User talk:SchreiberBike/Workspace/Italics of websites in citations and references

Other ideas

• Should the RfC include text about what specifically will be changed to make the conclusion clear? SchreiberBike | ⌨  23:19, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
• Should the RfC say how and when the RfC is to be closed? SchreiberBike | ⌨  05:26, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
• Surely it is important to state the reasons for an rfc?
  1. at Help talk:Citation Style 1#Attempt to conclude you list as supporting guidelines MOS:ITALICTITLE and MOS:ITALICWEBCITE. The former is, I suspect settled, but the latter is new as of this 2 May 2019 edit; most editors will not have read it. If the rfc is to rely on these guidelines, shouldn't they be named as references in the rfc?
  2. it is not clear to me that the CNN / CNN dispute between Editors GreenC and Psantora at Help talk:Citation Style 1#Examples of how to use the templates achieved agreement. I would suspect that in the greater en.wiki community there are at the least these two camps, perhaps others so this might be listed as a reason for the rfc. If there is a wiki project that has formed a consensus about italics and these kinds of channel / corporate / call-letters / website names, that consensus should be referenced.
  3. a similar disagreement may exist with regard to Rotten Tomatoes / Metacritic, etc. I think that I remember seeing such a dispute but cannot locate it. If some wiki project did in fact come to some consensus about italics and these websites, that consensus should be referenced.
  4. in cs1|2 periodical templates, |publisher= is rendered visually but is not supported in the citation's metadata so for those users who consume article citation information through the metadata, the periodical title is missing

  after having written all of this, in the end, isn't this rfc simply a proposal to affirm MOS:ITALICWEBCITE?

  —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:43, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

  That all makes sense to me. One clarification, when BarrelProof first mentioned a bunch of people in the debate at WT:CS1 it was presented as themselves, SMcCandlish, and SchreiberBike (and "others", which I think includes Redrose64) on the "italic" side and myself, Mandruss, Starship.paint, and GreenC on the "upright" side. Since that mention I believe Starship.paint and Mandruss have explicitly stated that they support an RfC and don't really have a preference one way or the other as long as the outcome is consistent and clear (and has wide support). As far as I can tell the only other editor that participated in the debate was Jc3s5h, but without specifically stating support for either side. After I was pinged, I explained how my position changed from "italic" to "upright" and that is when GreenC and I got into our debate there. And on that point, though I'm sure there are other editors that agree with GreenC, I didn't see anyone else supporting the "upright" view there. And therefore, I hope we can find a way to keep this RfC as neutral as possible... I think Ttm has the right approach to simply frame it as an affirmation of MOS:ITALICWEBCITE/WP:ITALICWEBCITE. With that in mind, would it be best to then center the debate at WT:MOSTITLE? - Paul^T+/_C 13:44, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

The MOS has been worded in a way to support one side and done so recently! A proposed RfC is not really "affirming" the MOS. Rather it is seeking consensus for a recent change to the MOS, and also allowing room for suggestions to changes and/or how CS|2 itself works. -- GreenC 15:15, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

We don't (and shouldn't) need to get into this now, but SMcCandlish's change in May is directly supported by policy (as quoted at MOS:ITALICWEBCITE):

Relevant policies (emphasis in originals):

• WP:Verifiability: "all material must be attributable to reliable, published sources.... Articles must be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Source material must have been published.... Unpublished materials are not considered reliable.... Editors may ... use material from ... respected mainstream publications. [Details elided.] Editors may also use electronic media, subject to the same criteria."
• WP:No original research: "The phrase 'original research' (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material – such as facts, allegations, and ideas – for which no reliable, published sources exist."
• WP:What Wikipedia is not: New research must be "published in other [than the researchers' own] venues, such as peer-reviewed journals, other printed forms, open research, or respected online publications".

All he did with those edits was to bring them into one place so as to clarify the existing convention. At least, that is how I interpreted it. Regardless, whether it is called a reaffirmation or not, I don't agree that this represents a change in the spirit of the MOS. - Paul^T+/_C 15:48, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Specifically it was added "any website cited as a source, it is necessarily being treated as a publication" and from that determining that all such publications are italicized, is a novel interpretation that does take into account the issues raised and which you concur not everyone would agree with. -- GreenC 15:59, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

The concession that there are others who think differently has no bearing on the veracity of what those other people think (and to be clear, "those other people" included myself at the beginning of this discussion with BarrelProof). If you are disputing "any website cited as a source, it is necessarily being treated as a publication" as a novel interpretation, please give a single, specific example of a website cited as a valid source on Wikipedia (per the cited policies) that is correctly not treated as a publication. I'll wait. - Paul^T+/_C 16:43, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

This is now officially a rehash of the previous discussion which I already said was pointless as you keep running in circles to the same conclusion without dealing with the multiple complex issues raised. Even the MOS says "websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis [to italicize or not]". Example: {{cite web |url=http://www.wgbh.org/about/index.cfm |title=WGBH – About Us |work=[[WGBH-TV]] }}. There is no "publication" titled WGBH-TV it is the name of TV channel which is the name of a publisher and not italicized. Nevertheless WGBH-TV is the correct source for this page, or at least what most people will use. Some might use |work=www.wgbh.com but that fails to wikilink the WGBH page. Some might even create a wikilink behind the domain name but it is convoluted and not common practice. -- GreenC 18:21, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

In that example, the "publication" is wgbh.org/www.wgbh.org, referring to the official website for WGBH Educational Foundation (but, depending on what exactly is being cited and where/how/why, could also refer to (the official website for) WGBH-TV, as you noted, or even (the official website for) the radio station WGBH (FM)). In all cases, the wgbh.org site can be referred to by any of those articles (per WP:COMMONNAME-policy), depending on what is actually being cited and where/how/why (per WP:V, WP:OR, and/or WP:NOT-all policies). And again, in all cases the correct formatting for the reference (per the MOS) is for the publication (wgbh.org or whichever common name applies) to be italicized. In any case, it is not an example of a website cited as a valid source on Wikipedia (per the cited policies) that is correctly not treated as a publication, as the publication is wgbh.org.

I agree that there are complex issues involved here and the best way forward is to try to find agreement via an RFC so that we aren't "churning" per Mandruss. Your point about the MOS and websites is specifically about prose (which is not under debate); it does not apply to references. - Paul^T+/_C 19:07, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) MoS on that point means in mid-sentence in running text; not in citations. People keep failing to understand this (or, more likely, pretending to fail to understand it so they can perpetuate their WP:TE / WP:BATTLEGROUND pattern on this bit of style trivia). Example sentence: Salon is an online magazine; Facebook is a social networking service; Amazon is an e-shop; and Oxford Dictionaries Online is an electronic edition of the database behind the print edition of Concise Oxford English Dictionary. If you cite Facebook's terms-of-use policy as a primary-source document in an article about Facebook or some controversy on it, or whatever, the Facebook or Facebook.com in |work= (AKA |website=) is being cited as a work, of which that policy is a quotation-marked sub-work (in |title=); not as a service or a corporation (that's the publisher, the name of which is Facebook Inc., which is redundant with the work title, so we wouldn't put that in a citation). WP does not cite anything but published works. You cannot cite a goat, a board of directors, a rock, a necklace, a nonprofit organization, your relative, a game-software distribution business, or a dream you had last night – only a published work (though it may be authored or published by the board of directors of Sony, by the ACLU, by your Aunt Edna, or by GOG Sp.).

People have to stop confusing publishers and authors with the works they publish. It's like being unable to understand the difference between Apple Records or the Beatles and The Magical Mystery Tour. Seriously; it really is that damned simple. People pretend it's not, with excusea like "Well, the server name is Foo.com, and the title on the website is Foo, and the name of the company is Foo Ltd.; I just can't understand!" Bollocks. If I started a band called Foo, and and we set up our own Foo Records company, and our first album was self-titled Foo, no one who did not have severe brain damage would be unable to understand this or tell the difference between a CD, a music distribution business, and a rock group just because their names had a text string in common. FFS.

And people need to stop confusing online publications with some kind of magically different "un-publication" that doesn't take italics or (for sub-works) quotation marks. They are publications. The medium does not matter. It can be broadcast, printed on dead trees, distributed as DVD-ROM, whatever. It makes no difference.

The same handful of individuals harping on their WP:IDONTLIKEIT stuff about italics and electronic sources, over and over and over again for the last decade+, playing a very long WP:IDHT game, have made no dent whatsoever. Our templates are not going to change to stop italicizing major works just because they're electronic. Our MoS is not going to say to do that, either (in fact, it's been clarified in the opposite direction). This is a bogus "pseudo-debate" that just needs to die. If someone is lazy about cite formatting even in manual cites and doesn't italicize an online source as a cited work, someone else will do it later, and no one is going to revert them. I've been here since 2005, and not one single time has anyone reverted me making this MOS:TITLES correction, and I do it very frequently.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:50, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

PS: In the comment just above mine, that I edit-conflicted with: a station is not a publication, it's a publisher, or sometimes a |via= (a distribution channel for some other publisher). If there's a Foo News TV network or radio station, that's generally a publisher. If they have a specific news program titled something like The Foo News at 11, that's a publication for citation purposes (use the TV citation template). If they have a website called, say, Foo News at FooNews.com, that's a publication, an online one. Don't let your brain melt just because the names are similar. :-) And "www." should be dropped when citing something that doesn't have a title other than its domain name, except in the now-rare case in which the domain name without "www." doesn't actually work.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:50, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Re: a station is not a publication, no it is not. I see the ambiguous phrase and have corrected it by adding " (the official website for)" in the appropriate locations. I was implying that meaning but clearly it was not explicit enough. - Paul^T+/_C 20:27, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

• Surely it is important to state the reasons for an rfc? My thinking was that the RfC would be most likely to be conclusive if it was written neutrally and the arguments for one or another option were placed in the !votes and discussion. We could add something like "This RfC is necessary because while there is guidance saying to italicize website names as sources in references, many are using |publisher= to avoid the website being in italics." Honestly, I could go either way. I just want to see a conclusion.
• Also, rather than discussing the merits of one or another position on the RfC here, I'd rather use this space to create the most clear RfC we can. Thanks, SchreiberBike | ⌨  19:16, 15 May 2019 (UTC)