoonfuls (εἰπέ) 09:40, 23 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Wanting to adhere to conventional forms of expression to facilitate communication isn't a matter of "Don't make me think". Otherwise, why do we have a manual of style? And, not all borrowings are *inappropriate* cultural appropriation. It's hard to think of the Romans as egregiously awful colonizers, when one of their most notable panegyrists was Greek. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:12, 24 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    We should not be aiming for Latin or Greek names, but English ones where they exist. I'm pretty sure that nearly all English-language sources use Achilles and Plato, rather than other forms, so that is what we should use, just as we refer to Athens, Rome etc. by their English names. Less well-known people and places from antiquity are more often referred to in academic sources than in general-interest ones, so we should follow current academic standards. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:44, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    JACT has it right: "keep the familiar words in their 'Latin' form while treating the less familiar words in a 'Greek' way. [This] course has been followed in this book." And should be followed here, consistent with WP:COMMONNAME. Similarly, we have an article at Munich and a redirect at München. For names that are not habitually spelled a certain way ("Achilles", etc.) in English, then default to a closer transliteration of Greek, and bypass the Latinization.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:42, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Circa

    For the usage of "Circa", the current MOS simply states, To indicate approximately, the abbreviation c. (followed by a space and not italicized) is preferred over circa, ca., or approx. c. may be used.. This is pretty straightforward, but I'd like to suggest that we state that {{circa}} is actually the preferred usage. I have come across many editors and readers that have commented that just "c." alone is confusing to them and does not help them, while "circa" is better in their view, but I point out that it is not preferred by the MOS and that "c." is. That said, I think {{circa}} solves this problem, and I have never had any pushback over {{circa}}, because it allows the reader to hover over the c. and the text will display "circa", while I acknowledge that this might not be ideal then for mobile devices, it seems to be the best of all worlds. While not a formal RfC (yet). I'd like to ask the community if a minor reword to look like following could be made the he "Circa" section of this MOS:

    To indicate approximately, the abbreviation c. is preferred over circa, ca., or approx. For example, c. 1955 and not circa 1955, ca. 1955, nor approx. 1955 ♥Th78blue (talk)♥ 17:20, 25 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Or even simpler, just indicating priority of {{circa}}, how about, "To indicate approximately, the use of {{circa}} is preferred over circa, c., ca., or approx." This ensures that the benefit of the Tooltip is available to all, while in no way changing the aesthetic of the currently preferred "c." or c. ♥Th78blue (talk)♥ 01:07, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Can anybody explain why not to use the plain English words around and about instead of their Latin translation, which most English speakers can't even pronounce properly? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 23:11, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    In infoboxes and tables, at least, c. 1890 – c. 1950 is much more concise than around 1890 – about 1950. pburka (talk) 23:26, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    For years in confined spaces – OK. But for everything else?.. In normal text, "around"/"about" are much more natural, and for brevity, there is a common notation "~" (consistent with ">", "<", "≳", "≲"). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 23:47, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    When a term which was originally Latin has become so much part of the language that it is used in speech, then it would be obvious to accept it as having become English. There are many Latin words in everyday use, not just the more obvious ones such as "etcetera" or "consensus" but also modified words like "pork" or "beef". Using two words with a solidus between them is informal and deprecated unless there is no alternative. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 06:23, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Hear hear! Moreover, I will not pronounce the statesman's name "Kickero" unless and until time travel is a practical possibility. Cheers, all. Dumuzid (talk) 13:46, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    What did you mean by "two words with a solidus between them"? If if was related to "around"/"about", then I was using it just on this talk page, indeed in an informal context and with the sense of exclusive or. And why do you call it deprecated? CMOS doesn't think so (see 6.106). Regarding English "circa", all dictionaries define it as "approximately, about, around", not the other way around. So my initial question was what is the purpose of using a loanword in English Wikipedia if English language already has appropriate words with the same meaning. It still remains unanswered. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 19:06, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    There are few or no words in English that did not originally come from another language. There is no requirement on Wikipedia that we only write with Germanic-origin words, avoiding the Romance-origin or other-origin words. Indeed, you have used several other Romance-origin English words besides "circa" in your reply: approximately, initial, deprecated, dictionary, language, etc. Do you think those words, also, should be avoided? What makes "circa" in any way different from them? —David Eppstein (talk) 19:10, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    English is a crazy mixed-up language. Sometimes we don't care where words originated, and meld them anyhow - so "television" is a bastard of Greek and Latin. We've spent over a thousand years hearing invaders and other tourists using different words and for one reason or another, adopted them for ourselves. Sometimes it was the other way about: our colonists went to India and brought back bungalow, pyjamas, shampoo and verandah. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:28, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think that "approximately", "initial", "deprecated", "dictionary", "language" should be avoided. What makes "circa" different from them is that "circa" has more common and convenient analogs, whereas these words don't. I had no intention to go down to Proto-Indo-European history and am quite surprised that other people stated all this rambling instead of answering a simple question. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 19:39, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You are digging your hole deeper. Of course those words have Germanic parallels, as do most Romance words in English. "approximately"="about", "initial"="first", "deprecated"="unwanted", "dictionary"="wordbook", "language"="speech". In this respect they are not different from "circa". —David Eppstein (talk) 00:40, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Circa itself is common and convenient, as well as being more concise than "in approximately", "in or around", etc. It's not a "loanword" by any reasonable standard, having been used in its current meaning in English since the 19th century (the OED gives an example from 1861; Google Books finds an example apparently from 1848). XOR'easter (talk) 01:38, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Why do you assume that the way most English speakers pronounce it isn't "proper"? Seems like you are confusing the pronunciation of the Latin word "circa" with the pronunciation of the English word "circa". In which case saying that English speakers are mispronouncing it makes about as much sense as saying that you mispronounce your own first name because you don't say it the original Hebrew way. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:53, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You are replying at a wrong level. :–) And not answering the question asked ("why not to use the plain English words?"). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 19:06, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    1) Nope. I was replying to your comment about "proper" pronunciation. Hence, I indented one more level than you. 2) As to why use "circa" instead of "about" or "around", simply because circa is more commonly used in certain constructions in English. I would expect to see "around" or "about" in usages like "about a hundred years ago" or "around the time the tornado hit". I would expect to see "circa" in usages like "the city was founded circa 800 BC". English has many examples where there are "plain English" and "foreign" words that have dictionary definitions (denotations) that seem similar or identical, but which show different patterns of usage with different conotations. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:32, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    And sometimes different connotations, too. EEng 05:51, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    1) My comment about pronunciation had one level of indentation (:), your reply had four (::::), which is definitely not "one more level than the comment it replies to". 2) I've already said about years (see 23:47, 26 April 2022). Please take a look at what WP:MOS#Circa says (To indicate approximately, the use of {{circa}} is preferred over circa, c., ca., or approx.) and explain: where this "To indicate approximately" is limited to years? The whole section "Abbreviations" is about abbreviations in general, and the note in "Circa" says "See also" instead of "For details, see", making an impression that this prescription is also general, not just about years. From what I see in all the literature that I read, it would make more sense to prefer "about" or "around" over "approx." and "circa" in normal text, and specifically for years prefer {{circa}} over circa, c., ca., or approx. (due to whatever tradition). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 19:39, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    1) I interpreted that comment as a continuation of the previous one, not as a separate point. I concede that your interpretation of the levels is also valid. 2) What part of "See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers § Uncertain, incomplete, or approximate dates for examples." makes you think that circa is not limited to years? I can't recall ever seeing circa used for anything but years, and the fact that the note directs you to a section on "uncertain, incomplete, or approximate dates" and specifically says that it is "for examples" of the usage of circa is consistent with my recollection and seems to leave no room for confusion. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 21:22, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    WILL YOU TWO PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT THE INDENTATION LEVELS? SOME OF US ARE TRYING TO SLEEP. THANK YOU. 04:17, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
    The very next section, WP:MOS#Do not use unwarranted abbreviations, starts with a very similar "See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers § Units of measurement", although isn't itself limited to units (moreover, doesn't even mention them). There are several other examples, less striking but still demonstrating that "See also" doesn't limit the scope. Regarding MOS:APPROXDATE, there is no occurrence of the word "year" before "flourishing". Thus it can be easily interpreted such that "List of films set around May Day" must be renamed to "List of films set c. May Day" :–) (there are no such examples, but the lack of examples souldn't supersede the explicitly stated rule). However, if we assume that it is indeed limited to years, I still find it counterproductive. For example, Chronology of Jesus reads very naturally with all its "about"s and "around"s, and replacing them all with "c." would be too pretentious (there are only two occurrences of "c.", both to save space, which is fine). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 22:49, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This is obviously subjective, but I find the tooltip sort of annoying. I suppose I don't mind it much at first use in a given article, but I definitely wouldn't want it to be mandated at every occurrence, decorating a whole article with those dotted underlines. --Trovatore (talk) 23:04, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You know what, I've thought about it some more, and my views have hardened. I don't think we should use {{circa}} at all. The tooltip interface is not one of the basic ones we use in Wikipedia, so it violates the least surprise principle to see this funny hooked question mark popping up out of nowhere. Also it's minimally useful, because people who don't know what "c." means are likely not going to be helped by glossing it as "circa". --Trovatore (talk) 16:36, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Agree with this. Johnbod (talk) 16:45, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The purpose of the {{circa}} template is to provide an accessible means of expanding the abbreviation "c." - it does this by means of the <abbr>...</abbr> element and its title= attribute, which is the primary semantic use for that HTML element. The fact that for some users this appears in the form of a tooltip is neither a matter for this page nor a reason not to use the template and thereby compromise accessibility. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:57, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Never mind accessibility, what about utility? As Trovatore says: "people who don't know what "c." means are likely not going to be helped by glossing it as "circa"". In fact I'm sure more people understand "c." than circa. If it included a simple English explanation, such as "meaning "about"", there might be some point to it. Johnbod (talk) 16:59, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    So, how about we (or somebody with the right Power) change the title text from just "circa", to something like "circa – meaning about or approximately" — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 17:57, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That is not permitted by the spec that I linked in my last post - The abbr element represents an abbreviation or acronym, optionally with its expansion. The title attribute may be used to provide an expansion of the abbreviation. The attribute, if specified, must contain an expansion of the abbreviation, and nothing else. Notice the last three words. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:36, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    (edit conflict) I agree that "circa – meaning about or approximately" would be a better tooltip. I don't have any specific knowledge, but I suspect a lot of people don't know what circa means, so having "circa" as the tooltip may be unhelpful. That being said, I still think circa or c. is often the best word/abbreviation even if not everyone is familiar with it. I'd also say that like a wikilink, the tooltip shouldn't generally be used more than once per article. In addition, while the vast majority of uses are with dates, it's fine with other numbers. SchreiberBike | ⌨  19:50, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The template {{circa}} need only be used at first occurrence, but should be used at that occurrence. This is what is consistent with MOS:ABBR, which has us ensure that first introduction of an abbreviation is explained. I would support updating the circa advice to say this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:35, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Personally I think the c. template should appear at all instances appropriate on any given article, given that we never know where a reader might come in and begin to read any given article or section of an article. If it is valid once, it should be valid always. It also takes up no additional space, and I find the tooltip to be quite useful personally for other editors that have been confused in the past about "c." alone. ♥Th78blue (talk)♥ 15:06, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Agreed. Wikipedia is WP:NOTPAPER and we should recognize that our readers often jump into the middle of articles. If we really want to show the tooltip only on the first use that should be done through technical means, and it should handle cases such as readers redirected to a section, sortable tables, etc. pburka (talk) 15:37, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That isn't the point. The point is twofold: First, we don't use this "abbr element", as far as I'm aware, for anything else. Or it's possible I've seen it once or twice, not sure. But in any case it's not part of Wikipedia's standard UX.
    That's the general point about the abbr element. The specific point about this template is that this template is pretty damn close to absolutely useless. If you don't know what "c." means you probably don't know what "circa" means either. Now granted, you can Google it, which is why I qualified the statement with "pretty damn close". But all things considered the "accessibility" argument here is remarkably weak. --Trovatore (talk) 18:07, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I think we need to consider that circa is used primarily in English ti indicate "approximately", but only really for dates. For other things, such as a number of people killed in a battle, you would not use circa. In that instance, I think a tilde with a tooltip would be the briefest and still work nicely. Any way we can create a standard for that? Whereby a tilde (~) would generate a tooltip that says "approximately" when you hover over it? ♥Th78blue (talk)♥ 14:03, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    By the way, which style guides recommend "circa" or "c." at all? APA only says to use "ca." (not "c."!) for uncertain publication years; MLA says to use "circa" (not "c."!) for the same purpose; CMOS says, literally, "ca. or c. circa, about, approximately (ca. preferred for greater clarity)", and has very few examples, all with years and only one with a date: "ca. 21 September" – which I don't remember seeing in real life. None of them uses or recommends "circa" or its abbreviations for anything except dates. And even if we suppose that WP:MOS#Circa is indeed limited to approximate dates (which is currently not obvious), as I mentioned above, I don't think that, for example, Chronology of Jesus would benefit from replacing "about" and "around" with "circa" or "c.", neither that in phrases like "It was scheduled to arrive around November 6", "..., with an opening expected around April 1, 1958" or "Full containment was expected around November 30", as MOS:APPROXDATE says, "the use of the {{circa}} template is preferred over circa, c, c., ca, ca., around, approximately, or approx.". So I would like to see any major style guides supporting this recommendation. Otherwise WP:MOS#Circa and MOS:APPROXDATE should be changed to be more clear and less strict (use only with years, not to be preferred over "around"). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 17:36, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    A more world-wide addition. "Oxford Guide to Style" says: "The Latin circa, meaning 'about', is used in English mainly with dates and quantities. ... In discursive prose it is usually preferable to use about or some when describing quantities other than dates (about eleven pints, some 14 acres)." For what it's worth, "Australian Government Style Manual" makes a general statement: "Use English rather than Latin shortened forms, except in some cases. People will prefer the English equivalent unless the context requires special use." — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 18:12, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    MOS:ERA on multiple related articles

    Background:

    • This is emerging form a discussion at Talk:Book of Daniel.
    • Book of Daniel is just one example article of all the books (around 40) of the Jewish-origin Hebrew Bible ("HB" below) and the larger Christian Bible, where its Hebrew Bible component is usually known as the Old Testament ("OT" below).
    • It is this the Christian-origin aspect of dating that underlies the MOS:ERA BCE/CE vs. BC/AD debate itself.

    MOS:ERA is written from the perspective of a single article. But this question is about how its principles might apply to a set of closely related articles.

    The discussion at Talk:Book of Daniel would, I think, equally apply to all the books of the HB/OT, of which there are around 40. (The exact count varies, depending on the way they are counted, and, if the HB/OT-era Apocrypha is taken into account, what is included.) In response to a suggestion that we view the principle as applying to all books in the HB/OT collection, one of the comments there is "but that is not how WP:ERA works". Technically, and viewed literally, that single-article comment is probably correct. But it also seems that this collection would illustrate the usefulness of a MoS clause that acknowledged such a collection of articles as a single set of articles, and that applying MOS:ERA to the overall set can be a valid consideration.

    Courtesy ping: @StAnselm:; @Achar Sva:

    Feline Hymnic (talk) 14:54, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    It would be way more than 40. Logically, it would also include Hebrew Bible people and things. Hundreds. StAnselm (talk) 15:02, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • No need to amend WP:ERA. If you think a group of articles should all use the same ERA style (and currently do not)… hold a centralized RFC to discuss the issue. Post a link to that centralized RFC on all the talk pages that apply.
    WP:ERA says that we ARE allowed to change styles, we just need discussion and consensus before we do so. This would apply to groups of articles as well as individual articles. Blueboar (talk) 15:12, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The points raised at Talk:Book of Daniel are variations on Christian articles must use BC/AD and non-Christian articles must not use BC/AD. This is the wrong basis to choose from. The basis should be what the reader understands. For the majority of English speaking countries this would be BC/AD. BCE/CE is most used by academics - including Christian academics.  Stepho  talk  15:22, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This discussion here at MOS:ERA isn't about particular outcomes of a particular single-article case. It is, rather, about the principles of grouping, so that multiple, closely-related articles can have consistent criteria, treatment and outcomes, as if it were, in this ERA context, one super-article. Feline Hymnic (talk) 16:04, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    And the answer to that question is that they CAN have consistent era styles, but they are NOT REQUIRED to have consistent styles. Whether a specific group of articles should have a consistent era style isn’t something we should mandate here at the MOS. You need to hold a centralized discussion (or an RFC) to determine what the consensus of the community is. Blueboar (talk) 19:15, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yeah, there is a part of me that wants all related articles to be rigorously and strictly in the same format in all ways. But pragmatically I know that this has little actual benefit, will be hard to enforce and will be the source of much argument finding the "one true way". We certainly don't need yet another reason for a religious war to break out. Best to just let each article do its own thing for ERA.  Stepho  talk  23:08, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    There's also the fact that a particular article may be part of multiple groups that may have conflicting relations to era notation. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 11:46, 3 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    If A is a related article to B and B is a related article to C, would that mean that A must then also have the same style as C? If so then by defining "related" loosely enough one could then in a backdoor way require most or al of the encyclopedia to use a single era even if each article is only related to a small number of others. So to prevent conglomeration of multiple related groups into superclusters of far too many articles, I this idea would only be workable if the notation of "related" could be defined in such a way as to limit each article to being in only a single related group, of a constrained size, with these limits baked into any proposal. That seems totally unrealistic to me, to the point where I don't think it is possible to do this at all. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:02, 3 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The very article that started this is proof that it isn't realistic. As already stated, there are people classifying it as a Christian related article which must use BC and other people classifying it as a non-Christian (specifically, Jewish) article that must use BCE. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 17:00, 3 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Which goes back to what I said before about religion should not be the basis of choosing BC/AD or BCE/CE. Being able to group them is merely widening the scope, so that a victory (for either side) in one article can then be used to bludgeon the edit war into a wider group. And as said above, if articles form overlapping groups then this will be used as an excuse to endlessly flip-flop across multiple articles (eg book of Daniel is group with Jewish articles, so it must not be BC, but it is also grouped with the Christian bible, so it must be BC). Therefore: 1. let each article stand alone, 2. do not use religion for choosing the era style and 3. use WP:RETAIN, WP:DATERETAIN, etc to avoid changing the existing style.  Stepho  talk  22:00, 3 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Religion is ultimately the only reason this debate exists, period. There is no way around that fact.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:32, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Well unless you want to adopt 2022 = 2775 AUC, then every system that there is is based one way or another on religion. Assuming that we don't want to adopt this year as 5783 AM or 1443 AH, then you are left with two alternatives both based on a miscalculated assumed date of Jesus' birth. Call it "Before Christian Era" or "Before Christ", they both mean the same. Likewise "AD" which most people can't really translate or "Christian Era" are really the same. It's just a pious(!) attempt to grab a moral high ground and appear superior to the masses in a few scientific journals. I'd suggest "BP", but what is special about AD 1950 CE? and how do we date times after that? Martin of Sheffield (talk) 13:52, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Except that "CE" is "Common Era", not "Christian Era". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:57, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Agree with Khajidha-- as far as I am aware, "CE" is usually now said to stand for "Common Era," so as to obscure the religious connection, even if doing little to actually separate it. Still obviously based on religion, as you say, but I support "CE" as at least a tiny step in the right direction. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 13:59, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Eh? Since when? So now we have three ways of expressing the same thing! Whilst we are at it, what defines this "common"? Martin of Sheffield (talk)
    See Common era. I'm rather partial to Era Vulgaris; too bad that one didn't catch on...
    —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:25, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Since about 1708. --Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 14:37, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You are the only person I've ever encountered who actually used "CE" = "Christian Era". I've come across it as an alternative listed as an aside (like ""CE", for "Common Era" (or "Christian Era")"), but even that has been rare. It has always been presented to me as "CE = Common Era" since I first learned of it back in the 1990s. So, no, we don't have three ways of expressing the same thing. And the "common" means "using the year numbers commonly used in international contexts". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:57, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    To me what it means is that we're still using a dating scheme based on the Christian religion but we're pretending that Christians are the only people important enough to be considered common and everyone else doesn't count. It's not really more or less offensive than AD, which spells out its Christian origin more directly and honestly. So I'm not convinced that Dumazid's "tiny step in the right direction" is actually in the right direction. But all that doesn't really matter; the date system is what we have and it makes no sense to try to go back to AUC or Unix dates or whatever. As long as the general consensus is that CE is the secular alternative to AD, we should generally prefer it in articles that are not specifically Christian in content (and I don't see why we can't use it in those either). —David Eppstein (talk) 16:07, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This is a perfectly fair take. I do feel the need to say that "common" to me has always meant that by dint of historical accident, the Christian dating system spread well beyond its original confines and was 'common' in that it was used by various communities. Also, I prefer this since "A.D." is specifically predicated upon the birth of Jesus, which most would now agree did not happen in 1 A.D.--and "CE" to me is an implicit admission that "we all just agree to this point in time." As ever, reasonable minds can differ, especially upon picayune matters! Cheers all. Dumuzid (talk) 16:14, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    To David Eppstein: the reason we should not be using BCE/CE is that this era style is largely unknown to the general public i.e. our readers. Sweet6970 (talk)
    [Citation needed]. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:41, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    See Common Era – in particular, the mentions of the National Trust, the BBC and the Guardian. Sweet6970 (talk) 17:02, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    And, from that article: "In 2013, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History) in Gatineau (opposite Ottawa), which had previously switched to BCE/CE, decided to change back to BC/AD in material intended for the public while retaining BCE/CE in academic content.[1] If you have a watchlist with a lot of history, archaeology or art articles, you do see puzzled people asking what BCE is - this is especially the case on Indian-related pages, as only very expensively-educated Indians encounter BCE/CE, or often anyway. WP:ERA very clearly does NOT "generally prefer it [CE] in articles that are not specifically Christian in content", and if you think it should you should propose that there, & see how that goes! Johnbod (talk) 17:32, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    1. ^ "Museum of Civilization putting the 'Christ' back in history as BC and AD return", by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press, National Post, 27 February 2013

    Introductory commas

    "In 2017, he finally found a job in the warehouse"; "Eventually, he found a job in the warehouse"; "In May 2020, they issued their first single", etc., etc. Are these commas necessary? Are they preferred for some reason? The only guideline I can see which might cover them is: "Modern writing uses fewer commas; there are usually ways to simplify a sentence so that fewer are needed." It may be my imagination, but these "introductory commas", which seem to me to be wholly superfluous, appear to be far more prevalent in American English articles. Is some guidance needed here? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:32, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Longer introductory phrases frequently take commas, or else we get "In the early 16th century buildings were denser." As far as I'm aware, most varieties of English use commas in such situations. Two-term phrases like "In 2017" are a bit more varied. I'm not sure we need guidance to use the comma or not, and articles should just be consistent. I noticed you removed one in the lead of Elon Musk, though the comma is included everywhere else, so I'm glad we're talking about it. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 21:23, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Two-term phrases are my biggest gripe. I have to admit the task of removing all those commas that I see as unnecessary is too daunting. I tend to revert additions and also any others I spot in the same section. If in the early 16th century buildings were denser, that's fine by me. But I'm not sure how adding a comma, anywhere in that sentence, would change the meaning. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:31, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Without changing the meaning, a comma can make sentences easier to parse. How about "In the early 16th century buildings Sheena experienced a growing sense of connection with her heritage." A reader is likely to eventually figure out the correct meaning of the sentence, but I would probably initially think I was being told the setting in time of the sentence. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 21:43, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    For me the first part of that sentence constitutes a subordinate clause, so I think a comma is actually required. In a sentence such as In 2017, Sheena experienced a growing sense of connection with her heritage, the comma looks to me wholly redundant. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:48, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think you're right about clauses, but three is about my limit for daily comments in a grammar debate. I reiterate my desire for consistency within articles and my opposition to a guideline either requiring or deprecating commas in introductory phrases. I look forward to the opinions of other editors. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 21:52, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    If you can stretch to four, I'd be happy to see any sources you could provide for a rebuttal of my view on subordinate clauses. Although I'd be happy to move from "required" to "preferred". Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:56, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    For you, anything! As long as my teachers learned me right, a clause needs a subject and a verb. Here's two sources that agree:
    Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 22:04, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I see. I still think a comma is required in your example. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:14, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    For me, "In the early 16th century buildings Sheena experienced a growing sense of connection with her heritage." would benefit from a comma before “Sheena” as this would be better for clarity of argument. As I would naturally pause after “century” but the comma would just clarify what exactly you’re trying to say. I don’t find that comma redundant though in the “In 2017, Sheena experienced a growing sense of connection with her heritage“ as it signifies the point whereby you would naturally pause. For me, it’s just neater and cleaner. Define02 (talk) 22:12, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Here I am, to weigh in with half-remembered lessons! I do believe "in the early 16th century buildings" would be considered a prepositional phrase, and not, indeed a subordinate clause. I was always taught that a basic rule of thumb was less than four words, no comma, four or more, comma. This was, of course, caveated with the wonderfully tautological advice that one should always use a comma "if necessary to prevent misunderstanding." Happy to be corrected by others, but I think I am adequately channeling my grandmother. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 22:15, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Is a comma required after a prepositional phrase? And hearty congratulations on the firing up of the "Jennifer Aniston neurons". Martinevans123 (talk) 22:23, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I should have been clear that my "four words or more" rule is generally applied to prepositional phrases. Thus "In 2017 she ate all the carrots" but "In the early 16th century buildings, she ate all the carrots." Dumuzid (talk) 22:27, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Maybe I just don't feel the need to pause after two words. This is an encyclopaedia, not a murder mystery. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:18, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    But for example, if you started the sentence with “Unfortunately, the weeds were highly prevalent”. One would naturally pause after “Unfortunately” hence though comma. Though indeed adverbial sentence starters do differ from the aforementioned subordinate clauses. Define02 (talk) 22:25, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Yes, fine. Maybe I don't read "In 2017" as an adverbial phrase. Or, if it is, one that requires any pause to disambiguate the meaning. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:29, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Right. I had to look at disjuncts to remind myself! Dumuzid (talk) 22:30, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for the link. An obvious case where commas are needed. "In 2017" is not a disjunct, is it? And neither is "On 1 April 2017", etc. ? Martinevans123 (talk) 13:04, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    No, those are not disjuncts, but prepositional phrases, per the above ("on" and "in"). Thus, my leaning would be "In 2017" does not require a comma, but "On 1 April, 2017," would (four words). Again, this is not in any way a hard and fast rule, and I don't mean to pretend I have any great authority here! Just, as mentioned, dim memories. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 13:38, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Dumuzid's advice is one I've seen in style guides (four words or fewer), but it's not an established MoS style guideline so far. Martinevans123, could you wait for firmer consensus before removing commas from shorter introductory phrases? I presume there's a "retain existing styles" advantage to the status quo ante. If, as you suggested, this is a feature of American English, then articles like Musk's should continue to use it. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 13:51, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The advice I recall is "four words or more." You are now my bitterest enemy. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 13:57, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't know why I phrased it that way! It made total sense in my head, like "Don't use the introductory comma for phrases that are four words or fewer." Why phrase it in the negative? Perhaps I was attacked by a comma as a child. Either way, I accept your enmity. I've been hoping for a good wikinemesis, as the LTA that hates me is more of a pest than a worthy foe. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 14:01, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I'd like to see some consensus about American vs British English. Revert Musk if you must. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:05, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    No 'must' from me on Musk. I'd prefer if you didn't start making changes "on mass" (real error I ran into the other day) to a bunch of articles. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 14:15, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    It was only your "consistency" comment that prompted my Musk attack. I'll hold fire on any others. (pre-Brexit we used to have en masse, lol) Martinevans123 (talk) 14:22, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    A tragedy! Heads up: there are still more brief intro commas at Musk. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 17:46, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    There's the added complication of US date format which is e.g. "April 1, 2017". At least Brit English escapes that one. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:07, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    My understanding is that the comma in "American" date formats (which used to just be the English date format) does not require a comma after the year, if a comma would otherwise not be placed there; but again, I might be wrong. Honestly, though...is this something that really needs to be codified, especially to the finest minute detail of counting words and requiring either a commma or no comma in all such cases? I think it is better to decide when and where to place commas on a case-by-case: articles are written in natural language, so it is a question of "Would there be a natural pause here if this were spoken?" There may be good reasons for having some sentences do one thing, and others another. For example, In 2017, she began a journey around the world in a hot air balloon, but In April the rain forced her to be grounded on the plain, in Spain. SirTramtryst (talk) 17:30, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Well well well, it looks like I am going to need an entire bitterest enemies list. (I jest!) I am not of the opinion that it needs codification, and I was offering my word counting 'rule' for two reasons: (1) chuffed I can remember back that far; and (2) it's a reasonable rule of thumb if someone is looking for guidance. I certainly don't think it should be mandated as I tried (and apparently failed) to say. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 17:39, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Fff - Be my guest. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:25, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I feel less special now. SirTramtryst, I know other style guides might differ, but Wikipedia's does indeed require a post-year comma in mdy date formats. See MOS:DATECOMMA. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 17:46, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Not needing to be codified?? Good lord. I believe shoddy comma crimes should lead to an indefinite block, or at least an indefinite article. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:23, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Introductory-phrase commas are generally recommended by style guides, and should always be used when the construction could be confusing without one. I just ran into a case yesterday that was something like "In July 2012 researchers [did whatever]" and added a comma because there were not 2,012 researchers involved. If you go around removing commas from things like "In 2022, O'Brien moved to Madagascar", expect to get reverted, because they are not incorrect. See MOS:VAR. Leaving those commas out is primarily a news/journalism habit, and Wikipedia is not written in news style as a matter of policy (WP:NOT#NEWS). News style guides have had nearly zero input into or impact on our MoS, for good reasons, the most obvious of which is an extreme of expediency and compression at the expense of comprehensibility. It is important to remember that WP is written for everyone, including school children and ESL learners. Don't remove commas you don't think are absolutely required; remove commas only when they are flat-out incorrect. When MoS says that English today uses fewer commas than it used to, it means in comparison to writing from, say, 1922.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:30, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    • Always test without them and remove if they're not needed. Tony (talk) 22:26, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • If there had been 2,012 researchers, I would have expected a comma right there. I'd say that, in the UK, "leaving those commas out is primarily".... normal, not some journalistic habit. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:31, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        A) You can't depend on our editors much less our readers to have read and absorbed MOS:NUM. B) Then I suggest you don't read enough British writing (e.g. Oxford U. Press output etc.) that isn't journalism. I devour nonfiction voraciously, and the commas as usually present in high-end, academic-leaning writing, which is what MoS is based on and the kind of writing that an encyclopedia employs. If there's any room for any confusion on the part of any reader, use the comma.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:01, 25 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    WP:CURLY

    It seems to me that the reasons for prohibiting curly quotes are obsolete

    • Reason 1: some browsers are not smart enough to treat the two as interchangeable characters.
      • Rebuttal: Can be easily overcome with redirects
    • Reason 2: direct typing of straight quotes is easier than typing curly quotes
      • Rebuttal: curly quotes can easily be inserted from the special characters menu in the edit page.

    Can we form a consensus to eliminate the prohibition of curly quotes? --Banana Republic (talk) 02:32, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I should mention that I personally find the curly quotes (“quote”) more visually pleasing than the straight quotes ("quote"). --Banana Republic (talk) 02:34, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    While I find the curly ones to be rather silly looking, much like the Comic Sans font.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:40, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Response:

    • Rebuttal 1 is incorrect. Browsers do not and should not treat the two as interchangeable. So searching for text becomes more difficult. Redirects will not be good enough; we will require changes to the Mediawiki software. We already went through this with the ndash fiasco.
    • Rebuttal 2 is problematic. Yes, I can select them from the special characters map in WikiEd and Visual Editor, but I am not sure that all editors have this functionality. Finding U+201C and U+201D on the Windows character map takes a bit of time. It's annoying to have to go to the special characters when straight quotes are available on the keyboard. They cannot be cut and pasted from the command line or another application (eg MS Word) due to character set issues: you need to be using UTF-8, but some operating systems (eg Windows) use other character sets. This will be affected by locale as well.

    Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:40, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    And inevitably an article will end up with a disconcerting mixture of the two, which is particularly annoying when editing in wikimarkup mode as here. Doug butler (talk) 21:44, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Personally I prefer straight quotes and apostrophes (KISS), but reasonable people disagree. What about making the wikitext agnostic as to curly or straight, but to always display curly. Word processors can figure out which direction the quote marks or apostrophes should curl; could Wikipedia's display text do the same? I suspect that would be a big problem to solve, but it would finally solve the problem. SchreiberBike | ⌨  23:15, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    "Smart quotes" tend to break things when they get inserted in places where they are invalid. I vehemently oppose any automatic replacement of, e.g., apostrophes, parentheses, quotes, with alternate code points, even though I agree that ‘foo’ and “foo” are more attractive than 'foo' and "foo". --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 00:26, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Use of commas with glosses

    I was editing the page Honourable to standardise a number of different styles for glossing/translating (I don't pretend to fully understand the difference) between different equivalents of honorifics in various languages. I tried to apply the MOS re glosses (MOS:SINGLE), but that left some slightly odd results in my view. Principally, the MOS prohibition on commas between term and definition.

    It's fine for one- or two-word simple glosses (e.g. Mevrouw 'madam' is ...).

    It seems clunky for longer ones (e.g. Legal academics are addressed as De weledelgestrenge heer/vrouwe Mr 'the well-born lord/lady master' when ...).

    It also seems clunky when some qualification of the translation is needed (e.g. Ad libitum literally 'towards pleasure' is used ... or Anima roughly 'soul' can be ...) especially in the middle of a sentence (e.g. ... it was called a res publica traditionally translated 'commonwealth' despite having ...).

    Would it be very controversial to edit the MOS to add words to the effect of...

    • Simple glosses that translate or define unfamiliar terms take single quotes, with no comma before the definition (Cossack comes from Turkic qazaq 'freebooter'). Longer or qualified glosses may require commas for clarity (Amicus usque ad aras, literally 'a friend up until the alters', refers to a very loyal friend.).

    With or without the example (someone can likely think of a better one), or put the addition in a footnote otherwise?

    Charlie A. (talk) 13:41, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    It's not the length of the gloss that matters, but the syntactic structure (including qualification, but also relative clause structure, apposition, etc.); for example:

         – Amicus usque ad aras 'a friend up until the altars' refers to ...
         – Amicus usque ad aras, literally 'a friend up until the altars', refers to ...
         – Amicus usque ad aras, which means 'a friend up until the altars', refers to ...
         – Amicus usque ad aras, a Latin expression for 'a friend up until the altars', refers to ...
         The first of these is a simple gloss with no comma before the definition, and the rest are non-simple. Doremo (talk) 15:16, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    OK, that's very helpful – thanks. But if single-quotes rule applies to the non-simple glosses, as your answer implies, the MOS wording needs to be changed to say so. (I also think that the example in Dutch I gave above would be much improved with commas, but I'm happy enough to accept it if I've applied the rule as intended). Charlie A. (talk) 17:08, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I was thinking of simple (syntax) = no comma vs. non-simple (syntax) = comma. Otherwise a gloss is a gloss and is set in single quotes, even long stuff with grammatical codes. Doremo (talk) 17:48, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Crikey that's an intimidating chapter. I would welcome a clarification to the MOS to make clear the two rules you've outlined: (a) simple glosses don't need a comma, non-simple do; (b) all English glosses go in single quotes, whether simple or non-simple. I read the current guidance as clear for simple glosses, and saying nothing about non-simple ones. Charlie A. (talk) 18:05, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Come to think of it, it's not really the gloss that's the issue at all: (a) all English glosses go in single quotes with no comma before the definition, (b) relative clauses, appositives, and other structures containing a gloss may be preceded by a comma or other punctuation after the lexeme. Doremo (talk) 02:53, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Agreed, that's a good summary. The current wording only covers scenario (a), though it actually applies to glosses in general. How about something like:
    • Simple gGlosses that translate or define unfamiliar terms take single quotes, with; simple glosses require no comma before the definition (Cossack comes from Turkic qazaq 'freebooter' is the root of Cossack; republic comes from the Latin res publica, loosely meaning 'public affair').
    (With or without the second example) Charlie A. (talk) 08:11, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This looks good to me. I think the second item is helpful. (I'd prefer no the before language names, but some people do that.) Doremo (talk) 12:36, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That was me on autopilot – reordered the example to show the gloss in the middle of the sentence, put a the in naturally. Wasn't an intentional/meaningful change, I've removed it. Should I just go ahead an edit or do we need some broader input/RfC? Charlie A. (talk) 13:34, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with it. I think it's uncontroversial and has been fully discussed here. Please go ahead and make the edit (suggestion: "the Latin" → "Latin"). Doremo (talk) 14:01, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Done ✅ (with "the Latin" → "Latin"). Thanks for your help! Charlie A. (talk) 15:58, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I never heard of using single quotes except inside double quotes. Is this some Commonwealth custom? BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 04:59, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    It's a standard convention in linguistics, just like setting binomials in italics is standard in taxonomy. Articles that make use of linguistic, taxonomic, etc. material generally follow the field-specific conventions. Doremo (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikipedia is also the first place I'd encountered the convention. I do like it though, it's helpful to have a different markup from the glossed term (in italics) that's subtle and distinct from a direct quote. Charlie A. (talk) 07:55, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    MOS:TMSTYLE

    Is MOS:TMSTYLE restricted strictly for usage to trademarks only? Is using (stylized in all caps) or (stylized in lowercase) in the start sentence of lead of entertainment (songs/albums/bands/television series/etc) articles (for illustration purpose – Hello World (stylized in all caps) ...) considered as deliberately going against MOS? — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 12:54, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Yes, taht's what MOS:TM is aimed at. It has nothing to do with trademark registration and officialness, but with marketing intent.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:55, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @SMcCandlish Looks like my interpretation is not wrong, in that it isn't aimed exclusively for trademarks only. For further verification, does doing such considered as "not noteworthy" because of reasons such as the work's title regardless of actual stylization is in uppercase or lowercase is simply the same word hence not noteworthy enough to use to justify usage of (stylized in all caps) or (stylized in lowercase) or should it only be used only when the title is complicated enough such as having unicode and/or special characters. — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 12:57, 17 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not sure we're entirely on the same page here. I don't think it has anything to do with "noteworthiness". It's about potential for reader confusion. We commonly include a "(stylized as ...)" note in leads just to be sure the reader knows they are at the right page, but we're not going to around writing SONY or macy★s in running text otherwise. A good example is probably Client (band). When an entity like the University of Wisconsin–Madison has a logo that literally reads "UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MADISON" we have no need to do a "stylized as" note because there's no potential for confusion on the reader's part. But someone who encounters "CLIEͶT" in a music magazine is not necessarily going to be 100% certain that's the same band as "Client" unless we tell them so. One thing we're not going to do, by contrast, is a bunch of color-coded font goofery like "(stylized as ebay)". The purpose is not to mimic trademarks and logos, it is to prevent reader confusion about whether they're at the right place. Anyway, if your goal is to delete all the "stylized as" notes, that's not a worthwhile goal. But where they just show upper-case, for a string that is not going to be confused with an acronym, they probably serve no purpose. E.g. at a song title "Don't Touch My Monkey" there is no purpose served by adding '(stylized as "DON'T TOUCH MY MONKEY")' just to mimic the all-caps cover of the single.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:25, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @SMcCandlish Understood, thanks for the clarification. — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 01:34, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Personally, I believe the MOS:TM guidance applies generally to other topics as well as trademarks and business names. As far as I'm concerned, the spirit of MOS:TM applies whenever an affiliated source is using special styling to promote any topic. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 05:04, 23 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yep.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:58, 24 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Readability / reading level / accessibility

    Is anyone aware of past discussions or good recommendations on how to decide an appropriate reading level for a Wikipedia article?

    Here is the wiki article on the concept. Readability Here is a related concept; I am not suggesting plain English in all cases, but it could be appropriate in some of them. Plain English

    Some questions:

    • If an article is about a technical concept, who is the readership: an expert or the general public?
    • If a technical concept's wiki article is very popular in terms of pageviews, and we can presume it has a general audience, then is this sufficient cause for simplifying the article or removing technical terms?

    I am especially interested in any links to past discussions that anyone can identify. I am not asking about any particular article. Thanks. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:56, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    WP:TECHNICAL might be of interest. Visviva (talk) 11:42, 15 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Styling for self-referencing list item

    I have a question about list formatting. If an article contains a list, and one of the elements in that list is the subject/name of the article, can/should that element be bolded? I'm sure I've seen this somewhere, most often done automatically in navigation templates, but I'm not sure it's proper in the article body. Any thoughts on this? – Reidgreg (talk) 00:53, 12 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    We boldface the article title in the lead, so people are clearer that they're at the right page, but there's no cause to re-boldface a recurrence of it in a list. If you mean a list that mentions the titles of other articles, no don't boldface them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:53, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Wikilawyering over passive voice

    MOS:PASSIVE says "Passive voice should still be avoided when it is not needed". The discussion at User talk:131.203.251.134#editing which is damaging to article quality. suggests that this is being interpreted as "Passive voice should be avoided if it is at all humanly possible", resulting in changes such as these:

    • The name was anglicised → The name became anglicised
    • The word tapu can be interpreted as "sacred" → One can interpret the word tapu as "sacred"
    • policy is the manner in which a given entity (often governmental) has decided to address issues → policy is the manner in which a given entity (often governmental) proposes to address issues
    • It was closed in 2011 → The Greater Wellington Regional Council closed the station in 2011
    • was an early supporter → became early supporters
    • Wolfe was killed → Wolfe died
    • War diaries are focused on → War diaries focus on

    The first, for example, pointlessly changes from one passive construction to another. The second unnecessarily introduces the Impersonal pronoun. The third changes the meaning from something that is already decided to something that has only been proposed so far. The fourth places the emphasis on an unimportant actor (which PASSIVE says not to do). The fifth changes a linking verb to the passive voice. The sixth removes information (he didn't just die; he was actively killed by gunfire). The last suggests that inanimate objects have attention spans and the ability to choose their focus, which is just silly.

    These are all bad, and at least most of them have been reverted. I think that the behavioral problem could be reduced by changing the wording at PASSIVE. So far, the IP insists that passive voice is acceptable only if absolutely needed. I think we could probably come up with a clearer way to explain this. We don't want to use passive voice when it omits relevant information –

    Mistakes were made.
    The passive voice was used.
    Responsibility was shirked.

    – but we also don't want people to make pointless changes from one form of passive to another, to remove linking verbs, to create stilted sentences with the unnecessary use of "one" in violation of MOS:YOU, or to replace clear sentences with clunky, awkward, or silly constructions.

    I don't have a proposal offhand for how to re-write this sentence, but I'd like to know whether you all think this should be adjusted to prevent future problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:24, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I think the existing language would cover many of those examples. For instance, "The Greater Wellington ..." is "a news-style shift to dwelling on a non-notable party". Many examples, including "was an early supporter", aren't even passive voice, just the past tense of "to be". Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 17:32, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, I agree that the existing language covers this. If we could count on people to read and follow the whole thing instead of just the 11 words that, taken in isolation, support their personal preferences, then we wouldn't be here. But, unfortunately, we can't. So I am wondering whether we could adjust the wording to make it more difficult to wikilawyer over. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:49, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    (ec) I'm totally on board with this project. The passive voice is a tool to be used for specific purposes, namely whenever the grammatical object of the main verb is more pertinent than its grammatical subject. Unfortunately there's a fair amount of unreasoned aversion to this perfectly normal aspect of our language. I've noted that people who complain about "passive voice" are sometimes not even talking about passive voice, but about grammatically active-voice sentences using an unaccusative verb, which is not the main point of this discussion but is not unrelated either.
    What is worth saying is that the passive voice should not be used just to use it, for example because you think it makes the text sound more refined or lawyerly or scientific or something. --Trovatore (talk) 17:37, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I like your phrase, "whenever the grammatical object of the main verb is more pertinent than its grammatical subject". That's a good way to explain why we would write "She was burned" instead of "The hot object burned her" – but that in other cases, we would write "The scalding hot coffee burned her". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:55, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Agreed, it sums up the situation nicely. I can still hear Mr Thomas (chemistry) whilst telling us how to write up chemistry practicals stating that "no-one cares which one of you heated the test tube, only that it was heated", and that was 50 years ago! Martin of Sheffield (talk) 20:37, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This whole "don't use the passive voice" thing must be one of the worst rules introduced by prescriptive grammarians into English in the last few decades. I'm pretty sure that the first time I saw it was when Microsoft introduced so-called grammar-checking into its word processor and flagged all uses of the passive voice as errors. As with several other of my pet peeves in this area it seems that people are more prepared to go along with silly rules introduced by ignoramuses at tech companies rather than emulate people who use the language well. And, after I have said all that, some of the examples given don't even use the passive voice. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:52, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    "policy is the manner in which a given entity (often governmental) has decided to address issues" - there is no passive voice in this. Both verbs ("is" and "has decided") are in the active voice. Indefatigable (talk) 21:37, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    What we really want to say here is "write well". There's a limit to the level of detail we can go to to make that happen. And it looks like in this particular case we're making things worse by trying. We can't really teach people how to write. There are times when the passive voice is great, and times when it sucks, and there's no way to teach that by giving some out-of-context (and therefore ill-advised) examples. "write 'Germany invaded Poland in 1939', not 'Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939'" is just bad advice, because in many contexts the latter would work better, and with no context it's no more useful than "Don't get wet" or "Wear sunglasses". The other examples in that section are more clearly bad writing ("There were no witnesses, but O'Neil shot the guard..." ) and that's what you want if you want an example.
    Passive voice is sometimes used by illiterates -- "Upon the valve being opened by us, a deceased bat was seen" or whatever -- but then illiterates use all kinds of bad constructions. If that could be solved by providing an MOS we wouldn't need writing courses. And passive voice is sometimes used to bamboozle or shirk blame ("The computer proved to be unable to be programmed by the persons who had been hired to do so"), but that's not an issue here and if it is its an NPOV and weasel-word issue, which is something else altogether.
    "Passive voice should still be avoided when it is not needed; write Germany invaded Poland in 1939, not Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939" is just a bad, unhelpful passage that somebody put in there. It should just go. I suppose you could just say "Passive voice should still be avoided when it results in weak or confusing writing" or something, but what for? Anything that results in weak or confusing writing should be avoided.
    Hmmm, looking at our article Passive voice, we sure as shooten play our cards straight out there:

    Many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged minimizing use of the passive voice, but this is almost always based on these commentators' misunderstanding of what the passive voice is. Contrary to common critiques, the passive voice has important uses, with virtually all writers using the passive voice (including Orwell and Strunk & White). There is general agreement that the passive voice is useful for emphasis, or when the receiver of the action is more important than the actor. Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage refers to three statistical studies of passive versus active sentences in various periodicals, stating: "the highest incidence of passive constructions was 13 percent. Orwell runs to a little over 20 percent in "Politics and the English Language". Clearly he found the construction useful in spite of his advice to avoid it as much as possible".

    Ouch, burn. And that's the article. I think the sentence in dispute here was probably added as a sop to the Orwells and Strunks and Whites. But people mostly don't pay attention to Strunk & White anymore, and according to our article they're just flat wrong, and the sop is just causing trouble.
    It's pretty clear that from this discussion and the user-talk thread pointed to, there is only one person who seems to think that the sentence should stay. I was going to remove it myself but no super hurry. Herostratus (talk) 06:09, 15 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I am very happy to find this oasis of good sense with regards to the use of the passive. I would strongly support the removal of the sentences regarding Poland. As a teacher of English as a Second Language, I frequently used the clauses "Germany invaded France" and "France was invaded by Germany" as examples of when the passive might be appropriate, the latter being more suitable in a text focusing on the history of France. Boynamedsue (talk) 08:53, 15 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I think at this point the only question is whether to remove the sentence or change it to something else. I vote for the former because, as Strunk & White say, "omit needless words". An editor above wrote that the passive is best used "whenever the grammatical object of the main verb is more pertinent than its grammatical subject" and that is cogent and precise, altho possibly obscure to people who are a little shaky on the difference between "verb" and "object" (which is many of us, and we're here to help the writing be better, not judge people). If you wanted a clearer example... well, look at how the Pottinger-Cain Incident would be described in, respectively, the articles David Pottinger (criminal) and Lorenzo Cain (victim) if they existed (emphasis added):

    "David Pottinger (1883-1936), dubbed 'The Beast of Leeds', was a famous violent criminal. His career began in 1882 when he assaulted Lorenzo Cain...

    "Lorenzo Cain (1883-1936), dubbed 'The Unluckiest Man in Leeds', was famous as the victim of many brutal attacks. The first was in 1882 when he was assaulted by David Pottinger...

    Beating a dead horse here at this point tho I guess. Just remove the sentence, I say. Herostratus (talk) 15:57, 15 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    In defence of George Orwell, who is always someone worth taking seriously even when you disagree with him, he said in that essay, "never use the passive where you can use the active" [my emphasis] and "break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous". We seem to have at least one editor who interprets such general guidance as "never use the passive voice", which is just bollocks. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:26, 15 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Very well said. And as others have pointed out, most people have a very bad accuracy rate at actually identifying instances of the passive voice. Language Log has written many times about this tendency to equate "passive voice" with any "construction that is vague as to agency". Which makes advice about avoiding it doubly futile. Colin M (talk) 17:23, 15 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    In defense of Strunk & White, the passive voice was never spoken about in such absolutes by those two as many seem to wish to think it was. Dhtwiki (talk) 03:06, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with the OP that most if not all of the changes shown were not improvements. Passive voice is more frequently used in encyclopedic writing than otherwise, and people just have to learn to live with it. The last time we had a "my preferred grammar ideas are the law" holy warrior around here, it resulted in a topic ban and very long block.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:51, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Having read the discussion above, I would argue that we should remove this text "Passive voice should still be avoided when it is not needed; write Germany invaded Poland in 1939, not Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939." And replace it with the following text:
    "The passive can be used to maintain focus on the party receiving an action, for example look at look at how the Pottinger-Cain Incident would be described in, respectively, the articles David Pottinger (criminal) and Lorenzo Cain (victim) (emphasis added):

    "David Pottinger (1883-1936), dubbed 'The Beast of Leeds', was a famous violent criminal. His career began in 1882 when he assaulted Lorenzo Cain...

    "Lorenzo Cain (1883-1936), dubbed 'The Unluckiest Man in Leeds', was famous as the victim of many brutal attacks. The first was in 1882 when he was assaulted by David Pottinger...

    ".
    If there is no consensus in favour of this, simply deleting the sentence would be enough. Boynamedsue (talk) 07:44, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I would favour removing the sentence altogether, because most of our policies and guidelines are far too long already. It's a good example, but we cannot legislate for every aspect of good writing. This is an encyclopedia, not a book on English style. Phil Bridger (talk) 07:51, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • The entire footnote [o] should be deleted per WP:CREEP. It's just a rambling tangent from MOS:WE and MOS:YOU and is too indecisive to be useful. An essential feature of good writing is that it is short and to the point. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:19, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Removing the entire footnote means removing all of this:
      The passive voice is often advised against in many forms of writing, but is used frequently in encyclopedic material, where its careful use avoids inappropriate first- and second-person constructions, as well as tone problems. Passive voice should still be avoided when it is not needed; write Germany invaded Poland in 1939, not Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939. The most common uses of encyclopedic passive are to keep the focus on the subject instead of performing a news-style shift to dwelling on a non-notable party; and to avoid leaping to certain-sounding conclusions from uncertain facts. Contrast The break-in was reported to police the next morning, versus Assistant manager Peggy Plimpton-Chan reported the break-in to police the next morning. Compare also There were no witnesses, but O'Neil was convicted of shooting the guard, and Sklarov of driving the getaway car, and There were no witnesses, but O'Neil shot the guard, and Sklarov drove the getaway car.
      (Also, I have just noticed that our advice about the passive voice is written partly in the passive voice.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:45, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      We should keep something on this, or we're just going to get more well-meaning but wrongheaded "death to passive voice" bullshit. It's in there for a reason. Just doesn't need to be that detailed. Boynamedsue's material above could work, though it's fine if it remains in a footnote.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:35, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      We could cut the existing text down to something like this:
      The passive voice is often advised against in many forms of writing, but is used frequently in encyclopedic material to avoid inappropriate first- and second-person constructions, tone problems, and leaping to certain-sounding conclusions from uncertain facts, as well as to keep the focus on the main subject, rather than a minor actor.
      I also like Trovatore's "whenever the grammatical object of the main verb is more pertinent than its grammatical subject", and Herostratus' Pottinger–Cain incident examples are good, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:51, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Gee, I wonder how long before someone recasts that in the active i.e. "Many forms of writing advise against the passive voice." ;P EEng 02:13, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      How about in the passive-aggressive voice?  Stepho  talk  05:42, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      That's only for ANI and Arbcom cases. EEng 06:01, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I agree with WhatamIdoing's rewrite above.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:56, 24 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      What about cutting it to "Passive voice is allowed in articles", and someone writing an essay that explains more detail? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:28, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      MoS should provide rationale when reasonable to do so, and essays generally have no authority. An essay on this would be a good idea, like the great one about WP:Elegant variation, but MoS should still give reasons to use passive voice, or we'll just be right back here with people arguing that MoS is being pointlessly prescriptive and arbitrary and that "Passive voice is allowed in articles" should be removed. Maybe more to the real point, though, PV is advisable not just allowed in articles for various purposes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:56, 24 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Did anyone, ever, advocate turning all passive-voice constructions into active ones? Or that "the passive voice is acceptable only if absolutely needed"? If so, I missed it.

    The examples of horrible edits quoted hardly support the case for this whole apparent storm in a tea-cup and subsequent attempt to crush butterflies with sledgehammers. And those examples lack links to articles or even to sections edited, making it more difficult for anyone to assess them in context and to evaluate what proportion of each editing operation involved passive-to-active shift, let alone how many other passive-voice constructions remained untouched (rather than getting the improve-on-sight treatment). Leaving aside the examples which do not involve substituting actives for passives (three of the seven), we find:

    • "One can interpret the word tapu as 'sacred'" - Nothing wrong with the occasional impersonal pronoun as a feature of stylistic variety.
    • "The Greater Wellington Regional Council closed the station in 2011" - This answers the question: who closed the station? The railway company? The local government? Or the regional government? Or the central government? - The alleged "unimportant actor" may have great importance to some readers. The article becomes richer with this detail, but remains vaguer without it.
    • "Wolfe died" - In the context of a battle one might assume a fatal wound. In this case I would suggest that the finer details may seem irrelevant. That said, I wouldn't die in a ditch for this edit.
    • "War diaries focus on" - Depending on context, "war diarists focus on" might seem better. But the claim that inanimate objects have "attention spans" has little merit. Which sounds better: "The sun set at 6pm" or "At 6 pm the sun was obscured by the horizon due to the rotation of the Earth"? The passive-voice version ("was obscured") has the advantage of scientific pedantry but little else.

    Who defines "minor actor" or "non-notable party"? Or whether a verb object seems "more pertinent" than a grammatical subject? Such apparently sensible strictures on style might invite serious wiki-lawyering.

    I have no particular beef for or against Strunk and White. But one of the comments on these worthies seems to suggest that their views have dated. In that case, we can alternatively (or also) quote more contemporary authorities. A brief glance at English passive voice#Style advice suggests that both style guides and editors generally favor use of the active voice - with some defined exceptions. And that article, of course, as a part of Wikipedia, demonstrates and exhibits a neutral point of vies. Remember, too, that Wikipedia-editors produce not literary fiction, but simple straightforward explanatory prose - the MOS prescribes: "Editors should write using straightforward, easily understood language". In this context, active-voice constructions can exactly mirror the content of passive-voice ones - and often more succinctly. Baldly labelling specific active-voice constructions as "bad" or as "bad writing" scarcely helps the debate.

    Speculating on the motives of the esteemed developers of the Wikipedia Manual of Style seems pointless. We have archives to provide evidence on such matters.

    Active voice might merit a mention in the Manual of Style. Otherwise we give undue weight to passive-voice constructions at the expense of the most common English-language grammatical voice. Articles with excesssive use of the passive voice may become dreary (see facet, for example) and uninformative.

    User:Andrew Davidson suggests: "An essential feature of good writing is that it is short and to the point." Endorsed. And judicious use of the active voice can exemplify good writing.

    - 131.203.251.134 (talk) 04:39, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    The real guidance should be "avoid circumlocution". Passive voice is only a problem when it obfuscates the meaning of a passage, or interrupts the flow of a narrative, or similar. There are times when you want to use passive voice, because it is actually more concise, to the point, and where changing to active voice changes the emphasis or meaning of a passage. The sentence "The American Revolution War was fought between the British Empire and their former subjects on the North American continent", for example, is in passive voice. To convert that to active voice actually makes it worse, from a narrative perspective and in being able to parse its meaning. "The British Empire and their former subjects on the North American continent fought the American Revolutionary War" is in active voice, and is a trainwreck of a sentence. --Jayron32 13:36, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    "The British Empire fought the American Revolutionary War in North America against their former subjects". Really in most cases you can use either. As long as it's not truly grating or objectively confusing (less a function of a particular voice than of the general skill of the writer I think), let the volunteers write how they write. If and when we hire professional writers we can demand more conformity. Herostratus (talk) 22:43, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    True. But the passive makes more sense than either of those constructions if you are writing about the war itself. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:19, 23 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I'd be interested to know how many IP addresses the IP user above is using to make these anti-passive edits. I reckon I've seen about 5 or 6 accounts with a very similar editing style. The alternative being that at there are at least 6 people doing this on wikipedia, which would strongly argue for a change in the MOS. And also it'd be cool if they could confirm they have taken on board the consensus on this page and stopped making this kind of edit. --Boynamedsue (talk) 07:09, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I personally see no reason to discourage passive voice in encyclopedic material unless it is being used to avoid providing information that the reader wants to know. "Mistakes were made" should not be used as a way of avoiding the identification of who made the mistakes. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 05:10, 23 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Main page examples

    Having been pinged here, I then perused today's main page and noticed extensive use of the passive voice. For example,

    The main exception seems to be OTD. All today's OTD entries seemed to use the active voice so I checked the next two days, including the staging area where the choices are made. In every case, there seemed to be candidates which used the passive voice but only active voice entries were chosen. I gather that OTD is mostly the work of a particular editor so perhaps this reflects their personal style?

    Andrew🐉(talk) 07:31, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I have always read OTD as being deliberately unencyclopaedic in style, serving a slightly different purpose to the main space. Its kind of frothy prose is intended to sound less formal and draw people in, so active voice makes more sense as it is used much more frequently in informal English. Boynamedsue (talk) 06:40, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I think there's something to this, but it's perhaps worth noting that "elected" and "located" are examples of verbs that are, respectively, either awkward or impossible to cast in active form. "The people of [country] elected [person]" is an OK sentence, but uses a lot of extra words (and would raise NPOV issues if it were used here). "Located" in this context has no agent, and arguably is not a "real" passive at all (CGEL would call it an "adjectival passive").
    "Went into foreclosure" is not passive (it seems like an active-voice recasting of "was foreclosed on", one that actually obscures the agent even further). But I suspect that DYK might have a particular tendency toward such patient-first constructions, including passive ones, because each entry is meant to highlight a specific article, and for any given factual statement in any given article, the article subject is more likely to be the patient than the agent. (Or so I imagine, having done no research on the subject.) Anyway, circling back to the main topic of discussion, I think these examples shown how context-dependent the choice between active and passive clauses is, and how unwise it would be to have any hard rules (or anything that could be misinterpreted as a hard rule). -- Visviva (talk) 01:52, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Completely agree. As a side point re "located": WP:LOCATIONLOCATIONLOCATION. EEng 05:51, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I concur entirely with Boynamedsue above; OTD is not written in the same style as the encyclopedia proper.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:50, 24 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Alright then, it seems time to a change make as, if I'm seeing it right, the editor is continuing to point to the existing written rule. So what I did was excise altogether the sentence "Passive voice should still be avoided when it is not needed; write Germany invaded Poland in 1939, not Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939". That's the minimum. I then went on to change

    The passive voice is often advised against in many forms of writing, but is used frequently in encyclopedic material...

    to

    [[]]

    To explain the situation to those readers who, like me, vaguely remember being taught when in short pants to not the passive use. Many of us are dead and most are decrepit I guess, but some apparently still have freedom to wander the grounds and access the computers in the dayroom. We could just have

    The passive voice is used frequently in encyclopedic material...

    Which is shorter but doesn't explain why we're bothering to address the issue. Other editors have advised just deleting the whole section and so on, anyway, make any further changes you like, the main point is that that horrid passage has now been knocked for six.

    In return for this service, I ask editors to stop rewriting me when I say "Smith was graduated from Smith in 1907", which is the correct construction. Herostratus (talk) 07:11, 27 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    The "formerly sometimes advised against" in "The passive voice was formerly sometimes advised against in many forms of writing, but is used frequently in encyclopedic material..." is awkward.
    I know this is a little on the humorous side, but would anyone object to a link to Wikipedia:Lies Miss Snodgrass told you in there? Perhaps "For non-encyclopedia writing, most schoolteachers and some style guides recommended against the passive voice, but it is used frequently and appropriately in encyclopedic material..." WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:38, 27 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    passive voice formerly sometimes advised against

    A revision of MOS:PASSIVE from May 2022 states: "The passive voice was formerly sometimes advised against in many forms of writing [...]."

    Looking at some relatively recent (post-Orwell) purveyors of advice on the matter of passive-voice usage, we find:

    • 1962: Flesch, Rudolf. How to Be Brief: An Index to Simple Writing. p. 5; 15. Retrieved 31 May 2022. The active voice is always better than the passive. [...] All forms of the verb to be [...] are signs that you probably used a weak passive voice or be-with-noun construction. Hunt for a strong active verb and re-write.
    • 1973: Evans, Harold (1973) [1972]. Newsman's English. Volume 1 of Editing and Design: A Five-volume Manual of English, Typography and Layout, Harold Evans. Heinemann [for the National Council for the Training of Journalists]. p. 23. ISBN 9780434905508. Retrieved 31 May 2022. Vigorous, economical writing requires a preference for sentences in the active voice.
    • 1996: Ratcliffe, Krista (1996). "De/Mystifying HerSelf and HerWor(l)ds: Mary Daly". Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. p. 94. ISBN 9780809319343. Retrieved 2 June 2022. [...] foreground grammar deletes agency: passive voice mystifies accountability by erasing who or what performs an action [...].
    • 1996: Fowler, Henry Watson. "passive territory". In Burchfield, R. W. (ed.). The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (3 ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 576-578. In scientific writing the passive voice is much more frequent than it is in ordinary expository or imaginative prose [...]. [...] In ordinary prose true passives are relatively uncommon [...]. [...] Gowers (1965) advised against the use of it is felt, it is thought, it is believed, etc [...]. He was probably right. The use or avoidance of the passive in such circumstances often depends on the level of formality being aimed at and often on the wisdom of accepting personal or group responsibility for the statement that follows. In general, however, it is better to begin by identifying the person or group who feel, think, believe, have decided, etc. [...].
    • 2002: Lasch, Christopher (2002). "Christopher Lasch and Politics of the Plain Style - by Stewart Weaver". In Weaver, Stewart Angas (ed.). Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 34. ISBN 9780812218145. Retrieved 31 May 2022. [...] inert and lifeless, the passive voice, for Lasch at least, also suggests a kind of moral cowardice insofar as it 'disguises the subject and makes it hard to assign responsibility for an action.' thus its appeal to bureaucrats, 'who wish to avoid resposibility for their decisions,' and timid academics, who, unwilling to risk a straightforward judgment, aspire above all else to 'an appearance of detatchment and objectivity' [...].
    • 2010: "Content Style Sheet" (PDF). Blackwell. 10 March 2010. p. 2. Retrieved 2 June 2022. Use passive voice throughout: [...] (science/medical requirement – fading practice)" [...] Use active voice throughout [...] {{cite web}}: |archive-date= requires |archive-url= (help)
    • 2011: Hitchings, Henry (2011). A History of Proper English. London: John Murray. p. 323. The use of the passive voice is another technique of denial [...].
    • 2022: "Nature portfolio". Nature portfolio. Nature. Springer Nature Limited. 2022. Retrieved 2 June 2022. Nature journals prefer authors to write in the active voice ("we performed the experiment...") as experience has shown that readers find concepts and results to be conveyed more clearly if written directly.
    • 2022: "Write clearly and concisely". IEEE ProComm - Professional Communication Society. IEEE. Retrieved 2 June 2022. Use active voice by default; research shows readers comprehend it more quickly than passive voice [...].

    So a few gullibles have drunk the kool-aid. But when (if ever) did the "formerly sometimes advised against" monster become "formerly sometimes advised against" (rather than generally accepted by grammarians, style-gurus and publishers) ?

    In the light of the examples presented, the characterization of passive-voice-use as "formerly sometimes advised against" seems vague and questionable.

    We could drop the formulation "was formerly sometimes". Or we could find and reference some overwhelmingly convincing alternative pronouncements in reliable sources to justify the new implied prescription ("passive constructions are no longer generally advised against"). So far in support of the new wisdom we have had some spirited statements of the type "[...] But people mostly don't pay attention to Strunk & White anymore [...]."

    - 131.203.251.134 (talk) 04:07, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    It was formerly advised against in the MOS. This whole debate is to change MOS to no longer generally advise against it. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:06, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Confusingly vague, no? - to state: "The passive voice was formerly sometimes advised against in many forms of writing [...]." Still what can one expect but vague sloppiness from an agentless passive-voice sentence, with or without irony?
    However, to address the interpretation that the advice for "many forms of writing" relates to advice promulgated in the Wikipedia Manual of Style. User:SMcCandlish added into the Manual of Style the text "Passive voice is used much more frequently in encyclopedic writing than in most other forms, in which it may be frequently advised against. [...] Passive voice should still be avoided when it is not needed [...]" on 26 September 2017, adding the edit summary: "Been meaning to add this for years, and keep forgetting." Sampling of the archives suggests that similar wording about the use of passive-voice constructions remained in the Manual of Style continually until May 2022. Does that gel clearly with the "sometimes" in the statement: "The passive voice was formerly sometimes advised against in many forms of writing [...]" ?
    It intrigues me to read that "[t]his whole debate is to change MOS to no longer generally advise against it". I thought that any debate aimed to determine something rather than to presuppose a predetermined outcome. Right now we apparently have a debate on possibly improving the formulation "The passive voice was formerly sometimes advised against in many forms of writing [...]" - in a sentence which User:WhatamIdoing has identified as "awkward".
    - 131.203.251.134 (talk) 04:39, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    It is clear that you feel you are right, and that these quotes support what you are arguing, unfortunately they don't. The reason the MoS has been changed is that the former wording could be misinterpreted to suggest that all passives were bad and should be changed where possible. That is not what the above quotes say, nor was it the intention of the previous wording, but it is what you are doing. I would suggest that, with the change of the text of the MoS, you should just move on and cease to rephrase passives until you are clearer about the incidences in which that might be appropriate. We are possibly arriving at a WP:CIR situation here. --Boynamedsue (talk) 06:26, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I fail to see how the repeated (but unfounded and unproven) suggestion - that I change all possible passive usages - has anything to do with the current discussion on the MOS's history and analysis of style. - 131.203.251.134 (talk) 04:50, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Just let me clarify as the above was a bit short. It may be that you are right about the passive and the other people who have commented here are wrong. But the consensus here is different to that, and therefore, for the purposes of wikipedia, you need to edit in a slightly different way. Not every consensus is backed up by a rewrite of the MoS, so this one seems pretty clear. Boynamedsue (talk) 06:57, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree. We do not require that people agree that this is the correct rule; we only require them to acknowledge that it is our rule and that our rule is the one that must be followed, however grudgingly, here.
    I have just re-written the first half to say: "The passive voice is inappropriate for some forms of writing, such as creative writing and instructions, but it is widely used in encyclopedia articles, because the passive voice avoids inappropriate first- and second-person constructions as well as tone problems." I think this is clearer (identifies what we mean by 'forms of writing') and less awkward. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:51, 12 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    checkY I like that. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 16:38, 12 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    "The passive voice is inappropriate for some forms of writing, such as creative writing and instructions, but it is widely used in encyclopedia articles, because the passive voice avoids inappropriate first- and second-person constructions as well as tone problems." This gives the message we want to communicate perfectly, but the first bit isn't true! Could we change "is inappropriate" for "is frequently advised against"? Boynamedsue (talk) 05:05, 14 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @Boynamedsue, what makes you think that the first bit isn't true? Consider these options:
    1. Remove the pizza from the box and plastic wrap. Discard all packaging materials.
    vs
    1. The pizza is removed from the box and the plastic wrap. All the packaging materials are discarded.
    Which of these is the appropriate style for telling someone how to prepare a frozen pizza for a hot oven? WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:48, 14 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You are certainly right in that example, but the phrase "The passive voice is inappropriate for some forms of writing, such as creative writing and ..." sounds like passive voice should never be used in creative writing. I can imagine it being just what's needed occasionally. Changing "is inappropriate" to "is rarely appropriate" or something like that sounds good to me. SchreiberBike | ⌨  15:25, 14 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, in that example the passive is absolutely wrong. But, for example, "The alarm must be fitted by a trained electrician" would be fine. The passive is frequently used in creative writing, it is just less common than in encyclopaedic language. A nice example is the legendary poem "This be the verse" by Phillip Larkin, where the artistic choice of the passive is doing an important job.
    Like I said, the relevant part of the text as it is now does the job we need, but the irrelevant part isn't technically correct. Boynamedsue (talk) 15:47, 14 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That's fair. Would you like to make the change that SchreiberBike suggests? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:37, 15 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I would put something like "less frequently used". Boynamedsue (talk) 16:32, 15 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Why are we advising people on creative writing? I don't see how this is within the scope of the MOS. --Trovatore (talk) 00:37, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    It's not "creative writing", which is how to write a novel, etc. I haven't read this voluminous thread but for the examples at the top of ridiculous passive-to-active changes. Please revert them wherever they occurred. Tony (talk) 02:26, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Boynamedsue, WhatamIdoing, and SchreiberBike seem to be discussing MOS text that references creative writing, contrasting it with Wikipedia writing and suggesting that passive voice is more appropriate here than it is in writing a novel etc. I don't have any problem with passive voice used appropriately in Wikipedia, but I think it's out of place for us to compare it with creative writing. No one is interested in our tips on creative writing. Or maybe they even are, but this isn't the place for us to offer them. --Trovatore (talk) 04:40, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Agreed. Furthermore, suggested text along the lines of "the passive voice is frequently advised against" would (re-)introduce vagueness and confusion. It would leave unhelpfully unclear, for example, whether the statement applies as much in Bolivia as it may in Burundi. Excellent example of the perils of an agentless passive. - At least the current MOS text discussing the usage of passives: "The passive voice is inappropriate for some forms of writing [...]" has greatly improved clarity - thank you, User:WhatamIdoing. - 131.203.251.134 (talk) 04:50, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The point is that people have had it pounded into their head by Miss Snodgrass and MS Word to never use the passive voice. They need a bit of context to understand why it has a place in an encyclopedia. We're not saying everything they've learned is wrong, only that in an encyclopedia, sometimes, passive voice is just right. SchreiberBike | ⌨  04:58, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    We don't need to say everything they've learned is wrong, but we don't need to say it isn't wrong, either. Maybe everything they've learned really is wrong. Or maybe not. Not up to us to say, at least not in the MOS. --Trovatore (talk) 16:31, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Just regarding this, anon user, you have been repeatedly asked not to change passive structures for active ones on this page, and given the reasons why you shouldn't do this. I believe the following edits to include further examples of what Tony asked to be reverted on sight. [[13]], 2, 3. Could you maybe stop doing this, given the well-established consensus against it? Boynamedsue (talk) 05:49, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Or not - given the wealth of support from various quarters for appropriate active-voice constructions in and beyond Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia talk-pages, and given the lack of any purportedly established consensus banning occasional improvements in editing for clarity and succinctness. - One might indeed convince oneself into a belief aligned with a third party's views on reversion - Tony states that he read only the examples of "passive-to-active changes" (the four or five cherry-picked ones, plucked out of context and unreferenced). But talk-pages do not always operate on the basis of repeated shrill denunciations, without reasoned discussion, and Tony may even have had the opportunity to read through our little thread here and to consider some of the more nuanced approaches to the use of active voice. - I detect no stylistic crimes in context in the referenced edits - WP:MOS does not require passive-voice structures. I suggest finding a real justification for any proposed reversions. - 131.203.251.134 (talk) 04:47, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Given that this thread is purportedly dedicated to encouraging clear exposition, I'm having a hard time interpreting the immediately foregoing as anything other than parody. EEng 05:11, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • If this could be conveyed to the anon user: scientific/engineering English nowadays uses a mix of active and passive when explaining in a funding application, for example, how a project will be conducted. The point is to avoid successive close occurrences of "We will ...", et al. Last century is was the norm to use wall-to-wall passive voice, in some weird attempt to suggest objectivity through the absence of actors. Passive voice has its place, though it's possible to find passive that would be better as active: just not the way the anon is doing it. Tony (talk) 13:05, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Now at ANI

    MOS:'S misguided?

    FYI, in the RM discussion at Talk:Eyles's harrier#Requested move 21 May 2022, most of the initial comments are saying that MOS:'S / MOS:POSS is misguided (re: "the boss's office, Illinois's largest employer, Descartes's philosophy" – especially "Descartes's philosophy"). Should the guidance be changed? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 04:55, 23 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    If anyone is serious about re-opening this, please first review these prior discussions (and others you may find) and let us know what's changed that should unsettle this settled matter. Dicklyon (talk) 18:51, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    See also template

    Do we have a consensus on cases when {{see also}} template is used inbetween of paragraphs (which is usually used for related topics) but there is no subtitle? Was it ever discussed before? Just want to make sure it's not regulated (I think it should not be because of WP:CREEP probably). Below is an examples of what I'm talking about. Thanks in advance.

    Some article about X topic
    […]

    Subtitle

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.


    See also: Abundance of elements in Earth's crust

    Some minerals here and there, like, sulfates, are quite rare on Earth etc...

    […]
    The Template:See also documentation states it should be placed "at the top of article sections (excluding the lead)." This has been there since at least 2006, so it seems like well defined consensus. --Cerebral726 (talk) 17:20, 24 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's not what the template is for, and using it this way will confuse the readers as to whether the cross-reference pertains the the preceding material or the following material. It would be better in a case like this to do: Some minerals here and there, like, sulfates, are quite rare on Earth etc... {{crossref|(For more information, see [[Abundance of elements in Earth's crust]].)}} Blah blah blah rest of paragraph.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:48, 24 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Examples requested at MOS:ENBETWEEN

    In MOS:ENFROM, there is explicit guidance about spacing of en dashes in ranges involving one or more entities containing spaces (e.g. "20 November – 3 December", not "20 November–3 December"), but MOS:ENBETWEEN is mute regarding similar issues. Is it "Duchy of Parma – United States relations" or "Duchy of Parma–United States relations"? An example or two in that section would be helpful. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:36, 25 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I hope the answer is no space. The space in the date ranges still looks odd to me. and was never something I agreed with. But obviously styles and opinions vary. Dicklyon (talk) 03:59, 28 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yeah, opinions do vary. I very much like our full-date protocol with the open en dash, but in some other contexts an open en dash could be termporarily understood as an interrupting dash (I think the original discussion opted for closed en dash, but you can probably get away with either). Tony (talk) 01:20, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Nothing wrong with the symbol №.

    This guide says, “do not use the symbol №.”, without stating a reason. Why should it not be used? And who says so? It seems totally arbitrary. Jeff in CA (talk) 11:16, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    The Chicago Manual of Style does not seem to cover usage of №, presumably because it is rare in English. The Unicode Standard 13.0 (2020, p. 821) states that "U+2116 numero sign is provided both for Cyrillic use ... and for compatibility with Asian standards"; it does not mention English use of the symbol. Doremo (talk) 11:31, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This is a case of having a rule for the sake of having a rule. This is a classic edge-case. Who was ever going to do it in the first place? Delete completely and practically no-one will ever notice. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:47, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The explicit rule is useful because editors that are not native English speakers can be referred to it. Native English speakers are certainly unlikely to try to use №, but it is helpful to invoke it while editing, just as the MOS explicitly says not to use guillemet (« ») marks, which would likewise never occur to a native English speaker. Doremo (talk) 12:58, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The numero sign (№) may by unusual in English, but Nº is not, particularly in manuscript. In print No. is possibly more common. Recently though I'd agree that the American # seems to have become more common. I've just grabbed the current issue of the Kent Archaeological Society's newsletter which has "Nº 118 Spring 2022" on the front cover. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 14:43, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I do not consider it sufficient to only consider how the symbol appears on the screen or paper when rendered; it makes a difference what is present in the wikitext, and when it isn't obvious, it should be specified how the editor would enter the character(s) in the wikitext. Martin of Sheffield did not specify how Nº was entered in the wikitext of the preceeding post, nor it is obvious. Since the Kent Archaeological Society's newsletter was not linked, it is not obvious whether Martin of Sheffield cut and pasted the exact same symbol that is present in an electronic newsletter, or whether it is Martin of Sheffield's impression of what electronic symbol best approximates what is shown in a paper newsletter. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:42, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Since I was not addressing the use of the symbol in Wikitext, nor yet the contents of the MOS, how I entered it is pretty irrelevant. As regards the KAS newsletter, since I grabbed the current issue and commented about the front cover and furthermore since it was not linked it ought to be obvious to most readers that it is in print and not electronics. I'm not arguing for a change in the MOS recommendations, merely commenting on the unfounded assertion of Doremo that No (or one of its variants) are "rare" and "unlikely" to be used by an English speaker. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 20:24, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I believe Doremo was referring specifically with the Unicode symbol №, as opposed to the more general No.. Note that No. is actually recommended by the MOS. Kahastok talk 20:47, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes; № ≠ No. ≠ no. Doremo (talk) 02:16, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (2015) says, No. for number. Note the capitalization: Haste is the No. 1 reason for errors. Do not use No. before the numerical designations of schools, fire companies, lodges and similar units: Public School 4 (or P.S. 4)... Le Marteau (talk) 18:57, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The clause which forbids the use of the "№" character, albeit worded differently, was first added to the MoS as long ago as September 2009, in this edit by Alexd~enwiki (talk · contribs). The relevant discussion may now be found at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 110## in British English, although the only mention of the character is in a post by Tony1 (talk · contribs) at 12:05, 14 September 2009 (UTC). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:15, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    So far I haven't seen any good arguments on the merits for having this rule. If it's hard to type, then don't. If "№" is hard to read and understand, then why is "No." allowed or even apparently encouraged, and then what about Nº or for that matter the octothorpe (#). If it's a matter of what some external manual of style says, who cares about that? My take is that this is instance #37,542 of this general case:
    • It just another rule put in for the sake of having a rule and bossing other editors around.
    • It was put in place during the Eisenhower Administration or whatever, after a brief discussion by three editors, none of whom are active anymore and two of whom are actually dead.
    • It will be in place til the Sun dies. These things are like bedbugs, once you have them it's practically impossible to get rid of them.
    So I'm not going to worry about it. Best practice if for editors to ignore rules like this, but either way is fine. But thanks to OP for pointing it out. Herostratus (talk) 15:13, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I can see no reason why you'd want to use this over "No." aside from affectation, which we generally don't encourage. Doremo above highlighted the possibility of non-native English speakers using it. As a general rule, I think it makes sense to discourage using a character that is difficult to type when there are non-special replacements readily at hand (No.) with no loss of meaning. Mackensen (talk) 15:34, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I think that there's an issue with screen-readers and fonts. It's the same reason that other symbols are discouraged
    > Do not use Unicode characters that put an abbreviation into a single character (unless the character itself is the subject of the text), e.g.: №, ㋏, ㎇, ㉐, Ⅶ, ℅, ™︎. These are not all well-supported in Western fonts. This does not apply to currency symbols, such as ₨ and ₠. For more comprensive lists, see Ligatures in Unicode, Letterlike Symbols, CJK Compatibility, Enclosed CJK Letters and Months, and Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement.
    Source Smasongarrison (talk) 22:59, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Starting sentences with conjunctions

    I don’t think it sounds right, or in keeping with Wikipedia’s style, to start sentences with conjunctions, such as “But”, “And” or “So”. In my view, it’s more encyclopaedic to start a sentence with “However” or “Despite this…”. I generally replace the former with the latter whenever I see it on Wikipedia articles. I can’t see anything in the MOS about it - has this subject been discussed before? Any views?—TrottieTrue (talk) 00:23, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Oh yes. see Wikipedia:Lies Miss Snodgrass told you. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:57, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    It still doesn’t sound right to me on Wikipedia - and it doesn’t seem to be the norm, either.—TrottieTrue (talk) 13:37, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Starting a sentence with a conjunction is "not the norm" in the sense that appropriate uses are rare. But they do exist. Stuff like this calls for application of stylistic judgment, not reflexive removal. EEng 15:58, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    My stylistic judgment is generally that it isn’t in keeping with the tone of Wikipedia’s house style. I seldom come across good quality articles which do this.—TrottieTrue (talk) 08:06, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Sorry, but asserting a blanket, one-size-fits-all stylistic judgment betrays a lack of stylistic judgment. Like I said, appropriate use cases are rare, but they exist. EEng 21:07, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, exactly. They are rare, but they exist. In the Featured Articles from the last week, there are several examples of articles using "however" to start a sentence. None of them use "But" to start sentences. In most cases, "however" is preferable to "but" - especially in an encyclopaedia. TrottieTrue (talk) 13:13, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    MOS:EDITORIAL already covers this: "Words to watch: but, despite, however, though, although, furthermore, while ...
    More subtly, editorializing can produce implications that are not supported by the sources. When used to link two statements, words such as but, despite, however, and although may imply a relationship where none exists, possibly unduly calling the validity of the first statement into question while giving undue weight to the credibility of the second. Doug Weller talk 12:15, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    But that's irrelevant to the point at hand, which is specifically re starting a sentence with a conjunction. EEng 21:07, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    And whether a conjunction creates an inadequately-sourced implication is independent of whether it is placed at the start or middle of a sentence. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:10, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    And I think that's what I was trying to say. But apparently not very well. However. EEng 03:51, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I worded my reply badly, but I think the point about the examples was important. Doug Weller talk 06:40, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Maybe I can help bring this to an end by pointing out that MOS doesn't try to teach universal principles that apply to all formal writing; except in rare cases in which some point has been a chronic source of trouble specifically here at WP, MOS restricts itself to points of WP's house style, that is, points on which formal publications vary. (See WP:MOSBLOAT.) So even if you were to be successful in convincing your fellow editors that it's a general rule of formal writing to never (or seldom) start a sentence with a conjunction, that's not going to be solemnized in MOS anyway.

    Nor is any central noticeboard the place to discuss it. Just make changes as part of normal copyediting. But -- warning -- any kind of systematic search-and-destroy mission is likely to lead to tears sooner or later. Bad idea. EEng 01:38, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I think you’ve misunderstood me. It’s not about rules for all formal writing - it’s about the house style of Wikipedia. I’m certainly not intending a “systematic search-and-destroy mission”. It’s simply something I tend to change as and when I find it, and another user has been edit warring over it on a few occasions when I’ve done so. TrottieTrue (talk) 17:53, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The trouble is, that if something ends up in MOS, then someone will carry out "systematic search-and-destroy missions", probably involving AWB or bots. This is why MOS should have as few rules as we can get away with.Nigel Ish (talk) 09:24, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I simply think that in most cases, starting sentences with “and” or “but” isn’t in keeping with the encyclopaedic tone of Wikipedia. I raised it here because another editor keeps warring over the usage of such conjunctions, refusing to let “but” be replaced with “however” at the start of sentences. I’m just going by what I’ve seen on Wikipedia - the general style seems to favour the latter. This editor insists it is acceptable grammar, which isn’t really the point. TrottieTrue (talk) 12:56, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Indeed the point isn't that it's acceptable. The point is that it isn't inferior or deficient in any way, and your sense that it "isn't in keeping" with Wikipedia's tone is baseless. AlsoWukai (talk) 04:54, 4 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Baseless apart from finding “however” on numerous articles, while “but” is seldom used, in my experience. In my view, “but” or “and” sounds inferior as a way of starting a sentence on an encyclopaedia. TrottieTrue (talk) 12:22, 4 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • FWIW, I think I agree with both positions here. Starting a sentence with a conjunction is perfectly cromulent English grammar. And in many contexts it's stylistically preferable. In part that's because such sentences naturally build into a crisp, clear argument. But that's also the problem with such sentences in article space: generally we don't want to be making arguments there. However, as has been noted, this isn't a very common problem in practice, because Wikipedians tend to avoid this structure anyway. And it's probably much less of a problem than articles that are making some sort of argument, but are hiding it behind more conventionally encyclopedic language. -- Visviva (talk) 01:17, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    See Katzenberger Trial, where User:AlsoWukai has been edit warring over their insistence upon the article retaining the sentences beginning with “but” which they inserted recently. It sounds quite awkward in that article, and unlike the tone I’m used to on Wikipedia. The article is protected for another day. This editor has also taken issue with me replacing “but” with “however” on a couple of previous occasions. It seems an odd thing to edit war over, quite apart from my stylistic preference for the latter (which I find far more often on WP).—TrottieTrue (talk) 01:33, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Now listen up, folks: there is nothing wrong with starting a sentence with "But" or "So" or even, occasionally, "And". If it's good enough for M.A.K. Halliday, the great grammarian of English, it's good enough for us. And it's in keeping with the principle of plain English. "However comma" might be ok for a major proposition in the text, or if too many "but"s are hanging around; but not otherwise. Tony (talk) 01:16, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Chicago Manual of Style "Crib Sheet" link is dead

    Under Further Reading; External Style Guides, the link is dead. Possible substitute: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

    DET (talk) 20:36, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Anything in the MOS about carriage returns?

    Cfls recently edited several articles to add carriage returns in the middle of infobox titles. That - formatting text so it works on one editor's particular display - seems like a bad idea. Is there anything in the MOS that specifically addresses this? ElKevbo (talk) 00:54, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    The relevant guideline is MOS:NBSP, which generally recommends preventing line breaks as opposed to forcing them. What work well on one's screen might not be optimal for another's. Readers can be reading from anything from a small phone to a widescreen monitor.—Bagumba (talk) 01:41, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Dear Wikipedia community members,
    I will now issue a specific fact sheet on ElKevbo's allegations.
    The United States has one of the best higher education systems in the world. Many states have established their own institutions of higher education, using geographical names as the distinction between branch campuses. For example, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with the world's top computer science school. The name of this university is very long.
    Wikipedia has a very good screen size adjustment mechanism, which can adapt to various computer and mobile phone sizes for easy reading. Meanwhile, in the case of an entry such as University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, no personal computer's browser in the world can display the name of the school in its entirety on one line at the top of the Wikipedia entry information box. The most common display currently is to display "University of Illinois Urbana-" on the first line and "Champaign" on the second line. Obviously, this is not the way people usually use sentence segmentation.
    In daily life, the way people use sentence segmentation is "University of Illinois" and "Urbana-Champaign." This is people's language-using habit. In the second paragraph of the main text of the Wikipedia Manual of Style we can see, "Editors should ... structure articles with consistent, reader-friendly layouts and formatting." Following this principle, I optimized the display of school names above the entry information box for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to match popular perception. Therefore, in this entry, "University of Illinois" is displayed on the first line, and "Urbana-Champaign" is displayed on the second line. This is in line with people's common perception.
    The same applies to some of the University of California campuses with longer names, such as University of California, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego. Such typographic optimization is to allow our readers to read our articles better and get information more easily.
    ElKevbo states his own personal opinion. This community member argues that the typesetting editing behavior that makes it easier for readers to read the Wikipedia entries for universities with unusually long names should give way to "let the browser do its job." We strongly affirm and acknowledge that Wikipedia's automatic typesetting system is excellent. At the same time, we need to pay attention to the fact that we should give correct line breaks to improve readability when faced with a university name that cannot be read in two words such as Cornell University. We know that in any case, the school names such as University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cannot be displayed in one line, so we should take the initiative to solve this situation. What I'm stating is by no means a distrust of Wikipedia's automatic typesetting. Instead, I'm trying to make Wikipedia entries better by editing them.
    The views expressed by ElKevbo is not acceptable. We should take into account the specific circumstances of each entry, and appropriately present what is described in the circumstances. We respect the Wikipedia Manual of Style as a community guide for all editing.
    Thank you, all active members of the Wikipedia community who have contributed greatly to the spread of human knowledge.
    This concludes my presentation. Cfls (talk) 05:57, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Re For example, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with the world's top computer science school. The name of this university is very long.: The name of this university is not as long as some, like the Vallurupalli Nageswara Rao Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology, Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University, or Ivan Chernyakhovsky National Defense University of Ukraine. But despite its relative brevity, the name we use here for UIUC confuses me. First off, our usual convention for combinations of names of separate entities that are not subordinate to each other, like in this case Urbana and Champaign, is to use an en-dash. Hyphens are for double-barreled names for single places, but there is no single place Urbana-Champaign. So why is it University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and not University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign? And second, why does its category hierarchy use the alternative form Category:University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with the en-dash and with an extra word "at" included? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:11, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Specific name of this university aside, the original question is more about how to optimally encode names that might not fit on one line for a given reader's screen (the actually page name can be dealt with on that specific page, WP:RM, etc.)—Bagumba (talk) 08:20, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    A general solution per MOS:NBSP would be using {{nowrap}}, e.g. {{nowrap|University of California}}, Los Angeles, which incidentally shows up fine as one line on my laptop, not to mention a widescreen external monitor. Encode it to give clues on optimal places to place a break, but leave the ultimate decision to the browser on whether a break actually is needed, depending on the screen being used.—Bagumba (talk) 08:13, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    See H:LINEBREAK for ideas about how to do this better. That page recommends against using <br /> in an infobox. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:31, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Beware that the intent is not to enforce a line break at a particular place but to discourage a line break in another particular place. Perhaps {{Non breaking hyphen}} could work here.  Stepho  talk  08:45, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @ElKevbo: To your original q., i.e. Is there anything in the MOS that specifically addresses this?, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Text, which says Do not insert line breaks within a sentence, since this makes it harder to edit with a screen reader. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:35, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Thanks for all of the replies and pointers to helpful guidelines and tools.

    @Cfls: What exactly are you trying to do here? It seems clear that simply adding a manual line break/carriage return is not a good idea or in line with our practices and policies. Would one of the ideas suggested here meet your goal(s)? ElKevbo (talk) 20:53, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    I've updated the relevant University of California schools to use {{nowrap}} and not explicitly force a line break, leaving the browser to decide on its own if it is needed.—Bagumba (talk) 07:11, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    That's contradictory. If you used nowrap, then browsers will not decide if it's needed, they will simply not wrap.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:11, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Still left opportunity for break: {{nowrap|University of California,}} {{nowrap|Los Angeles}}—Bagumba (talk) 19:51, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This is exactly the right way to approach this. EEng 04:12, 11 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Percent again

    Percent clarification

    I would like to propose a small update to the percent description. The description is spot on with regards to how to use it. 3% Three percent Three per cent (however much I personally hate this option; but that is one of the reasons there is a style guide)

    On what not to use, the style guide is a lot less clear Do not use: 3 % I think we should add: 3 percent 3 per cent. As invalid options. That is implied in the text, but it is not stated in the examples. Additionally, to be completely clear, I think we should add: Whether it is the first time in the article you use percent or not. if you do not write out the number, do not write out the percent. That also means that 70% can be written in only one way. I consider this a clarification of the rules, not an update (Together with how to write numerals in Wiki)

    Percent update

    The is one very small inconsistency with the percentage standards as opposed to most percentage standards. Where 3–5 m is correct for 3 to 5 meters (and 3 m – 5 m is not), the percentage standard is to include the percent in both instances, thus: 3%–5%. I guess that has to do with number formatting, as well as the fact that a lot of text could be added between the 3% and the 5%. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.207.179.62 (talk • contribs) 08:05, June 15, 2022 (UTC)

    Feedback request on SpaceX Starship

    Editors are invited to comment on the article "SpaceX Starship"'s use of date format at Talk:SpaceX_Starship#Request_for_comment_on_date_format. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 04:27, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Whitespace wrapping section headings in the source

    Is there a general consciousness on whether section headings should have whitespace after the first == and before the last ==? I realize it's rendered the same either way, with whitespace stripped, but I assume it's better to be consistent throughout the site. Help:Sections shows it with the spaces whenever an example heading is on its own line, but doesn't contain the spaces later in the article when the examples are inside of the paragraphs.

    Tl;dr: == Heading 2 == or ==Heading 2==?

    ShortTimeNoSee — Message ⸻ 02:17, 20 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Back in the day we never had spaces there, but FWIW, since I've seen others doing it, I've become a convert. The spaces make the wikitext noticeably more readable. Usually when I come across non-spaced headings they are in an old article that hasn't been heavily worked on for many years. -- Visviva (talk) 02:20, 20 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Some people have strong feelings that it should be one way or another. I can't imagine caring that much, so I just leave it as it is. It's like should it be * Text or *Text? I'm happy to let other people have their small victories. SchreiberBike | ⌨  02:44, 20 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    The guidelines are clear (last I looked; can't recall where): Always blank line before heading; optional after, and don't fight over it. I often add a blank line before a paragraph if it's crammed up against stuff like heading+images that make it hard to see the start of a paragraph, but if it's just up against a heading that's not so bad; I prefer a blank line there, but wouldn't add it unless most of the rest of the headings in an article are that way. Dicklyon (talk) 15:55, 20 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Oh, sorry, I answered the wrong question. Those spaces in headings are generally considered optional and not worth thrashing over. Dicklyon (talk) 15:56, 20 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    On talk pages, the "new section" tab places spaces between the equals signs and the heading. There are WP:SUBSTed templates that create headings without the spaces. But it really doesn't matter whether they're present or not. What must not occur is people editing pages just to add (or remove) those spaces. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:51, 20 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Examples use prose rarely encountered in WP

    I've checked the archives and don't believe this is a WP:PERENNIAL, but the examples under MOS:INOROUT show styles of prose rarely encountered in WP (e,g, Dory said, "Yes, I can read", which gave Marlin an idea.) which limits the example's effectiveness. Examples reflecting the style advocated for use in articles might facilitate better comprehension, especially in the scenario of differentiating clauses from editorial insertions, since these rules differ for both.  Spintendo  11:42, 25 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    This is a criticism I've long made of some parts of MOS -- particularly (as chance would have it) the fishy examples. Take these two:
    • "Why are you sleeping?", asked Darla.
    • "Fish are friends, not food", said Bruce.
    It's almost impossible to imagine an article reciting what someone said in this style, which is better suited to works of fiction. Same goes for:
    • Did Darla say, "Here I am"?
    No article could possibly contain such an interrogatory construction, so why are we instructing editors on how to punctuate it properly? (The exception would be a quotation, in which case we'd use the source's punctuation anyway.) If we can't illustrate a MOS principle using an example that might conceivably arise in an actual article, then there's no need for MOS to address that principle at all, and WP:If MOS doesn't need a rule on something, then it needs to not have a rule on that thing. EEng 20:02, 25 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Just chiming in to agree that this is a problem and has been a problem; I remember talking about it with EEng after I fixed one example in 2018(!), and some time later someone also changed the poetic "Old Man Winter's bleak greys relent as Spring begins to show her colors" example elsewhere on that page to something that could more plausibly occur in encyclopedic prose. Wherever possible, we should use examples that do, or at least plausibly could, occur in articles. Whenever you spot one that you can improve, please improve it or bring it up for discussion like this; it's just hard to find them all. -sche (talk) 06:28, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Right, but to reiterate what I think is, perhaps, an even more important point: if no one can think of a plausible example -- one that could arise in an actual article -- to illustrate a given point of usage, then that point should simply be deleted. EEng 18:25, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Could we please say ”omitted” or “removed”, rather than “deleted”… just a quibble. Blueboar (talk) 20:17, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Could we compromise on "annihilated", "shot on sight", or "terminated with extreme prejudice" [14]? EEng 22:08, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    For MOS:NOTUSA

    Add Using "America", while not disallowed, is heavily discouraged. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:36D:1200:4F8:51BC:5571:C919:E9FB (talk) 06:45, 27 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    MOS:HYPHEN

    MOS:HYPHEN has an image of college students stating "four-year old children", meaning these college students are in their fourth year (seniors) at a university. However, college students are not kids, but young adults and have obtained the age of majority, so the description is somewhat misleading. That is why I added a note explaining that sources sometimes refer to college students as college kids because of their youthfulness. cookie monster 755 02:38, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    They're all somebody's children. I've removed your overanxious pedantry. EEng 04:36, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I'd missed that pics had been introduced in that section. They're cool. Tony (talk) 08:27, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks. Honoraria may be sent to the usual numbered account. EEng 13:50, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    And they're old children. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:59, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Questions: is that expression, or even just "old children", actually in use in the USA in the context of university graduates - Ive never heard of that usage in the UK? At what age do students graduate from Texas Tech University?
    That is different form of pedantry, EEng#s. You are using children in the "vertical" family relationship sense, with no age implications whatsoever; the photo concerns contempories, using the word to mean young people who have not yet reached puberty or become adults. Davidships (talk) 09:58, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You're joking, right? EEng 13:50, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    College students are some ones children, but they aren't children in the legal sense. It's misleading EEng#s. cookie monster 755 17:12, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Then I guess if we end up in court over this we're screwed. EEng 18:28, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    lol. cookie monster 755 18:44, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    This seems to be a litany of people not getting the point, which is, in the context of hyphenation, that these children are four-year (in that they are studying four-year courses) and old (as children go). Mildly humorous things like this lose most of their effect if they have to be explained, but it seems that it is necessary to do so. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:33, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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