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Wikipedia:Update/1/General style changes during August 2009

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  • Wikipedia:Citing sources, selected version
    • In WP:CITE#Citation styles, removed "All citation techniques require detailed full citations to be provided for each source used. Full citations must contain enough information for other editors to identify the specific published work you used." "in italics" and "within quotation marks" were added in several places. For book citations, changed "The name of the publisher [... is] optional, although publisher is generally required for featured articles." to "name of the publisher". For newspaper articles, changed "a comment with the date you retrieved it if it is online (invisible to the reader)." to "date you retrieved it if you read it on the Web, unless it is on a stable website that maintains its archive over the long term", and changed "page number(s)" to "page number(s) are optional". For web articles, removed [the date you retrieved it] "(invisible to the reader if the article has a date of publication)", and removed "an optional short quote (used rarely, if the source is likely to be challenged)"
    • Moved WP:CITE#Metadata down, with minor tweaks
    • Renamed WP:CITE#Cite the place where you found the material to WP:CITE#Say where you found the material
    • Added to WP:CITE#Shortened footnotes: "Short citations can be written manually, or by using the {{harv}} template."
    • Removed subsection: WP:CITE#Collapsible tables (July 31 version)
    • Added to WP:CITE#Repairing dead links: [If a dead link cannot be repaired or replaced,] "one option to" [consider] "is" reworking the article section so that it no longer relies on the dead link,] "though this is not required."



  • Wikipedia:Layout
    • In WP:LAYOUT#See also section, removed "Still, if the subject fits to be integrated into somewhere in the article rather than into a list at the end of it, it is preferred." Added "{{Portal}} links are usually placed in this section."



Capitalize the first letter in the first and last words in the titles of English compositions (books and other print works, songs and other audio works, films and other visual media works, paintings and other artworks, etc.). The first letter in the other words is also capitalized, except for coordinating conjunctions, prepositions, and articles that are less than five letters long, as well as the word to in infinitives. More specifically:
  • Capitalize the first and last word.
  • Capitalize every noun, verb and adverb. This includes all forms of the verb to be (e.g., be, been, am, is, was, were).
  • Capitalize only those prepositions that are the first or last word of the title, are part of a phrasal verb (e.g., "Walk On" or "Give Up the Ghost"), or are the first word in a compound preposition (e.g., "Time Out of Mind", "Get Off of My Cloud").
  • With compound hyphenated terms, capitalize each word-part separately, according to the applicable rule.
  • Titles that include parentheses should be capitalized as though both the part inside and outside the parentheses are separate titles (e.g., "(Don't Fear) The Reaper")




  • [Words as words:] Deuce means two, "or "deuce" means "two", whichever will be clearer in context (consider an article with many quotations, or an article full of italicized foreign terms).
  • Legal case names are always italicized: Plessy v Ferguson.
    • Changed "list" to "glossary"
    • Removed: "Some other markups are available but risky. Examples are teletype (edited as <tt>teletype</tt>), underline (edited as <u>underline</u>), and italic (edited as <i>italic</i> or <cite>italic</cite>). But the teletype (monospace) tag does not usually produce text sufficiently different from the standard Wikipedia font to be useful; the underline tag can create confusion with links; and the HTML tags <i> and <cite> are not differentiated by most common browsers. The Wikipedia italic, described above and edited as ''italic'', is preferable to the HTML tags <i> and <cite>."
    • Changed "The markup "double-quoted" (edited as "double-quoted") is not risky ..." to "Wikipedia uses "double quotation marks" (and for quotations within quotations, 'single quotation marks'), regardless of English-language variant. “Curly quotes” are not used in articles."



  • Wikipedia:Words to avoid
    • In WP:AVOID#Avoid editorial opinion, added "... happy, sad, ..." Added: "Human-interest writing often uses adverbs such as happily and sadly when the reader is expected to empathize with the subject's successes or failures. These are better avoided in encyclopedic writing, where the purpose is to neutrally describe events rather than to entertain the reader's sympathies."
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