SMcCandlish
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No RfAs or RfBs reported by Cyberbot I since 19:47 4/23/2025 (UTC)
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| Updated as needed. Last updated: 17:09, 23 April 2025 (UTC) |
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Currently, there are no requests for arbitration.
No cases have recently been closed (view all closed cases).
| Request name | Motions | Case | Posted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clarification request: Off-wiki misconduct in Palestine–Israel topic area | none | none | 22 March 2025 |
| Clarification request: Palestine-Israel articles 5 (balanced editing restriction) | none | (orig. case) | 6 April 2025 |
| Amendment request: Topic banned | none | (orig. case) | 18 April 2025 |
No arbitrator motions are currently open.
News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2025).
Administrator changes
Bureaucrat changes
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes
Miscellaneous
- Sign up for The Core Contest, a competition running from 15 April to 31 May to improve vital articles.
Most recent poster here: Yapperbot (talk)
Mini-toolbox:
- My Wikimedia Library (journal access, etc.; to get your own, see WP:LIBRARY)
- Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Script (req. WP:AWB access and JWB installed or is just a normal redlink)
- Special:LintErrors
- Hunt down abuse of
{{em}}for non-emphasis italics [1] — and<em>[2] - Move and redirect articles with slashes in their titles when feasible (i.e. when not proper names that require them)
- NAC-at-ANRFC geekery to remember
- NAC-at-RM geekery to remember
- Ref consistency checker (use in preview or sandbox):
{{ref info|Manx cat|style=float:right}} - Reliably regex-match a single linebreak in wikicode (or elsewhere):
(\r\n|\r|\n) - Helpful links related to WP:MEATBOT, WP:COSMETICBOT, and code cleanup: WP:EDITORFRIENDLY (a.k.a. WP:EDITORHOSTILE), WP:COSMETIC (a.k.a. WP:SUBSTANTIVE), WP:SPECTRUM
- All WP:CUE project participants should watchlist this alerts page.
Good article nominees
- 03 Mar 2025 – 2025 Masters (snooker) (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by HurricaneHiggins (t · c); start discussion
- 01 Feb 2025 – Bernard Bennett (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by BennyOnTheLoose (t · c); start discussion
- 30 Jan 2025 – Gary Owen (snooker player) (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by BennyOnTheLoose (t · c); start discussion
- 24 Jan 2025 – 1951 World Snooker Championship (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by BennyOnTheLoose (t · c); start discussion
- 28 Dec 2024 – Mark Wildman (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by BennyOnTheLoose (t · c); start discussion
Other:
- MW Editing team e-meetings, /wikimedia.org/edit-tasktriage via Google Hangouts (Tuesdays, noon–12:30pm PDT = 20:00 UTC during DST, 19:00 otherwise, but often half an hour earlier).
- MW Tech Advice e-meetings, via IRC at #wikimedia-tech connect (Wednesdays, 1–2pm PDT = 16:00–17:00 UTC).
- meta:Talk:Spam blacklist – global blacklist requests
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As of 2025-04-21 , SMcCandlish is Active. 
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Old stuff to resolve eventually
editCueless billiards
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Categories are not my thing but do you think there are enough articles now or will be ever to make this necessary? Other than Finger billiards and possibly Carrom, what else is there?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
Sad...editHow well forgotten some very well known people are. The more I read about Yank Adams, the more I realize he was world famous. Yet, he's almost completely unknown today and barely mentioned even in modern billiard texts.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
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Some more notes on Crystalate
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Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.[3]; info about making records:[4]; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:[5]; "In 1880, crystalate balls made of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol began to appear. In 1926, they were made obligatory by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the London-based governing body." Amazing Facts: The Indispensable Collection of True Life Facts and Feats. Richard B. Manchester - 1991wGtDHsgbtltnpBg&ct=result&id=v0m-h4YgKVYC&dq=%2BCrystalate; a website about crystalate and other materials used for billiard balls:No5 Balls.html. Fences&Windows 23:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
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No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL to contain any style information at all, other than in summary form and citing MOS:LIST, which is where all of WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
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You post at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright
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That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
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Hee Haw
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Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw(talk) 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
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Redundant sentence?
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The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed? There is an issue, covered at Wikipedia:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
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Note to self on WP:WikiProject English language
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Finish patching up WP:WikiProject English language with the stuff from User:SMcCandlish/WikiProject English Language, and otherwise get the ball rolling. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 20:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC) |
Excellent mini-tutorial
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Somehow, I forget quite how, I came across this - that is an excellent summary of the distinctions. I often get confused over those, and your examples were very clear. Is something like that in the general MoS/citation documentation? Oh, and while I am here, what is the best way to format a citation to a page of a document where the pages are not numbered? All the guidance I have found says not to invent your own numbering by counting the pages (which makes sense), but I am wondering if I can use the 'numbering' used by the digitised form of the book. I'll point you to an example of what I mean: the 'book' in question is catalogued here (note that is volume 2) and the digitised version is accessed through a viewer, with an example of a 'page' being here, which the viewer calls page 116, but there are no numbers on the actual book pages (to confuse things further, if you switch between single-page and double-page view, funny things happen to the URLs, and if you create and click on a single-page URL the viewer seems to relocate you one page back for some reason). Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
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You had previously asked that protection be lowered on WP:MEDMOS which was not done at that time. I have just unprotected the page and so if you have routine update edits to make you should now be able to do so. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 06:42, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
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Ooh...potential WikiGnoming activity...
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I stumbled upon Category:Editnotices whose targets are redirects and there are ~100 pages whose pages have been moved, but the editnotices are still targeted to the redirect page. Seems like a great, and sort of fun, WikiGnoming activity for a template editor such as yourself. I'd do it, but I'm not a template editor. Not sure if that's really your thing, though. ;-) Cheers,
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Note to self
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Don't forget to deal with: Template talk:Cquote#Template-protected edit request on 19 April 2020. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC) |
Now this
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Not sure the ping went through, so noting here. Just spotted where a now-blocked user moved a bunch of animal breed articles back to parenthetical disambiguation from natural disambiguation. As they did it in October and I'm only catching it now, I only moved back two just in case there was some kind of consensus change. The equine ones are definitely against project consensus, the rest are not my wheelhouse but I'm glad to comment. Talk:Campine_chicken#Here_we_go_again. Montanabw(talk) 20:14, 25 June 2020 (UTC)
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PGP
edit UnresolvedFYI, it looks like your key has expired. 1234qwer1234qwer4 21:57, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- Aiee! Thanks, I'll have to generate a new one when I have time to mess around with it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:32, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
German article on houndstooth, Border tartan, and related patterns
edit Unresolvedde:Rapport (Textil) is an interesting approach, and we don't seem to have a corresponding sort of article. Something I might approach at some point. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:11, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Post-holidays note to self
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Current threads
editNotice of a discussion I think you'd be interested in knowing about
editHey Mac, I thought you might want to be aware of this discussion (which includes not just the linked to thread, but a much larger one further above on VP/WMF). In summary, it appears that the WMF is prepared to imminently disclose personally identifying information about volunteers in a controversial Indian court case, where a news agency is attempting to suppress Wikipedia's tertiary coverage of the content of secondary sources (which it considers unflattering) by going after a number of individual editors as defendants. In order to comply with court orders in the case, it seems the WMF is prepared to share this information in what a number of us consider a pretty seismically bad idea and a betrayal of community priorities and values (the WMF has also already used an office action to remove an article reporting on the case, at the direction of the court for what said court regards as legitimate sub judice reasons).
While the deletion of the article has been framed by the WMF as temporary step to preserve appeal on the overall case, and there are mixed feelings in the community response as to that so far, there is a much more uniform opposition to throwing the individual editors (at least one of whom is located in India and has profound apprehension about what this could mean for his life with regard to litigation and beyond) under the bus. And yet the WMF appears to be prepared to share the information in question, as soon as Nov. 8. Can I impose upon you to take a look at the matter and share your perspective? SnowRise let's rap 00:46, 6 November 2024 (UTC)
- Yeesh. That sounds really dreadful. This seems really problematic on multiple levels. I hope the disappeared article is available through some archival service (what with Wayback being under concerted attack for so long now). But the privacy matter seems more important here. I've been quietly arguing for some time that WMF has to stop blockading VPNs, for reasons like this. If you don't have PII to divulge, then governments don't try to twist your arm in the first place. I have the US election shitshow in my face at the moment, but maybe can look into this tomorrow. I don't have a lot of reach any longer, but my FB and LinkedIn pages probably hit the eyes of some who do on such matters. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:13, 6 November 2024 (UTC)
- I've been coming to similar conclusions about the VPN issue of late, although I confess that the potential for abuse by vandals is a difficult concern to ignore at the same time. In any event, I agree that the PII issues is the much more serious and pressing of the issues, even if neither is exactly a trivial matter. And yes, I appreciate the timing could not be worse, but do consider looking into the matter further if time allows--few people here are more articulate than you, once you've made your mind up on how you feel about an issue. SnowRise let's rap 04:41, 6 November 2024 (UTC)
- Life got away from me, and I'll try to look into this shortly, though maybe some deadline has been passed already. PS: On VPNs, I don't mean we should permit them across-the-board, but just for logged-in users with accounts past some threshold (of the sort we impose for various other things; maybe autoconfirmed, though something more stringent could also be used). It just makes zero sense that I can be logged in as me, a user with 19 years experience here, and cannot edit beyond my userspace if using a VPN (which is more and more an automatic thing one has to affirmatively turn off in various browsers these days). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:04, 12 November 2024 (UTC)
- I've been coming to similar conclusions about the VPN issue of late, although I confess that the potential for abuse by vandals is a difficult concern to ignore at the same time. In any event, I agree that the PII issues is the much more serious and pressing of the issues, even if neither is exactly a trivial matter. And yes, I appreciate the timing could not be worse, but do consider looking into the matter further if time allows--few people here are more articulate than you, once you've made your mind up on how you feel about an issue. SnowRise let's rap 04:41, 6 November 2024 (UTC)
Your comments at the AT discussion
editI can assure you I have no emotional attachment to the AT policy and I'd ask that you strike your comments suggesting that I'm engaging in bent-out-of-shape ranting
, etc. Clearly I misunderstood what you were saying regarding the "over-ride" issue; you could have just clarified your point instead of calling me hysterical. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:07, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
- @Voorts: Done, in the interests of peace. Though I just did a direct revision instead of a strike-through.
It would be nice if, for your part, you actually addressed the substance of the argument I made instead of repeatedly just criticizing perceived tone and imaginary implications (of my wording or Cinderella's), since the actually operable implications in the context are quite limited, as has been explained in some detail.
That said, the discussion/proposal is a dead stick. Cinderella's wording choices set off so many people that the snowball is probably irreversible. This should be re-addressed some other time (perhaps after a customary 6-18 months) with more careful wording and a more clearly articulated argument, because the problem identified is a real one and it is not going to magically go away. My sectional merge proposal would obviate it, but no one's going to notice and support it because they're running around alarmed by "supersede" and "override". It might not be "hysterical" but it's not responsive to the issue in any way. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:36, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
- Your revision is hardly better. You've still left in the stuff about argument to emotion and called me blustery. And, now you're assuming that I'm angry at you as well. I can once again assure you that I'm not angry. Stop speculating on my emotional state or my motivations. It's not productive. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:48, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
- I revised for tone because the tone was not constructive. As for the rest: no one likes being criticized, but something that basically boils down to "stop criticizing" isn't a request I'm going to obey. I stand by my criticisms. Your and other "no" !votes in that proceeding are not in any way responsive to the substance of the proposal but only emotively over-reacting to wording used by the proponent and to imaginary not plausible repercussions. As my old friend John Perry Barlow put it in regard to such "terriblizing" (to paraphrase here; I don't have the article he wrote about this right in front of me): Objecting to something on the basis of the possible outcomes instead of the probable one is fallacious. In the imagination, there are no limits to the possible, but the outcome is extremely unlikely to be in the extreme range of it. As for "angry", your tone toward me there and here is clearly angry (displeased, antagonistic, combative, complaining, unhappy, dwelling on your hurt feelings instead of on the substance, however one wants to put it). It requires no mind-reading to observe this. You don't get to duck and dodge the implications of what you write by disclaiming that they convey what they clearly convey, any more than I do. I've gone the extra mile to edit my tone in response to you, but you have not met me half way. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:08, 28 November 2024 (UTC)
- Your revision is hardly better. You've still left in the stuff about argument to emotion and called me blustery. And, now you're assuming that I'm angry at you as well. I can once again assure you that I'm not angry. Stop speculating on my emotional state or my motivations. It's not productive. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:48, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Your user scripts
editmight benefit more users if they were also listed at Wikipedia:User scripts/List. That's the go-to place where I get all my scripts from... Huggums537voted! (sign🖋️|📞talk) 05:14, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
- Yes, though I think they still need a bit more tweaking (even aside from one lacking the vertical formatting feature entirely). It's stuff I worked on obsessively for about a month straight, but have been doing other stuff since then. Takes a while to get back into such things. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:05, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
Feedback request: History and geography request for comment
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Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
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Feedback request: Media, the arts, and architecture request for comment
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Feedback request: History and geography request for comment
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Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
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Io Saturnalia!
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Io, Saturnalia! | |
| Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth (talk) 15:25, 17 December 2024 (UTC) |
New pages patrol January 2025 Backlog drive
edit| January 2025 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol |  |
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:53, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
December thanks
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Thank you today for improving article quality in December! - Today is a woman poet's centenary. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:47, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
Merry Christmas!
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A very happy Christmas and New Year to you! | 
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Feedback request: Biographies request for comment
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DisregardYou were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name. Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 03:31, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
Redirect listed at Redirects for discussion
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EndorsedA redirect or redirects you have created has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 December 27 § "Musican" Redirects until a consensus is reached. User:Someone-123-321 (I contribute, Talk page so SineBot will shut up) 12:36, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
You're my MOS maven...
editI cannot believe that we seriously intend for this style of number separation to be used - here. Am I utterly off base? Ealdgyth (talk) 00:03, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Gram capitalisation (eponym exceptionalism)
editYou've probably had your fill of this, so forgive me if so.
My background
I'm a long-time IP editor of WP with an interest in style, grammar & punctuation, who has regularly been unfairly thwacked with actions from admins or logged in editors — usually as collateral damage in an IP-range block, but occasionally through some other tiresome thing, such as edit reversion.... Some of those admins have seemed pretty trigger-happy to implement blocks, without feeling any compunction when I've occasionally pointed out that some of those specific instances were contrary to the official WP guidelines (and, furthermore, no penalty to such admins...). Anyway, enough of my ranting... Just that the contrast in treatment is 'interesting'.
I was wondering why the styling at Gram-positive bacteria and Gram-negative bacteria never got resolved. If indeed (as I think you made a fair case) one or a handful of editors were standing against the MOS, then why was there no admin action against those editors for blocking/reverting changes consistent with the MOS to retain a version at odds with the MOS?
I notice that the explicit guidance on eponyms in the MOS has stood for the past several years, but those two articles remain as inconsistent as ever.
I don't think this necessarily has to be your burden to carry, but why are some admins not resolving this?
—DIV (202.7.208.27 (talk) 13:35, 29 December 2024 (UTC))
- As a sometimes McCandlish lurker, per your concerns about IP editing, may I point out that User:DIV is open if you want it. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:02, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
- Would be a pretty cool username, too. Not many three-letter ones available that are pronounceable. As an HTML-element reference, it would imply that you're full of content. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:15, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- It never got resolved because most of us have lives and run out of time and patience to deal with it when there is a camp of editors who will fight ceaselessly to keep some WP:SSF-based weird stylistic divergence from our style manual, because the variant suits their off-site writing habits that pertain to some other domain. One of these cases is the preference on the part of the American Medical Association's style guide to lowercase a proper-name-bearing term any time it is used as (or as part of) a modifier instead of as a noun phrase. This is weird, intentionally inconsistent, and downright confusing. It doesn't match the writing style of any other group of English-language users in the entire world. But if editors who are fans of this practice are a thick majority of the editors who will respond to any attempt to normalize the style to reader expectations at a particular subject, then progress will tend to stonewall. Often the only way to break through such a deadlock is an RfC at some venue like WT:MOS or even WP:VPPOL. Personally, I have little patience for this stuff any longer, because there are more important things to do. They always turn into WP:DRAMA festivals.
That said, fixing "gram-negative" to "Gram-negative" throughout all of our material would be good to do, because almost everyone who encounters this term and is not already a medicine or biology professional is going believe that it has something to do with the gram[e] unit, when it is really an eponym based on the surname Gram. Other terms lowercased for the same dubious reason, e.g. "parkinsonian", are less problematic than this case because they lack such obvious and confusing ambiguity. To put it another way, if the AMA's next style book edition demands to start spelling "CAT scan" and "PET scan" as "cat scan" and "pet scan", WP would ignore them as ridiculous and "reader-hateful". We should already have come to that same conclusion with regard to "gram-positive/negative" (and having come to that conclusion, then step-wise also concluded to avoid "parkinsonian" and the like as a consistency matter).
On your admins side question: it's virtually unheard of for admins to get involved in MoS-related disputes in a block-wielding manner, because they are guidelines not policies, and they have a lot of "real work" to do, e.g. against vandalism and spam and so on. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:15, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
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Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
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Feedback request: Biographies request for comment
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Feedback request: History and geography request for comment
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Style
edit@SMcCandlish, hello … this is Augnablik, a Wikipedia editor for the past 2.5 years. I'm writing because you were recommended as someone I might turn to for answers to questions about the more convoluted elements of MOS. Example: right now I'm in somewhat of a fog trying to decide the best way to disambiguate the subject of an article.
I wish Wikipedia still offered a similar one-on-one feature called Editor Assistance that used to be available, as I recently discovered, only to find it was discontinued. In its absence, would you be willing to pick up on this and occasional other such questions for me?
Augnablik (talk) 02:12, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- @Augnablik: Sure, happy to help. I probably have one of the better mental-map understandings of most of MoS and how it interrelates in various sections, and interacts with other guidelines and policies. If I don't get back to you speedily, it's not because I'm ignoring you, just off doing something else for a while. Anyway, keep in mind that I'm just one editor; while I've been one of MoS's shepherds for 15+ years, there can be interpretational disagreements about it. If something I say seems wrongheaded, it might actually be wrongheaded, with the question better asked at WT:MOS or on the talk-page of one of the more specific MoS sub-guidelines (e.g. WT:MOSCAPS for case questions, WT:MOSNUM for number and date ones, WT:DAB for disambiguation ones, etc.). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:22, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for such a quick reply, @SMcCandlish. I look forward to discussions with not just a highly recommended MOS expert but also someone whose User page indicates a shared love and ownership of cats (but don't they own us?) as well as ability in versions of the English language for which I didn't even know User boxes were available. And since you're "one of MOS's shepherds"— forgive me for this — I won't need to be sheepish about asking you some of the intricate questions I may come up with.
- Here is my most immediate need. I'm working on the existing article for Ramendra Kumar, a noted Indian children's author — that is, what's left of it after having been pretty much blown to bits. I recently discovered another Indian by the same name, who also turned out to have a Wiki article: Ramendra Kumar (politician). Today I found two more Indian politicians by the name of Ramendra Kumar but an additional surname, all with at least something in a Wiki article (Ramendra Kumar Yadav and Ramendra Kumar Podder).
- — I know that disambiguation should be created for not just the Ramendra Kumar whose article I'm working on but also the other three.
- — I think it would also might be helpful to point out that the first name "Ramendra" should not be confused with Rajendra or Ravendra, as there are other notable Indians who also have those first names along with Kumar as a surname.
- When I thought there was only one other person by the same name, I was going to attempt a disambiguation and ask the yet-unidentified MOS expert if what I'd come up with seemed okay. But now that I know there are so many others with the same or similar names, I think I'd better just throw up my hands and turn to the expert. Augnablik (talk) 10:47, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- We would not involve either Ramendra Kumar Yadav and Ramendra Kumar Podder as disambiguation page entries for the name "Ramendra Kumar" (much less put disambiguation hatnotes on them) except for one who is also referred to in reliable sources as "Ramendra Kumar" alone. The unfamiliarity of these names to the average English speaker (outside the Indian subcontinent) doesn't make any difference. If we have Michael Jackson (disambiguation), we would not add someone named "Michael Jackson MacTavish" or "Michael Jackson Chen-Garcia" to it, unless RS indicated they were referred to often enough without "MacTavish" or "Chen-Garcia". It's reasonable at a disambiguation page's "See also" section to but something like "All pages with titles containing Ramendra Kumar" (see the Jackson page for example). That section would also be a good place for "* Rajendra Kumar" and "* Ravendra Kumar" (or apparently not the last one yet, since it's still a red link, so would serve no navigational purpose on a disambig. page). There's no need to "point out" to readers, in a reader-addressing manner, that such names also exit and might be what they're looking for; a diambig. page's see-also section exists for not having to do that in a pedantic way, but just by providing links. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:56, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- Okay. And now a few more related disambiguation questions ...
- I'm thinking to remove the sentence currently serving as the lead in the Ramendra Kumar author article and instead place it within parentheses, like what the article does for the Indian politician of the same name: (author).
- When the above is done, then: — Underneath the article title for RK the author, I write For Ramendra Kumar the Indian politician, see Ramendra Kumar (politician). But how do I indent that line, as it appears on disambiguated pages? — Underneath the article title for RK the Indian politician, I write For Ramendra Kumar the Indian author, see Ramendra Kumar (author).
- As for the "See also" section idea you gave, citing the Michael Jackson article, when I went there I saw what seemed a completely unrelated list of dancers of all time! In any event, your comment that we don't have to point out to readers that similar names to the one in the title also exist made me decide not to include a See also section for RK the author. I guess I'd been assuming that sort of thing was an editor's duty.
- Augnablik (talk) 16:59, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- Neither should be using parenthetical descriptions in their lead sentences; that's a style for article title disambiguation. If the author isn't markedly more notable than the politician, he should move to Ramendra Kumar (author) (and that should exist as a WP:Redirect anyway, otherwise). For a two-person disambiguation, WP:Hatnotes are sufficient as a minimum, but it doesn't hurt for there to be a Ramendra Kumar disambiguation page (with Ramendra Kumar (disambiguation) also redirecting to that), since we have at least two "See also" ideas (maybe three, if the presently red-linked Ravendra Kumar also ends up with an article), in addition to two proper entries. The navigation hatnotes at the top of the articles would be done with Template:For, something like
{{for|the member of Indian Parliament|Ramendra Kumar (politian)}}and{{for|the children's book writer|Ramendra Kumar (author)}}, here written to avoid annoyingly repeating the words "politician" and "author", though some editors wouldn't care and would do that anyway. This will put the indented navigational hatnotes at the point the template is used in the article's source code, which should be immediately under any{{Short description}}template (the first on the page) and before other templates like cleanup notices, or{{Use Indian English|date=January 2025}}and{{Use dmy dates|cs1-dates=ll|date=January 2025}}, which would also be appropriate for this article, and infoboxes, which probably would also be appropriate. You can learn a lot about how to use (and order) such templates by looking at the code of existing articles, some of which use more complicated hatnotes for cases of multiple disambiguations. The politician article should probably have{{Infobox politician}}. The author article is already using{{Infobox author}}, but has an{{EngvarB}}template that should be replaced with{{Use Indian English}}; the politician article lacks such an English-dialect template entirely. I improved the author's lead sentence a little, but left the rest for you to do as practice, though I could also just do it since it's easy for me.Regarding Michael Jackson (disambiguation) – it's fairly likely that a disambig. page for a name both common and prominent will attract some entries that should be removed as inappropriate; I didn't mean to suggest it as a perfect model, but simply as an example of not adding [A] [B] [C] cases to [A] [B] (disambiguation) pages. I.e., if it were normal to do that, then any page of that sort would already have numerous such entries, but they do not. Human-name disambiguation pages that treat a name in isolation might do that, if the name is uncommon enough that the list is not excessively long. E.g. McCandlish has an an entry for someone using it as a given name. But we might not do this at a very popular name, for length reasons. Jackson is doing it, in sections, but in other cases we have a separate given-name disambiguation or list page, e.g. List of people with given name Wilson (I'm not sure by what criteria this would be at "List of people with given name Foo" instead of "Foo (given name)", and the one will usually redirect to the other regardless. The editors at WP:WikiProject Anthroponymy probably have an answer for this question (or perhaps what to do with such quasi-articles is in some kind of disputed state; I would not be surprised). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:37, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- 🙄 @SMcCandlish, oh yikes, what have I gotten myself into? This is even deeper yogurt than I thought. Augnablik (talk) 00:12, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- The simple approach to any case like this is to just copy what has been done already for a parallel case. "Michael Jackson" isn't even a bad example. This is name with an obvious WP:PRIMARYTOPIC that will be at that name without disambiguation; 99% of readers will be expecting the singer. A disambiguation page lists as
*list items all the articles that match the name as their title (aside from disambiguation parentheticals tacked on), as well as anyone with an alternative (e.g. former) name that also matches the name. Any partial matches (e.g. as given/middle names, or as references e.g. "List of studio albums by Michael Jackson") or easily confused similar names, go in "See also" one way or another (using a search function if there might be a lot of them, but probably just as individual entries in that section is one or only a few). For the cases that do directly match, disambiguation hatnotes go atop the article.{{For}}is useful when there are very few, but other Category:Disambiguation templates might be used to produce different output in other cases, e.g.{{About|the|technologist}}will generate: It automatically picks up the base name of the page unless told to do otherwise. (That it automatically appends " (disambiguation)" is why a redirect like Ramendra Kumar (disambiguation) should exist and point to Ramendra Kumar after it becomes the disambiguation page (which likely should happen because neither the writer nor the parliamentarian seem like PRIMARYTOPIC candidates to be at the base name without any disambiguating parenthetical).Learning to edit Wikipedia source code is a lot like learning a programming/scripting language: there are lots of technical nit-picks, but they make sense as a whole after they're absorbed; they quickly become second nature. PS: I fixed the broken link in my previous response to WP:WikiProject Anthroponymy. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:30, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- I can empathize with you, @SMcCandlish, in your role of senior Wiki style expert at hearing an editor squawk under the onslaught of so many directives (even though they were requested!). As a teacher and trainer in real life — what's left of it l, that is,after Wikipedia has eaten up more and more hours of my day — I understand the value of living through a bit of pain at the prospect of all the overwhelming new stuff finally getting absorbed.
- I'll stay with it, but it's definitely more of a learning curve than I expected. Augnablik (talk) 12:25, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- My general advice for everyone is to just write content (in a dry, encyclopedic tone, and sticking to reliably sourced facts not supposition), follow the WP:BLP policy with regard to living people, and obey WP:COPYRIGHT (i.e., don't plagiarize material from other sources). As long as you do that then your contributions should be a net positive; others will point out any formatting or other mistakes and probably clean up after them. You'll gradually absorb the norms and details as you go along. Trying to learn a complex system like this without immersion in it is like trying to learn a foreign language from a book and a video. And if, for any question, you do what a preponderance of well-written conceptually similar articles are already doing, you'll rarely go wrong. E.g., if you wonder something like "Would it be appropriate for the author article to inline some audiovisual material, like him giving a speech at a book signing?", look at other other author articles and you'll see quickly that the answer is "no". A more prosaic example would be "Should award names be in italics or some other special markup?" If you look at the biographies of major figures with numerous awards, like a celebrated actor, a highly decorated soldier, and a champion athlete, you'll see immediately that the answer is "no italics or other special markup, beyond capitalizing the proper name of the award". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:25, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- Following the guidelines in the 1st sentence of your above message, and in the Visual editor, no problem. Working on curly bracketed code in the Source editor rather than the Visual editor, I'd prefer 2 root canals at the same time just to avoid. Augnablik (talk) 16:10, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- Should work out fine. Lots of editors use the VE, and get more comfortable with tweaking things in the source editor over time. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:29, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
- Following the guidelines in the 1st sentence of your above message, and in the Visual editor, no problem. Working on curly bracketed code in the Source editor rather than the Visual editor, I'd prefer 2 root canals at the same time just to avoid. Augnablik (talk) 16:10, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- My general advice for everyone is to just write content (in a dry, encyclopedic tone, and sticking to reliably sourced facts not supposition), follow the WP:BLP policy with regard to living people, and obey WP:COPYRIGHT (i.e., don't plagiarize material from other sources). As long as you do that then your contributions should be a net positive; others will point out any formatting or other mistakes and probably clean up after them. You'll gradually absorb the norms and details as you go along. Trying to learn a complex system like this without immersion in it is like trying to learn a foreign language from a book and a video. And if, for any question, you do what a preponderance of well-written conceptually similar articles are already doing, you'll rarely go wrong. E.g., if you wonder something like "Would it be appropriate for the author article to inline some audiovisual material, like him giving a speech at a book signing?", look at other other author articles and you'll see quickly that the answer is "no". A more prosaic example would be "Should award names be in italics or some other special markup?" If you look at the biographies of major figures with numerous awards, like a celebrated actor, a highly decorated soldier, and a champion athlete, you'll see immediately that the answer is "no italics or other special markup, beyond capitalizing the proper name of the award". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:25, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- The simple approach to any case like this is to just copy what has been done already for a parallel case. "Michael Jackson" isn't even a bad example. This is name with an obvious WP:PRIMARYTOPIC that will be at that name without disambiguation; 99% of readers will be expecting the singer. A disambiguation page lists as
- 🙄 @SMcCandlish, oh yikes, what have I gotten myself into? This is even deeper yogurt than I thought. Augnablik (talk) 00:12, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- Neither should be using parenthetical descriptions in their lead sentences; that's a style for article title disambiguation. If the author isn't markedly more notable than the politician, he should move to Ramendra Kumar (author) (and that should exist as a WP:Redirect anyway, otherwise). For a two-person disambiguation, WP:Hatnotes are sufficient as a minimum, but it doesn't hurt for there to be a Ramendra Kumar disambiguation page (with Ramendra Kumar (disambiguation) also redirecting to that), since we have at least two "See also" ideas (maybe three, if the presently red-linked Ravendra Kumar also ends up with an article), in addition to two proper entries. The navigation hatnotes at the top of the articles would be done with Template:For, something like
- Okay. And now a few more related disambiguation questions ...
- We would not involve either Ramendra Kumar Yadav and Ramendra Kumar Podder as disambiguation page entries for the name "Ramendra Kumar" (much less put disambiguation hatnotes on them) except for one who is also referred to in reliable sources as "Ramendra Kumar" alone. The unfamiliarity of these names to the average English speaker (outside the Indian subcontinent) doesn't make any difference. If we have Michael Jackson (disambiguation), we would not add someone named "Michael Jackson MacTavish" or "Michael Jackson Chen-Garcia" to it, unless RS indicated they were referred to often enough without "MacTavish" or "Chen-Garcia". It's reasonable at a disambiguation page's "See also" section to but something like "All pages with titles containing Ramendra Kumar" (see the Jackson page for example). That section would also be a good place for "* Rajendra Kumar" and "* Ravendra Kumar" (or apparently not the last one yet, since it's still a red link, so would serve no navigational purpose on a disambig. page). There's no need to "point out" to readers, in a reader-addressing manner, that such names also exit and might be what they're looking for; a diambig. page's see-also section exists for not having to do that in a pedantic way, but just by providing links. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:56, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
A note about a misplaced copy-paste, and the comedy of misunderstanding and banter that ensued
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Above, you wrote the following (nowikified here, to illustrate the point):
Pretty sure that was some kind of copy-paste glitch; just thought I'd mention it so as not to lead Augnablik astray. If it was intended, please enlighten! Mathglot (talk) 02:41, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
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- @Augnablik IIRC, Editor Assistance was closed since there was no difference in how it worked in practice compared to Help desk/Teahouse. But, it was where I had one of my funniest WP-discussions ever, Wikipedia:Editor_assistance/Requests/Archive_129#Saint_Jean-Baptiste_(Léonard_de_Vinci)_--wikipédia_française. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:26, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- Editor Assistance might not have worked differently in practice compared to the Help Desk or the Teahouse, but the value I see in an EA-focused place is that it would have been extremely helpful to focus just on MOS-related issues rather than a whole smorgasbord. And the archives for those issues could, over time, have become of special interest to editors wanting to pore over past MOS advice.
- As for your interchange with Monsieur Léonard, ooh-la-la! Augnablik (talk) 10:05, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- I don't recall EA being MoS-focused. To the extent an individual "advisor" like me isn't helpful to you or responsive quickly enough, MoS's own talk pages are generally helpful (except the more obscure drill-down ones, which may have few watcherlisters). So anyway, what's this burning disambiguation-related style question? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:34, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- Just posted, SMcC.
- I thought I'd reply to GGS first, a much easier message ... and I also miscalculated your California time, thinking you'd be asleep and wouldn't see what I'd write for quite a few more hours. Augnablik (talk) 10:52, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- I don't recall EA being MoS-focused. To the extent an individual "advisor" like me isn't helpful to you or responsive quickly enough, MoS's own talk pages are generally helpful (except the more obscure drill-down ones, which may have few watcherlisters). So anyway, what's this burning disambiguation-related style question? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:34, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
Follow-up to Style message thread (above)
editHi, SMcC ...
- Is it impossible to modify an article title? I can’t seem to change Ramendra Kumar to Ramendra Kumar (author), though I tried. (I’m assuming this was what you wanted done, even though I wasn’t quite sure from your comment: “If the author isn't markedly more notable than the politician, he should move to Ramendra Kumar (author).” (Your reply to me of January 6)
- Following your above comment, you added: “(and that should exist as a WP:Redirect anyway, otherwise).” As I’ve never been involved with redirects, do I understand the procedure correctly, to mean that this entails creating a separate page on which both Ramendra Kumars are mentioned by using the Template:For? I understand the concept of redirects but I find the “how-to’s” very confusing. One difficulty I see for editors trying to “learn about how to use (and order) such templates by looking at the code of existing articles” is that we have little idea where to begin, other than (as we see when we go to WP:REDIRECT), Pelé. Or, if we’re lucky enough to have an expert like you to ask, and we get a suggestion to look at what was done for someone such as Michael Jackson. But ideally, I see need for a tutorial providing a bunch of examples to work on, each representing a different editorial situation, with feedback for our answers.
- I succeeded in changing the infobox language from EngvarB to use Indian English, as you suggested. But frankly I think if it really required changing, it would have been fine with the British English language, as Indian and British are much the same. At any rate, this exercise was very helpful because it was my first time using an infobox, and it was fairly painless although I did have to re-read the information a number of times to really absorb it.
Augnablik (talk) 14:12, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- I've moved the article to Ramendra Kumar (author). It's possible you lack the ability to do page moves until after a certain amount of time as an editor. The rules about which permissions are available when isn't something I've been keeping track of. Also created the disambiguation page over the redirect at Ramendra Kumar, and redirected Ramendra Kumar (disambiguation) to that. And put hatnotes atop each of the articles (just pointing to each other; these would change to pointers to the disambiguation page if a third notable Ramendra Kumar comes up). If you click Ramendra Kumar (disambiguation) it will redirect you to the real disambiguation page at Ramendra Kumar. There, you'll see a small "Redirected from Ramendra Kumar (disambiguation)" note at the top; if you click that, you go to a version of "Ramendra Kumar (disambiguation)" that doesn't auto-redirect you right back to "Ramendra Kumar". If you edit that view of "Ramendra Kumar (disambiguation)", you can see how a redirect is built. This is covered more documentarily at WP:Redirect and Help:Redirect. PS: As for "Indian and British [English] are much the same": That's especially true in an encyclopedic register (without colloquialisms), and is true of all Commonwealth English dialects aside from Canadian, which is why I've advocated merging them all so we have nothing left but "Use Commonwealth English", "Use American English", and "Use Canadian English" (the last of these being a hybrid of the first two). But there's too much nationalistic sentiment for this to happen. Everyone wants their silly "Use Jamaican English", etc., templates, even for dialects that do not exist at all in a formal register (speakers of Jamaican, Tanzanian, etc. English use British English at an encyclopedic formality level). Win some, lose some. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:39, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- A thousand thank-you's for doing all you mentioned above, SMcCandlish. What a wonderful difference it makes to the articles for both Ramendra Kumars. Seeing what you did definitely makes a big difference in my ability to understand redirects and disambiguation and such. If Wikipedia ever gets to the point I'm hoping some day, with great tutorials for everything editors need to understand along the road that offer not just information but also examples and guided practice for editors, your work on the Kumar kerfuffle would be a terrific entry.
- To be honest, I think if I'd had to spend much more time trying to sort it out much further, I'd be a good candidate for a long Wiki vacation right about now.
- Interesting to find out that making a change to a title is a page move. I hadn't realized. By the way, just as clarification about editor level, I'm an extended confirmed user with 1,100+ editing points. So apparently we can't yet be trusted doing page moves. Probably for good reason. At this point in my Wiki career, I feel like a new driver who's getting ever more comfortable on the road, but not when it goes up a steep hill with lots of bends and the road begins to narrow and rain begins to fall and ... Augnablik (talk) 18:11, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- I do wish there were better tutorial materials. I've thought of making some, but it's time consuming, and I'm not very photogenic or a good speaker for doing video presentations; someone else would be better for that. I might do some "crash course" write-ups though. I have had several in mind. Most of my WP essay work has been about nitty-gritty subjects of policy and guideline interpretation, and written for old hands. It would be an interesting change of pace to do some "So, you're new around here? Let me help you out" material. Page moves: Yes, a move and rename are the same thing. As for ability to do moves, if you are EC then you probably can already do it, it just might be buried in some menu or other. I use the crusty old "Vector Legacy (2010)" theme, and have customized it to hell and back with user CSS and JS scripts, so I couldn't tell you where the move/rename option is by default these days. Help:How to move a page and/or Wikipedia:Moving a page may have the info about that. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:44, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- Almost forgot to suggest that instead of calling Ramendra Kumar the author a writer of children's and YA books, you spell out that acronym. Not everyone will know what it refers to. Augnablik (talk) 10:23, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
- Judging by your Talk page photo, I think you're "selling yourself short."
- As for being an engaging speaker — on which you may also be selling yourself short — one way you could do it would be to be interviewed by another editor about the decisions and steps to take in procedures that you feel most comfortable talking about. The other editor could be (1) someone who might serve as the narrator of a whole series of "how-to's" or (2) someone acting in the role of a bewildered newish editor asking the seasoned editor for guidance. (No, I'm not volunteering! 😅) Augnablik (talk) 04:29, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
- Someone should do that, but it's not really my kind of project, and I have too many projects as it is. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:53, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
- PS: Augnablik I've merged these two Kumar threads. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:50, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- You mean you repositioned the later one so it directly follows the earlier one, I assume ... I think I do recall the later one had been further down.
- To do that, did you just go to the Source code and move the later one up? Augnablik (talk) 18:20, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- Yep, edited the entire page, to get at all the sections at once, moved this one up, and changed it from
==level-2 heading to===level-3 subheading. I would think in VisualEditor, you'd copy-paste the section, then select its heading and change it from H2 to H3 level. But I haven't used VE in years, so I'm not sure. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:44, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- Yep, edited the entire page, to get at all the sections at once, moved this one up, and changed it from
Its time for you to put on your MOS hat again...
editI know that we don't do this (putting categories in the middle of article text), but I have no idea where we have a proscription against it, any clue where it might be? Ealdgyth (talk) 15:53, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- When is that hat ever off? Heh. We don't seem to have a rule against using links this way. If we did, I would expect to find it at MOS:LINK#Links to Wikipedia's categories or in MOS:LAYOUT somewhere. In this case, the custom hatnote is falsely claiming these are articles, so is inappropriate (at least in the present form) for that reason alone. It's not uncommon for category links to appear in "See also", and they are also used as direct links in this way in many navigation templates, so they are not per se forbidden. But they do seem to be more appropriate as "See also" entries. If kept as a mid-article hatnote, it should at least be clarified to stop claiming it is providing links to main articles on Henry I's children and mistresses, and it also should not be piping these links to disguise the fact that they are categories and hide what the names of the categories actually are. The MOS:LINK section above doesn't suggest doing anything like this with with category links, and MOS:SUBMARINE says more directly not to make links confusing in a "reader-hateful" manner. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:45, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- I think we can't have such a rule,[citation needed] or else we will have to have a carve-out for templates which put articles into categories. (Hopefully that template is clever enough not to categorize this page in Category:All articles with unsourced statements due to the namespace; we shall soon see.) Mathglot (talk) 02:52, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
RfC notice
edit DoneHello, this notice is for everyone who took part in the 2018 RfC on lists of airline destinations. I have started a new RfC on the subject. If you would like to participate please follow this link: Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not § RfC on WP:NOT and British Airways destinations. Sunnya343 (talk) 00:40, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
A couple more style questions about an article subject
edit@SMcCandlish, another interesting new question for you:
I'm doing some editing on the article for Joseph Bharat Cornell, recognized as one of the world's 100 leading nature educators. He has written many books. For many years he published under just his birth name, "Joseph Cornell." Bharat is a spiritual name given to him in the spiritual community to which he belongs, and he began publishing books with all three names only in later years.
Thinking the question of how to handle this duality in Cornell's publication names might be somewhat similar to what the MOS had to say about handling names of women authors if they marry and change the name under which they publish, I went to the MOS and looked up name information but didn't find exactly what I think I need to know about handling this situation.
Advice? Augnablik (talk) 17:13, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
- What is it that you think you need to know about handling this situation? This isn't like a marriage-related name change, or the MoS material about that would also include cases like this. If this person is most commonly known in present-day sources as "Joseph Bharat Cornell", then that's what our article title should be at (WP:COMMONNAME). If it's not (and the one semi-independent source cited thus far isn't using it) then we'd go with the shorter "Joseph Cornell", as the actual COMMONNAME and per WP:CONCISE; we only use additional names (middle, nick, adoptive, etc.) when leaving it out will confuse people as to who the subject is because the subject usually has that additional name (e.g. Sarah Jessica Parker is nearly never referred to as just "Sarah Parker", so readers will not be looking for her under that name or nor expect her to be at any article by that title). Wikipedia article titles are not about making self-marketers happy but about helping readers find and be certain they have found the right article. At any rate, it appears very likely to me that this article will be soon deleted for failing WP:Notability. There is no in-depth coverage in independent reliable sources, only an interview (which does not count) and self-published materials (which don't count; Crystal Clarity Publishers and Dawn Publications are clearly his own labels, not independent and reputable publishers). If Cornell really has been awarded some kind of "world's 100 leading nature educators" label by some independent organization, then that would be worth including, with a source citations, as evidence of notability to help save the article (though that one item by itself may not be enough). PS: His yoga teacher should not be referred to as "Swami" anything; that's an honorific (non-neutral title that should not be used in Wikipedia's own voice. Note that his article is at Kriyananda not "Swami Kriyananda". And he is at that title, instead of something like James D. Walters, because most sources refer to him by (or primarily by) the name Kriyananda, not his birth name. "Kriyanada gets an Indian name" does not automatically equate to "Cornell also gets an Indian name", since they are not parallel cases. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:14, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for all the tips here. I can see why the article might be a candidate for deletion without notability buttressing. There is quite a bit available beyond Dawn Publications and Crystal Clarity (which do also publish several other authors, especially Crystal Clarity) and I'm surprised it wasn't used by the editor(s) who worked on the article.
- Although I have a COI with the article, I'll add a few such citations as soon as possible to deter deletion. Meanwhile, I hope other editors will take over the article, as Cornell is definitely notable in his field. It would be a particularly interesting one for new editors with an interest in nature and nature education.
- As for the addition of the spiritual name, I think it would probably be best — all things considered in what you point out here — to simply say that he got "Bharat" as a spiritual name without pointing to any one person who gave it to him.
Augnablik (talk) 17:28, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- Joseph Cornell already is the title of someone else's article, so Joseph Bharat Cornell works pretty well as a disambiguation. If his article is kept but "Joseph Bharat Cornell" doesn't turn out to be the common name, then it would be disambiguated as something like Joseph Cornell (educator), which should exist as a redirect anyway, especially since he didn't start adding the "Bharat" until later, as you say. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:55, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- Oh, that's a great catch (the existence of the other Joseph Cornell) — thanks. I hadn't noticed the other fellow's existence till fairly recently, let alone thought to check on whether there might be others with the same name.
- Joseph Bharat Cornell is such a recent name change for the nature educator that I wonder if he did himself any favors by publishing under it. Perhaps he too found the other one. But I'm sure it will confuse a number of people who know him under his original name. Augnablik (talk) 17:36, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- The hatnote at the top of Joseph Cornell should resolve any such confusion. If there turn out to be three+ notable Joseph Cornells, then we should have Joseph Cornell (disambiguation) and use that as that hatnote target instead. With regard to the educator, I'd be more concerned about establishing that he passes WP:Notability and doesn't get deleted. Adding a source about his "top 100" award would be a good start, as well as any non-interview source material about him in works he didn't publish himself. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:34, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
PS: I have not created Joseph Cornell (disambiguation) yet, because the survivability of the Joseph Bharat Cornell article is in doubt, and if it's deleted, then the disambig. page would have only one entry and thus also have to be deleted. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:49, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- I've added some information to the Joseph Bharat Cornell article that I think will help end any concerns about his notability and keep him in Wikipedia. Much more will be added over time, hopefully more references beyond his organizational website and the interview I found in what appears a good strong educational journal.
- Now, to follow up on your last message above ...
- — I don't see the hatnote to which you refer in your 1st paragraph.
- — I can't find a third Joseph Cornell, which in your message you seemed to believe necessary for a disambiguation page. Is there some reason that disambiguation can't be done with only two Joseph Cornells (even though you kindly did create such a page for the two Ramendra Kumars? And because the article for the Joseph Cornell the nature educator is entitled Joseph Bharat Cornell, he still needs to be differentiated from the Joseph Cornell who was an artist and sculptor because the nature educator is so widely known as only Joseph Cornell. Augnablik (talk) 09:12, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
- Since I wrote you yesterday:
- — I've added several pieces of information along with citations to support Cornell's notability.
- — Believing that after my work today and over the past few days I could legitimately remove the template about the need for citations in the article, I did so today.
- — Suddenly aware that I hadn't declared COI with Cornell (I know him a little), I did so in the edit summary when I removed the template. Augnablik (talk) 11:35, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
- I put a hatnote in (one that addresses readers who might end up at that page without having used "Bharat" in the name). Meant to do it before but maybe forgot to save the page. Two-item disambiguation pages are not forbidden but are somewhat discouraged except in cases where there is no clear WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the base name. That's probably not the case here. But I think 2-item DABs are harmless. If someone wants to be persnicketty about it, then they can nominate the DAB page for deletion. Interview: May be usable for WP:ABOUTSELF claims, but is not usable for claimed facts beyond that and does not count toward notability; only sources independent of the subject count toward the latter. CoI disclosure: good, though even better would be to no longer edit the article. Even the best-meaning and most careful CoI editing just raises other editors' alarm levels about whether the material is neutral and accurate. If you need to make more substantive changes to the article, it would be appropriate to instead use
{{Edit CoI}}on the talk page (and be patient). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:25, 25 January 2025 (UTC)- Thank you, @SMcCandlish ... I was beginning to think I'd worn you out and that's why I hadn't heard from you for a while, though I can see how in demand you are!
- 1- Disambigution: although I was delighted you added the hatnote on Joseph Cornell's page, he is much more than simply an "educator." What he is notable for is being a nature educator.
- That said, however, I frankly doubt that many readers will search for either Joseph Cornell (educator) or Joseph Cornell (nature educator). So to me, it makes more sense to make a DAB. That was what my mentor recommended to be done on with two Ramendra Kumars. Definitely seems harmless.
- About WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, this is the first time I've heard of it. I read through the information but still haven't quite absorbed all of it and figured out which, if either Joseph Cornell is primary, but my overall thought is that if one gets a hatnote, why shouldn't the other one as well?
- 2- Interview and notability: okay, helpful.
- 3- COI disclosure: this is an area that I was surprised to see a huge amount of disagreement on among even senior editors, specifically whether never to edit an article with which we have even a tinge of COI vs. to go ahead and edit it as long as we're transparent and of course aim for objectivity.
- Some months ago, wanting to really understand a few seeming discrepancies in Wiki documentation on COI, I raised a question about this at the Village Pump in hopes of finally getting clarity from the seniors I knew would pick up on it. I was amazed at what began to look like a free-for-all at times between editors on both sides of the spectrum. The thread went on for a long time.
- I emerged with much more confidence that as long as COI is declared, and we're honest with ourselves and others, it's permissible to edit COI articles. After all, none of us can ever be 100% free from bias anyway, even with subjects with which we have no official COI.
- That said, however, for several reasons I'd prefer that someone else pick up on this article now. It was a very helpful learning experience, with your guidance. Augnablik (talk) 19:15, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
- I get sidetracked in other projects and sometimes bail on WP for weeks at a time. "Nature educator" is also fine, but it's not the purpose of disambiguation (in titles or in hatnotes) to serve an educational/informative function (that's what article text does), only ensure that the reader gets to the right place. Our rule is to use the most concise possible disambiguation string, at least in the title itself (i.e. never use "(nature educator)" unless "(educator)" is itself a disambiguation failure because of multiple notable educators by the same name. As for people finding the article: you'd be surprised how many readers suss out our disambiguation system and take stabs at it in the URL entry line. CoI: As with virtually all WP policy matters, there's a spectrum of opinion. The advice I give is safe-side. No one will fault you for avoiding CoI editing, but many will fault you for engaging in it even if some others will not. Anyway, glad I've been able to help some, with the caveat that my take on all this stuff is just one take on it among many. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:07, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- Please help me understand, SMcC, why the two Ramendra Kumars could end up — at my mentor's suggestion — with their own DAB as well as parenthetical descriptors following each name (author for one, politician for the other) on both their DAB page and their articles ... whereas for the two Joseph Cornells we're ending up with no DAB as well as no parenthetical descriptors for both an a hatnote only for the one involved in nature education.
- I think your "no one will fault you" comment in connection with which side of the COI spectrum to choose is a really useful piece of advice, and that it should be in the COI documentation.
- 🏴 Lastly, I thought to mention that you and I share Scottish ancestry. As a child, I got fascinated by Scotland and especially tartans. I actually asked for — and got — a little book of them. My family isn't sure exactly where our roots are in the "auld country," but we are certain that we have them (though along with additional roots elsewhere). Augnablik (talk) 12:12, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- The Kumars might both end up with a disambiguation string because neither is clearly the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the name "Ramendra Kumar"; they are vying for it, if you will. But the artist/filmmaker is clearly the primary topic for Joseph Cornell: there is a great deal more source material about this person than the author/educator, and more readers will be looking for the former than the latter. A side factor is that the latter's preferred name now includes Bharat, which serves as a natural disambiguator without needing a parenthetical one to be used in his article title. But since he also published as just "Joseph Cornell" and some people will be looking for him by that name, redirects from "Joseph Cornell (writer)" and "Joseph Cornell (educator)" are good things to have in place. Not only because people who understand our disambiguation system may stab-in-the-dark at such a page title, but also because templates that auto-generate links to a particular set of contextual articles might expect them to exist (the largest deployed example I can think of is that various templates and scripts expect every language to be available at a "Language_Name language" or "Language_Name (language)" title or redirect, even in cases where " language" or " (language)" might not be strictly necessary in the actual page title, perhaps because the demonym is a little different from the language name, or the specific language/dialect name doesn't have any other meaning than the language. An example of that would be Middle English, for which Middle English language and Middle English (language) exist as redirects (one natural disambiguation one parenthetic).
On the "no one will fault you" thinking: An analogy might be that [in most places] there isn't a law against tattooing your face, but it's probably not a good idea, as many people of my generation and later have learned the hard way.
Scottish families: If you know what the name(s) is/are, there's likely already a lot of information out there about where it was historically found and whether it was a clan or associated with one (most were not, contrary to popular belief). My own was an exception; it turned out so obscure and with such disputed history that I've had to do 30+ years of research about it, which is gathered at Cuindlis.org. Virtually no one else had looked into the matter, and the few that did, in 20th century, proved remarkably unreliable and often mutually contradictory. They relied largely on family stories not on documentary evidence, and spun a "west Highland chieftain with a castle" fairytale that cannot be supported with any documentary evidence of any kind. All of that evidence points to a SW Lowlands origin, with the surname developing as one (from earlier literal patronymic usage) in the 17th century or perhaps a bit earlier. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:58, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- You certainly got my attention when you began speaking of a demonym! Never heard that word before. All kinds of scary imagery ran through my mind after I saw it, but of course my fears were allayed when I looked up the meaning of the word.
- As for applying WP:PRIMARYTOPIC to the artist and nature educators Joseph Cornells, the artist wins the contest on the basis of third-party publications ... but if we could line up everyone in the world who'd simply ever heard of the two of them, I think the nature educator might win. Unfortunately, though, there doesn't seem to be as much published about him in the conventual places Wikipedians have to look. This conversation has made me begin thinking in turn about a side effect of Wikipedia's appearance and ever-increasing popularity in today's world: that if you're into promotional work — whether for yourself or someone else — you need to get as much as possible written by others about you or whoever you're promoting so that person can qualify for a Wiki article!
- 🏴 This conversation has been a delightful way to rekindle interest in my family's Scottish roots! Our family name is Kirby. I just made a quick side trip on the Web to see if I could find the part of Scotland we're likely from, as I didn't recall — if I ever knew. Although I still don't, I found the name is actually of Nordic origin because of the -by at the end and that many of us came over in the Norman invasion. Now I too am likely to get distracted .... Augnablik (talk) 01:17, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- People (especially in "infotainment" circles) approaching Wikipedia as something to try to "qualify for" is itself a mistake. This is not promotional vehicle for "creators", but an information service for users who need to find out basic facts about topics of global significance. If your website or band is not already self-evidently of global significance by having received in-depth coverage in multiple independent reliable sources (the WP:Notability criterion), then it should not have an article here. It will not serve the interests of our readers, and will not really serve the interests of the "creator", because a skeletal article here will not have an impressive, promotional effect, and will not provide any more information that readers would already get by just Googling the name of whatever the person or project is. Meanwhile, if there has been any controversy of any kind about that person or project, our editors will find it and probably include it, even if it is from a long time ago, leading to quite the opposite of the "whitewashed promo" that a self-marketer would hope to see. A large number of invididuals and organizational entities wish they did not have an article here, because they have risen to significant notoriety or controversy that they have coverage here that, based on the coverage in the "real world", is far from flattering. The average person or group is vastly better off putting up their own website and just going about their business. WP will notice you when you need to be noticed, according to our readership needs, and you might wish that that point had not been reached.
As for the general background point: "if we could line up everyone in the world who'd simply ever heard of the two of them, I think the nature educator might win" isn't something that's directly testable, but the gist of it is for our practical purposes actually demonstrable as true or false: What we can do is see what the long-term focus is for such a name when it comes to which pages our readership in the aggregate end up going to (after the pages have existed for a while). This statistical analysis is frequently done as part of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC determination when there is doubt. Beware of the inverse form of the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which those steeped in a particular topic have an inflated sense of the understanding of the topic, and its details and terms and key figures, among the general populace (the "Surely everyone knows [insert obscurity here]" assumption problem). Much of the challenge of writing an encyclopedia well is coming to learn how one is making such assumptions and avoid making more of them. Aside from article titles and decisions of what should be covered and how, it also has a great deal to do with how to write effectively for a totally generalized audience at all. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:43, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
- People (especially in "infotainment" circles) approaching Wikipedia as something to try to "qualify for" is itself a mistake. This is not promotional vehicle for "creators", but an information service for users who need to find out basic facts about topics of global significance. If your website or band is not already self-evidently of global significance by having received in-depth coverage in multiple independent reliable sources (the WP:Notability criterion), then it should not have an article here. It will not serve the interests of our readers, and will not really serve the interests of the "creator", because a skeletal article here will not have an impressive, promotional effect, and will not provide any more information that readers would already get by just Googling the name of whatever the person or project is. Meanwhile, if there has been any controversy of any kind about that person or project, our editors will find it and probably include it, even if it is from a long time ago, leading to quite the opposite of the "whitewashed promo" that a self-marketer would hope to see. A large number of invididuals and organizational entities wish they did not have an article here, because they have risen to significant notoriety or controversy that they have coverage here that, based on the coverage in the "real world", is far from flattering. The average person or group is vastly better off putting up their own website and just going about their business. WP will notice you when you need to be noticed, according to our readership needs, and you might wish that that point had not been reached.
- PS: The fact that you've found this useful is good feedback. I've run with your "add it to the documentation" idea, and created a section Template:Edit COI/doc#Why to use. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:42, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- Congratulations! I went and checked it out. A wonderful addition. May your Wiki documentation career take off now, and dissipate your misplaced concern about not being photogenic enough to make "how-to videos." Augnablik (talk) 01:21, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- Oh, I've been doing documentation here forever and ever. LOL I've been a WP:TemplateEditor for over a decade (which involves a great deal of documentation), and am one of the longest-term WP:MOS shepherds; see also User:SMcCandlish/Essays. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:22, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
- I see. Somehow I'd picked up that you'd been thinking about doing documentation but had held back, just as you mentioned that you had on appearing in training videos. Still, my congratulations are not misplaced; they're just not in quite the same context as I'd thought. Do please, as a good shepherd, keep helping to give us editor sheep nice clear documentation and training materials — ideally with lots of practice and targeted feedback.
- In a similar vein, Mathglot has been encouraging me to document what he calls my "pain points" before I get too far along the Wiki editor path and forget what they were. That's because he found out somewhere along the line that I'm actually an instructional designer in real life, and realized I'm approaching the Wiki learning curve from both perspectives. Frankly, I don't think I'll ever forget those pain points! 🙂 Augnablik (talk) 13:30, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
- Oh, I've been doing documentation here forever and ever. LOL I've been a WP:TemplateEditor for over a decade (which involves a great deal of documentation), and am one of the longest-term WP:MOS shepherds; see also User:SMcCandlish/Essays. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:22, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
- Congratulations! I went and checked it out. A wonderful addition. May your Wiki documentation career take off now, and dissipate your misplaced concern about not being photogenic enough to make "how-to videos." Augnablik (talk) 01:21, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- The Kumars might both end up with a disambiguation string because neither is clearly the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the name "Ramendra Kumar"; they are vying for it, if you will. But the artist/filmmaker is clearly the primary topic for Joseph Cornell: there is a great deal more source material about this person than the author/educator, and more readers will be looking for the former than the latter. A side factor is that the latter's preferred name now includes Bharat, which serves as a natural disambiguator without needing a parenthetical one to be used in his article title. But since he also published as just "Joseph Cornell" and some people will be looking for him by that name, redirects from "Joseph Cornell (writer)" and "Joseph Cornell (educator)" are good things to have in place. Not only because people who understand our disambiguation system may stab-in-the-dark at such a page title, but also because templates that auto-generate links to a particular set of contextual articles might expect them to exist (the largest deployed example I can think of is that various templates and scripts expect every language to be available at a "Language_Name language" or "Language_Name (language)" title or redirect, even in cases where " language" or " (language)" might not be strictly necessary in the actual page title, perhaps because the demonym is a little different from the language name, or the specific language/dialect name doesn't have any other meaning than the language. An example of that would be Middle English, for which Middle English language and Middle English (language) exist as redirects (one natural disambiguation one parenthetic).
- I get sidetracked in other projects and sometimes bail on WP for weeks at a time. "Nature educator" is also fine, but it's not the purpose of disambiguation (in titles or in hatnotes) to serve an educational/informative function (that's what article text does), only ensure that the reader gets to the right place. Our rule is to use the most concise possible disambiguation string, at least in the title itself (i.e. never use "(nature educator)" unless "(educator)" is itself a disambiguation failure because of multiple notable educators by the same name. As for people finding the article: you'd be surprised how many readers suss out our disambiguation system and take stabs at it in the URL entry line. CoI: As with virtually all WP policy matters, there's a spectrum of opinion. The advice I give is safe-side. No one will fault you for avoiding CoI editing, but many will fault you for engaging in it even if some others will not. Anyway, glad I've been able to help some, with the caveat that my take on all this stuff is just one take on it among many. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:07, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- I put a hatnote in (one that addresses readers who might end up at that page without having used "Bharat" in the name). Meant to do it before but maybe forgot to save the page. Two-item disambiguation pages are not forbidden but are somewhat discouraged except in cases where there is no clear WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the base name. That's probably not the case here. But I think 2-item DABs are harmless. If someone wants to be persnicketty about it, then they can nominate the DAB page for deletion. Interview: May be usable for WP:ABOUTSELF claims, but is not usable for claimed facts beyond that and does not count toward notability; only sources independent of the subject count toward the latter. CoI disclosure: good, though even better would be to no longer edit the article. Even the best-meaning and most careful CoI editing just raises other editors' alarm levels about whether the material is neutral and accurate. If you need to make more substantive changes to the article, it would be appropriate to instead use
- The hatnote at the top of Joseph Cornell should resolve any such confusion. If there turn out to be three+ notable Joseph Cornells, then we should have Joseph Cornell (disambiguation) and use that as that hatnote target instead. With regard to the educator, I'd be more concerned about establishing that he passes WP:Notability and doesn't get deleted. Adding a source about his "top 100" award would be a good start, as well as any non-interview source material about him in works he didn't publish himself. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:34, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: WikiProjects and collaborations request for comment
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Books & Bytes – Issue 66
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The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 66, November – December 2024
- Les Jours and East View Press join the library
- Tech tip: Newspapers.com
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --17:33, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Economy, trade, and companies request for comment
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A barnstar for you
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The Redirect Barnstar | |
| To SMcCandlish with much gratitude for redirecting a complex editing situation involving redirects. Happy to add this to your amazing collection of barnstars. It's not only the most fitting choice for your help with this situation but also one I don't think I saw on the wall at your User page. Careful, though ... you're running out of space!
Oops, this version of the barnstar doesn't look like the updated one, but I copied and pasted what was there for the 2nd version. Perhaps the code itself needs redirecting. Augnablik (talk) 18:50, 11 January 2025 (UTC) Augnablik (talk) 18:50, 11 January 2025 (UTC) |
- Thank you. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:18, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
Next up ... BLPSPSs
edit— What I read at WP:BLPSPS sounds a little circular. It starts off by saying we should never use self-published sources, unless written by the subject of the article. I know personal websites are okay to cite, but the above guidance came as a surprise. So, then, anything else self-published is okay, like a web site about the work of the subject of an article (example: Sharing Nature, a foundation set up by Joseph Cornell about his programs, which I view as a very well-done and informative website)?
— Then WP:BLPSPS goes on to say, "it does not refer to a reputable organisation publishing material about who it employs or to whom and why it grants awards, for example." So, then, employee information like a list of professors and their years of service or professional contributions plus awards they've received is okay?
— Continuing, WP:BLPSPS says that blogs "may be acceptable as sources so long as the writers are professionals and the blog is subject to the newspaper's full editorial control." This would presumably cover book companies that provide information about authors they publish, of which there are quite a few with useful information about Ramendra Kumar (example: Learning And Creativity Desk. “ParentEdge Magazine Lauds Effective Parenting: A New Paradigm.” Learning & Creativity, Sept. 28, 2016. https://learningandcreativity.com/parentedge-magazine-reviews-effective-parenting/) So, then, I can use it for the RK article (and other similar sources)?
— Assuming that sources like the above count as acceptable, might I still be questioned by other editors if I use them?
— And if I have any doubts that an editor would question any of my BLPSPS type of sources, is there a way I can write an explanation of the reliability of such sources that the editor would see but would be hidden from public view? (in other words, to head off a deletion or revert before it happens) Augnablik (talk) 12:31, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
- Better asked at WT:BLP, as that's a hardcore policy not a guideline. The gist is that, per WP:ABOUTSELF policy, self-published sources can sometimes be used for certain sorts of claims made by the subject about the subject, but only if they are utterly non-controversial claims and there is no doubt as to their veracity. E.g., we can use Microsoft's website to source the claim that Windows 10 will stop receiving security updates on X date, because MS is the most reliable source for MS's own schedule, and we have no reason to believe they are lying. We can use Taylor Swift's social media posts as a source for what she claims as her strongest musical influences, since she'd know that better than anyone else could, and doesn't have a history of making up nonsense. We can't use any statement by Donald Trump or Rudolf "Minnesota Fats" Wanderone about their personal background, accomplishments, beliefs, etc., because both of these figures have well-documented and extensive histories of bullshitting about everything all the time. We can use Trump's Xitter posts as sources for what he claims his political plans are, since he does tend to kinda-sorta attempt to follow up on a lot of them. With regard to a writer or other content provider, we can't use self-published materials for anything that smacks of promotionalism: they are not reliable sources for sales records, for awards won, for positive reviews or other accolades, for influence or reception or importance, etc., etc. But would be a reliable source for something like "This book was published in 2017". Such sources do not count in any way toward establishing notability. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:37, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
- More specifically with regard to the above, the self-published blog of a publishing company is a reliable source in most circumstances for bare-fact details of something they've published (what the title is, who the author is, the general scope of the contents, etc.), but nothing promotional (claims of influence, importance, reception, sales, etc.). Whether such a source can be used for claims about the author (where they are from, what their educational background is, etc.), has been subject to renewed debate, which is why to ask about this on the policy's talk page. I've not been personally tracking that debate, which has been ongoing for about 2 years or so sporadically. Whether a self-published site is "very well-done and informative" is irrelevant; that's a judge of web-development competence, not source reliability. Sharing Nature doesn't qualify as "a reputable organisation" in this meaning, since it is obscure (i.e. doesn't really have much of a reputation at all). "employee information like a list of professors and their years of service or professional contributions plus awards they've received is okay?" Probably the first half of that, "a list of professors and their years of service", but not "professional contributions plus awards", which is promotional/aggrandizing in nature; the organizations granting the awards are the reliable sources for that (as would also be any independent coverage of the awards, like a newspaper or journal article). "professional contributions" is something judged by independent sources, like biographical material written by journals and other publishers that have no connection to the person they are writing about. LearningAndCreativity.com isn't somehow forbidden from use for anything as a general matter (e.g., I don't find it listed as categorically unreliable at WP:RSN), though it does not seem to have much of a reputation as a source/publisher. However, not only is the linked "article" above extremely trivial (summarizing someone else's review), it is certainly not independent of the subject: Kumar is one of L&C's most prolific staff writers [10][11]! The piece in question is assigned to a role account, "Learning And Creativity Desk", instead of a person, so it is very probable that Kumar wrote it himself, or had a friend at the site do it. The thing to do here would be to find the original ParentEdge review and cite that instead. There is no point of any kind in citing a pseudo-article that just claims a review exists and parrots from it a little. Go to the actual source not self-serving clickbait about the source. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:16, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
- PS: In all matters like this, ask yourself not "What can I get away with – what comes up just short of transgressing a rule?", but ask instead "What is best for readers – what most ensures the encyclopedic quality of the material?" — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:19, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
- SMcC …
- I completely agree with you about not trying to aim low at "what can I get away with" but for the highest quality all around.
- What I'm finding somewhat challenging is that on occasion there are different interpretations even among senior editors about the interpretation of what's okay to do vis a vis Wiki policy and guidelines.
- Augnablik (talk) 12:24, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
- It's always been that way. It's more of a continual community negotiation than something like a legal system. This is why I suggest asking about BLP policy questions at WT:BLP; you'll get a good slice of current community thinking. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:35, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
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Feedback request: History and geography request for comment
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2025
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| story · music · places |
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2025 opened with trumpet fanfares that first sounded OTD in 1725 (as the Main page had). Today I had a composer (trumpeter, conductor) on the main page who worked closely with another who just became GA, - small world! To celebrate: mostly flowers pics from vacation ;) - How are you? -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:10, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
- Mostly just kind of swamped with off-site projects. Trying to overhaul a promising but malfunctional phpBB extension, cleaning up a genealogy database, and various other stuffs that keep me busy enough to not be around here much lately. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:50, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
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Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
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MOS and Eldridge Cleaver
editI am reaching out to you because you understand the intricacies of the Manual of Style much better than I do. I remember learning or being advised a long time ago that direct quotations should not include wikilinks. If I remember that advice correctly, that made sense to me then, since the selection of a wikilink might change to a greater or lesser extent the intended meaning of the author of the direct quote. On to the substantive issue: The current lead of Eldridge Cleaver quotes Cleaver as saying: If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.
Inclusion in the lead indicates that this quote is important to understanding Cleaver. So, there are two wikilinks. If they are acceptable, then the first to Malcolm X is not a problem since that is obviously the person that Cleaver refers to. On the other hand, I do not believe that Cleaver's mention of "Muslims" unambiguously refers to the Nation of Islam. I certainly acknowledge that NOI was the largest Muslim group among African-Americans at that time, but there were many smaller groups such as the Muslim Mosque, Inc. founded by Malcolm X himself in 1965, and other African-Americans found their own path into more mainstream Muslim communities. Plus there were many smaller fringe Muslim groups. I think that there was increased diversity among African-American Muslims in the 1964-1968 time period and I am concerned that this piped link within this Malcolm X quotation creates a false impression. I removed the wikilink and got reverted. So, there is in my view a MoS issue and a content issue, and I would appreciate your input on either or both. Cullen328 (talk) 06:32, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
- The "don't link in direct quotations" rule got abandoned about 5 years back, via an RfC. That was probably at WT:MOS, but maybe at WP:VPPOL. As a rule, virtually no one obeyed it, and it didn't produce good results when we did, causing us to wordily re-explain things with additional text before or after the quotation instead of just providing a link. Agree with your take on "Muslims" in this case; unless there are RS that tell us with certainty that this was the exact contextual meaning, an editor making that assumption is engaging in WP:OR and potentially misrepresenting the material. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:12, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you. I appreciate your input. Cullen328 (talk) 19:20, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
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Bierce
editIf you've never read Ambrose Bierce's "Write it Right", then I have found it (and some other old gems) in the appendix of https://ereader.perlego.com/1/book/4376992/16 through Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:01, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
- No login needed for it here: https://archive.org/details/writeitrightlitt00bierrich or here https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12474.
I'm generally a fan of his (especially The Devil's Dictionary), though not all of his advice has aged gracefully, even in the first few entries: His demand for an hotel and an heroic has not really survived much except in the most pretentious modern usage (and in informal speech in dialects with a silent leading-h, like Cockney). Likewise, his preference for about instead of around in "The debris of battle lay about them" hasn't fared well, either, and contradicts much of his other advice (which returns again and again to avoiding terms that have other, conflicting meanings and may be confusing); his rationale isn't even right, as the round in around is not synonymous with circular (e.g. oblongs are also round).
But probably 80% of that material is still good advice, at least in a formal register.
Some bits of it are curmudgeonly, logical resistance that I subjectively like but which aren't having any real-world effect. A good example is the entry on laundry, which also has implications for the British insistence on spelling jewelry as jewellery; the latter is properly the working establishment of a jeweller, as a bakery is that of a baker and a smithy that of a smith. That stuff reminds me tangentially of the nonsensical shift in meaning of cat litter from 'cat scat' to 'sandy stuff in which cats leave their scat', a change that happened some time before I was born but which still makes me chuckle. Why would anyone want to pay money for "cat litter"?
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:00, 27 January 2025 (UTC) - PS: Bierce features prominently in my email sig over the last year or two:
- "History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant,
which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools."
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)"When you're born in this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show.
And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat.
And some of us get to sit there with notebooks."
—George Carlin, Archive of American Television interview (2008) - — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:54, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- There are others I disagree with, e.g., "Substantiate for Prove. Why?" Because the former doesn't imply that the evidence was accepted as proof. But it's still a fun read. There are others in that book that might equally amuse you. There is a list of words/meanings that William Cullen Bryant banned from his newspaper: casket when coffin was meant, day before yesterday without a preceding definite article, even reliable when trustworthy is meant, and a style guide from James Gordon Bennett Jr. as well. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:15, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- I probably would have agreed with the casket point back in that era, but today they've taken on distinct meanings. A casket is the modern rectangular sort, while a coffin is the historical tapered sort (the Halloween-decorations traditional shape). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:32, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
- There are others I disagree with, e.g., "Substantiate for Prove. Why?" Because the former doesn't imply that the evidence was accepted as proof. But it's still a fun read. There are others in that book that might equally amuse you. There is a list of words/meanings that William Cullen Bryant banned from his newspaper: casket when coffin was meant, day before yesterday without a preceding definite article, even reliable when trustworthy is meant, and a style guide from James Gordon Bennett Jr. as well. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:15, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
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Miscellaneous
editHi, SMcC,
We've been conversing about several different facets of Wiki style and procedures over the past month or so, and I'd really like to follow up on a few but without going back to add more length to those already lengthy threads.
— One thing I wanted to do was thank you for taking care of a number of formatting issues in the Joseph Cornell article, especially removing the quotation marks around titles of publications and then italicizing the titles. I'd purposely left them along to focus on taking care of more basic things, like citations to make more of a case for Cornell's notability.
— Then, thinking how you may well be on the cusp of a new expansion of your role as a Wiki style guru, I thought to call your attention to a recent Teahouse discussion in which an editor asked how to edit articles for which the expert sources diverged on important facts like dates of events or numbers of people involved. In responding to the questioner, one of the senior staff suggested he read WP:When sources are wrong. Because I'd run into a somewhat similar situation in an article — one that you and I hadn't discussed — I consulted that source too. I found it really valuable not just about "when sources are wrong" but also what it could offer as a model for Wiki style documentation to cover situations because it provided:
- — Alternative methods editors can use to address a challenging situation, clearly described and enumerated
- — Great case studies in which editors can see the value of applying those alternatives
Like, for instance, to help us decide which of several legitimate choices we have in handling different situations involving the subject matter and length of the article such as ways we might subdivide different articles ... decisions about ways we might create citations ... and ways we might title the footnotes and reference sections. Your recent contribution to the COI documentation was just a glimmer of what else you could do along those lines. Augnablik (talk) 13:26, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
- I don't entirely agree with that essay, because it is nearly missing, and definitely hiding and discounting, the most obvious and most common approach, one that we use constantly: When sources that otherwise seem reliable are in disagreement about a claimed fact, we present that as a real-world disagreement, and describe both (or more) positions, giving them due weight. The central problem with the essay is that it mentions this approach only in passing, as if it's something we rarely need to do, and even suggests that it only be done when "there is strong reason to think many or most sources are wrong or there is nothing approaching a consensus of sources". As a policy matter, that is simply flat-out wrong. What we do by default per WP:DUE policy is present all encyclopedically-worth-noting viewpoints on the subject at issue, weight them according to their support level in the sources (and there is usually a strongly dominant one verging on a consensus of sources, to which we give the most weight).
To the extent the rest of the essay has ideas that are sometimes applicable, I agree with the gist of it, as to the techniques that can be used when certain sources are provably full of crap, or when the preponderance of other sources' evidence suggests in the aggregate that another source is full of crap, or when a writer, otherwise reputable, makes extraordinary claims not backed up by extraordinarily good evidence (all of which are somewhat different cases). Despite never having read that essay before (that I recall), I actually already employ most of those techniques, as needed. That suggests that they generally are in keeping with community practices (since I didn't make up my own solutions to such things, but absorbed them from WP existing practice). The only place the essay seems to be going wrong is the one I highlighted.
Anyway, most of its techniques are ones that I employed in Tartan and the split-off articles I'm slowly working on (the Tartan article itself is at least 5× too long; the material is encyclopedically comprehensive and researched with very nearly every available source on the topic (which I've been amassing for 30 years), but is far too much to have in a single article. I've already split off Regimental tartan, and am almost done with User:SMcCandlish/Incubator/Tartan design and weaving, and will next probably make Clan tartan into article instead of a sectional redirect, then do History of Tartan, and we'll see from there). The on-topic point is that many tartan-related sources, especially those from before about 1950, are reliable for certain basic facts but grossly unreliable for others, the more so the more historico-analytic the claims are and the more so the older the source is, with the Georgian–Victorian ones veering from romanticist fantasy to cynical commercial exploitation to outright proven forgery. Yet many of these unreliable sources will be quoted by later writers and believed by members of the general public, so the bullshit in them has to be addressed head-on, sometimes directly in the prose, more often in footnotes, and these WP-editorial decisions backed up with citation to more reliable actual research that can demonstrate the claims it is making instead of blowing Celtic Twilight smoke. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:19, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
- I'll have to re-read WP:When sources are wrong with your critique in mind. It didn't hit me as I was going through it the first time, perhaps because I was so ecstatic to find Wiki documentation (an essay, at least) set up so well for training. The lack of it has really been an ongoing "pain point" for me as the instructional designer confronts the agonized and frustrated toddler Wiki editor or vice versa.
- I think my recent experience in trying to "follow suit" in footnotes and bibliographies (or similarly termed references) in an article previously set up using sfn templates and reflists, trying to use Wiki documentation and even when seeking direct help from senior editors, may forever occupy the highest notch on my pain point scale — we'll see.
- That Tartan article is probably the longest I've ever seen in Wikipedia. It does feel unwieldy at its current length, but I'll be interested how you finally slice it because I sometimes worry that doing that can make topics seem less unified way. For example, when I did some editing on the Houseboat article, I was amazed to discover another article entitled Houseboats in New York City, which to me made absolutely no sense to be a separate article — and frankly still does, considering that the article I edited isn't what I think of as very long. Augnablik (talk) 14:22, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
- @Augnablik: You may find my crash course at User:SMcCandlish/How to use the sfnp family of templates helpful. Even I didn't fully understand these templates, for years (and this is reflected in the half-assed citation formatting job I did at Tartan and haven't cleaned up yet, but you can see the same sort of cleanup I did just recently do at the draft split-off article here). After working on the tartan article, I actually learned in-depth how to use these templates and what a concision and easy-of-use benefit they provide once they're understood properly, but I found the formal template documentation of them obtuse (and missing some salient details), which is why I wrote that essay. Slicing up the tartan subject: It's a great deal of work, especially because citations have to be ported from the original article into the "child" piece seamlessly, the material rewritten to flow as a stand-alone article and to have appropriate depth for the sub-topic, and then the original material in the first article replaced with a WP:SUMMARYSTYLE précis, again with citations adjusted. Doing each of the two split-offs I've done (regimental and design/manufacture) was several days of full-time work. As for "[narrow topic] in [place]" articles, they rarely make sense unless there is something unique about the intersection. Yet editors (especially newer ones, and one with a "local/regional pride" motivation) can be incredibly insistent about creating and defending them. Deflating such a quasi-promotional endeavor can be almost more work than it is worth. See, e.g., Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Internet meme trolls in Kerala, in which I had to do about 10x as much source research and analysis as the person trying to defend the "article" (collection of largely unrelated local-interest trivia that coincidentally had something to do with the Internet, as does pretty much everything today). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:37, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment
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DoneHi. I see in Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Biography/2017_archive#Toward_a_MOS:NICKNAME that you are the original author of this guideline, at least the earliest form. We're not clear on whether the suggested form applies to all nicknames or just the ones that are the article title. Can you weigh in on Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Biography#How_should_we_interpret_MOS:NICKNAME? We'll probably want a clarifying sentence in the guideline whichever way. Thank you. --GRuban (talk) 20:35, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
Redirect listed at Redirects for discussion
edit DoneA redirect or redirects you have created has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 February 7 § pin game until a consensus is reached. consarn (speak evil) (see evil) 20:54, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
Subsequent references to the same person
editSMcC, I'd really appreciate your take on three style issues:
- I'm editing an article in which the first occurrence of someone's name (other than the subject of the article) gets linked to either a Wikipedia article or some outside source, but re-linked almost every later time it's used. To me, this seems overkill ... but as I thought about it, I could see that perhaps the thinking is that this avoids concern about some readers skipping over the link the first time. Is there a Wiki preference one way or the other?
- Some articles, when mentioning a famous city like Tokyo or New York, also provide the name of the country or state as well. Again it seems overkill to me. But is it a Wiki preference?
- Lastly, some articles use links on even common things like cab or pepper to a dictionary definition. I can't believe anyone reading Wikipedia would need help on that basic a level. But is this sort of linkage something that Wikipedia prefers we should just leave alone when we see it?
Augnablik (talk) 20:11, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
- In the same order:
- It might be overkill, but I'd have to see the article to be sure. We formerly had a "link once per article" provision, but this was changed by RfC several years ago to "Link once per major section". See MOS:DUPLINK. And we are not to use links to other websites directly in article text per WP:EL; if some external link is needed with regard to some subject like a biographical figure, it goes in a citation. If you ever see something like "According to an interview with Smith on YouTube with
[https://www.youtube.com/@dylan_anderson Dylan Anderson]..." (not the Dylan Anderson we have encyclopedia material about, so[[Dylan Anderson]]can't be used for this), that needs to get replaced with "According to an interview with Smith on YouTube with Dylan Anderson<ref>{{cite web | ... cite the actual interview here, not the profile of the interviewer ...}}</ref>...". If it's something like "McNabb became CTO of[https://example.com/ BigBizCorp]in 2013", that needs to be "McNabb became CTO of[[BigBizCorp]]in 2013", or simply "McNabb became CTO of BigBizCorp in 2013" if BigBizCorp is not notable and doesn't have an article here. - After the name of major city (one globally recognizable by English-speakers), it is usually overkill and undesirable to also name (much less link) the country and/or a subnational unit like a US state or a Canadian province or a UK county or whatever, unless either:
- The name is encyclopedically ambiguous: Portland, Maine, vs. Portland, Oregon. But not London, UK, vs. London, Ontario, the latter being rather unfamiliar to everyone but Canadians; even Canadians say/write "London, Ontario" unless the context makes is absolutely clear that the local one is meant, e.g. "I'm stopping in London on my drive from Toronto to Port Huron." Which place came first doesn't matter; Birmingham, England, and Birmingham, Alabama, are about equally well known, if you average it all out. But Boston, Massachusetts, is the Boston, and hardly anyone outside of England has ever heard of its original namesake, Boston, Lincolnshire, a town of only 45,000. By contrast, Cambridge, England, is vastly better known than Cambridge, Massachusetts (named after the former), despite the latter being home to Harvard University and MIT, among other institutions.
- Or, there's a contextually specific reason to include that additional information (e.g. in a table, to have consistently formatted entries; and we also often do it in infoboxes, on the first line in which a country would appear (usually birthplace in a bio). This is covered at MOS:OVERLINK.
- Linking everyday words should not be done (per MOS:OVERLINK again), unless there's a contextually specific reason to do it, e.g. in an article on botany, trade, or spices, it might be pertinent to link to black pepper or to chili pepper depending on which kind is meant. For "cab" meaning 'taxicab', there would pretty much never be a reason to link that. If an article about transit/transport, it might make sense to link something like "ridesharing companies versus the traditional taxicab industry", because they are contextually important and the reader may need to compare/contrast them in detail for full understanding. But in "Jones was last seen entering a cab [or taxi, or taxicab, whatever the wording] on 17 April 2022", there is no reason to link "cab" (or either of the alternative words). Similar rationales are likely to apply to other meanings of the word "cab". In a bio, use no "cab" link in "Smith's cell phone was hacked after it was left behind in the cab of a limo". But in an article on automotive wiring, it might make sense (at first occurrence of these terms) to do: "The fuse box in most modern automobiles is within the cab, usually on the lower part or underside of the dashboard, but in some older or specialty vehicles way be within the engine compartment or even in the trunk/boot", because the reader needs to understand precisely what these terms refer to, might be a non-native English speaker or a child unfamiliar with the terms, and car-part terms vary by regional dialect a lot anyway.
- It might be overkill, but I'd have to see the article to be sure. We formerly had a "link once per article" provision, but this was changed by RfC several years ago to "Link once per major section". See MOS:DUPLINK. And we are not to use links to other websites directly in article text per WP:EL; if some external link is needed with regard to some subject like a biographical figure, it goes in a citation. If you ever see something like "According to an interview with Smith on YouTube with
- Figuring out when to add/keep/remove a link takes some absorption of encyclopedia writing skill over time. The basic question to ask is whether the reader is likely to need, in this particular context, some of the information in the linked article or not. No one reading up about a missing person or phone-hacked celeb has any need of details about what a taxi is or a car interior and its parts are. But someone learning about politico-economic disputation about transport options is likely to need to know how to distinguish taxis from rideshares in various ways. And someone trying to figure out why their car went dead after a popping noise when they tried to start it this morning may need basic car-parts terminology info. (Even if WP isn't the best place for them to get it, it is in the top 10 websites in the world and probably is still no. 1 for informational sites, so many people will start here whether they should for a particular need or not; same applies to medical and legal as well as technical information.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:03, 15 February 2025 (UTC)
"Template:R from style" listed at Redirects for discussion
edit DoneThe redirect Template:R from style has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 February 13 § Template:R from style until a consensus is reached. Gonnym (talk) 14:36, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
MOS:INITIALS has an RfC
edit DoneMOS:INITIALS has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 05:10, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Media, the arts, and architecture request for comment
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February thanks
edit | |
| story · music · places |
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Thank you for improving article quality in February! - I point at a composer today, as the main page does. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:52, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Thank you for clarification about what a main editor is! - I face the same problem where I didn't expect it, for infobox opera that is, the standard for operas, present in 1720 opera articles (as of today), including most FAs (Carmen, L'Orfeo ...) but not Rinaldo. History: the "main autor" died. Before, he had reverted an infobox for Rinaldo because another main editor had threatened to leave Wikipedia if Handel's operas had infoboxes instead of the sidebar (of - old - Handel pictured and links to his other operas and oratorios, - I can't show you because it has been deleted as the community wished). That editor left anyway. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:00, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
- This kind of "I'm going to quit Wikipedia if I don't get my way about infoboxes on articles me and my friends WP:OWN" grandstanding and hold-the-community-hostage behavior coming from the composer/classical/opera project-circle is another example of why yet another ArbCom case about F'ing infoboxes is probably inevitable. [sigh] — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:32, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
- I don't think it takes an arbcase. - I was trained not to tell people whose memory is fading that this is so. Did you notice that all three opera articles were written by the same, only in this one - see above. He also wrote an essay. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:07, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
- "companion piece" - the belief that its author argued against infoboxes is widespread, but I don't share it. He came up, during the end of the infobox arbcase and during FAC preparations for the article, with this experiment for a compromise, DYK? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:38, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- I did not, so will moderate that claim. I remember him as consistently anti-i'box, but I clearly missed some discussions in which he was not. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:56, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you. A discussion with him, about infobox opera for Carmen, has been copied to the the talk of {{infobox opera}}, DYK? April 2013: "In summary, subject to further discussion on the outstanding points, I can't think that anyone would have much objection to an opera infobox using a template along such lines." (archived, of course) There was an infobox for Carmen, soon after the first main page appearance (for which they were afraid of protests) for as long as he lived, without any problems (besides debates about the image), and after his death through a second TFA show. And on that background look at Rinaldo, perhaps ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:02, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- "afraid of protests" is entirely the issue. The very fact that there has been a miasma of editorial fear in a particular tripartite but interrelated topic sector, causing people to tip-toe around the often unreasonable demands of a vanishingly small number of editors simply because the latter behave WP:VESTED with regard to "their own" articles, and that this continues after multiple ArbCom cases, is a serious issue. The community needs to break the back of this problem. It is not okay for a gaggle of topic-devoted editors to lord it over at least three vast categories of articles and browbeat every other editor on the system into obeying their demands. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:45, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- you are right, and thank you for your part in the breaking of the back of the problem! - I noticed that you may want to correct one more thing in your "companion piece", perhaps even the title. The so-called report came in October, after the case, and the "fresh look" in July, during the case, and before the opera initiative (also during the case), followed by a similar one for a composer, Percy Grainger, after the case (check my 2013 archive). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:46, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- Fixed; I just misread which preceded the other. However, I see even more disturbing stuff in there: "It looks like an infobox was in this article continuously from May 2010 until August 2019, when it was boldly removed by an editor "per Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music/Style guidelines#Biographical infoboxes" (an unenforceable WikiProject advice page). It has since been re-added in (that I could easily find in the history) May 2020, May 2024, and February 2025, and re-removed as many times." [12] If you ask me, this is already grounds for another ArbCom case, seeking topic-bans from infoboxes, because this is some particular people from a particular wikiproject abusing long-term "slow edit-war" and stonewall tactics against all comers, to try to "enforce" a WP:PROJPAGE essay as if policy, directly against prior rulings of ArbCom on such matters, against WP:CONLEVEL policy, against community consensus in an RfC examining the exact PROJPAGE in question, and against the very long-term status quo at that article and various editors' attempts to restore it to that state, which is what we do when an impasse is happening (though I don't think this really is an impasse, because the arguments against an i'box in that article are very weak). This has to stop. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:32, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- good plan --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:41, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- Tomorrow is Chopin's birthday. look, 2015, per consensus - some seem to have missed that. (reverted soon by Francis Schonken - later banned - and returned in 2023) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 00:02, 1 March 2025 (UTC)
- Oh, it won't be me pursuing any such ArbCom or AE activity. I'm allergic to that sort of drama. But if a "try to derail every composer/opera/classical infobox we possibly can" behavior pattern continues, then others with more tolerance for the dramaboards should take that approach and just put the matter to properly to bed. Even as a matter of core WP:EDITING policy it's wrong; if editors want to add well-accepted, standardized features to any article, they are free to do so; the onus is on someone who's opposed to the idea to demonstrate that there's objectively (not just in their subjective opinion) an unsurmountable problem in a particular article's case that makes for exceptional treatment. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:40, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- It's not "every composer", only those by the handful FA writers. Infoboxes - sometimes with, often without discussion - are present for Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, ... even most recent FAs, Schumann, Stravinsky, ... - What really should go is the hidden notice about obtaining permission on the talk before adding an infobox, - that's not WP style of editing boldly, among adults. - Opera: almost all major operas have an infobox, and many of the others, 1720 inclusions when I looked last, see here, - many will not believe that so many even exist. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:19, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Just for fun: the DYK hooks on my user page right now mention 18 composers, of which 3 have no infobox (Bizet, Mahler and Britten.) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:27, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Yes, I'm aware of the sea change over the last decade. The very fact that the community has collectively changed these subjects from a walled garden in which some wikiprojects were formerly asserting that infoboxes were not permitted at all without getting "permission" first, to now being subjects in which infoboxes are the default as with all other categories, is simply further indication that the article-by-article resistance still being offered by some holdout editors in these subjects is disruptive and a failure to WP:DROPTHESTICK. As for "the hidden notice about obtaining permission", any such should just be removed as violating WP:OWN policy. At most, a notice might pertinently suggesting getting an affirmative consensus first at the article talk page, iff the matter has already been debated in recent years (i.e. postdating the pertinent ArbCom cases) at that particular article's talk page already and failed to come to a consensus or come to a consensus against one. In short, this is not FightEveryoneUntilTheEndOfTimeToGetWhatIWantPedia. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:42, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- PS: If by "returned in 2023" you mean Francis, rather than an infobox at Chopin or whatever, then good. I'd had my issues with him now and then, but he was remarkably productive in his main areas of interest, and I thought an indef was a bit unreasonable (I feel that way about several other lately absent parties like BHG, too.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:17, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Oh, it won't be me pursuing any such ArbCom or AE activity. I'm allergic to that sort of drama. But if a "try to derail every composer/opera/classical infobox we possibly can" behavior pattern continues, then others with more tolerance for the dramaboards should take that approach and just put the matter to properly to bed. Even as a matter of core WP:EDITING policy it's wrong; if editors want to add well-accepted, standardized features to any article, they are free to do so; the onus is on someone who's opposed to the idea to demonstrate that there's objectively (not just in their subjective opinion) an unsurmountable problem in a particular article's case that makes for exceptional treatment. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:40, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Fixed; I just misread which preceded the other. However, I see even more disturbing stuff in there: "It looks like an infobox was in this article continuously from May 2010 until August 2019, when it was boldly removed by an editor "per Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music/Style guidelines#Biographical infoboxes" (an unenforceable WikiProject advice page). It has since been re-added in (that I could easily find in the history) May 2020, May 2024, and February 2025, and re-removed as many times." [12] If you ask me, this is already grounds for another ArbCom case, seeking topic-bans from infoboxes, because this is some particular people from a particular wikiproject abusing long-term "slow edit-war" and stonewall tactics against all comers, to try to "enforce" a WP:PROJPAGE essay as if policy, directly against prior rulings of ArbCom on such matters, against WP:CONLEVEL policy, against community consensus in an RfC examining the exact PROJPAGE in question, and against the very long-term status quo at that article and various editors' attempts to restore it to that state, which is what we do when an impasse is happening (though I don't think this really is an impasse, because the arguments against an i'box in that article are very weak). This has to stop. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:32, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- you are right, and thank you for your part in the breaking of the back of the problem! - I noticed that you may want to correct one more thing in your "companion piece", perhaps even the title. The so-called report came in October, after the case, and the "fresh look" in July, during the case, and before the opera initiative (also during the case), followed by a similar one for a composer, Percy Grainger, after the case (check my 2013 archive). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:46, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- "afraid of protests" is entirely the issue. The very fact that there has been a miasma of editorial fear in a particular tripartite but interrelated topic sector, causing people to tip-toe around the often unreasonable demands of a vanishingly small number of editors simply because the latter behave WP:VESTED with regard to "their own" articles, and that this continues after multiple ArbCom cases, is a serious issue. The community needs to break the back of this problem. It is not okay for a gaggle of topic-devoted editors to lord it over at least three vast categories of articles and browbeat every other editor on the system into obeying their demands. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:45, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you. A discussion with him, about infobox opera for Carmen, has been copied to the the talk of {{infobox opera}}, DYK? April 2013: "In summary, subject to further discussion on the outstanding points, I can't think that anyone would have much objection to an opera infobox using a template along such lines." (archived, of course) There was an infobox for Carmen, soon after the first main page appearance (for which they were afraid of protests) for as long as he lived, without any problems (besides debates about the image), and after his death through a second TFA show. And on that background look at Rinaldo, perhaps ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:02, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- I did not, so will moderate that claim. I remember him as consistently anti-i'box, but I clearly missed some discussions in which he was not. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:56, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
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Coloured vs coloured in South Africa
editHi SMcCandlish :) I dug around in the MOS talk archives and saw you were present in and central to basically all of the relevant conversations. I was wondering whether you'd be open to discussing the capitalization of the word "coloured", both in the MOS and in the articles affected by it. I see you seem to understand the C to be capitalized, but (I am South African) we use white, black, and coloured without a capital letter.
Despite my account age I am new to contributing to Wikipedia (currently reading the MOS) so I don't know what the right jargon or process is to make this case. To better understand your stance I searched for sources as I imagine you might have and found a lot of non-South African sources which capitalize the C, presumably as a well-intentioned mark of respect. Respectfully, they are wrong; they are perhaps a unilateral exoticization which does not represent reality in SA.
You might be interested in the South African GCIS editorial style guide which I digested when I worked as an editor in SA.
coloured people, coloureds (lowercase initials).
You can also look at any post-94 newspaper article 1 2 3 4 5 6, all of which will follow modern convention. You do start seeing the capital C pre 1994, it's more of an apartheid relic (the apartheid regime's specific jargon for the ethnic group was Cape Coloured, a subset of Coloured), but it has minimal real-world representation after that. You will also occasionally see stuff like 7, but note that this author is also capitalizing white and black against SA norms; I would guess that they have consumed a lot of US media. Finally, I also found someone else making the same case into the void (lol).
I am profoundly uninterested in fighting, so if you tell me you think I am wrong I will leave it at that, but this is a meaningful divergence from reality for Wikipedia and I thought you might be the right person to flag it to (having both the interest and relevant experience to do the necessary to fix it). Or if you are indifferent, I would appreciate your perspective in how to approach a fix (start with the MOS, right?)
Thanks for your time. Emberfiend (talk) 12:57, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
- Well, I will actually put in some time, since this is worth digging into in detail with some aggregate source analysis. (Not because of any interest in fighting, but because we need to take this stuff seriously, especially when dealing with names or labels of ethnic and other social groups.) The short version is that I doubt that lower-casing "Coloured" would go over well here, at least in the modern sense used as an identifier of a mixed-ethnic population (one similar in many way so the concept of African American, virtually all of whom are ancestrally blended, not solely African). Lower-casing it in historical senses as a politico-legal classification during the apartheid (or Apartheid if you prefer) era and earlier as a loose epithet used by colonial settlers, would more properly be lowercase. But the modern ethnic identifier probably not, because lowercasing it will be singling out a particular ethno-cultural group for very noticeable de-emphasis, apt to be felt as denigrating. Sensitivity to matters of this sort is something that has shifted markedly within my own lifetime, and really come to head since the 2010s. I.e., there is a shift in usage underway (not one that will necessarily be long-term successful; I can't predict the future, and the wave of jingoistic hyper-conservatism sweeping the Western world is not to be underestimated). This relates strongly, of course, to a recent-ish shift to capitalize (or capitalise, if you prefer) "Black" in such a sense, and follow-on moves to capitalize "White" and the more catch-all "Brown" in the same way. (That last is primarily an Americanism or at least a North Americanism, inclusive of pretty much everyone outside the "White" and "Black" categories, and the latter rather loosely defined – someone with, say, a single African-American grandparent might be still called "Black" in American English if they have some African phenotypic features, and British usage appears to me to lean in this direction as well, as does Canadian) [Edit: Actually, "brown" has been used a similar non-specific way in the context of SA ethnic groups; CCHDC activist Joseph Little in in 1997 at the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference, on changing post-apartheid affirmative action policies: "under the previous dispensation we weren’t white enough, with the next we weren’t brown enough".[13]]
Where this will end up (in general English usage) is an open question. Because of the psychosocial effect of lowercasing, especially in the presence of other such terms (notice what stands out in "The longevity statistics of Asian, black, Caucasian, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific, and Semitic study participants ..."), I suspect that the result is going to be to treat "Black", "White", and "Coloured" as (or "as if", depending on how you like to think of such matters) proper names AKA proper-noun phrases, at least when such terms are accepted names for ethno-cultural groups in particular. Not so with attempts to capitalize things like "deaf", "lesbian", and other groupings of others sorts. This is also related to capitalizing "Indigenous", "Native", and "Aboriginal" in regards to groups who use those terms as official or widely-adopted designations. (Various activists push this too far and seek to capitalize them literally any time they have human referents, but the real world is clearly not adopting this practice; you are only very rarely going to encounter something like "Scots and then English began to supplant the Gaelic that was the predominant Native language in south-west Scotland by the 15th century, and Gaelic was extinct there by the 18th century, or perhaps surviving in isolated pockets until the early 19th." The "Native" is just pretentious and brow-beating at best.)
Back to "Coloured" in particular: I don't wallow in SA media, and I'm hard-pressed to find a searchable modern corpus of SA English publications (Google Ngrams provides US and UK, and a general English one). So, it's hard for me to assess what the present-day norms might be across all sorts of publishing. News is low-hanging fruit, though it has style divergent in many ways from other forms of publishing. I'm not finding a good, searchable SA news aggregator, so just went site by site manually. I find that lowercase for these terms dominates in SA news, but is hardly the the exclusive usage, even in the top 20 or so sites provided by one index of SA news: eNews Channel Africa (eNCA.com) regularly capitalizes "Coloured", e.g. in constructions like "tackling the issues facing the Coloured community nationwide"[14] and "issues within the Coloured community continue"[15]. The South African uses both styles (probably a result of leaving some style decisions to individual writers): "Tensions brew between coloured and black communities in Nigel over housing occupation"[16], but "ActionSA demands answers over exclusion of Coloured applicants in traffic wardens posts"[[sic][17]. Same with The Bullrushes (of Johannesburg): "...in the old cemetery ... English graves were separated from Afrikaans graves. Whites were buried on one side, and blacks, Indians and coloureds on the other side."[18], yet "Africans, Asians, Coloureds, and Whites all received their distinct forms of education ..."[19]. Perhaps this is representing a different sensibility for historical usage as an imposed label versus modern usage as a self-identifier or at least a broadly accepted one. From the same publication: "Section 1 of the B-BBEE Act limits benefits to black people, which includes Africans, Coloureds and Indians that are South African citizens by birth or descent, or by naturalisation prior to 27 April 1994."[20] (quoting an official statement from a B-BBEE commissioner; and note the curious legal redefinition, and lowercase, of "black" in this particular context, to mean something other than it usually does in SA English and be inclusive even of SA Indians – to mean basically what "people of color", "Black and Brown people", or "BIPOC" mean in [left-leaning] American English (or a bit narrower with a citizenship requirement in that particular legal sense). Some Xitter and other social-media usage I've skimmed is a mixture, and not all of the capital-C "Coloured" is coming from the left; I thought to look because African Insider, out of Joburg, quotes what seems like a racist or at least racialist rant on X that capitalizes it.[21] The same paper again quotes a left activist (and former Public Protector) using it (and "white") lowercase, jarringly mixed with uppercase ethnonyms: "through the Group Areas Act of 1950 the government stole land and other movable property from Indians, coloureds and Africans and gave it to whites".[22] That looks like someone who's just pressing the shift key at the beginning of every other word as some kind of game, heh. Left to its own devices, African Insider seems to prefer lower case (e.g. lots of it here). iAfrica (a Primedia masthead, out of Joburg again): "the low number of registered [organ] donors from Black, Coloured and Indian population groups"[23] (also used "people of colour", adapting American jargon), but "The Khoisan ... demand the abolition of the 'coloured' classification—a legacy of apartheid—and the return of ancestral lands ...."[24], then "One of the largest and most established communities (classified 'Coloured' under Apartheid racial classification legislation) ...."[25], but then "... an investigation into racism at schools across the Western Cape following a distressing incident. ... black students were forced into the roles of slaves, while their coloured classmates pretended to auction them off."[26], then back to "Cape Town ... with the vast majority of poor and working-class families (who are predominantly Black and Coloured) still being confined to townships and informal settlements on the outskirts ...."[27]. So, that one seems to just leave it up to the writer.
That some go uppercase but others lowercase is meaningful. And I would bet money that there's a socio-political angle. There are probably more angles, one of which I've hinted at, as have these quotations. Namely, "[c|C]oloured" really has at least three meanings in the SA context: 1) An informal and racialist colonial epithet (an exonym) invented historically by White (or white, whatever) settlers for ethnically mixed people (basically the Brito-Afrikaner version of Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/French mulatto and similar "hypodescent" ancestry-labeling terms in the colonial Americas – which seem virtually never capitalized by anyone). 2) An apartheid-era legal and politico-regulatory classification (another thing usually not capitalized) that included some African or mostly-African descendant people, especially the Khoisan – who are actually the oldest group in the area, according to anthropologists. (That said, there's been some "neo-Khoisan" disputation, about allegedly rather random Coloured groups forming and claiming to be Khoisan or some other tribal group to claim benefits and even take over land. There have been some "fake Indian tribe" issues in the US occasionally, too.) The apartheid-period definition even lumped mainland-Chinese immigrants into "coloured" for some reason. 3) A largely post-apartheid ethnonym used by many people (this sort of term is usually capitalized, at least in modern material). That last is rejected by some to whom it could pertain, often on an individual basis, but there is certainly a "Coloured[s]" identity group well-established, including with advocacy organizations, like the Cape Cultural Heritage Development Council, and even a political party, National Coloured Congress. There are probably additional nuanced meanings; there's a paper about it [28], but I don't have full text right now; could probably get the EBSCOHost copy, via WP:TWL. There even seems to be a book[29] about (in part) the transition of this term from a legalistic classification to an enthno-cultural group identity.
How much does SA news usage (reflecting probably predominantly White SA vernacular usage) matter? I'm not entirely sure, but lean toward "not much", other than it demonstrates lack of uniformity. This isn't SouthAfricaPedia, and we do not write articles which are on regionally-confined or -significant topics to appeal to the sensibilities of a particular element of the societies in those places, but for a much broader audience. MOS:ENGVAR turns out not to be factor, because it cannot actually be shown that lowercase-c is a "rule" in SA English, like the -our versus American -or spelling in that an similar words ("neighbour", "honour") is, or the -re versus -er in "theatre" is. In that wider regard, what is of primary importance is broader usage outside of SA-local popular media, and instead in high-quality publications that are closer to an encyclopedic register, than to lowest-common-denominator news blather (which is always written to expediency-driven stylesheets). So, Google Books Ngrams is our next stop. It indexes scanned book content. It does contain some lower-quality material (especially for results after 2019), but overall it's a good indicator of usage in professionally written material. Here are some pretty carefully scoped searches: [30][31][32] These generally show that, in English across the world, "Coloured" in the South African sense[s] is capitalized more often than lowercased, despite the somewhat majority preference in SA newspapers and their e-equivalents for lowercase (perhaps also among some other groups of SA writers; it is hard to tell with the materials so far). These results are not perfect, since they can't tease out title-case usage in titles and headings, and cannot rule out occasionally irrelevancies like "South African coloured wigs" or whatever, but it's not really credible that gaps this wide could be caused by such false positives.
Next, let's try a Google Scholar search, indexing primarily academic journal articles (there are some magazines and even some books in here, but the vast majority of the results are identifiably RS material) [33]. There's a significant amount of capital-C in this, though it is the minority usage. Looking over specific results (tediously), I was mystified at first, because in looking at every hit in the first 5 pages of search results, I found: 21 sources using lowercase, 11 using uppercase, 14 using a mixture, and 1 indeterminate (too little text freely available, and original title in allcaps). The mixed ones mostly formed a very strange pattern, of lowercase in the title, but uppercase in the displayed body text (rather the opposite of what one would expect). For those, I took the time to examine the originals when available (or at least the original journal database entries Google was scraping). Of these, I found that 10 were Google misrepresenting lowercase in the title, 2 really did seem to be that way (but might be the journal dbs misrepresenting the title – for neither of those was a PDF or other image available, though uppercase was clearly used in the article body), 1 had a curious habit of uppercasing it as a noun and lowercasing adjectival uses, and 1 even more narrowly lowercased only derivational use like "coloured blindness" in SA politics, but both noun and adj. in direct reference to the population group was capitalized. So what this really amounts to is 21 lowercase, 25 entirely or almost entirely uppercase, and 1 unknown. So, uppercase proved to dominate. There's a slight trend toward capitalizing in the sense of an ethnonym for a present-day population or populations, and if it's more specific (e.g. "Cape Coloured") it is even more likely to be capitalized; but to lowercases it as a politico-legalism or as a historical epithet. Definitely not a clear-cut line, though. Plenty of the lowercase use is in the modern-population-identifier sense, and those prone to capitalizing it probably do so regardless. Two things in noticed while going over this material is that if the writer is Coloured or Black they are more likely to capitalize, and if the writer is not self-identifying that way the more likely to lowercase (especially if a critic or polemicist, e.g. a real gem from South African Journal of Philosophy with ranty stuff like "... among so-called coloureds in South Africa ..." and "... the cacophonic plurality of so-called coloured ...." This has some implications.) At any rate, I submit that all the above is pretty conclusive evidence that capital-C on this is not a Wikipedia "unilateral exoticization". If it is an exoticization [I'm surprised you'd prefer a z in that], and really nearly all SA publisher including academic ones lean heavily lowercase, it's an exoticization being imposed by the rest of the English-language publishing world (increasingly over time), and which WP has simply gone along with, as more consistent with other proper naming and with a majority (though not an overwhelming one) of the RS material.
One interesting bit I found in passing while digging through sources found in that GScholar search: Whether to capitalize the "c" has been somewhat politically debated, even among the population to whom the term pertains since at least 1994, in the development of a post-apartheid "coloured consciousness and ... [then-]emerging coloured identity" according to a paper in an edited academic volume: Rasool, Ebrahim (1996). "Unveiling the heart of fear". In James, Wilmot; Caliguire, Daria; Cullian, Kerry; Levy, Janet; Westcott, Shauna (eds.). Now That We Are Free: Coloured Communities in a Democratic South Africa. IDASA/FNS, Lynne Rienner Publishers. pp. 54–55. ISBN 9781555876937. (FWIW, the book uniformly lowercases the term, along with "black" and "white", but it's also just a hair short of 30 years old. In a new book of this sort written today, I would expect that it would be capitalized, at least in this latter-day sense, by at least some of the authors. This later paper[34] in a similar vein does so.) Another side point is that "Black" in the SA sense actually often has a narrower meaning than it does anywhere else, inclusive only of particular native/indigenous African ethno-cultural groups, but exclusive of others, including the Khoisan. So for that narrowed sense of the name, there's actually a stronger argument to capitalize it than there would be in the North American and British very generalized sense which basically equates to "noticeably of sub-Saharan African descent of any kind". Rather in the middle are terms like "Native American" and Canadian "First Nations", inclusive of unrelated ethnic groups, multiple language families, and gene pools that are very distinct (even if ultimately of north Asian origin toward the end of the last Ice Age). A third passing point is that capitalization of "Coloured[s]" in an ethic sense seems to go back quite away; a major article (cited at by at least 22 later works) on the subject of them in an anthropological not politico-legal sense, has capital-C throughout and dates to 1950 [35]. This one[36] from 1967 has been cited even more. I can't presently very well evaluate whether there was a marked shift in or immediately after 1994 toward lowercase (at least in SA publications; I would need to find some way to examine a boatload of them from the 1948–1994 range), but I'm not sure it matters much, since the capitalization (even if it slumped for a while) is on the rise, at least for "sense 3". The immediate evidence is this: If we re-do the above GScholar search but constrained to the last 5 years worth of articles only [37], then the capitalization rate increases markedly (though I'm not going to do another one-by-one count; that took a while).
My default (I'm rather notorious for it) is to lowercase pretty much anything WP can get away with lowercasing. But there's a logic problem with doing it in this kind of case, specifically because these terms are serving as ethno-cultural or so-called "race" names (not descriptions or classifiers), thus are serving the function of proper names, regardless how they originated. (Really, virtually all names ultimately have a traceable linguistic meaning, except when they are invented silliness, like Mxyzptlk, though some real ones are uncertain/debated, including my own surname, which I've been researching for 30-odd years.) It's ultimately the etymological fallacy to decide that because such a term a has/had another more prosaic, common-noun meaning that it cannot be a proper name when used as one. (By that "reasoning", the Blackfoot Indians are really "blackfoot", and even Pacific peoples would have to "pacific". The brainfart there is obviously that these are not literal description, but metaphor; the Blackfoots don't have dark extremities, Polynesians are not unusually placid, and the Coloureds do not display rainbows of hues like bird plumage nor were they coloured in by anyone.) The variable use in SA is pretty clearly indicative that some simply do not want to capitalize "black", "coloured", and "white" because they are also, in other contexts, everyday words, and some are probably resistant to do it simply because of prescriptive notions they grew up with about the "right" way to write, and a habit of language preservationism/traditionalism. (There are habits I'm not entirely immune to, but they aren't much affecting me on this particular matter because the logic of applying the same capitalization to all ethnic names, as a proper-name class by definition, is much more compelling.)
In closing, the question is whether MoS's rather blanket statement on this (to use capital-C "Coloured" in reference to the South African population) should be changed. I think it's not problematic as it is, really. Nothing has "broken" as a result of it. From a WP:P&G perspective, we have some rules that interact complicatedly. The lead of MOS:CAPS has us lowercase, by default, anything that is not "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent reliable sources" (and "coloured", like "black" and "white", is not). However, further down the guideline, at MOS:PN, we have an instruction to always capitalize a proper name, except for rare exceptions (usually trademarks like iPod and a few artiste names like k.d. lang) that begin lowercase and the majority of sources go along with that lowercase stylization in that case. "Coloured" as an ethnonym, in its modern usage, qualifies as such a proper name by most sensible measure, but doesn't qualify for lowercasing since sources do not uniformly lowercase it. We also have a de facto principle to consider WP:ABOUTSELF: The subject (even a group one) can be a reliable source for its own name, so the more Coloureds prefer that name and capitalize it (and the number seems to be growing not shrinking), the stronger the pressure on us to do so. Altogether, this suggests that if the rule were to change, it should be to capitalize it as an ethno-cultural name, but lowercase it as an apartheid and earlier politico-legal classification (especially since that included people from disparate actual ethnic groups). Do we need to make that change? WP:MOSBLOAT suggests "no": If we have gotten along fine for 20+ years without a rule, then we do not need that rule, and if we do not need it, we have an active need to not have it, because MoS is over-complicated and lengthy already. You might or might not have already known this, but I have been one of the principal shepherds of MoS for 18 years or so (which should explain why I've cared to go into this much analysis on a style question). The experience has taught me the heard way that a complex, hair-splitting rule tends to cause more trouble than it is worth. We have this problem, long term, with several matters of constant confusion and dispute, such as when to capitalize a job/office/role title, and when to use which kind of dash and how to space it, among several other perennial thorns in the collective side. Simplicity has its merits, even when it cannot please everyone on every matter. 21:25, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
PS: See also WT:Manual of Style#RfC: Gentilic form of Botswana as potentially of interest, though not directly related to this. PPS: Thanks for the SA govt. Editorial Style Guide. That one somehow had escaped my collection, and just in the first few pages it has proven useful for some unrelated purposes. (E.g. it is evidence against the oft-bandied-about claim that dotted abbreviations like "e.g." and "Prof." are Americanisms and that everyone else follows the alleged "British practice" of writing "eg" and "Prof" without the punctuation. I already knew that was nonsense, since even major British style guides that are not news-journalism ones do not advise that; but it's additional evidence to cite next time that comes up.)
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:25, 26 February 2025 (UTC)- Well, I meant what I said about not wanting to fight, but equally I want to respect the thoroughness of your response by giving you more detailed feedback than "okay".
- Your first two paragraphs represent an extremely American perspective. Reality is close to the opposite in SA, the capital C is seen as racist (at least in the circles in which I have spent my life) because it's how all the apartheid regime's language referred to coloured people. For my part, I am going to spend the next few weeks asking around my social circles for other perspectives, to check that I didn't invent this and then start treating it as true at some point.
- Before this conversation, my only awareness of its capitalized use (outside this outdated, racist sense) was in specific, very academic circles where things settled differently, and certainly not in any common or everyday usage.
- I completely accept that this is probably a generational thing and that (as you say) younger people are picking up the American Black, White, etc. thing, but it is pretty clearly not a majority position yet (as you recognize).
- Let me give you that list (with black "standing out") from an SA perspective: black, coloured, Indian/Asian, white. Our conundrum is not the present (or indeed the future) of American English, but of South African English.
- (Or maybe my assumption is wrong here, and SA English is deserving of less respect than, for example, UK English on Wikipedia.)
- "I doubt that lower-casing "Coloured" would go over well here" is perceptive and valid, as in, convincing a bunch of Americans of this cultural difference isn't worth the energy. The unspoken baseline seems to be "the US has cultural hegemony here on Wikipedia, you must accept our language norms", which I may not enjoy but is obviously a practical operating mode.
- Paragraph three: I really appreciate the earnest and thorough source review. It exposed me to a lot more of the capitalization than I was aware of. You've effectively shifted my view from "lowercase c is correct" to "either is fine".
- Four (the angles you identify): 1) and 2) are functionally the same thing, because the white immigrants were the ones inventing the categories. I think it is more accurate to think of 2) as those of 1) who were imbued with bureaucratic authority. You are quite far off on 2), the apartheid bureaucrats were really fond of capitalizing it as Coloured and did so in all of their screeds and laws and so on (and this is why it is offensive today, to my sensibilities). I disagree on 3) (given my life spent immersed in SA media) but recognize that the onus is on me to make that case and I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so.
- Five is about what I expected. It is really wild for me to see you quote a rule that says that "The English Wikipedia prefers no national variety over others." and then defend leaving the rule "Coloured [...] is capitalized" as written, after looking at all the material you have in researching this. Maybe ENGVAR should say "Wikipedia does not prefer US English over UK English". That said, I do think your point about SA not being sufficiently consistent on the capitalization is valid (but it is evidence for an either/or, not a must-be-capitalized rule).
- The source review towards the end of five, and in six: again, I respect the effort, and honestly can't really comment. Maybe the SA formal-literary and academic worlds are as you say (the n is a little on the low side, but I respect the limits of comprehensiveness for such a niche issue). My language exposure has been more everyday: news media, written text conversations, pulpy fiction books, business documents, and so on.
- The single example of a racist using a lower-case c is not convincing.
- South Africa is really inconsistent on -ise vs. -ize. Most style guides will say -ise, but my experience of used language leans more -ize, so I standardized my use to that. I am a devout descriptivist.
- Not much to comment on in seven. Again, I respect the effort put in.
- Eight: I happen to share that aesthetic preference (lowercasing where possible). The rest is preaching to the converted; I am also very sensitive to correct use of ethonyms and their social implications. Indeed it is the reason I brought this up to you (so I wouldn't have to type Coloured if I wanted to contribute to an article about SA).
- Ascribing the inclination to lowercase ethonyms to them being everyday words and/or absorbed prescriptivism is deeply offensive. This is simply how we use these ethonyms in South Africa. Try to understand that your perspective on capitalizing ethonyms is American.
- Nine: I tend to agree with you that simplicity and fewer words should generally be the compass for something like articulating a MOS. But I think it is disingenuous to frame the potential change as you have; in the relevant sentence
The term Coloured in reference to a specific ethnic group of Southern Africa is not a slur, and is capitalized; person/people of colo[u]r is not offensive, and not capitalized.
- ...I would simply change "and is capitalized" to "and may be capitalized", to match reality (as you found in your source review, there is a lot of lowercase c out there). A couple more sources for you: the Stellenbosch University English style guide, the University of Johannesburg English style guide.
- I think your ABOUTSELF point is your strongest, but I wouldn't claim to be able to aggregate the sentiment of such a broad group of people with, frankly, inadequate representation in the kinds of media we have easy online access to for sourcing.
- Finally, I want to give you some human perspective on what it feels like to engage in conversations like this. I very strongly respect everything you've done in terms of going to sources and trying to look at the state of reality, and the huge amount of time you must have committed in putting that reply together, but some of your perspectives (looking at very US-specific elements of your own experience of reality and applying them to everyone else, i.e. US defaultism) are incredibly depressing to try to, um, push back against.
- I wrote a long analogy here to try to make it easier for you to empathize, but I decided that it didn't really work so I deleted it. I think that perhaps more generally, it is not possible to share the experience of being culturally erased with someone who has not experienced it themselves. I hope you never do (experience it).
- As a specific MOS interpretation question, since it says
Ethno-racial "color labels" may be given capitalized (Black and White) or lower-case (black and white). The capitalized form will be more appropriate in the company of other upper-case terms of this sort [...]
- ...does this mean that we must also capitalise black and white when they appear next to "Coloured", as they often will in SA-adjacent articles? "Will be more appropriate" is awkward language and I'm not sure how much (if any) wiggle room it offers.
- Even if I disagree with your conclusion, I do appreciate that you are well-intentioned and doing your best with the resources available to you, and acting in good faith, which is all anyone can do. Thanks for treating the question seriously and for the time you've committed to it. Emberfiend (talk) 13:47, 27 February 2025 (UTC)
- I also appreciate your detail and depth (and tone). :-) At this point, I wouldn't call such matters literally an Americanism, though there is a good chance this one is an "un-South-Africanism" to some extent. That is, I see a trend (which seems to have started in the US) to capitalize terms like "Black" and "White" in an ethno-cultural sense (at least with regard to modern populations) and it is growing outside of the US. So, I think I come back to the "WP is written for English-users globally not for South African users of the language in particular" angle, at least as a default place from which to start. Since the usage patterns in SA don't form an overwhelmingly consistent pattern, there doesn't really seem to be a MOS:ENGVAR argument. But there could be something of a population WP:ABOUTSELF one to consider.
The possibility that capital-C Coloured has latterly come to be taken as offensive by persons to whom it might pertain (or to a large subset of them) is worth further investigation. I would not want to be in the position of insisting on something for consistency's sake if it was actually offensive to the subjects. (E.g., the fact that "Afro-Brazilian", "Afro-Cuban" and the like remain common usage, both in academic RS and in vernacular usage, doesn't mean that "Afro-American" should be imposed, when the persons to whom it refers have largely denigrated the term since the 1980s.)
I did think to use GScholar's ability to constrain results to a particular period, and limited it to the 1948–1994 apartheid span [38]. The results do show a bit more capitalization than in an unconstrained search with all results included. But it's not actually a very strong difference, especially if you look through 5 or so pages of results (and as with the original searching, discard false positives along with capitalization that only appears in titles but not body text; certain political terms-of-art from that era, like "the Coloured Vote" in a narrow sense, tend to always be capitalized, and I ruled them out as general evidence of capitalization in my original review above). This is kind of a difficult matter to assess more closely, in the absence of much RS material that's specifically focused on this term and its usage.
On the numbered (1, 2, 3) bits, I'm of course aware of the 1→2 relationship. But I was not trying to imply anything about apartheid-era bureaucratese; rather, I meant that independent RS rarely capitalize "coloured" as a legal/regulatory label, especially in modern publications. The capitalization pattern in recent sources seems to lean towards the usage as an ethno-cultural designation, especially for present-day groups.
Generational: I would think so, too. I was initially strongly resistant to "Black", "White", etc. (and to "Indigenous", "Aboriginal", "Native", etc., outside of a handful of constructions universally capitalized like "Native Americans" and "Aboriginal Australians"). Over time, I recognized that real-world usage was changing whether I liked it or not, and have re-approached with a different logic. Namely: is the term serving the function of a proper name, or simply descriptive? If the latter, as in "indigenous populations of the Eurasian steppe regions in the Bronze Age", or "native to the Gaeltacht areas of Ireland", then lowercase it. But "Black", "White", and "Coloured" as ethnic terms are not descriptions, but metaphoric/evocative names. (No one, even with OCA-2 albinism, is actually "white", but pale pinkish at most, and even the most melanin-heavy individuals on earth are dark brown not literally "black"). But all that logic would also have to give way to "This term is broadly taken as offensive by those to whom it refers" facts, if established.
"given my life spent immersed in SA media": I respect that (and it's part of why I've taken all this so seriously; if you were from Indiana or Hong Kong, I would have been far more skeptical that you had any basis for these concerns). I should be clear that I'm not trying to approach this from an "America knows best" angle (or an "SMcCandlish knows best" one). Just analyzing the available material I can find so far, and applying various logical arguments in the materials' interpretation. I've tried to include more than one such argument, even if one is more appealing to me. I should also mention that my edu. background is in cultural anthropology and linguistics, which makes me very much a relativist and descriptivist versus a prescriptivist about such matters (in simple terms, it results in conclusions like "the usage pattern looks like X, except in this area where it leans toward Y", versus "X is right, except in this dialect, where only Y is correct"). This approach can self-conflictingly produce general results that are more culturally sensitive than average but which turn out culturally less sensitive in a particular instance, especially if an advocacy position underlies perception in the latter case.
Re, "The capitalized form will be more appropriate in the company of other upper-case terms of this sort": That would, yes, suggest "the Black, Coloured, Indian, and White population groups in the Cape Town Area", versus "black, Coloured, Indian, and white" or "black, coloured, Indian, and white". But if it becomes clear that capitalizing all three of those labels (skipping "Indian", which is obviously a proper name no matter what) demonstrably have an offensiveness level to a significant number of South Africans, then it might be something to make an exception for in an MoS footnote. Regardless, "black, Coloured, Indian, and white" would surely be an PoV-undesirable result.
[A lengthy wiki-historical aside: This sort of disputation has most come up since the mid-2010s, again originating in American English usage but spreading much further since. It started up because an advocacy camp (which even some news publishers have joined, though the majority have not), including some editors here, wants to capitalize "Black" but lowercase "white", just to make a socio-political point, with results like "the Black, East Asian, Hispanic, Indic, Native American, Pacific, Semitic, and white demographics of New York", and of course this has not gone over well. The last big discussion of this (that I recall) is how we ended up with the current guideline to use either "Black and White" or "black and white" consistently within the same piece, and to use the capitalization for consistency if other such terms like "Asian" or whatever are in the same material. This seems to be a pretty stable compromise, so far. The two goofy arguments that are presented against "White" in particular are: A) That it's not really an ethnic categorization or discrete population; and B) that we don't want to lend ammo to white (or White) supremacists. Argument A is silly for a number of reasons, most obviously that Europeans, or western Eurasians since "White" often includes groups from west-central Asia, are closer inter-related to each other genetically and usually culturally than even some directly neighboring autochthonous ethnic groups in Africa, and also far less diverse than "Asian" (even in a sense exclusive of west-Asian "White" people) as a label, so if "African" and "Asian" are broad ethno-cultural or "racial" names, then necessarily so is "White"; and it could not be possible for "White people" (or "Caucasians" or "people of European descent") to have a problematic hegemony on assets and influence in the West and in areas of its historical colonialism if no such group could even be identified and named. Argument B is even more silly; if one were critical of "fundamentalist Islamist terrorist activity", or "pro-Franco political violence in dictatorial Spain", or for that matter "the Nazi party in mid-20th-century Germany", one would not write these things as "islamist", "pro-franco", or "nazi" simply to denigrate them, no matter how valid the criticisms might be. People on Wikipedia have to get away from the idea of abusing capitalization (or stand-out lowercasing) as a "signifier" (and mostly have, because of the guideline linked there, though we have a few holdouts who frequently are tendentious at WP:RM discussions).]
Not sure where to go from here. It seems reasonable to suppose that some linguistics, political science, sociology and other journals and books will have included articles/chapters on use of the term "[c|C]oloured" in South Africa and its perceptions over time, probably also inclusive of some capitalization analysis; and that if significant numbers of people in SA care about this typography that advocacy pieces and more journalism-level material on the question should exist somewhere. Regardless what such material if/when found and given WP:DUE analsysis might tell us, 'simply change "and is capitalized" to "and may be capitalized"' would not work, because it sets up a choice with no reasons provided, which means people would simply fight over it emotively per their personal PoV without anything to shortcircuit that squabbling (something else we've learned over time about MoS and how it gets written). We'd need a rationale given, even if just in a footnote, that could be relied upon to decide and to end or forestall "style-war" disputation.
In closing, I should mention that while I'm an American citizen, I learned to read and write in England and spent formative years there, and have also lived in Canada. I'm not prescribing an American viewpoint (though I'm likely to have been influenced by one, since I've lived in Yankeelandia longer than elsewhere). Your concern that WP writing primarily revolves around US vs. UK English style choices is valid; things lean this direction simply because of the editorial and reader demographics. My engagement in this in such depth is out of concern that we really could be making a mistake here. (Plus I'm also full of coffee, can type very fast, and have near-endless patience for sociolinguistics.) Nevertheless, my "capitalize, as proper names, terms that are used as names for and by ethno-cultural groups" logic is self-contained and based on MOS:PN; if in this case it happens to agree with more American publishers' output, that's entirely incidental (correlation not causation). I reality, I read more British than American non-fiction, due to my research interests.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:50, 28 February 2025 (UTC)- Thanks for the response. I digested it all but I'm out of bandwidth for more meaningful replies. I think I'll just avoid SA articles so I don't have to deal with this rule. Again, I appreciate your time, I learned a lot. Emberfiend (talk) 11:11, 1 March 2025 (UTC)
- Well, buried in the above is increased concern on my part that you might actually be right. It's just a hard matter to prove documentarily without more published material directly addressing modern usage/spelling of the term. It's now something much more on my radar, though I'm not certain where the best places are to look for such material (perhaps JSTOR and EBSCOHost searches via a WP:The Wikipedia Library account (i.e., to get full access to article texts) is the route. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:45, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for the response. I digested it all but I'm out of bandwidth for more meaningful replies. I think I'll just avoid SA articles so I don't have to deal with this rule. Again, I appreciate your time, I learned a lot. Emberfiend (talk) 11:11, 1 March 2025 (UTC)
- I also appreciate your detail and depth (and tone). :-) At this point, I wouldn't call such matters literally an Americanism, though there is a good chance this one is an "un-South-Africanism" to some extent. That is, I see a trend (which seems to have started in the US) to capitalize terms like "Black" and "White" in an ethno-cultural sense (at least with regard to modern populations) and it is growing outside of the US. So, I think I come back to the "WP is written for English-users globally not for South African users of the language in particular" angle, at least as a default place from which to start. Since the usage patterns in SA don't form an overwhelmingly consistent pattern, there doesn't really seem to be a MOS:ENGVAR argument. But there could be something of a population WP:ABOUTSELF one to consider.
March music
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| story · music · places |
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New month: today is the birthday of Chopin and Ricardo Kanji, see my stories of today and yesterday, with dream music by the first and Bach played by the other. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:14, 1 March 2025 (UTC)
Today: Carmen turns 150, as the main page and my story tell you. I chose a 1962 concert of the Habanera, - enjoy! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:34, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
On Ravel's birthday, we also think of a conductor and five more composers ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:58, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
- Maybe you do. I can't keep track of my own relatives' birthdays! Heh. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:18, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
- I do, thanks to WP's lists of events ;) - Today I could have written five stories off the main page, and chose Sofia Gubaidulina. I find the TFA also interesting, and two DYK, and a birthday OTD. How about you? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:28, 16 March 2025 (UTC)
- I don't think I've touched front-page stuff in a decade. Too much wiki-politicking. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:04, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
- I try to get culture there, and sometimes it works. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:52, 20 March 2025 (UTC)
- Like today: an opera, 100 years old OTD, on Bach's birthday. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:19, 21 March 2025 (UTC)
- Today, 300 years of Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1! We sang works for (mostly) double choir by Pachelbel, Johann Christoph Bach, Kuhnau/Bach, Gounod and Rheinberger! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:59, 25 March 2025 (UTC)
- I don't think I've touched front-page stuff in a decade. Too much wiki-politicking. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:04, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
- I do, thanks to WP's lists of events ;) - Today I could have written five stories off the main page, and chose Sofia Gubaidulina. I find the TFA also interesting, and two DYK, and a birthday OTD. How about you? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:28, 16 March 2025 (UTC)
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(Probably) quick title case/sentence case question for you
editHello again, SMcCandlish ... I've recently joined the Guild of Copy Editors and have been contributing a few edits to articles in the current month's backlog reduction drive. The author of my last article, "Deer Lady," contacted me to discuss some of the editing, and mentioned that he'd changed any titles of publications, websites, etc., that were in sentence case to title case.
I think I've read somewhere that we're supposed to leave titles exactly as they appeared in their original format. For the author's sake, I hope I'm wrong, as he has a lot of references and if he's wrong, it would require a lot of work on his part in turn to get them back to the way they were. The sooner we know the answer, the better, so the GOCE folks can check off this article as completely done.
Who's right? Augnablik (talk) 09:55, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- (talk page stalker) For clarity, I'm the author. The issue of some reference titles using sentence case, and others using title case, first came up to me several years ago at an FAC of mine. They generally request uniform citation titles, in either format, and I've also seen similar requests at FLC. Several months ago I came across a user script that helps out with this, so I've been preemptively taking care of it on articles that I write or make major contributions to as part of general cleanup, and to avoid issues if I decide to take it to FAC/FLC down the road. I believe the relevant guidelines are MOS:CONFORM and MOS:CT.
TheDoctorWho (talk) 18:03, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- There's been debate about this before. The problems are that a) citation styles differ, b) any attested citation style is permissible here [at least in theory – a very unhelpful one would be likely to be replaced], c) but only one can be used in a single article, and d) for all intents and purposes WP:CS1 is the default (it's used in about 95% of our material), yet e) it doesn't specify a preference in this regard.
It's been my observation, both professionally and as a Wikipedian for so very long, that the most prevalent convention is that 1) the title of the major work (the thing in italics) always goes in title case; and 2) that often not always the title of the minor work (the part in quotation marks) goes in sentence case (but starting again with sentence case for a subtitle, whether after ":", after "–", or inside parentheses AKA round brackets), most especially if it is an article in a periodical publication (including a website). This combined style dominates (though not super-overwhelmingly) in academic journals, in chapter titling of academic books, in news publishing, and in genuinely reliable-source online publications (i.e., in the vast majority of WP's source material). So, doing "Article name in sentence case: With subtitle" and Periodical or Book Name in Title Case is generally a reasonable default, especially if your goal is to normalize conflicting styles within the same article. The complications are that this pattern does not hold for minor works that have something of a stand-alone nature, which generally also receive title case (e.g. songs on an album or from a musical production; short stories gathered into an anthology; sometimes previously published papers gathered into an edited volume; episodes of a TV series; named issues or subseries of a comic book/graphic novel series; named multi-episode arcs of a TV series; and several other such cases; often also in chapters or sections of a fiction book). So, don't try to impose an artificial uniformity that doesn't match real-world usage.
All that said, one should have absolutely no concern at all with regard to how it was formatted originally (other than for special uses of italics or lowercase, e.g. biological binominals are always properly given in the form Notophthalmus viridescens (italicized, but not above the genus level; genus and higher capitalized; species and lower not capitalized), regardless of title-case versus sentence case generalities; and trademarks conventionally (i.e. by almost all independent publishers) given with leading lowercase, like iPhone, are left that way). If I write a paper and submit it to one journal, it may be published as "The unbearable being of lightness", while the next journal over may run it as "The Unbearable Being of Lightness", and the next one might render it in all-caps. This is meaningless and WP simply has no reason to care. When you look for such a source via JSTOR, Google Scholar, EBSCOHost, Scholar.Archive.org, etc., how it is listed in search results often does not reflect how it was printed in the original publication – it got changed by the system doing the indexing (same goes for news searches). Plus, in title case, there are additional messes, like some academic publishers lowercase ALL prepositions, even long ones such as alongside and throughout, while others follow the same five-letter rule that we do (MOS:5LETTER, part of MOS:CT, part in turn of MOS:TITLES), and some use the four-letter rule most favored in news journalism. But journalism isn't consistent either, and sometimes is five-letter, or sometimes three-letter, or sometimes is an in-house idiosyncrasy, like "four-letter except these exceptions"). Worse yet, as more and more publications move to online-first, and their publishing is mediated through sometimes not-very-sophisticated filtering mechanisms, you frequently run into the twin nonsense of uppercasing every single word (even "a", "an", "the", and other ones conventionally, for 200+ years now, never capitalized in title case), or lowercasing every single word that is shorter than X number of characters (thus "if", "no", etc. being lowercased in "broken" title case). But that's not all! There are (primarily academic) publishers who sentence case ALL titles, including of books and journals. There's even at least one (fortunately rare) academic citation style that forces the title of the major work into SCREAMING ALL-CAPS (and another one that contrarily does that crap to author names); I've also seen a super-dumb one that puts the article or other minor-work name in italics and uses no markup (italics or quotes) for the major work title (journal, book); and another that italicizes author names and no titles. Thankfully, none of those abominations has caught on here. For all I know, they might all be dead practices by now; it's stuff I encountered as an undergrad in the 1987–91 range. That brings up yet another wrinkle: Just because some journal or publisher of journals preferred some style at the time of the publication of the article doesn't mean they still do today, making the choice meaningless yet again.
WP and, more importantly, our readers have no use for any of that kind of chaos, and should always normalize titles (MOS:CONFORM) to our five-letter rule, when title case is involved, to present a consistent approach to citations that is intuitive to read and easy to maintain.
PS: The edge case of "artistic capitalization" (which mostly comes up in song titles and album names) should be approached from a MOS:TM perspective: Do virtually all independent sources, including especially any outside the sphere of entertainment journalism (which is not really independent of the media companies, but entirely dependent on their advertising dollars) go along with the unusual capitalization (or unusual lowercasing, or other unusual stylization)? Or do they mostly ignore it? Or it is a really mixed bag? If either of the latter two cases, then write it in normal English. Another thing to check in such a regard is to look at all releases of the item in question, and all promotional material from the artist/author and from the label or other publisher (and all of them, if more than one). If they themselves do not consistently use the unusual stylization, this is evidence that the style was a choice of the cover designer not of the artist or studio, and is not meaningful, so WP should not mimic it. Another telltale sign of such a case is when every title on the album (or whatever) is given in a weird format; this is a designer being cutesy, not the band (or whatever) signifying something important. There are cases where it is important, but it is sources not personal editorial belief or preference (or "artist deference"!) that make this the case. David Bowie's "'Heroes'" song and "Heroes" album form the most classic case in point; Bowie used a scare-quoted "Heroes" to imply skepticism/irony, and this has been sufficiently discussed in reliable sources to prove it. Another example is AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted by Ice Cube; this is a reference to the KKK (Ku Klux Klan), and should not be rendered Amerikkka as if it represents a stutter, much less "corrected" to America. But sometimes stylizations that various fanbois are up in arms about are not appropriate to adopt here and get rejected by consensus after examination of usage in independent sources. This includes a large number of ALLCAPS titles that are not actually acronyms, and also includes a fad in modern Asian publishing of injecting extraneous punctuation into names when transliterated into Latin characters. The classic case in point is Gangsta (manga), styled on its English-version cover as GANGSTA. – with all-caps and dot. But there are several others in the same vein, including some J-pop and K-pop band names and album/song titles, as well as other manga/anime cases. (I have declined to store them in my wetware RAM.)
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:58, 14 March 2025 (UTC)- 😱 Thanks for all the time and effort you put into that reply SMcC! At times like this, I'm tempted to think you might not really be a live person but a machine into which we drop requests, like coins, and out slide full-fledged graduate-level dispensations of Wiki wisdom!
- Looking back and trying to remember what I read by way of WP guidance on titles of references, I wonder if whatever it was might have pertained only to titles in foreign languages. I'm sure it said to leave those alone because English tends to use title case but many other languages, especially European ones, sentence case. Augnablik (talk) 03:14, 15 March 2025 (UTC)
- Happy to help. On foreign titles, the default approach is "Capitalization in non–English-language titles varies, even over time within the same language. Retain the style of the original for modern works. For historical works, follow the dominant usage in modern, English-language, reliable sources." But this doesn't somehow supersede all other concerns. E.g., we have a broader principle, applicable to everything (other than acronyms properly given in "XYZ" format) to normalize all-caps to regular writing. So, if someone copy-pasted in citation information that had a title like MI GATO ES EL DIABLO we should put that in the default style for Spanish, Mi gato es el diablo, and a chapter mis-rendered as "LLEGÓ DE LAS ESTRELLAS" would be normalized to "Llegó de las estrellas". This pattern holds for titles of books, plays, movies and similar works, and subworks like articles, chapters, scenes, episodes, etc. The exception is that it is becoming conventional to title-case the titles of newspapers and magazines, thus El Diario de Nuevo Laredo. If it were French, then we'd use the French conventions: MON CHAT EST LE DIABLE would become Mon chat est le diable, while LE CHAT EST LE DIABLE would become Le Chat est le diable (because French capitalizes the "important" word that follows le/la/l' at the start of a title or subtitle), and the chapter of "IL EST VENU DES ÉTOILES" would become "Il est venu des étoiles". This pattern holds for all works, including newspapers, e.g. L'Action française. German is more complicated, because it capitalizes all nouns. All these languages also capitalize proper names in titles, but most languages do not have English's habit of capitalizing adjectives derived from proper nouns (Spanish becomes español; French becomes française). For languages that do not have capitalization, like East Asian scripts, we'd normalize a transliteration or translation to the style used for the English-language titles, thus newspaper 秋田魁新報 becomes Akita Sakigake Shimpō (transliteration), and 東京スポーツ becomes Tokyo Sports (translation), and most often article titles in sentence case unless our article is consistently giving them in title case (which is decreasingly usual): "堂島米市場 — 世界における先物取引所の先駆け" > "Dojima rice market: The world's first futures exchange". PS: In citation templates, the way to handle that sort of thing is:
{{cite web |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by line.--> |title=堂島米市場 — 世界における先物取引所の先駆け |language=ja |trans-title=Dojima rice market: The world's first futures exchange |work=JPX: 日本取引所グループ |trans-work=JPX: Japan Exchange Group |publisher=[[Osaka Exchange]] |date=2020 |url= https://www.jpx.co.jp/dojima/ja/index.html |access-date=15 March 2025 |url-status=live |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20240515051058/https://www.jpx.co.jp/dojima/ja/index.html |archive-date=15 May 2024}}. Anyway, a way to look at the (rather poor) "Retain the style of the original for modern works" instruction is really that it means "Use the style you found, unless it is really obviously screwed up (like ALL-CAPS) or you really know what you are doing." It's a discouragement of people who don't know what they are doing trying to "fix" things in ways that may not actually be helpful, like rendering a French book title as Les Liaisons Dangereuses (the correct form is Les Liaisons dangereuses), or a German article title as "Die statuen des antiken Mesopotamiens" (with the noun Statuen incorrectly lowercased). The WP:IAR principle applies; if you actually do know what you are doing, then correcting mis-formatted foreign titles would objectively be an improvement to the encyclopedia, so the erstwhile "rule" to use the title as-found should be ignored. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:17, 15 March 2025 (UTC)
- Happy to help. On foreign titles, the default approach is "Capitalization in non–English-language titles varies, even over time within the same language. Retain the style of the original for modern works. For historical works, follow the dominant usage in modern, English-language, reliable sources." But this doesn't somehow supersede all other concerns. E.g., we have a broader principle, applicable to everything (other than acronyms properly given in "XYZ" format) to normalize all-caps to regular writing. So, if someone copy-pasted in citation information that had a title like MI GATO ES EL DIABLO we should put that in the default style for Spanish, Mi gato es el diablo, and a chapter mis-rendered as "LLEGÓ DE LAS ESTRELLAS" would be normalized to "Llegó de las estrellas". This pattern holds for titles of books, plays, movies and similar works, and subworks like articles, chapters, scenes, episodes, etc. The exception is that it is becoming conventional to title-case the titles of newspapers and magazines, thus El Diario de Nuevo Laredo. If it were French, then we'd use the French conventions: MON CHAT EST LE DIABLE would become Mon chat est le diable, while LE CHAT EST LE DIABLE would become Le Chat est le diable (because French capitalizes the "important" word that follows le/la/l' at the start of a title or subtitle), and the chapter of "IL EST VENU DES ÉTOILES" would become "Il est venu des étoiles". This pattern holds for all works, including newspapers, e.g. L'Action française. German is more complicated, because it capitalizes all nouns. All these languages also capitalize proper names in titles, but most languages do not have English's habit of capitalizing adjectives derived from proper nouns (Spanish becomes español; French becomes française). For languages that do not have capitalization, like East Asian scripts, we'd normalize a transliteration or translation to the style used for the English-language titles, thus newspaper 秋田魁新報 becomes Akita Sakigake Shimpō (transliteration), and 東京スポーツ becomes Tokyo Sports (translation), and most often article titles in sentence case unless our article is consistently giving them in title case (which is decreasingly usual): "堂島米市場 — 世界における先物取引所の先駆け" > "Dojima rice market: The world's first futures exchange". PS: In citation templates, the way to handle that sort of thing is:
- There's been debate about this before. The problems are that a) citation styles differ, b) any attested citation style is permissible here [at least in theory – a very unhelpful one would be likely to be replaced], c) but only one can be used in a single article, and d) for all intents and purposes WP:CS1 is the default (it's used in about 95% of our material), yet e) it doesn't specify a preference in this regard.
Feedback request: History and geography request for comment
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Citations in block quotes
editAccording to Chicago, MLA and APA style guides, they do go in the block. Do we have contrary guidance? Srnec (talk) 23:17, 15 March 2025 (UTC)
- Yes (see MOS:BQ), and we don't care what some off-site style guides prefer; we have our own for good reasons :-). CMoS, etc ., are written with typesetting on paper in mind, but WP:NOT#PAPER. The content inside the
<blockquote>...</blockquote>element is defined by W3C and WHATWG as quoted content only, so putting citations inside that element is breaking the HTML specs, which is something we avoid doing like the plague. (This is also why{{block indent}}exists; don't abuse{{blockquote}}or its wrapped<blockquote>to get visual indentation of non-quotations.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:00, 17 March 2025 (UTC) - PS: The offsite style guides you like are also aimed at academic material in which inline-readable citations, with author and date and sometimes other details ("Harvard" or parenthetical referencing), are the norm. But that style has actually been rejected by the WP community (see WP:PARENTHETICAL). So, while it would be entirely sensible in some journal article to tack something like
[Johnson (1922), p. 37]at the end of a block quotation, following the style of the journal publisher, that approach is no longer used here. The habit of doing this is something some academic-leaning editors have tried to "port over" to our[1]super-compressed citation approach, but that is mixing apples and oranges; the rationale for putting a citation at that spot in parenthetic style on paper (or in TeX) isn't applicable to a completely different citation approach and a markup language that forbids it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:15, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
A goat for you!
edit.jpg)
Since I missed Thanksgiving through New Years holidays, this is just a reminder you are one of the people I consider to be the GOAT!
Huggums537voted! (sign🖋️|📞talk) 12:21, 16 March 2025 (UTC)
- Wow, thank you very much! — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:02, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
DoneWikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Film has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. —Matthew / (talk) 22:49, 16 March 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
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Feedback request: History and geography request for comment
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Books & Bytes – Issue 67
editThe Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 67, January – February 2025
- East View Press and The Africa Report join the library
- Spotlight: Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention and WikiCredCon
- Tech tip: Suggest page
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --18:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
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Contentious topic
edit DisregardYou have recently made edits related to discussions about infoboxes, and edits adding, deleting, collapsing, or removing verifiable information from infoboxes. This is a standard message to inform you that discussions about infoboxes, and edits adding, deleting, collapsing, or removing verifiable information from infoboxes is a designated contentious topic. This message does not imply that there are any issues with your editing. For more information about the contentious topics system, please see Wikipedia:Contentious topics. The request for comment at Talk:China involving the info box. 128.193.8.125 (talk) 20:30, 20 March 2025 (UTC)
- WP:DTTR. As an anon, you are not in a position to "police" registered editors' topic participation, and this template is not appropriate (as its documentation clearly says) for talk pages of people long already involved in a particular CTOPIC and thus already well aware of the CTOPIC designation of that subject. But of course you have to look into the discussion to know who that is, and you clearly didn't do that here. You should leave CTOPIC notices to admins and other regular editors. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:14, 22 March 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment
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Feedback request: Society, sports, and culture request for comment
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Request For Comment - Infobox Weather Damage Estimates
edit DoneThere is a new ongoing request for comment discussion, with the goal to solve the various disputes on weather-related articles (such as tornadoes or hurricanees) on how to best utilize damage estimates in the infobox. Your comments are highly-requested, as the result of this discussion will affect all weather-related articles. This notice is being sent to all editors who have recently edited weather event articles.
You can view and participate in the discussion here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Weather#RFC - Weather Infobox Damages. The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 17:23, 23 March 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Society, sports, and culture request for comment
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Feedback request: Society, sports, and culture request for comment
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WT:NCCAPS
editHi, it is not appropriate to make comments about editor conduct at a page such as WT:NCCAPS particularly in a designated CTOP. This edit (particularly from Randy_Kryn's now decade+ failure, indeed abject refusal ...
digresses from commenting on the issue and could reasonably be seen as a personal attack. I acknowledge that the proceeding comment was inflammatory but two wrongs don't make a right. I would suggest that you redact that part of your comment and subsequent comments that defend it. I have posted a similar message in respect to the proceeding comment Cinderella157 (talk) 05:00, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
- @Cinderella157 and Randy Kryn: I concede/agree that editor behavior/conduct matters aren't generally helpful in such discussions. If RK is willing to redact, then I am as well, though I'm not sure how productive that is after such a time span. Especially if anyone else has responded to that sub-thread. It might be most sensible to use
{{collapse}}(or{{collapse top}}and{{collapse bottom}}) around that block of material, including any third-party chiming in about the tone. If we feel the need, we can re-make our on-topic points in a non-personalized manner in new posts. Another option is to just let it lie, but then RK and I agree to not continue such inter-editor conflict and stick to the substance of the matter. Any of these are fine by me. What wouldn't be fine is me deleting/striking/collapsing my (or much of my) material while RK's stands as-is, since that would give the false impression that his views on the question (and about other editors) have gone unchallenged. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:33, 1 April 2025 (UTC)- Thanks SMcCandlish, but we were both being honest about our feelings on the issues and I don't feel insulted even though I may mention that insults have been given. My comment contains my thoughts about the continuing arguments over percentages for uppercasing/lowercasing, the subject of the discussion, as does yours. If Cinderella157 feels like policing the Wiki then that's their right, doesn't mean we have to agree with them or with ourselves. Randy Kryn (talk) 09:07, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
- Fair enough, and kinda the same boat. Disagreement and complaint don't have to be "insulting". It's not like you said my mama was stupid or I said you look ugly. Heh. Cinderella157's correct that it's not the right venue for the personalized complaint part from either of us. And WP:REFACTOR would let anyone collapse-box a thread chunk they thought was a distraction for everyone else. Honestly, there are bigger fish to fry right now, without me having spell that out. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:29, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
- Bigger fish could include a smoked trout for Cinderella157 (who may notice the 'smoked' reference). Randy Kryn (talk) 09:39, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
- Randy Kryn when you comment on percentages, you are addressing the debate. When you start making comments like:
They shouldn't be editing casing discussions in my opinion
, you digress into commenting on editors and WT:NCCAPS is not the appropriate place for that. It is comments like that which can turn a reasonable discussion into a battle ground with retaliatory comments (Stanton's). The discussion occurred with a CTOP area. The area has been designated a CTOP because it is subject to greater than usual disruption. As a CTOP a higher standard of editor conduct is expected - not a lesser standard. I am not the only one to note the exchange, even if I am the one that has taken some affirmative action. Stanton's initial response (above) acknowledged that there was an issue and has mutually agreed to refrain from similar conduct in the future. A similar acknowledgement and undertaking would resolve the matter but trivialising it is not helpful. Given this (at WT:NCCAPS) is likely the start of a protracted discussion, I would hate for this opening salvo to set the tone. If it does, I could foresee several editors arriving at ANI or WP:ARBREQ. Cinderella157 (talk) 10:55, 1 April 2025 (UTC)- Yes teacher. You have a good point and I will leave a pumpkin on your desk. But rather than go to the principal's office I'd rather go to WP:BARBEQUE. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:13, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
- All good points, C. For my part, I will plead over-stress due to my country tearing itself apart and much of the West with it. Everything everywhere has felt like a disaster and an impending war. I can't even get on somewhere like LinkedIn without almost everything being somewhere between a disaster and a declaration of battle lines. If I go out with friends, every single conversation turns within minutes to whether half the people we know will be deported, in a concentration camp, or dead within the year. I'm fairly good at compartmentalizing when I'm on this site, but I'm not a robot, and the mood of alarm and despair is not entirely escapable. The length of time that RK and I have been going over the same things with each other also has something to do with it, but I can generally translate that into a weary rather than upset tone. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:50, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
- Randy Kryn when you comment on percentages, you are addressing the debate. When you start making comments like:
- Bigger fish could include a smoked trout for Cinderella157 (who may notice the 'smoked' reference). Randy Kryn (talk) 09:39, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
- Fair enough, and kinda the same boat. Disagreement and complaint don't have to be "insulting". It's not like you said my mama was stupid or I said you look ugly. Heh. Cinderella157's correct that it's not the right venue for the personalized complaint part from either of us. And WP:REFACTOR would let anyone collapse-box a thread chunk they thought was a distraction for everyone else. Honestly, there are bigger fish to fry right now, without me having spell that out. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:29, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks SMcCandlish, but we were both being honest about our feelings on the issues and I don't feel insulted even though I may mention that insults have been given. My comment contains my thoughts about the continuing arguments over percentages for uppercasing/lowercasing, the subject of the discussion, as does yours. If Cinderella157 feels like policing the Wiki then that's their right, doesn't mean we have to agree with them or with ourselves. Randy Kryn (talk) 09:07, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment
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BLP, computer software entrepreneur
edit DoneHi SMcCandlish, I recently posted an edit request for Arkady Volozh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Arkady_Volozh#Career_section_restructure. Volozh is an entrepreneur with a computer science background - as you wrote on your userpage that you are a software engineer and computer system administrator, and you have done extensive work for WP:BLP, I was hoping that you would help me reorganize his article. I have a COI and would like a neutral editor to make the changes. Thank you very much Wikigracht (talk) 14:54, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
- I might be able to take a look at it but ... "a lot is going on right now", and my WP time is limited. I'm also stuck with the flu, not have little energy and focus right at the moment. See thread immediately below this one for "general approach" comments that might be thematically pertinent to this kind of bio. It'll take a quick look at the thread you pointed to and comment there, though. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:14, 3 April 2025 (UTC)
- I did that, with a suggested re-revision. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:27, 3 April 2025 (UTC)
- Hi SMcCandlish, I hope you're feeling better. I understand that you're busy and appreciate you taking the time with my request. Wikigracht (talk) 22:06, 9 April 2025 (UTC)
- It's on my list, ahead of the Thoma-related request (in the thread below). There's just a lot going on right now. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:54, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
- Hi SMcCandlish, I hope you're feeling better. I understand that you're busy and appreciate you taking the time with my request. Wikigracht (talk) 22:06, 9 April 2025 (UTC)
- I did that, with a suggested re-revision. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:27, 3 April 2025 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandlish! I saw on your userpage that you're a member of WP:WPNM and you also mention an interest in Art Nouveau - given that overlap, I wonder if you would look over my draft for Carl Thoma, an art collector with a strong presence in the Sante Fe art scene (as well as an elder statesman in the private equity industry). The draft was initially declined, but I've since tightened the sourcing and the language - if you believe it's ready, would you mind publishing it? Thanks, JBarTB (talk) 15:36, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
- I'm not really in a position to contradict the Articles for Creation reviewers. While this is a bit on the harsh side: "It is a complete puff piece built on manufactured and paid for PR non-references. No indication of significance." – there seems to be more than grain of truth to this. "No" indication of significance isn't quite true; the "one of the deans of the buyout business" and "private-equity pioneer" quotes indicate why he might be notable, and at least seem to come from reliable sources. (Forbes can be questionable; per WP:RSNP, only material written by its editorial staff is usable, not material submitted by "contributors", i.e. by random bloggers). The source of the other quote I don't know well.
However, the article is not focused on his industry impact/legacy/reputation (as assessed by reliable sources). It's almost entirely a rote recitation of factoids about where he went to school, what company names were, who he worked with, etc. "There's no there there." The sourcing sometimes does seem like regurgitated press releases, or is too often primary sourcing: his or his own company's output. When it is legit news, it's almost always about a company or a corporate happening, not about him, and only mentioning him in passing, a quick name-drop. Where are the in-depth profiles written by independent journalists in major business-news publications and major newspapers? Where's are the chapters about him in major-publisher books about private-equity and acquisitions/buyouts sub-industries, or about business in New Mexico? Being rich and having an art-buying hobby doesn't make someone an encyclopedia subject. The real world has to be writing significant material about him (that's actually about him, not a company he's involved with) and without his or his people's "help" (spin) in writing it.
The tone does appear to have improved from earlier draft and is reasonably neutral. But this remains written like a "Who's Who in New Mexico Business" CV, not like an encyclopedia article. I'm not sure it can be written like the latter until there is more material from publications unrelated to him but which devote a lot of page-space to industry and public perception of him, his work, and its impact. PS: The fact that there isn't even the slightest hint of criticism or controversy is suspicious. No one becomes a billionaire without incident. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:36, 3 April 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for the thorough and helpful response. And you're right - it's clear that in my effort to avoid promotional language, I neglected to give enough attention to Thoma's significance and industry impact in the draft. Would you be able to help me integrate some of this material - which exists and is supported by RS - into the draft?
- Specifically, when RS talk about Thoma's role as "one of private equity's founding fathers" (PE Hub), they generally point to how he pioneered the "buy and build" strategy, which is now "part of the toolkit of almost every PE firm" (Buyouts Insider). This is also borne out in scholarly sources, like this Virginia Law & Business Review article, which says: "In the 1980s, a small number of firms started to successfully employ an alternative strategy, 'buy and build.' Often attributed to Stanley Golder and Carl Thoma, the strategy involves making an initial 'platform acquisition' and 'adding on' complementary or competing firms by way of subsequent acquisitions." (VLBR).
- I should also add, at the risk of quibbling, that "an art-buying hobby" is somewhat of an understatement - Thoma is a significant figure in the art world (see this article in D Magazine, which isn't currently cited in the draft).
- I really appreciate you lending a hand here! Thanks again, JBarTB (talk) 18:47, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
- I might be able to take an editing pass at it (and shift it toward something more likely to be accepted by WP:AFC and not deleted at WP:AFD). But I have more pressing stuff to deal with at the moment, and already something similar to this in my queue (to work over an article that already exists in mainspace not as a draft). PS: I'm not suggesting that Thoma's art collecting be suppressed from the draft; it's simply not the main reason he might be notable, so not appropriate to excessively dwell on. And one's person assertions of someone's importance (e.g. to the art world) are encyclopedically meaningless. It is reliable independent sources that tell us whether someone is important and why. It's a bare fact that not everything we personally might want to write about in our personally preferred way is going to happen at this site, because it is a tertiary-source publication, tied to reliable-source coverage, and is not an op-ed vehicle for publishing one's primary-source original opinion or research. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:46, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
Some citation questions
editHi, SMcC, I'm about to wrap up the Ramendra Kumar article you helped me with on some earlier issues (disambiguation and See also entries being the main one). Now I have a few questions about some citation intricacies that I hope you can help me with. Here is the first, which it seems to me should also go in the See also section, even though what's there now are two names similar to Ramendra Kumar.
SITUATION: Kumar became what is popularly called a "cancer warrior" four years ago, and his oncological surgeon was so impressed with his recovery from near-death and his family support system that he made a YouTube video, in which he narrates the case as something of a story. Before asking my format-related questions, I need to tell you a few things about the video.
- The URL of the video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fArgL7sTt9g
- The title of the video as shown on the video when it starts to play is is "Battling Tumor with Humour."
- In the browser — which viewers following the link would see just before the video starts playing — there is other text appearing just below the photo of the video: Triumph Over Rectal Cancer: A Journey of Resilience. Mr. Ramendra Kumar & Dr. Sandeep Nayak.
- There are two pieces of information that appear at the upper left and upper right of the video: saMrohaNa Cancer Foundation (left) and MACS Clinic (right).
Now, on to the citation formatting questions.
1- I would have expected the basic Wiki format to be something like this, which is MLA format:
Nanak, Sandeep. 'Battling Tumor with Humour.' YouTube, 21 December 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fArgL7sTt9g.
But when I looked up Wiki guidance on how to cite a video, I found something that would seem to require this format (unfortunately, I didn't write down the link I'm referring to):
Nayak, Sandeep (21 December 2023). 'WATCH: Battling Tumor with Humour' (video). youtube.com.
Your thoughts about formatting a video?
2- Since there is text below the photo of the video in the browser (Triumph Over Rectal Cancer: A Journey of Resilience. Mr. Ramendra Kumar & Dr. Sandeep Nayak)—even though what usually appears there is the video title—should this additional text be included along with the video title in the citation somehow/somewhere?
3- May I put (Dr.) in parentheses after Nanak’s name? Augnablik (talk) 13:53, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
4- Should saMrohaNa Cancer Foundation and MACS Clinic appear somewhere in the citation?
- "See also" is only for links to other WP articles, not off-site resources like videos. That's "External links", if the thing in question cannot reasonably be used instead as a reference citation (in which case it should usually not also appear in "External Links". See MOS:LAYOUT for what these sections are for. YouTube videos are usually not reliable sources, unless the channel author/publisher is recognized as reliable (e.g. is a well-known subject-matter expert or is a major media organization like Associated Press or The Guardian or the New York Times.). MLA format doesn't have any more sway over Wikipedia than any other citation format. The default basically is the WP:CS1 templates, used in about 95% of our articles. Every article should have a consistent citation format/style, and if your article is already using those templates, then continue to use them. The one you are looking for is probably
{{Cite AV media}}, in which one can specify a timestamp within the video. YouTube in any such template is|via=YouTubenot|publisher=YouTube, since YT does not exert editorial control over the content and is simply a distribution method not a publisher (nor is it even an exclusive distributor; many YT videos also are simul-posted on other video venues and on the originator's website).Additional text: Probably not, but it's a judgement call. The main purpose of
|title=in a citation template is helping people find and identify the source. If adding additional text doesn't do that, then it is superfluous. "Dr.": No. WP does not do that, ever. Every author of any scientific journal paper has a doctorate, so in any science-related article, our citations would be filled with "Dr." after "Dr." after "Dr." for no reason. Again, the point of citation data is identifying and finding the source cited. It is not lauding and applauding the authors or publisher. As for your question 4, I'm not certain since I've not seen the videos. If they are the real publisher(s) of the material (have exerted editorial control over it and caused it to be produced and distributed), then yes. If they are third parties that the material is mentioning, then no. All that said, if you are attempting to cite this as some sort of source for the idea that being cheerful cures cancer, that is not okay, per WP:MEDRS. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:30, 7 April 2025 (UTC)- The See also section is only for Wiki articles ... now, that is a surprise.
- Clarification: the video is not an official reference, just something the author's surgical oncologist decided to make as an inspirational video for a series he's made with other cancer patients.
- I didn't mean that I was planning to use MLA format for references, just that because videos are not something I think I've ever cited before, I would have expected a format more like that, but instead the one I mentioned had come up somewhere in my Wiki how-to search.
- Mysteries remain, like why the placement of what we're referring to as additional words where the title of the video would normally go—under the photo of the video in the browser—and why the two logos are shown at the top of the video but not mentioned elsewhere if they're publishing facts.
- Another basic question about citations I'm almost embarrassed to admit: I have never had to create a reference (bibliography) list from scratch in Wikipedia (though I've done it countless times in outside work, also footnotes). I was able to create footnotes in the Ramendra Kumar article, using a template in the Visual editor, but I just don't find another template to use for creating the reference list. I was thinking to copy the footnotes and do some rearranging under a new list below the footnotes, but no luck with that workaround.
- Can you point me in the right direction of the template I need? Augnablik (talk) 09:21, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
- And lastly, any ideas for how to handle a case when excerpts from talks by one of the speakers asked to make remarks on Kumar's writing at a literature fest are incorrectly titled with the title of the event itself rather than the title we know is correct for those excerpts?
- "something the author's surgical oncologist decided to make as an inspirational video" sounds like clearly not a proper source to cite for anything remotely like a medical claim; this is covered by WP:MEDRS. Citations inline in the article are shown at the bottom, under a heading typically named
==References==, with the template{{reflist}}. This is a wrapper for the<references />Wiki-markup tag, and provides some additional features beyond use of<references />alone. I don't really understand your last question without being able to review the material in careful detail. But this sounds like material we would never cite in an encyclopedia article in the first place, especially not about cancer or other medical science. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:46, 7 April 2025 (UTC)- Thanks again for your replies to my above questions. Only two remain, after I bring further discussion about the video to an end by saying the video was never something I planned to use as an information source, rather for other reasons' but to avoid further confusion about this I'll simply omit it.
- 1- Although you gave me reflist as the template to use to create the equivalent of a bibliography, that would have to be used in the Source editor — which I'd prefer to avoid, if possible. I see that I didn't mention that to you in my question about a template. I was hoping for one I could use in the Visual editor, because I knew there was a template available there that could be used to create the equivalent of footnotes — so it seemed only logical to expect a corresponding template there to create the equivalent of a bibliography. Is reflist (requiring the Source editor) the only option for my needs, then?
- 2- Now for the unusual case of the incorrect title of excerpts from a talk by one of the speakers at a conference.
- Below — in small print — is the citation that I created, done in Indian/British format, and set up as best as I can figure out how to do it. I used the Basic template to create the citation, as nothing else fit the situation.
- Immediately following the citation is my best shot at wording the discrepancy between the title that appears at the URL where the excerpts can be read and a flyer showing the title of the conference along with the titles of talks by various speakers. That explanation is in small print like the citation because I think either this or an alternately worded explanation is required in this unusual situation.
- Immediately following the explanation is a description of how the flyer looks, since I can't attach it here for you to see.
- __________
- Patil, Anand. 'Indian Children's Story World and Ramendra Kumar', 1 May 2024. Excerpts from a talk presented at a daylong seminar—Ramendra Kumar's Unique Children's Story World—on 15 April 2024, in Bengaluru, sponsored by three Karnataka literary organisations: Abhinava, Makkala Sahityasakta Geleyar Balaga, and B. M. Shri Pratishthana. https://learningandcreativity.com/ramendra-kumar-world-of-childrens-literature/.
- Note: the above title is the correct one for Patil's talk, although it was not the one that appeared at the above link on the access date; instead, the displayed title is the title of the conference itself.
- __________
- If you follow the above link, you are taken to the excerpts of the talk by Anand Patil, one of the conference speakers. There you see the title of his talk is given as Ramendra Kumar’s Unique World of Children’s Literature.
- But the flyer promoting the conference shows that the above is, instead, the title of the conference itself. The flyer also shows that the title of Patil’s talk is Indian Children’s Story world and Ramendra Kumar!
- SMcC, if you can help get me out of this weird dilemma, I will happily design you a one-of-a-kind barnstar with a tartan background or perhaps a tartan Superman cape... Augnablik (talk) 13:44, 8 April 2025 (UTC)
- I don't use the Visual Editor, but I'm sure that it has the capability to insert templates; people do it all the time. I'm not able to advise about how, though, since I use the source editor 100% of the time.
- Your citation should work (any citation is better than none, as long as someone can make sense of it), though the "Note: ..." part doesn't actually seem important for readers, only for editors who might be doing source verification in details, so could be put inside an HTML comment. I think how I would do this, using our standardized citation templates:
<ref>{{cite conference |last=Patil |first=Anand |contribution=Indian Children's Story World and Ramendra Kumar |date=1 May 2024 |orig-date=15 April 2024 |title=Ramendra Kumar’s Unique World of Children’s Literature |location=Bengaluru |publisher=Abhinava / Makkala Sahityasakta Geleyar Balaga / B. M. Shri Pratishthana |via=LearningAndCreativity.com |url= https://learningandcreativity.com/ramendra-kumar-world-of-childrens-literature/ |access-date=10 April 2025}}<!--Note: the above title is the correct one for Patil's talk, although it was not the one that appeared at the above link on the access date; instead, the displayed title is the title of the conference itself.--></ref>
- This will look like:
- Patil, Anand (1 May 2024) [15 April 2024]. "Indian Children's Story World and Ramendra Kumar". Ramendra Kumar’s Unique World of Children’s Literature. Bengaluru: Abhinava / Makkala Sahityasakta Geleyar Balaga / B. M. Shri Pratishthana. Retrieved 10 April 2025 – via LearningAndCreativity.com.
- Hope that helps. Even if you use the VE for most purposes, you may have to get into the source editor to do certain things. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:31, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
- The Visual Editor has a template for setting up references that act like traditional footnotes, although they come out formatted in bibliographic style, with author's last name preceding first name and separated by a comma ... but with page numbers like traditional footnotes. Yet I just don't find a template for doing a traditional bibliography. That said, though ...
- I am really confused about the wide variety of what I find in the citation area at the bottom of articles. There are always footnotes, though they seem to be not only formatted differently from traditional footnotes but also called many things, including even REFERENCES, which I also see used for a traditional bibliography in some articles. But there doesn't always seem to be a section of references apart from what are used as footnotes. I assumed articles were always supposed to have both footnotes and bibliography, whatever they might be called.
- Do you have a template in the Source editor to create a bibliography as apart from footnotes?
- Two quick questions about your suggested reformatting of the footnote I set up with the Basic template:
- 1- Wouldn't the original date of the talk and the date of publishing the excerpts need to be more clearly identified?
- 2- Would the three literary organizations that sponsored the event really be publishers? Augnablik (talk) 19:49, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
- In appreciation for all your help on this and other articles, SMcC.
For SMcCandlish the Style Fixit Superman - Augnablik (talk) 10:13, 12 April 2025 (UTC)
- There are multiple styles of doing reference citations, and they vary from article to article. You just get used to it. For the gist, see MOS:REFERENCES and (in more detail) WP:CITE. It is generally not the case that WP articles use "a bibliography" in the exact sense that an acadeic journal article does. There are basically two WP citation models: 1) A single "References" section (that's the most common name for it, though it can have others), in which all citations appear, in the order they are cited. 2) A two-part section, most often "References" with a subheading called something like "Sources" (though there are again alternatives, like "Works cited" or even "Bibliography", though that can be problematic, either implying a particular format we don't use, like the one you happen to prefer, or in a biography implying a list of that person's works rather than independent soures we are citing). In the two-part style, the "Sources" (or whatever) subsection provides a list of works that are cited more than one time, usually alphabetically by lead author (or editor if no author); this is fairly similar to a traditional academic bibliography. Above that subsection are the inline citations, and shortened footnotes are used to reference the full citations in the subsection. However, works only cited once (especially websites) are usually also in there with the shortened footnotes above the full-citations subsection. Trying to integrate every full-citation work into the subsection even if only cited once is a great deal of work for very little if any benefit. The shortened footnotes and one-off citations, above the "Sources" or "Works cited" subsection, might also themselves be put into a subsection. (See my almost-completed draft at User:SMcCandlish/Incubator/Tartan design and weaving for an example, which also clearly illustrates how shortentened footnotes are commingled with single-use full citatation at the top of the "References" section, and only multi-use full citations are in "Sources" subsection lower down. And it also illustrates the difference between narrative footnotes and citation footnotes, in separate sections.) It's also not unheard of for a two-part setup to use separate "References" and "Sources"/"Works cited" top-level headings, instead of the latter nested under the former, but that is sloppy and unhelpful.
"Wouldn't the original date of the talk and the date of publishing the excerpts need to be more clearly identified?" No, since the purpose of our reference citations is simply helping people identify and find the sources to examine them (and secondarily to evaluate their pertinence; e.g. material from 1843 will be a poor source in most cases for anything scientific, and it would be misleading to have only
|date=2024on a recent reprint of 1843 material). Our citations are not a bibliographic database (this is why we don't include things like total page count and other claptrap). And the meaning is already clear: first released in some form on|orig-date=, while the copy we are citing was published on|date=. That said, if you feel strongly a desire to add more info, the|orig-date=parameter is actually freeform, so you could do|orig-date=original presentation 15 April 2024. This cannot be done with|date=which is strictly limited to one of WP's recognized date formats."Would the three literary organizations that sponsored the event really be publishers?" For purposes of this sort of citation, yes. The material was originally part of a live presentation at a conference, not published on paper or e-paper, and those were the conference organizers (i.e. publishers, for all intents and purposes, of the conference). As far as I can tell, anyway. If one or more of them were simply commercial sponsors and were not editorially involved in creating the event, inviting speakers, approving their presentations, etc., then they should not be mentioned at all. Again, the purpose of these citations is helping people identify and find the sources, and to be able to evaluate them, not "giving credit where due" or marketing for anyone. If the event in question was created/promoted by a three-organization partnership, then these organizations are essentially integral to the citation, especially if they have some reputation (positive or otherwise) to some subset of readers. If they were not editorially involved in the conference, then they are chaff to delete. The website we happened to find an e-text copy at had nothing to do with the material editorially and is just an after-the-fact distribution mechanism, so it goes in
|via=.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:31, 13 April 2025 (UTC)
- There are multiple styles of doing reference citations, and they vary from article to article. You just get used to it. For the gist, see MOS:REFERENCES and (in more detail) WP:CITE. It is generally not the case that WP articles use "a bibliography" in the exact sense that an acadeic journal article does. There are basically two WP citation models: 1) A single "References" section (that's the most common name for it, though it can have others), in which all citations appear, in the order they are cited. 2) A two-part section, most often "References" with a subheading called something like "Sources" (though there are again alternatives, like "Works cited" or even "Bibliography", though that can be problematic, either implying a particular format we don't use, like the one you happen to prefer, or in a biography implying a list of that person's works rather than independent soures we are citing). In the two-part style, the "Sources" (or whatever) subsection provides a list of works that are cited more than one time, usually alphabetically by lead author (or editor if no author); this is fairly similar to a traditional academic bibliography. Above that subsection are the inline citations, and shortened footnotes are used to reference the full citations in the subsection. However, works only cited once (especially websites) are usually also in there with the shortened footnotes above the full-citations subsection. Trying to integrate every full-citation work into the subsection even if only cited once is a great deal of work for very little if any benefit. The shortened footnotes and one-off citations, above the "Sources" or "Works cited" subsection, might also themselves be put into a subsection. (See my almost-completed draft at User:SMcCandlish/Incubator/Tartan design and weaving for an example, which also clearly illustrates how shortentened footnotes are commingled with single-use full citatation at the top of the "References" section, and only multi-use full citations are in "Sources" subsection lower down. And it also illustrates the difference between narrative footnotes and citation footnotes, in separate sections.) It's also not unheard of for a two-part setup to use separate "References" and "Sources"/"Works cited" top-level headings, instead of the latter nested under the former, but that is sloppy and unhelpful.
- "something the author's surgical oncologist decided to make as an inspirational video" sounds like clearly not a proper source to cite for anything remotely like a medical claim; this is covered by WP:MEDRS. Citations inline in the article are shown at the bottom, under a heading typically named
If you ever want to make an official proposal for that word change, you'll have at least my vote from the community. 🙂 Augnablik (talk) 19:11, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
- The tartan articles are complex with regard to footnotes; kind of a "maximal" example. They pretty much necessarily have a number of contextual narrative footnotes because of conflicts between the sources, and the citations themselves are complicated because various sources are one-shot and would clog up a traditional-style bibliography, while there are also many sources that are reused over and over again and do belong in a bibliography then referenced repeatedly only with shortened footnotes instead re-re-re-repeating full-length citations. As for "incubator", I use that for articles in some stage of drafting progress, because I use "sandbox" for test pages and template code development. My word choice pre-dates the "Draft:" namespace or I might have gone with "draft" instead of "incubator". I like the latter anyway, as it serves as a self-reminder that they need further development. "Draft" to me feels like "stuff that's likely to be abandoned forever", LOL. But most editors use "draft" for draft articles, and I think they tend to use "sandbox" for test pages and such, though I've seen various "User:Whoever/sandbox/Article draft name here" pages, I suppose. There's not really a reason for WP to have consistency in how people do user-space pages. [shrug] — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:41, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
PS: Something you might find helpful: User:SMcCandlish/How to use the sfnp family of templates. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:00, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
- This is in reply both to your PS above and to your April 6 message in which you commented, "Even if you use the VE for most purposes, you may have to get into the source editor to do certain things." Frankly, the more I see of the Source editor, the more I think I'll look for a fellow editor who'd be willing to work out a barter arrangement — in which I give that editor my citations to put into proper format and in exchange I proofread or edit text!
- To pick up on this a little further ... you might be interested to hear that in the Teahouse at the moment, I posted a topic in which originally I asked how editors might find other editors knowledgeable about the VE or the SE, so we could turn to them as I have to you for particularly challenging questions about your Wiki specialty (perhaps one of many): style. It was suggested that I just go ahead and post my specific question there, so I reluctantly went ahead and said — as I have to you — that although there was a template available in VE to create the equivalent of footnotes, I hadn't found one to do the equivalent of a bibliography, asking if anyone knew of such a template. An editor by the name of Asilvering picked up on it and said there wasn't one, but gave me a workaround involving using the SE that I'm trying to make work. It seems that Asilvering also likes to use the VE, but acknowledges the difficulty with this particular task. If I find the workaround does in fact work, would you like to know about it in case any other editor seems in need?
- The length of my paragraph above makes me get brave, now that we're sort of Wiki friends, and mention that there's a wonderful new invention called an Enter (Return) key that can actually break up chunky text ... 😅 (running and ducking) Augnablik (talk) 06:16, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
- I am curious what your VE approach is; I don't know much about VE, but might as well learn what people are doing in it for citations. As for long paragraphs, when I'm on my ultra-wide monitor they don't look so long, so it's harder to tell when one could use a paragraph break. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:17, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
- If I can make that "VE approach" work, I'll happily share it.
- And as for ultra-wide monitor text displays, maybe you could carry out an experiment like this: you'd copy some gibberish to create about 5 different chunks of text of varying sizes, publish it ... and then on a regular computer monitor as well as a cell phone, look at the same page to compare how the different chunks look. That would be an act of mercy on your many fans' eyesight. 🙂 Augnablik (talk) 07:47, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
- That is, of course, you'd see which size chunks begin to get a bit long when ported over to the other monitors, and use that as a guide on your ultra-wide monitor. I'm a little jealous that you have one. Maybe one day ... Augnablik (talk) 07:50, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
- I am curious what your VE approach is; I don't know much about VE, but might as well learn what people are doing in it for citations. As for long paragraphs, when I'm on my ultra-wide monitor they don't look so long, so it's harder to tell when one could use a paragraph break. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:17, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment
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April music
edit | |
| story · music · places |
|---|
Tout est lumière --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:28, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
My story is about music that Bach and Picander gave the world 300 years (and 19 days) ago, - listen (on the conductor's birthday) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:03, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Biographies request for comment
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DoneHey,
I wanted to ask if you'd be willing to weigh in again on the ongoing discussion in the talk page of the Copts article. Your previous input was very valuable in guiding the process the first time around, and I believe your perspective could be especially helpful now, as the current RfC seems to be getting mired in complexity and losing focus.
There’s no pressure to take a definitive position on any version, but what I’d really appreciate is your insight into how the issue might be resolved, or how the existing proposals could be improved or reframed for easier consensus.
Thanks in advance! Turnopoems (talk) 08:56, 12 April 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
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Punctuation of a "between" relationship between items containing spaces
edit DoneI just opened a discussion at Talk:Gulf of Mexico–America naming dispute that I think might benefit from your expertise. — BarrelProof (talk) 20:02, 19 April 2025 (UTC)
Nomination for deletion of Template:Linum
edit DoneTemplate:Linum has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:20, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Biographies request for comment
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