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<span style="white-space:nowrap;font-family:'Trebuchet MS'"> — ] ] ] 😼 </span> 03:52, 30 January 2024 (UTC) <span style="white-space:nowrap;font-family:'Trebuchet MS'"> — ] ] ] 😼 </span> 03:52, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

== Improper close of MOS botany ==

I recommend you undo your {{diff|Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style|1201120432|1201118813|Plant Descriptions thread closure}} at ]. As you know from your own work on ] and your recent ], the thread is indeed absolutely an MOS issue, WP:BOTANY does not have its own MOS under active development. It's also not a sourcing matter -- {{u|Meteorquake}} is describing the order in which content sections should be presented, and why it being unorganized as now causes confusion, which seems like exactly the kind of thing MOS:CS is set up around.

{{u|Meteorquake}} was correctly told to check with WT:BOTANY. But as this can be nothing other than a style issue, and as BOTANY has no MOS project set up yet, the thread is improperly closed, and the description and edit summary are inaccurate. ] (]) 00:26, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

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Old stuff to resolve eventually

Cueless billiards

Unresolved – Can't get at the stuff at Ancestry; try using addl. cards.
Extended content

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)

Crud fits for sure. And if the variant in it is sourceable, I'm sure some military editor will fork it into a separate article eventually. I think at least some variants of bar billiards are played with hands and some bagatelle split-offs probably were, too (Shamos goes into loads of them, but I get them all mixed up, mostly because they have foreign names). And there's bocce billiards, article I've not written yet. Very fun game. Kept my sister and I busy for 3 hours once. Her husband (Air Force doctor) actually plays crud on a regular basis; maybe there's a connection. She beat me several times, so it must be from crud-playing. Hand pool might be its own article eventually. Anyway, I guess it depends upon your "categorization politics". Mine are pretty liberal - I like to put stuff into a logical category as long as there are multiple items for it (there'll be two as soon as you're done with f.b., since we have crud), and especially if there are multiple parent categories (that will be the case here), and especially especially if the split parallels the category structure of another related category branch (I can't think of a parallel here, so this criterion of mine is not a check mark in this case), and so on. A bunch of factors really. I kind of wallow in that stuff. Not sure why I dig the category space so much. Less psychodrama, I guess. >;-) In my entire time here, I can only think of maybe one categorization decision I've made that got nuked at CfD. And I'm a pretty aggressive categorizer, too; I totally overhauled Category:Pinball just for the heck of it and will probably do the same to Category:Darts soon.
PS: I'm not wedded to the "cueless billiards" name idea; it just seemed more concise than "cueless developments from cue sports" or whatever.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 11:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
I have no "categorization politics". It's not an area that I think about a lot or has ever interested me so it's good there are people like you. If there is to be a category on this, "cueless billiards" seems fine to me. By the way, just posted Yank Adams as an adjunct to the finger billiards article I started.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
Cool; I'd never even heard of him. This one looks like a good DYK; just the fact that there was Finger Billiards World Championship contention is funky enough, probably. You still citing that old version of Shamos? You really oughta get the 1999 version; it can be had from Amazon for cheap and has a bunch of updates. I actually put my old version in the recycle bin as not worth saving. Heh. PS: You seen Stein & Rubino 3rd ed.? I got one for the xmas before the one that just passed, from what was then a really good girlfriend. >;-) It's a-verra, verra nahce. Over 100 new pages, I think (mostly illustrations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 13:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
If I happen to come across it in a used book store I might pick it up. There's nothing wrong with citing the older edition (as I've said to you before). I had not heard of Adams before yesterday either. Yank is apparently not his real name, though I'm not sure what it is yet. Not sure there will be enough on him to make a DYK (though don't count it out). Of course, since I didn't userspace it, I have 4½ days to see. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ancestry.com and have never found any free database nearly as useful for finding newspaper articles (and census, birth certificates, and reams of primary source material). I tried to sign up for a free trial again which worked once before, but they got smart and are logging those who signed up previously. I just looked; the new Stein and Rubino is about $280. I'll work from the 2nd edition:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
Hmm... I haven't tried Ancestry in a while. They're probably logging IP addresses. That would definitely affect me, since mine doesn't change except once every few years. I guess that's what libraries and stuff are for. S&R: Should be available cheaper. Mine came with the Blue Book of Pool Cues too for under $200 total. Here it is for $160, plus I think the shipping was $25. Stein gives his e-mail address as that page. If you ask him he might give you the 2-book deal too, or direct you to where ever that is. Shamos: Not saying its an unreliable source (although the newer version actually corrected some entries), it's just cool because it has more stuff in it. :-) DYK: Hey, you could speedily delete your own article, sandbox it and come back. Heh. Seriously, I'll see if I can get into Ancestry again and look for stuff on him. I want to look for William Hoskins stuff anyway so I can finish that half of the Spinks/Hoskins story, which has sat in draft form for over a year. I get sidetracked... — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
It's not IPs they're logging, it's your credit card. You have to give them one in order to get the trial so that they can automatically charge you if you miss the cancellation deadline. Regarding the Blue Book, of all these books, that's the one that get's stale, that is, if you use it for actual quotes, which I do all the time, both for answer to questions and for selling, buying, etc. Yeah I start procrastinating too. I did all that work on Mingaud and now I can't get myself to go back. I also did reams of research on Hurricane Tony Ellin (thugh I found so little; I really felt bad when he died; I met him a few times, seemed like a really great guy), Masako Katsura and others but still haven't moved on them.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
Ah, the credit card. I'll have to see if the PayPal plugin has been updated to work with the new Firefox. If so, that's our solution - it generates a new valid card number every time you use it (they always feed from your single PayPal account). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 18:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
PayPal Plugin ist kaput. Some banks now issue credit card accounts that make use of virtual card numbers, but mine's not one of them. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:49, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot. I signed up for a newspaperarchive.com three month trial. As far as newspaper results go it seems quite good so far, and the search interface is many orders of magnitude better than ancestry's, but it has none of the genealogical records that ancestry provides. With ancestry I could probably find census info on Yank as well as death information (as well as for Masako Katsura, which I've been working on it for a few days; she could actually be alive, though she'd be 96).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:52, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Sad...

How 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)

Reading stuff from that era, it's also amazing how important billiards (in the three-ball sense) was back then, with sometimes multiple-page stories in newspapers about each turn in a long match, and so on. It's like snooker is today in the UK. PS: I saw that you found evidence of a billiards stage comedy there. I'd never heard of it! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 15:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
Jackpot. Portrait, diagrams, sample shot descriptions and more (that will also lend itself to the finger billiards article).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
Nice find! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 06:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Some more notes on Crystalate

Unresolved – New sources/material worked into article, but unanswered questions remain.
Extended content

Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.; info about making records:; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:; "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)

Thanks! I'll have to have a look at this stuff in more detail. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 15:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
I've worked most of it in. Fences&Windows 16:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
Cool! From what I can tell, entirely different parties held the trademark in different markets. I can't find a link between Crystalate Mfg. Co. Ltd. (mostly records, though billiard balls early on) and the main billiard ball mfr. in the UK, who later came up with "Super Crystalate". I'm not sure the term was even used in the U.S. at all, despite the formulation having been originally patented there. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 21:04, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

WP:SAL

Unresolved – Not done yet, last I looked.
Extended content

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)

I'll take a look at the page shortly. Thanks for the nudge. SilkTork 23:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

You post at Misplaced Pages talk:FAQ/Copyright

Unresolved – Need to fix William A. Spinks, etc., with proper balkline stats, now that we know how to interpret them.
Extended content

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)

Yeah, I did a bunch of archiving yesterday. This page was HUGE. It'll get there again. I'd forgotten MCQ existed. Can you please add it to the DAB hatnote at top of and "See also" at bottom of WP:COPYRIGHT? Its conspicuous absence is precisely why I ened up at Misplaced Pages talk:FAQ/Copyright! Haven't seen your balkline response yet; will go look. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 21:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Hee Haw

Unresolved – Still need to propose some standards on animal breed article naming and disambiguation. In the intervening years, we've settled on natural not parenthetic disambiguation, and that standardized breeds get capitalized, but that's about it.
Extended content

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 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Truce, certainly. I'm not here to pick fights, just improve the consistency for readers and editors. I don't think there will be any scholarly articles on differences between landrace and breed, because there's nothing really to write about. Landrace has clear definitions in zoology and botany, and breed not only doesn't qualify, it is only established as true in any given case by reliable sources. Basically, no one anywhere is claiming "This is the Foobabaz horse, and it is a new landrace!" That wouldn't make sense. What is happening is people naming and declaring new alleged breeds on an entirely self-interested, profit-motive basis, with no evidence anyone other than the proponent and a few other experimental breeders consider it a breed. WP is full of should-be-AfD'd articles of this sort, like the cat one I successfully prod'ed last week. Asking for a reliable source that something is a landrace rather than a breed is backwards; landrace status is the default, not a special condition. It's a bit like asking for a scholarly piece on whether pig Latin is a real language or not; no one's going to write a journal paper about that because "language" (and related terms like "dialect", "language family", "creole" in the linguistic sense, etc.) have clear definitions in linguistics, while pig Latin, an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally-managed form of communication (like an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally managed form of domesticated animal) does not qualify. :-) The "what is a breed" question, which is also not about horses any more than cats or cavies or ferrets, is going to be a separate issue to resolve from the naming issue. Looking over what we collaboratively did with donkeys – and the naming form that took, i.e. Poitou donkey not Poitou (donkey), I think I'm going to end up on your side of that one. It needs to be discussed more broadly in an RFC, because most projects use the parenthetical form, because this is what WT:AT is most readily interpretable as requiring. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 00:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I hate the drama of an RfC, particularly when we can just look at how much can be naturally disambiguated, but if you think it's an actual issue, I guess ping me when it goes up. As for landcraces, it may be true ("clear definitions") but you would be doing God's (or someone's) own good work if you were to improve landrace which has few references, fewer good ones, and is generally not a lot of help to those of us trying to sort out WTF a "landrace" is... (smiles). As for breed, that is were we disagree: At what point do we really have a "breed" as opposed to a "landrace?" Fixed traits, human-selected? At what degree, at which point? How many generations? I don't even know if there IS such a thing as a universal definition of what a "breed" is: seriously: or breed or . I think you and I agree that the Palomino horse can never be a "breed" because it is impossible for the color to breed true (per an earlier discussion) so we have one limit. But while I happen agree to a significant extent with your underlying premise that when Randy from Boise breeds two animals and says he has created a new breed and this is a problem, (I think it's a BIG problem in the worst cases) but if we want to get really fussy, I suppose that the aficionados of the Arabian horse who claim the breed is pure from the dawn of time are actually arguing it is a landrace, wouldn't you say? And what DO we do with the multi-generational stuff that's in limbo land? Montanabw 00:41, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm not really certain what the answers are to any of those questions, another reason (besides your "STOP!" demands :-) that I backed away rapidly from moving any more horse articles around. But it's something that is going to have to be looked into. I agree that the Landrace article here is poor. For one thing, it needs to split Natural breed out into its own article (a natural breed is a selectively-bred formal breed the purpose of which is to refine and "lock-in" the most definitive qualities of a local landrace). This in turn isn't actually the same thing as a traditional breed, though the concepts are related. Basically, three breeding concepts are squished into one article. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Side comment: I tend to support one good overview article over three poor content forks, just thinking aloud... Montanabw 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Sure; the point is that the concepts have to be separately, clearly treated, because they are not synonymous at all. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 02:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Given that the article isn't well-sourced yet, I think that you might want to add something about that to landrace now, just to give whomever does article improvement on it later (maybe you, I think this is up your alley!) has the "ping" to do so. Montanabw 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Aye, it's on my to-do list. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 22:25, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Although I have been an evolutionary biologist for decades, I only noticed the term "landrace" within the past year or two (in reference to corn), because I work with wildland plants. But I immediately knew what it was, from context. I'm much less certain about breeds, beyond that I am emphatic that they are human constructs. Montanabw and I have discussed my horse off-wiki, and from what I can tell, breeders are selecting for specific attributes (many people claim to have seen a horse "just like him"), but afaik there is no breed "Idaho stock horse". Artificially-selected lineages can exist without anyone calling them "breeds"; I'm not sure they would even be "natural breeds", and such things are common even within established breeds (Montanabw could probably explain to us the difference between Polish and Egyptian Arabians).
The good thing about breeds wrt Misplaced Pages is that we can use WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE to decide what to cover. Landraces are a different issue: if no one has ever called a specific, distinctive, isolated mustang herd a landrace, is it OR for Misplaced Pages to do so?--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I have been reluctant to use landrace much out of a concern that the concept is a bit OR, as I hadn't heard of it before wikipedia either (but I'm more a historian than an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know?): Curtis, any idea where this did come from? It's a useful concept, but I am kind of wondering where the lines are between selective breeding and a "natural" breed -- of anything. And speaking of isolated Mustang herds, we have things like Kiger Mustang, which is kind of interesting. I think that at least some of SMc's passion comes from the nuttiness seen in a lot of the dog and cat breeders these days, am I right? I mean, Chiweenies? Montanabw 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
The first use of the word that I saw referred to different landraces of corn growing in different elevations and exposures in indigenous Maya areas of modern Mexico. I haven't tracked down the references for the use of the word, but the concept seems extremely useful. My sense is that landraces form as much through natural selective processes of cultivation or captivity as through human selection, so that if the "garbage wolf" hypothesis for dog domestication is true, garbage wolves would have been a landrace (or more likely several, in different areas). One could even push the definition and say that MRSA is a landrace. But I don't have enough knowledge of the reliable sources to know how all this would fit into Misplaced Pages.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Landraces form, primarily and quickly, through mostly natural selection, long after domestication. E.g. the St Johns water dog and Maine Coon cat are both North American landraces that postdate European arrival on the continent. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
I see some potential for some great research on this and a real improvement to the articles in question. Montanabw 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Yep. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Redundant sentence?

Unresolved – Work to integrate WP:NCFLORA and WP:NCFAUNA stuff into MOS:ORGANISMS not completed yet? Seems to be mostly done, other than fixing up the breeds section, after that capitalization RfC a while back.
Extended content

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 Misplaced Pages: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)

  1. I would leave it a alone for now; let people get used to the changes. I think it's reasonable to include the "general names" thing, because it's a catch-all that includes several different kinds of examples, that various largely different groups of people are apt to capitalize. Various know-nothings want to capitalize things like "the Cats", the "Great Apes", etc., because they think "it's a Bigger Group and I like to Capitalize Big Important Stuff". There are millions more people who just like to capitalize nouns and stuff. "Orange's, $1 a Pound". Next we have people who insist on capitalizing general "types" and landraces of domestic animals ("Mountain Dogs", "Van Cat") because they're used to formal breed names being capitalized (whether to do that with breeds here is an open question, but it should not be done with types/classes of domestics, nor with landraces. Maybe the examples can be sculpted better: "the roses", "herpesviruses", "great apes", "Bryde's whale", "mountain dogs", "Van cat", "passerine birds". I'm not sure that "rove beetle" and "oak" are good examples of anything. Anyway, it's more that the species no-capitalization is a special case of the more general rule, not that the general rule is a redundant or vague version of the former. If they're merged, it should keep the general examples, and maybe specifically spell out and illustrate that it also means species and subspecies, landraces and domestic "types", as well as larger and more general groupings.
  2. I had noticed that point and was going to add it, along with some other points from both NCFLORA and NCFAUNA, soon to MOS:ORGANISMS, which I feel is nearing "go live" completion. Does that issue come up often enough to make it a MOS mainpage point? I wouldn't really object to it, and it could be had by adding an "(even if it coincides with a capitalized Genus name)" parenthetical to the "general names" bit. The pattern is just common enough in animals to have been problematic if it were liable to be problematic, as it were. I.e., I don't see a history of squabbling about it at Lynx or its talk page, and remember looking into this earlier with some other mammal, about two weeks ago, and not seeing evidence of confusion or editwarring. The WP:BIRDS people were actually studiously avoiding that problem; I remember seeing a talk page discussion at the project that agreed that such usage shouldn't be capitalized ever. PS: With Lynx, I had to go back to 2006, in the thick of the "Mad Capitalization Epidemic" to find capitalization there, and it wasn't even consistent, just in the lead.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  11:11, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
  1. Well, certainly "rove beetle" and "oak" are poor examples here, so I would support changing to some of the others you suggested above.
  2. I think the main problem we found with plants was it being unclear as to whether inexperienced editors meant the scientific name or the English name. So you would see a sentence with e.g. "Canna" in the middle and not know whether this should be corrected to "Canna" or to "canna". The plural is clear; "cannas" is always lower-case non-italicized. The singular is potentially ambiguous. Whether it's worth putting this point in the main MOS I just don't know since I don't much edit animal articles and never breed articles, which is why I asked you. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
  1. Will take a look at that later, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
  2. Beats me. Doesn't seem too frequent an issue, but lot of MOS stuff isn't. Definitely should be in MOS:ORGANISMS, regardless.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  00:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Worked on both of those a bit at MOS. We'll see if it sticks.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  01:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Note to self on WP:WikiProject English language

Unresolved – I think I did MOST of this already ...
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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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  20:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Excellent mini-tutorial

Unresolved
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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)

@Carcharoth: Thanks. I need to copy that into an essay page. As far as I know, the concepts are not clearly covered in any of those places, nor clearly enough even at Help:CS1 (which is dense and overlong as it is). The e-book matters bear some researching. I'm very curious whether particular formats (Nook, etc.) paginate consistently between viewers. For Web-accessible ones, I would think that the page numbering that appears in the Web app is good enough if it's consistent (e.g., between a PC and a smart phone) when the reader clicks the URL in the citation. I suppose one could also use |at= to provide details if the "page" has to be explained in some way. I try to rely on better-than-page-number locations when possible, e.g. specific entries in dictionaries and other works with multiple entries per page (numbered sections in manuals, etc.), but for some e-books this isn't possible – some are just continuous texts. One could probably use something like |at=in the paragraph beginning "The supersegemental chalcolithic metastasis is ..." about 40% into the document, in a pinch. I guess we do need to figure this stuff out since such sources are increasingly common.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  20:29, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
Yes (about figuring out how to reference e-books), though I suspect existing (non-WP) citation styles have addressed this already (no need to re-invent the wheel). This is a slightly different case, though. It is a digitisation of an existing (physical) book that has no page numbers. If I had the book in front of me (actually, it was only published as a single copy, so it is not a 'publication' in that traditional sense of many copies being produced), the problem with page numbers would still exist. I wonder if the 'digital viewer' should be thought of as a 'via' thingy? In the same way that (technically) Google Books and archive.org digital copies of old books are just re-transmitting, and re-distributing the material (is wikisource also a 'via' sort of thing?). Carcharoth (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
@Carcharoth: Ah, I see. I guess I would treat it as a |via=, and same with WikiSource, which in this respect is essentially like Google Books or Project Gutenberg. I think your conundrum has come up various times with arXiv papers, that have not been paginated visibly except in later publication (behind a journal paywall and not examined). Back to the broader matter: Some want to treat WikiSource and even Gutenberg as republishers, but I think that's giving them undue editorial credit and splitting too fine a hair. Was thinking on the general unpaginated and mis-paginated e-sources matter while on the train, and came to the conclusion that for a short, unpaginated work with no subsections, one might give something like |at=in paragraph 23, and for a much longer one use the |at=in the paragraph beginning "..." trick. A straight up |pages=82–83 would work for an e-book with hard-coded meta-data pagination that is consistent between apps/platforms and no visual pagination. On the other hand, use the visual pagination in an e-book that has it, even if it doesn't match the e-book format's digital pagination, since the pagination in the visual content would match that of a paper copy; one might include a note that the pagination is that visible in the content if it conflicts with what the e-book reader says (this comes up a lot with PDFs, for one thing - I have many that include cover scans, and the PDF viewers treat that as p. 1, then other front matter as p. 2, etc., with the content's p. 1 being something like PDF p. 7).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼  08:07, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

WP:MEDMOS

Unresolved – Go fix the WP:FOO shortcuts to MOS:FOO ones, to match practice at other MoS pages. This only applies to the MoS section there; like WP:SAL, part of that page is also a content guideline that should not have MOS: shortcuts.
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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)

Thanks. I don't remember what it was, but maybe it'll come back to me.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:17, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
Now I remember.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:53, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Ooh...potential WikiGnoming activity...

Unresolved – Do some of this when I'm bored?
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@SMcCandlish:

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,
--Doug Mehus T·C 22:30, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Argh. I would've hoped some bot fixed that kind of stuff. I'll consider it, but it's a lot of work for low benefit (the page names may be wrong, but the redirs still get there), and it's been my experience that a lot of editnotices (especially in mainspace) are PoV-pushing crap that needs to be deleted anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:20, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
I'm going to pass for the nonce, Dmehus. Working on some other project (more fun than WP is sometimes). I'll let it sit here with {{Unresolved}} on it, in case I get inspired to work on it some, but it might be a long time.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:46, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Note to self

Unresolved – Cquote stuff ...
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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

Unresolved – Breed disambiguation again ...
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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 20:14, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

@Montanabw: Argh. Well, this is easy to fix with a request to mass-revert undiscussed moves, at the subsection for that at WP:RMTR. Some admin will just fix it all in one swoop. While I have the PageMover bit, and could do it myself as a technical possibility, I would run afoul of WP:INVOLVED in doing so.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:30, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
@Montanabw: Did this get fixed yet? If not, I can look into it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

PGP

Unresolved – Gotta put my geek hat on and fix this.

FYI, 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)





Current threads

Capitalization after a hyphen

Hey there. In 2020, you moved Three-Fifths Compromise to Three-fifths Compromise, with the edit summary WP:HYPHEN (don't capitalize after a hyphen unless what follows the hypen it itself a proper name). I have a question about that: are you certain WP:HYPHEN is saying "if what follows a hyphen is a proper noun" rather than "if the hyphenated compound is a proper noun"? If your interpretation of the wording is accurate, then I would propose that the exemption for "titles of published works" be extended to all proper nouns. In the case of the Three-Fifths Compromise, plenty of sources capitalize "fifths", including AP, NYT, WaPo, Forbes, LA Times, and Guardian, etc. This is also an outlier, as we have articles like Coca-Cola ("cola" is not a proper noun), Spider-Man ("man" is not a proper noun), Quasi-War ("war" is not a proper noun), Employment Non-Discrimination Act ("discrimination" is not a proper noun), etc. InfiniteNexus (talk) 19:37, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Collapse-boxing a long thread so I don't have to keep scrolling past it
A user talk page isn't where to propose a change to a guideline. But what would probably actually happen is that "In titles of published works, follow the capitalization rule for each part independently" in MOS:HYPHEN would probably be removed, because it does not match actual practice (which is predominantly to use titles like "Evidence Suggesting Pre-adaptation to Domestication Throughout the Small Felidae" not "...Pre-Adaptation...". As for "Three-fifth Compromise", MOS:CAPS: "Misplaced Pages relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Misplaced Pages." Your "plenty of sources" dopesn't translate to "substantial majority"."Coca-Cola" and "Spider-Man" are trademarks that are near-universally spelled that way in sources. The last two of those should probably move to "Quasi-war" and "Employment Non-discrimination Act" unless RS demonstrate that is is nearly always given with a capitalized "War" and "Discrimination" (if they do, then the renames should not happen). The fact you can find a handful of exceptions to our general practice is meaningless, because WP is written by humans and they are not consistent, and per WP:P&G: "Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply." These exceptions are arrived at by editorial consensus on a case-by-case basis, and we have various articles that diverge from what MoS or naming conventions or even the article titles policy expect because the sources indicate that an exception should be made and consensus imposes such an exception in that case. E.g. CCH Pounder does not follow MOS:INITIALS and Spider-Man: Far From Home does not follow MOS:5LETTER, and neither case is accidental. The existence of exceptions (due to either laziness/ignorance regarding the rule or a consensus to diverge from it in a particular case) does not mean the guidelines are broken.At any rate, I have no idea why, when you find a rule the gist of which is "do not capitalize after a hyphen" (except in a proper name like Graeco-Roman that is consistently written that way by RS) you would want to introduce more inconsistency and confusion about this, just to selectively mimic AP News, Forbes, and some other off-site publishers who have nothing to do with our style manual. They are not following our style manual but their own ones. Unless treatment of a term/name across pretty much all of English-language publishing is uniformly doing something against our style manual, we have no reason to do something with that text string that is against our style manual.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:46, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
Normally I would apologize in advance for delivering a WP:WALLOFTEXT response, but since you just wrote one to me, I figured we were good :)
  • A user talk page isn't where to propose a change to a guideline. Well yeah, obviously I wasn't trying to propose a guideline change here. I was saying that I would consider making a proposal at WT:MOS and/or WT:NCCAPS to change the guideline if your interpretation is accurate (which I assume you're saying that it is).
  • But what would probably actually happen is that "In titles of published works, " in MOS:HYPHEN would probably be removed, because it does not match actual practice MOS:HYPHEN is supplemented by MOS:TITLECAPS, which directly contradicts the last part of your claim: "The general rule in English is to not capitalize after a hyphen unless what follows the hyphen is itself usually capitalized (e.g. post-Soviet). However, this rule is often ignored in titles of works."
  • Your "plenty of sources" dopesn't translate to "substantial majority". If you're looking for hundreds and thousands of sources that use the term "Three-Fifths Compromise", I hate to break it to you, but unlike Spider-Man and Coca-Cola, there aren't going to be many talking about a 200-year-old compromise. But I have provided a list of highly reliable sources that capitalize "Fifths" — the rest I found actually lowercase the entire phrase, including "three", but that is not WP:CONSISTENT with every other article in Category:Political compromises in the United States and would therefore not work for us. TITLECAPS specifically says to refer to sources, and in this case the majority is to capitalize (I found not a single source that capitalized "Three" but not "fifths").
  • The fact you can find a handful of exceptions to our general practice is meaningless It's not a "handful of exceptions", it's the majority. Before you ask, no, I do not have statistical evidence to support that, because it would be impossible (as far as I know) to compile a list of articles about proper nouns that are hyphenated — no regular expression would be able to determine what is a proper and common noun, unless there is a magical formula that I am not aware of. But since you asked for more examples/evidence, I went to WP:FA and did a Ctrl+F search for all the hyphens on the page. Of the 45 articles where the hyphenated title was a proper noun that was not a person or place name, and where the hyphen was followed by a common noun, only five used lowercase: 2019 WPA World Ten-ball Championship, Ninety-five Theses, Sonic X-treme, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II, and Trembling Before G-d. The latter three don't even count — the hyphen is not being used to connect two words for Sonic and Trembling, and "Middle-earth" is specifically singled out at MOS:HYPHEN (and TITLECAPS) because it is pretty much the only published work universally spelled with a lowercase "earth". So you see, "Three-fifths compromise" (and Ninety-five Theses and 2019 WPA World Ten-ball Championship) are the outliers, not the norm. If our MOS really does call for lowercase, it does not reflect the actual practice at all.
  • These exceptions are arrived at by editorial consensus on a case-by-case basis And they should be applied to cases where sources universally go against the norm of capitalizing after a hyphen in proper nouns, such as "Middle-earth". To reiterate, the norm for proper nouns is to capitalize after a hyphen. Can you name a hyphenated trademark where this isn't the case?
  • At any rate, I have no idea why, when you find a rule you would want to introduce more inconsistency and confusion about this, just to selectively mimic AP News, Forbes, and some other off-site publishers who have nothing to do with our style manual. First off, that sounded a little aggressive, but I've seen worse. Capitalizing after a hyphen does not make things inconsistent; it's what the world has been doing and we've been doing in practice, so changing the guideline would make the outliers consistent with the norm.
  • Lastly, before I start prepping my proposal, I once again ask, are you certain your interpretation is correct? I just looked at MOS:HYPHENCAPS, and it offers a slightly different wording: "In article text, do not use a capital letter after a hyphen except for terms that would ordinarily be capitalized in running prose, such as proper names, demonyms and brand names." This sounds even more ambiguous than MOS:HYPHEN, leading me to wonder whether the MoS really means to capitalize after a hyphen for proper names, demonyms, and brand names. Or maybe that's just me.
InfiniteNexus (talk) 07:01, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
In the same order as above (and, yes, stuff like this often involves a lot of detailed argument):
  • Why? I repeat: "I have no idea why, when you find a rule the gist of which is "do not capitalize after a hyphen" (except in a proper name like Graeco-Roman that is consistently written that way by RS) you would want to introduce more inconsistency and confusion about this". See below on why it introduces confusion and inconsistency.But maybe we can short-circuit this and all my reponses below were a waste of time. You came here particularly about Three-fifths Compromise, and if that's really all you're on about, then I have to observe that a large number of sources do not capitalize any element of this, so it its not consistently treated as a proper name and should be moved to Three-fifths compromise per MOS:CAPS and WP:NCCAPS, and that would make this whole discussion moot. But I'll go over the rest in case your concern is broader.
  • "Often ignored" = "the capitalization is done very inconsistently in sources". Per MOS:CAPS: "Misplaced Pages relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Misplaced Pages." So if a work title like "Evidence Suggesting Pre-adaptation to Domestication Throughout the Small Felidae" is not near-universally presented in independent sources with "Pre-Adaptation" in it (when given in title case) then it should have "Pre-adaptation" in it (when given in title case), and must default to "Pre-adaptation" if there is insufficient RS mention of that title to do much of a head-count – for the same reason that "method acting" should be given in WP as "method acting" not as "Method Acting", because the preponderance of sources independent of the subject do not capitalize it. What we have here is a subtle WP:POLICYFORK in which MOS:TITLES and a titles-related line-item at MOS:HYPHEN have been drifting away from the MOS:CAPS central rule, on a basis ("some sources like to do it") that MOS:CAPS explicitly rejects. This needs to be repaired, not worsened.
  • This point is actually addressed by the one above, really. If there are insufficient sources to demonstrate a clear preference across English writing that pertains to the topic in question, then do what MoS defaults to, which is lower-case. In this particular case, it might actually be that there are sufficient sources to support a "Three-Fifths" exception, but even if there were that would not indicate any need for any RfC to change any guideline. The only need demonstrated for such an RfC or other discussion is to re-normalize MOS:TITLES and the abberrant related MOS:HYPHEN line item back into agreement with MOS:CAPS.
  • WP:FA search: In doing a Ctrl-F there myself, what I see is that almost all of the titles there (also ignoring persons and places) with hyphens in them and a capital after the hyphen are in one of the following classes: 1) have an independent proper name after the hyphen (Saint-Gaudens double eagle, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Rolls-Royce Merlin, Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, Franco-Mongol alliance, Sino-Roman relations, etc., etc., etc.; or 2) are cases of following the style preferred by a trademark holder or other originator of a proper name (several examples, but one was Inter-Allied Women's Conference, which is also contraindicated by MOS:TM by default, but which might be permissible in those specific cases, e.g. if "Inter-Allied" is used near exclusively in sources completely independent of the subject and "Inter-allied" is virtually unattested); or 3) are titles of published works which have been rendered this way because of the misleading POLICYFORK identified above (The Bread-Winners, Seventy-Six (novel)); or 4) have the hyphen followed by an all-caps acronym or other code/symbol (WBPX-TV, Tropical Depression Nineteen-E (2018), Nike-X, etc.). 2006 Chick-fil-A Bowl is interesting; it goes lower-case after the first hyphen (as it should, since "fil" it not a proper name but a fragment of the common noun fillet) but then upper-case again because the "A" there is a symbol, the letter A prounced by its name as /eɪ/, and is not just a letter representing the usual /ɑː/ sound that a would typically have at the end of an English word or name, i.e. it's not "Chick-fil-ah". (It also happens to match the official corporate name spelling and much more importantly the dominant spelling in reliable sources which is Chick-fil-A not "Chick-Fil-A", which is what you seem to be arguing for.)A few of the FA search results are problematic in novel ways, despite having FA icons on them, or are exceptional or edge cases. E.g. 2001–02 South-West Indian Ocean cyclone season is against MOS:COMPASS, as "South-West Indian Ocean" is not a proper name, but a general description of a vague area and not even a notable topic, so should be "south-west Indian Ocean" or "southwest Indian Ocean" (and the article text veers back and forth between these spellings, which is against MOS:CONSISTENT, too). Similarly, John Edward Brownlee as Attorney-General of Alberta is against MOS:JOBTITLES and should have "attorney-general"). Hi-Level is a weird one; actual source usage includes all of "Hi-Level", "Hi Level", "High-Level", "High Level", "high-level", "hi-level", etc., etc.; the article is unclearly written despite its FA star, and it is uncertain whether this is/was a trademark of Budd Company or just a general class-of-vehicle term that should not be capitalized at all; since it originates from the concept "high-level locomotive" or "high-level train" and is thus a compound modifer, an argument could be made to retain the hyphen even in the short form, though not all sources use it. O-Bahn Busway is another weird case, of an Ausralian road given German name; in German all nouns (Bahn means 'path, track, way, course') are capitalized; and "O-bahn" is not unattested in independent sources. That said, proper names in the form "X-Longersting usually are capitalized after the hyphen in most sources, thus D-Day naval deceptions and the non-FA D-Day. North-Eastern Area Command, North-Western Area Command (RAAF), Operation Ten-Go: special cases of official designations; we would not necessarily "obey" them, per WP:OFFICIALNAME, but RS usage strongly dominates with the capitalization (though curiously the hyphen is often dropped, even in governmental sources, in the first two cases; in the third, the proper spelling of this non-English term is actually Ten-gō, and it can be found that way in some English sources, though our "FA" doesn't really reflect this).Anyway, if you think that being an FA has anything at all to do with MoS compliance, you're mistaken. The tiny WP:FACTION who control FA process have evicined startling levels of anti-MoS activism over the years (up to and including hounding out of the process one of WP's best copye-ditors and fact-checkers for daring to insist on some MoS compliance in an FAC, with such viciousness that he almost quit WP entirely and has certainly withdrawn most of his participation, for several years now). They're generally in favor of whatever personal preferences the dominant editor of an article has (WP:OWN policy be damned). There is no MoS-compliance requirement in WP:FACR to begin with, and the only MoS cleanup checking that programmatically happens is at WP:GACR, and only for five kinds of compliance. All sorts of things pass GAN and FAC with style problems in them, from titles on down; it is left to editors to randomly clean them up as time and interst permit.
  • Trademarks are a terrible basis for trying to decide what to do with capitalization, since one of the most frequent marketing techniques is to over-use capitalization to get attention. WP really doesn't care what companies and other trademark holders prefer (see all of MOS:TM as well as WP:OFFICIALNAME), only what reliable sources do with the name, and we only diverge from our default style when, for a specific case, the independent sources nearly always agree to style it the way the trademark holder does. Since you asked: Middle-earth itself is a trademark, of The Saul Zaentz Company d.b.a. Middle-earth Enterprises (formerly Tolkien Enterprises). As for more examples, few trademarks have hyphens in them, and when they do, they are usually joining proper names or before a code like "-XR" or "-B"; I can't find any kind of "list of hyphenated trademarks" anywhere on the Internet to examine. But we already saw that Chick-fil-A is another example.
  • "Capitalizing after a hyphen does not make things inconsistent": It certainly does do so because the default is to not do it otherwise, and the broader default is to not capitalize anything that is not consistently capitalized in sources. We write Mediterranean-style cuisine, so why on earth would we write something like "Bob's Mediterranean-Style Restaurant" when "Bob's Mediterranean-style Restaurant" is perfectly fine, and the first is confusingly inconsistent with all the text around it about "Mediterranean-style cuisine". The capitalization of the S in the restaurant name serves no purpose at all, and is just use of capital letters to draw the eye for marketing reasons. The only time we should do it is when, for whatever reason, independent reliable sources overwhelmingly prefer it (and there are enough of them to be statistically meaningful). Honestly, I think for most of the indivdual cases you probably care about that they'll be instances where the sources show such in the first place. Much more to the point, though, POLICYFORKing the material further and further apart so that MOS:CAPS is in more conflict with more other micro-topical concerns like a line-item in MOS:HYPHEN and a section at MOS:TITLES would by defintion be increasing inconsistency and confusion. Observing this and calling it what it is (or would be) is not "aggressive".
  • The wording was weird because the latter two are examples for the former; the three don't really form an and list. It's a recently introduced error. Fixed it to: "In article text, do not use a capital letter after a hyphen except for terms that would ordinarily be capitalized in running prose, such as proper names (e.g. demonyms and brand names)". This is consistent with MOS:HYPHEN, other than it hasn't been messed up by the titles-of-works "rider" that someone injected at MOS:HYPHEN (and in MOS:TITLES) and which is generally the source of the confusion and inconsistency we've been seeing here and there.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:35, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for the thoughtful "long-ass" response. What I'm trying to point out to you is that according to our MOS (specifically, MOS:HYPHEN), the default is Middle-earth and Chick-fil-A, while Spider-Man and Nineteen Eighty-Four are exceptions that are only permissible if an overwhelming majority of sources use a capital letter. We can safely disregard single letters (e.g. D-Day) and acronyms (WABC-TV) as those would normally be capitalized after a space in prose. The issue with this guideline is that for the vast majority of proper names, an overwhelming majority of sources do use a capital letter. Logically, Spider-Man should be the default and Middle-earth the exception, not vice versa. The published-works exception sorta, kinda does this, but published works are not the only cases where capitalization after a hyphen is the norm. You have observed yourself that almost all of our FA sample falls under "exceptions"; if everything is an exception, that means they are not exceptions but the norm.
Responding to more specific points of your response, I was not implying that FAs were the gold standard for interpreting the MoS (though I should note that WP:FA? does have an MoS compliance requirement, #2). As for Three-Fifths Compromise in particular, I am well aware that some sources use all-lowercase, but as I noted in my previous comment, this is not WP:CONSISTENT with Category:Political compromises in the United States. With that being said, I realize a hypothetical RM would have a 50/50 chance of passing given the clash between PAGs (AT is actually policy and MoS a guideline, but MoS warriors certainly are not going to let this go without a fight).
InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:26, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
I guess that's one way to look at it, but it is not the way I look at it. We have a general, across-every-topic-for-every-reason, default that we do not capitalize that which is not capitalized in a strong majority of independent sources. We could just stop there. The cases you are generally concerned about (trademarks and work titles) would mostly qualify as capitalized after the hyphen in a strong majority of sources. And they still will qualify even if we also say something specific like "Generally don't capitalize after a hyphen except when a proper name follows the hyphen". It's simply not broken. This discussion, however, opened with Three-fifths Compromise, which is neither a trademark nor a work title, and which turns out to not be consistently treated as a proper name in RS, so should not be capitalized anyway, but rendered "three-fifths compromise", mooting the concern in the first place.When exceptions to a rule exist for completely unrelated reasons that does not constitute "an exception", confusing dissimilar things into one fictional category, so it cannot be exceptionality so common that it's really the norm. That's equivalent to saying that because it's okay for police to shoot criminals under various circumstances, armed forces to kill lots and lots of people in military conflicts, home-owners (in many if not most jurisdictions) to kill home invaders, and taken all together these exceed the murder rate, that the laws against homicide are wrong because killing people for these unrelated exceptions exceeds the norm against murdering people and has become the new norm. We have laws against murder because killing people for reasons that don't fall under one of those exception is something that shouldn't happen, and we have a lower-case-by-default rule because capitalizing things for reasons other than enumerated exceptions is something that shouldn't happen.FA having a requirement to have a lead that properly summarizes the article and to be divided sensibly into sections (and to have a consistent citation style, which is not an MoS matter but a WP:CITEVAR one) is not FACR having an actual and enforced rule to follow MoS (except on two "how to not write terribly" basics that would be in there even if MoS didn't exist at all). If you actually read FAC discussions over the last decade or so, they are a morass of argument against MoS compliance.Various other things in Category:Political compromises in the United States probably also need renaming to lower case for the same reason. WP:CONSISTENT is not a tail that wags the dog. Our article titles should be consistent to the extent that is practical, after they conform to various applicable policies and guidelines; they are not made to thwart those P&G just to be consistent temporarily with titles that themselves are wrong per the P&G. And the underlying notion that everything in a category that contains some articles on things that are treated as proper names means that they must all be proper names is clearly not tenable. See, e.g., Category:Political movements and all its many subcategories; on a portion of what is contained in them are proper names (and some things in them that are presently capitalized should not be, though many of these have been cleaned up over the last few years). We don't go capitalizing all of them, especially when MOS:DOCTCAPS is a specific rule against doing that. Maybe more the point, WP:AT has nothing to do with capitalization and never has; that's a style matter determined by MoS concerns. People get confused about this because the MOS:CAPS rule to capitalize when the vast majority of the RS do so is superficially similar to WP:COMMONNAME (which again has nothing to do with style of a name; it's the policy to choose Foo over Bar if Foo is the most common name, without any regard at all to whether in a particular case it is rendered Foo, foo, F-oo, f-oo, F oo, f oo, etc. only with regard to it not being some variant of Bar)."MoS warriors certainly are not going to let this go without a fight"? You're the one who approached this from a "the guidelines are wrong and I must change them to suit my views" battleground position, and there is no RM discussion in the entire history of that article and its talk page. What did happen is one editor inappropriately used WP:RMSPEEDY in 2011 to move it from the correct title Three-fifths compromise to Three-Fifth Compromise against three guidelines (MOS:CAPS, WP:NCCAPS, MOS:HYPHEN), and the responding RM admin should have refused because this would automatically be a controversial move; and much later, following MOS:HYPHEN but just assuming in good faith that this was actually a proper name, I moved it to Three-fifths Compromise. But I'm the one you're upset at? This comes across as another of those "give me capital letters or give me death" things, the sort of activity that the MoS regulars refer to as "style warrior" behavior: pursuing disruptive battles against MoS guideline compliance for personal style peccadillo reasons. But you want instead to pretend that people applying the guidelines as they are written are the "warriors"? When there has been zero activity to de-capitalize this as not a proper name, in the entire 18-year history of the article? Please.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:15, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
I did not call you an MoS warrior. I said that if I were to open an RM for Three-Fifths Compromise on the grounds of WP:CONSISTENT, there would likely be backlash from MoS warriors who insist MOS:CAPS takes precedence over WP:CONSISTENT. As for your murder rate example, I look at this way: we have a general rule that you should not kill people (capitalize after a hyphen). However, if you are a police officer (title of a work), soldier (trademark), or a homeowner whose home is being invaded (other proper nouns), you are permitted to use deadly force (capitalize after a hyphen) unless the circumstances do not call for it (unless the overwhelming majority of sources say otherwise). Under the current wording of MOS:HYPHEN and its associated guidelines, police officers (titles of works) are already exempted, which you are apparently against, and I am saying this exemption should be extended to soldiers and homeowners (other proper nouns).
Clearly, we do not agree on what is and should be the norm, so I will not pester you further unless you feel additional discussion is warranted. I haven't decided whether it is worth my time and energy to start an RfC, but considering the limited time I have on my hands, as well as my other more important on-wiki commitments, I am probably just going to let this go for now (not ruling out revisiting this in the future, should it ever come up again). Thank you for the ... spirited debate. InfiniteNexus (talk) 05:07, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
"Other proper nouns" that are capitalized that way near-uniformly in RS are already exempted, by the very fact that they are capitalized that way near-uniformly in RS. One that is not captitalized that way near-uniformly in RS should not be exempted, or MOS:CAPS would not say what it does. This also actually applies to trademarks, and also always applied to titles of works until two individuals POLICYFORKed the material in two places (that don't even agree with each other!). What obviously needs to happen is for the material to be re-normalized back to "do not capitalize something unless it is capitalized in a strong majority of RS". What you want to do is take an alleged exception that doesn't categorically exist (trademarks) and another alleged exception that two editors made up out of nowhere but can't actually agree on, and use this doubly cracked foundation as a rationale to invent a third and even broader category of alleged exception. So, yes, I'm not going to agree with that, and I don't think much of anyone else will either, other than a handful of the same actual "style warriors" who just hate MoS in general or at least MOS:CAPS because they are not getting their pet-peeve preference that they perpetually re-re-re-litigate, on some WP:SSF or WP:CSF matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:19, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
I already responded to this argument above. I said that what is currently being evaluated on a case-by-case basis (whether to capitalize) should be flip-flopped with the default (whether to not capitalize). You responded with the murder-rate analogy, which I replied to, and now you're repeating your claim that whether to capitalize should be determined on a case-by-case basis, despite the fact that most sources capitalize the word after a hyphen in proper nouns. Would you like to explain why you think we should ignore the norm and take MOS:CAPS as gospel, ignoring common sense? InfiniteNexus (talk) 05:40, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
That's one of those "have you stopped beating your wife?" constructions. We have a general principle at MOS:CAPS; it is expressed in narrower form in various other places, including MOS:HYPHEN, though some people have been screwing around inconsistently with the language there and this needs to be repaired. There are lots of other places the same "don't capitalize unless all the sources are doing it" principle is also expressed and employed (all throughout MoS, really). It is consistent and well-understood, even if a handful of editors WP:DONTLIKEIT because they like over-capitalizing things to better match what they are used to in ornithology journals or video-gamer websites or dog-breeding magazines or train-spotting fandom forums or whatever the specialized-style fallacy is. Then you come along and want to create a complicated counter-rule, to always capitalize after a hyphen by default for any kind of proper name (when you have to know by now that WP editors spend more time arguing about what is and is not a proper name than doing much of anything else, and that's even how this thread started to begin with). This would be confusing and divisive, set up a conflict between guidelines, be abused as a wedge to drive more capitalization into the project for all sorts of other things, and cause various other problems. Meanwhile, the end result for the titles you care about would not change in any way: the ones that should be capitalized after a hyphen, because they are treated this way near-universally in independent sources, would be capitalized after a hyphen here, under both scenarios. You would cause a truckload of trouble for no practical gain of any kind.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:59, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
I am aware of the MoS's general preference for lowercase, but there are exceptions listed under almost every single MoS guideline — why shouldn't there be one for hyphens? What MOS:TITLECAPS currently says about capitalization after a hyphen is true: almost nobody does it in titles of works, and I'm arguing that the same can be said for other proper nouns. And no, there would be practical gain: outliers such as Three-fifths Compromise (assuming we treat it as a proper noun) and Ninety-five Theses would be moved to be in line with Spider-Man, Quasi-War, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, unless it is proven that the overwhelming majority of sources do not use a capital letter. InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:29, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
There shouldn't be one for hyphens because they are applied for completely different reasons in different cases, and because of MOS:BLOAT. We do not need to record in MoS every time consensus comes to some kind of exception decision in a particular case, or MoS would be ten times longer and would look like nothing but a morass of exceptions and no general rules, thus defeating its purpose. But you're arguing for a broad "mega-exception" across an entire set of classes of cases. It isn't even true that lower-case after a hyphen is almost never done in titles of works. It tends not to be done in titles of movies and modern books (though there are exceptions) since it doesn't support marketing's love of capitalization to grab attention. But lower-case after a hyphen is common in article titles that are written in title case. I no longer have a collection of style guides filling up half my place, but I would bet good money there are citation styles that specifically demand lower-case after a hyphen except for a proper name. (At the other extreme are various content-management systems that automatically capitalize every single string in a title, with results like "Of" and "An" and "The" being capitalized in mid-phrase. Not something to emulate here.)Your scenario about "Three-fifths Compromise (assuming we treat it as a proper noun) and Ninety-five Theses" would not be affected in any way by any of this at all; the first of these should provably move to three-fifths compromise (there is no "assuming we treat it as a proper noun" because it is already proven not to be one); and Luther's work would be determined by the exact same criteria under both systems: whether RS are near-consistent in capitalizing "Five").If you're curious, they certainly are not: . The prevalence of "Ninety-five Theses" without capital-F "Five" is strong evidence against your claim that sources nearly always capitalize after a hyphen in such titles. (It's also suggestive that some off-site style guides call for lowercase after a hyphen, or the style would not be so common (and WP's MoS wouldn't have come up with idea on its own), though which ones might do so would bear more direct research if someone wanted to insist on it. Ultimately it doesn't matter, because WP has its own style manual and is not dictated to by any particular external publishers.) The only thing your position for "-Five" has going for it is that in recent books, "-Five" in this title has quite suddenly become more common than "-five" . But it is not so overwhelmingly dominant that MOS:CAPS would be satisfied, especially given the very long history with "-five" dominating , and the recent (c. 2004 onward) spike in "-Five" probably being attributable to a particular publisher or a small handful of them (probably religious publishers given the nature of the subject matter, and so not independent of the subject), and quite possibly strongly influenced by WP itself (WP:CIRCULAR) because our article title had "-Five" until 3 May 2016 (and the n-gram data ends at 2019, so we can't see what's been happening in the 2020s)‎. The fact that our article on the subject dates (with "-Five") to right when the capitalization suddenly started increasing in books is very suspicious. Nor does this increase appear to be matched in other source types, since "-five" is still common in news, journals, and other results, including recently published ones (though we lack a means of getting solid satistical numbers on them; no one's made a large corpus of English that can be queried in this way except from book materials).Questions like this should continue to be handled on a case-by-case basis of whether there is sufficiently consistent use of a capital letter in a largely majority of RS to warrant a divergence from the MOS:CAPS lowercase default. There's simply nothing special going on with titles: styles differ in the real world, we have a default style (like all major publishers do), and a divergence from it in a particular case should only be made because in that specific instance nearly all independent sources agree on that divergence. That's the general MoS treatment of everything, not just capitalization.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:32, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Chicago:

The following rules apply to hyphenated terms appearing in a title capitalized in headline style

  1. Always capitalize the first element.
  2. Capitalize any subsequent elements unless they are articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions (), or such modifiers following musical key symbols.
  3. If the first element is merely a prefix or combining form that could not stand by itself as a word (anti, pre, etc.), do not capitalize the second element unless it is a proper noun or proper adjective.
  4. Capitalize the second element in a hyphenated spelled-out number (twenty-one or twenty-first, etc.) or hyphenated simple fraction (two-thirds in two-thirds majority).

The examples that follow demonstrate the numbered rules

Record-Breaking Borrowings from Medium-Sized Libraries (2)
Anti-intellectual Pursuits (3)
A Two-Thirds Majority of Non-English-Speaking Representatives (3, 4)

APA:

In title case, capitalize the following words in a title or heading:

  • major words, including the second part of hyphenated major words (e.g., "Self-Report," not "Self-report")

MLA:

When you copy an English-language title or subtitle use title-style capitalization: capitalize the first word, the last word, and all principal words, including those that follow hyphens in compound terms.

Do not capitalize the word following a hyphenated prefix if the dictionary shows the prefix and word combined without a hyphen.

Theodore Dwight Weld and the American Anti-slavery Society

AMA:

In titles, subtitles, and text headings, do not capitalize the second part of a hyphenated compound in the following instances:

If either part is a hyphenated prefix or suffix (see )

Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs for Ankylosing Spondylitis

If both parts together constitute a single word (consult )

Reliability of Health Information Obtained Through Online Searches for Self-injury
Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children

However, if a compound is temporary or if both parts carry equal weight, capitalize both words.

Low-Level Activity
Drug-Resistant Bacteria

In titles, subtitles, and text headings, capitalize the first letter of a word that follows a lowercase (but not a capital) Greek letter (see ), a numeral (), a symbol, a stand-alone capital letter, or an italicized organic chemistry prefix,

AP makes no mention of capitalization after a hyphen, but "The Star-Spangled Banner" is given as an example of a title (which we also capitalize, would you look at that).

InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:48, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Post-holiday followup

@InfiniteNexus: More research of the above sort is needed. To just dive in and do one bit of it, I find that MHRA Style Guide has a ridiculously inconsistent rule to capitalize after a hyphen, even when it's a prefix that cannot stand alone, except when that prefix is specifically Re-. There is no rationale given for this weirdness. I think it would be worthwhile to look in other major style guides and see whether anything like a largely consistent pattern actually emerges. Your four American ones (at least two of which, APA and AMA, have been moving over time to be increasingly consistent with Chicago on many points) don't cover enough ground for us to be certain of this. And AMA is trying to be meaningful but failing dismally. "Short-term" and "low-level" are both the same kind of term; same goes for "self-injury" and "drug-resistant". They can all be split up without hyphens, without losing meaning: "A low level of drug resitance was observed over a short term in a study of patients admitted for self injury". (I guess this is what happens when medical people with no linguistics background try to write material about English-language structure and usage.) The unitary hyphenated compounds below cannot be split up this way (though some are sometimes colloquially written as hyphenless closed compounds: "knowhow" and "runnerup", but not "fatherinlaw").

Iff it turns out that there is a demonstrable lean across all major style guides, then we could probably encapsulate it with something simplified and easy to remember and apply, which might (more resesearch is needed) be something like:

In title case, capitalize after a hyphen when the compound is temporary (usually a multi-word modifier that would be written without hyphens if not used adjectivally): Real-Estate Demography, Remote-Control Operation, Common-Sense Guidelines. Do not capitalize after a hyphen if the term is a compound with:

  • a prefix (Pre-eclampsia, Anti-establishment), unless what follows the hyphen is a proper name Neo-Aristotelian;
  • a suffix (Dada-esque);
  • a compound with a synergistic meaning separate from that of its parts and which is almost always hyphenated (Father-in-law, Know-how, Runner-up).

A construction like this would avoid AMA's categorical confusion; avoid highly debatable ideas like "constitute a single word", "if both parts carry equal weight", "principal words", "major words"; avoid "the dictionary" nonsense (there is no such thing as "the" dictionary, but lots of dictionaries which often conflict with each other and have different levels of prescriptive versus descriptive approach); and avoid nitpicky geekery no one is apt to care about, like musical key symbols and italicized organic chemistry prefixes (we should not address minutiae like that unless long-term dispute arises about it, per WP:CREEP and WP:MOSBLOAT).

However, I find the "the second element in a hyphenated spelled-out number" very dubious, and same with "-century" constructions; I have seen many titles of things that use "Twenty-two", "Fifty-third", and "Fourth-century"; this is one of several cases that needs more investigation in more style guides. And in the end, we are not required to do what a loose preponderance of other style guides seem to lean toward, especially when they contradict each other as to details and rationales; they are just duly informative with regard to what we decide. But we do need to decide something, since the extant material at MOS:TITLES has a gap, and people are not agreeing on what fits inside it.

PS: Your "The Star-Spangled Banner" is given as an example of a title (which we also capitalize, would you look at that) smirking isn't constructive. You know as well as I do that WP content is not a source, and that editors doing stylistically questionable things at a particluar article has nothing to do with whether a style rule we have should be changed. More to the point, the style guides you quoted are not in agreement on it, and AMA for one would have it as "The Star-spangled Banner" because "star-spangled" is not a temporary compound but a poetic 18th-century neologism that is a unitary term and appears to have nearly no existence without the hyphen. MLA would also lower-case "-spangled" because of its dictionary rule .  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

If you are still interested in looking into this, feel free to so, but right now I do not have time to continue delving into this matter. The four (five, if counting AP) style guides I looked at are probably the most widely used in the U.S., so it seems safe to assume that this is the norm among most external style guides. I don't have access to style guides from other countries. InfiniteNexus (talk) 07:35, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Getting rid of {rp}

Applause! Now tell me how to get round wp:CITEVAR objections like this one: Talk:Eric Gill/Archive 1#Proposal to change citations of McCarthy's books to use harvard referencing and Talk:Eric Gill/Archive 1#Page number citations are expected when the source is a substantial book. I had hoped to get the Eric Gill article up to GA standard but I am too much of a secret typographer to put my name to a GAN, given its current spider-crawled-in-the-ink appearance. Sigh. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:03, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

@JMF: I think in the Gill case (if I'm reading it right), the other party's objection was to inline parenthetical referencing with page numbers, which the community also deprecated already, i.e. doing things like "This is a claim (Smith 2023, p. 7).", instead of "This is a claim.<ref>Smith 2023, p. 7.</ref>", or the templated equivalents "This is a claim.<ref>{{harv|Smith|2023|p=7}}</ref>", or "This is a claim.{{sfn|Smith|2023|p=7}}". It's actually possible that 14GTR was literally opposed to ever including page numbers in any form, in which case his argument has no WP:P&G legs to stand on and should just be ignored.Sudden flash of possible insight: A strong case can be made that because the community did clearly deprecate inline parenthetical referencing in 2020 (WP:PAREN), and the rationale for doing so was its reading-flow disruptiveness, not the fact that round-bracket characters were involved, this actually translates automatically to a deprecation of {{Rp}} as well. It is simply another format for doing inline parenthetical referencing (its own documentation states explicitly that it's an adaptation from "full Harvard referencing and AMA style", though ultimately this is me quoting myself), just with fewer details and using superscript and colon, instead of more details with round brackets and no superscript or colon. That is, the deprecation is of citations that are inline and parenthetical, not inline and using what Americans call parentheses (round brackets). So, replacing "This is a claim (Smith 2023, p. 7)." but retaining "This is a claim<ref>Smith 2023.</ref>{{Rp|7}}" to produce "This is a claim." is simply defying that site-wide consensus by still putting part of the citation (page numbers or other in-source locations) inline parenthetically – especially given that the template can be used to produce things like "This is a claim.". Indeed, Misplaced Pages:Citing sources#Generally considered helpful already includes "converting parenthetical referencing to an acceptable referencing style". So, you could actually try that argument right now in doing cleanup of {{Rp}}.Because of the "let chaos reign" stupidity that is WP:CITEVAR, some people are probably apt to try to argue against this, but I think their case will be weak and easily deflated. That said, probably the only path to total cleanup is going to be really fully documenting how to convert {{Rp}} into other formats, and why it is a good idea, and why {{Rp}} is bad, and then have a follow-up RfC or TfD to formally deprecate {{Rp}} and mandate its replacement (mostly by AWB and sometimes even by bots for simple cases), so that it is no longer considered a valid "citation style" for CITEVAR purposes, no question about it. And I think the work in doing that documentation is going to be in my lap, though I'm not over-eager to wade into it right this second. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:04, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
The stonewall response was much as I expected though I had hoped that time and the offer of a ladder to climb down might just do the trick. AFAICS, the only way forward is to formally propose that {{rp}} be deprecated in favour of harvard referencing. Trouble is, when I tried to use the {{harvid}} method way back, I found it hostile. I persisted and matters much improved when I found {tl|sfnp}}. But other editors may have had their fingers burned and will resist, based on their bad experience way back when. So preparing the ground with explanation and education may be needed? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:00, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
Took me "a minute" to figure it out, too. I've started the slog of fully documenting how to replace {{rp}}, at User:SMcCandlish/Replacement of Template:Rp. Still needs some more info in it, and proofreading for any markup errors that mess up any of the code examples.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:46, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Incremental updates

Update: This is going very slowly, but I'm committed to working on it. It's going to require a bunch of very well-tested regular expressions, used in series in a JS user script, to catch and clean up a large number of content use cases, so that it produces uniform citation formatting (and without breaking anything). My earlier-documented work toward that at the page mentioned above has already been surpassed, in code I'm developing off-site. I'll start building the regexes I'm working on into a JavaScript pretty soon and start testing that against real content and refining it. After it reliably works for all valid and most sane but invalid test cases, then we'll be able to do search–replace operations against {{rp}} that will have predictable results with minimal errors. This is going to be a big project. It was more difficult than I expected because XML syntax (much less XML mixed with a {{...}} syntax!) is incredibly difficult to parse accurately with regex (or anything else for that matter) reliably. I've been using advanced tools like regex101.com with complex blobs of valid and invalid test-case input, and using ChatGPT to try to work out particularly thorny matching failures, and so on. As an example, just one of the regexes developed so far looks like <ref\s+name\s*=\s*(?:"\s*((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*"\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*"|'\s*((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*'>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*'|((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*))\s*(?:(\/)|)>, and even this cannot yet handle <ref name=foo group=bar> to normalize the name= part, only to avoid breaking a ref that has a group= part (and it does not do anything to normalize the latter part yet, only the former).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:06, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

It now parses even stuff like <ref group="bar's > / bar" extends=baz name='foos > / foo' follow="quux quux" /> (and some of the code it's accounting for is only in the beta of mw:Help:Cite and not deployed on en.WP yet), though this one regex only fixes up the name= parameter; other passes with similar regexes would handle other attributes like group= to normalize their formatting. Then another pass to fix spacing that shouldn't exist between citations. And so on. And of course a pass to replace {{rp}} with {{sfnp}} or whatever. Like I say, a multi-step process that'll be done by using the regexes in JS. The regex in question is now the monstrous <ref\s+((?:group|follow|extends)\s*=(?:(?!name\s*=).)*)?name\s*=\s*(?:"\s*((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*"\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*"|'\s*((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*'>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*'|((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*))(\s+(?:group|follow|extends)\s*=(?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*>).)*)*\s*(?:(\/)|)>. I'm suprised I pulled this off. Its one failure is that it can't gracefully handle the XML-valid (but technically ref-invalid) form name='foo "bar" baz' (single-quoted value with nested double quotes) or the completely invalid name="foo "bar" baz">; that's something that'll need to be handled by an earlier cleanup pass that looks just for those specific problems.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:02, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
Regex upgraded again, to handle line-breaking between <ref> attributes, as well as > inside quoted attributes after name=.
The new regex (just for handling name with or without other attributes present) is: <ref\s+((?:group|follow|extends)\s*=(?:(?!name\s*=))*)?name\s*=\s*(?:"\s*((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*"\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*"|'\s*((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*'>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*'|((?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*))(\s+(?:group|follow|extends)\s*=(?:(?!\s*\/>|"\s*>|'\s*>))*)*\s*(?:(\/)|)>
It is already sophisticated enough to handle input as awful as:
<ref group=
      "bar's > / bar"
     extends=
      baz
     name=
      '
      foos > / foo
      '
     follow=
      "quux > quux"
 />
Even <syntaxhighlight> can't deal with the above, but what I'm writing can. This one just cleans up name (to name="foos > / foo" from the above mess, and gets rid of the line break before the closing /> while we're at it); similar regexes in later passes will deal with group, etc., then eventually {{rp}} replacement.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:27, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Reminder to self: At some point, the script will also have to account for {{#tag:ref |Citation content here. |name=... |group=... |follow=... |extends=...}} (with parameters in various order and with or without linebreaks and extraneous spacing).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:37, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Intervene?

Have you seen Help talk:Citation Style 1#Automating conversion of REF-plus-Rp to Sfn((m)p)? Do you want to launch a teaser trailer? Your call. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 18:22, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

@JMF: Done.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Vauthors

Possibly telling people how to write harv citations is out of scope but I thought I should flag this one for you to include or ignore, your call. I've only just found the {{ref={{sfnref|blah blah}} }} facility and it is a lot more convenient that adding first=/last= to each and every name, just so you can write {{sfnp|last1|last2|last3|last4|2024}}. Here is a test example:

Up to you. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:56, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

I'll need to account for |vauthors= in the documentation and scripting eventually. But |vauthors= should not be used except in an article entirely done in Vancouver-style references (or it's against WP:CITESTYLE's instructions to use a consistent referencing style). It's a poor idea to use that style in the first place because it outputs less-useful author metadata, and much more importantly is harder to parse for readers (it is less clear that something like "Tan LH" is an individual's name than "Tan, L. H." that matches the rest of our initials formatting and other name handling, most especially when "Tan LH" appears in an article otherwise using citations that output "Tan, L. H."), and it's more error-prone for editors because this weird name formatting must be done exactly perfectly in that parameter. Another serious fault with it is that we often actually know complete author names (and these can be quite helpful in distinguishing authors and even in finding the source in the first place if it's something without a free-to-read URL or DOI), but |vauthors= forces us to drop most of the name information we already have; it's a disservice to readers and to editors doing verification work. Any time I run into a |vauthors= in an article that is not consistently in Vanc style, I replace it with a set of |last1=|first1=... (unless I'm in a big hurry or something), often with more complete author names.Using |ref={{sfnref|...}} a.k.a. |ref={{harvid|..}} isn't dependent in any way on |vauthors=.Also, the Lua behind the citation templates can already parse the names inside |vauthors= (if they were done right) and use them with {{sfnp}}, {{harvp}}, etc., directly. If we remove the |ref={{sfnref|Wang ''et al''|2015}} from your example:

Here is a claim in the article.

References
  1. Wang et al. (2015).
Sources

Wang T, Mo L, Mo C, Tan LH, Cant JS, Zhong L, Cupchik G (June 2015). "Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Evidence from an fMRI study". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 10 (6): 814–23. doi:10.1093/scan/nsu123. PMC 4448025. PMID 25298010.

Just using the automated {{sfnp|Wang|Mo|Mo|Tan|2015}} is clearer and easier than using a |ref={{sfnref|Wang ''et al''|2015}} along with {{sfnp|Wang ''et al''|2015}}. And there doesn't seem to be a consensus that "et al." should be italicized as Latin, because it is so assimilated into English, like "i.e." and "e.g."; I don't think any of our citation templates italicize it. (But it should have a "." after it, italicized or not, even in British usage, since it's a truncation abbreviation, of et alia.) Even without the italics, just using the automated {{sfnp|Wang|Mo|Mo|Tan|2015}} is still clearer and easier than using a |ref={{sfnref|Wang et al.|2015}} along with {{sfnp|Wang et al.|2015}}.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:23, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't realise that {{sfnp}} was able to deconstruct a vauthors list. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle. Now I've given myself some more hassle to redo it properly. ;-^
(I too prefer to change a vauthors list to |first1= last1= first2= last2= etc. Generally I avoid using it when creating a citation except when the authors are Chinese or Japanese but the article is in English: how do I know if it is last=Mao first=Tse Tung or vice versa? I confess to using it too when ten authors are listed, for example on IPCC papers.) --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:18, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
Well, like I said at the other page, no one's ever going to be "punished" for mixing citation styles. :-) Someone else just might rearrange it later. It can be a hassle. I got pretty irritated in fixing a vauthor instance stuck into an otherwise non-Vancouver article, as it had over 30 authors. I've seen someone reduce this to the first four last/first pairs then do |display-authors=etal, but I'm a little down on that because we had more author information and doing that deleted it. I think I'll whip up a script to convert from vauthors to last/first, at least for my own convenience, but probably after doing this big ref-cleaner and rp-replacer job first.

As for Asian names, I would guess just go by what the publication says; if it's "Chaudhary, C.; Richardson, A. J.; ...", and had a "Hua, X." or rarely but sometimes in Sinological material "Hua X" with no comma, in the author list, that already indicates the family-name order. But if the paper's author list started with "Chetan Chaudhary, Abigail Richardson, ..." and included something like "Hua Xiang" then it could be ambiguous; did they keep the same order, or give the Chinese names in surname-first order? I'm not sure vauthors would help here, since you wouldn't be sure whether to use "Hua X" or "Xiang H". Some familiarity with East Asian naming patterns helps. A name like "Hua Xhiangshu" or "Hua Xhian-shu" or "Hua Xiang-Shu" (orthography varies) would be family-name-first. People with more experience at it than I have can figure out Japanese names just by familiarity with which are usually given and which family names. Korean I'm generally at a loss with, unless it follows the Chinese pattern ("Lee Joon-gi" or "Lee Joon-Gi" or "Lee Joongi" is surname-first). It helps a little that a few Korean family names are overwhelmingly common, like Park/Pak/Paik, Lee/Li, Jun/Joon/June, Song/Sung, and Kim. When I'm unsure, I usually just Google around for other works by the same person until I can figure it out. If I could not at all, I would probably do |author4=Hua Xiang using the name order I had found (at all or most commonly) and leave it for someone with language/culture-specific experience to figure it out later. Maybe put in an HTML comment to this effect.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:52, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

PS: As I understand it, the vauthors to sfnp/harvp "translation" uses the author names up to the first four. I'm not sure what happens when someone has a main cite with |vauthors=Chaudhary C, Richardson AJ, Hua X|display-authors=etal. I'm not sure if the latter is just a visual injection of "et al.", or whether it counts as a fourth author name and would require {{sfnp|Chaudhary|Richardson|Hua|et al.|2023}}. I suspect not, but something to test in a sandbox.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:04, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Games

S, I know you're into games and their capitalizations, so take a look at List of abstract strategy games. I downcased a whole bunch of games listed there already, but there are a few I'm not sure what to do about, such as Connect Four, that might be trademarks, or might be generic. Do you have any insights or advice on those? Dicklyon (talk) 07:25, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Will have a look-see, but am in middle of some detailed thangs.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:29, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
@Dicklyon: For that one, we have an article title of Connect Four, and a lead that begins "Connect Four (also known as Connect 4, Four Up, Plot Four, Find Four, Captain's Mistress, Four in a Row, Drop Four, and Gravitrips". "Connect Four" does appear to be sourced as a Milton-Bradley (now Hasbro, after merger) trademark, along with the later "Connect 4" spelling. And in English, it is probably the WP:COMMONNAME even if we'd prefer otherwise. It is possible some of the other names are trademarks (or constitute titles of works in the form of commercially published variants of this game, more specifically), but would need to be investigated one-by-one, with those that are not trademarks being lower-cased. And it might be more WP:NPOV to rewrite most of the article to use one of the lowercased non-TM names, and only use "Connect Four" or "Connect 4" when referring to specific MB–Hasbro products/publications.What is presently at "score four" seems like it should be "Score Four" (trademark of Funtastic in 1968, AKA "Connect Four Advanced" by Hasbro later); there doesn't appear to be a generic name for that variant. And I'm skeptical it is a valid stand-alone article instead of a section at Connect Four, anyway; looks like it would not pass a GNG test at AfD.I didn't look closely at other examples. Were there some other iffy ones?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Sure, lots of potentially iffy ones. Like what I did here. You concur? And what about things like Five Field Kono that are usually capped in sources, for no apparaent reason? Dicklyon (talk) 05:51, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
The cleanup at peralikatuma looks spot-on to me. And five field kono (not even a redirect there? FFS ....) is a folk game, not a trademark/publication, so should be lower-case, and as: five-field kono (five-field {{lang|ko-Latn|kono}}) – per MOS:HYPHEN and MOS:FOREIGN. The parent article gonu has similar issues. This is the kind of stuff MOS:GAMECAPS is specifically aiming to address (along with overcapitalization of things like sports, folk dances, sport/dance moves and techniques, game pieces, musical instruments, etc.). For at least the immediate future, we have one weird exception, for go (game), which is presently being rendered "Go", but obviously really should be go ({{lang|zh-Latn|go}}), but we would need another RfC to undo the previous one that arrived at "Go" through what seems to be a WP:SSF-based WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. But in no way is "Go" some kind of "capitalize all Asian folk games" excuse. So, kono/gonu.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:20, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, I fixed some more of those. There's still a ton of over-capping in games generally though. Dicklyon (talk) 18:27, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Yes there is. Probably still in a lot of dance articles, too, though I cleaned up a lot of those. Sports mostly look pretty good, but I still run into obscure ones over-capitalizing stuff.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:24, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Dahua Technology

 Done

Hi SMcCandlish, I noticed that you are part of the category of Wikipedians willing to provide third opinions . I have been working on Dahua Technology and am hoping you may be interested in reviewing an ongoing discussion on the talk page regarding specific terminology used in the article. I'd be grateful for your feedback and assistance in implementing the edits as you see fit. Thank you, Caitlyn23 (talk) 19:23, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Will try to look into it tomorrow, but it's been a long day for me already.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:31, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
More like the next day or day after; have a lot going on.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:00, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandlish, just checking back to see whether you may have time to review the discussion on the Dahua Technology talk page. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and would appreciate assistance with the edits. Thanks again, Caitlyn23 (talk) 18:22, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
@Caitlyn23: This isn't really a Misplaced Pages:Third opinion matter, because it's not a dispute between two editors; rather, there has been a series of consensus discussions with unclear resolution. It would be much more appropriate for me to simply weigh in as one of those editors, than try to do what amounts to arbitrating between one editor (you) and a bunch of other editors (of differing opinions but some of them against yours). I have done that now, suggesting a compromise approach both sides hopefully will find workable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Artistic billiards

Hi! I've done a little bit of work on Artistic billiards over the last couple days - I'd never seen a match, but recently found a video on YouTube and it's very enjoyable! Shame it is so hard to find a detailed video. I've added some info from Trick Shot about Artistic Pool, but I'm not super familiar with the subject. Is there any funky sourcing outside of Shamos's book about these terms, Google isn't super helpful. Lee Vilenski 13:13, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

@Lee Vilenski: Not that I'm really aware of, or I would have split Artistic pool into its own article by now. I know Tom "Dr. Cue" Rossman is heavily involved in artistic pool (or at least was as of around 2010 or so). Old pool magazines like Inside Pool and Billiards Digest from that era probably have some coverage, but I no longer have a collection of that stuff (used to live in a converted warehouse space with oodles of room, but now a small apartment, so had to downsize a lot). AZBilliards may have some coverage, and there might be historical info among Rossman's own online materials. As for artistic billiards, carom in general isn't very popular in the English-speaking world but is a big deal otherwise, so I would expect more source materials to be available in French, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese, among other languages in the "carom world".One minor concern is that Trick shot#Artistic pool and Artistic billiards#Artistic pool are basically near-identical WP:CFORKS. The meat of the material should be merged to the former, with the latter reduced to a compressed summary, with {{Main|Trickshot#Artistic pool}} at the top of it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:13, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
I thought as much. I am in the process of merging, although I don't really see how Trickshot would be the main article of the two. Perhaps I don't know enough about the subject. Lee Vilenski 09:21, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
@Lee Vilenski: Well, artistic pool, artistic billiards, and trick-shot snooker are all essentially sub-topics (discipline-specific variants) of the Trick shot topic. Artistic billiards is well-developed in encyclopedic material enough for a stand-alone article. Artistic pool is slowly heading that direction; trick-shot snooker is not yet (though there's at least one specific-competition article). But Artistic pool (on a six-pocket pool table) is not a subtopic of Artistic billiards (on a pocketless carom table).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!
Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free and may Janus light your way. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:45, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

Happy New Year, SMcCandlish!

Happy New Year!

SMcCandlish,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Misplaced Pages.
Abishe (talk) 14:17, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Abishe (talk) 14:17, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Speed pool

Do you know if Speed pool is actually a thing? It's been unsourced for a decade and I couldn't find much about it aside from a few tournaments of the same name. Seems non-notable to me, but thought I'd check first. Lee Vilenski 23:52, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

It's definitely a thing, a professional competitive discipline. Jeanette Lee was big into it, back before all her medical issues. AZBilliards and such probably have good coverage of it that we're not citing yet.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:19, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Post-holidays note to self

Something to deal with quickly:

Need to stop putting this off; will probably only take 10 minutes.

Ongoing:

Several things appear to have stalled out over the holidays:

Some of these may need to be restarted as RfCs.

See also:

Forgot about this one for a long time (need to merge the NC material out of MOS:COMICS into WP:NCCOMICS):

An article still using deprecated WP:PARENTHETICAL referencing of the {{harv}} style to use as a cleanup testbed:

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:14, 7 January 2024 (UTC); updated: 23:00, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Dicing

Hello. You'll see that my edit was a typo, as I ' Claimed ', as inexpicably I'd typed ' qs ', not ' Vide ', and corrected it.

I'd say that this being an online dictionary, people who read it, by their nature, have an interest in what they don't understand; that not to use words, (though it wasn't my intention), that '...more than a few...' (sic) understand should be persuasive only if we weren't writing in English: to use that for a guide now, (not that that's contravening any Wikipaedia rule), should mean that at some past time somebody declared it is one, anyway; and it must have been sometime between one of the forms of Celtic speech used in Britain and today, since we're using English, here; words which, at one time, '...not more than a few...' knew, meaning we might still be uding Anglo-Saxon. So when did excluding the unfamiliar become a rule ? Dictionaries are still being published to explain both new and unfamiliar words; a pursuit disallowed, now, by this guide.

It's true I could have made ' Vide ' a link; but what's conversational for some is as abstuse as others' reasonings.

Yes, it was mentioned above ; but not all sections and sub-sections are read, and the re-emphasised words occupying the space of an old ink blot might very well, (for the majority, not ' The few ', who skip through what they read), have been the harmless ones that conveyed the distinction between tartan and dicing.

Anyway, regards to you. Heath St John (talk) 19:46, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

@Heath St John: Sorry about the "wasn't a typo fix" part; I had seen both your edits as a single combined diff, and only the edit summary of the second was visible, so it looked like the addition of the cross-reference was claimed to be a typo fix. I should have checked to see whether it was more than one edit with distinct edit summary rationales. Anyway, Misplaced Pages doesn't use q.v. (what I'm guessing was intended by qs) or vide this way. They're unfamiliar to too many readers, and don't really serve a purpose here (mostly because Misplaced Pages is not paper). If the mention was right there in the same block of text (as it was in this case), there is no reason to tell people where it is; and if it's widely separated, in a different section, the thing to do, if a cross-reference really seems needed, is to link to that section, e.g. with {{see below|]}} or whatever, which produces output like (see below). The usual purpose of q.v. is to refer to a headword, such as is found in a glossary; and vide is generally used in academic material to refer to a specific passage (and your use of it didn't provide such specificity). Anyway, the lead section at Sillitoe tartan is now even clearer than it was, with the terminological quibbles consolidated, so there's little if any room of confusion any longer. PS: Misplaced Pages style for abbreviated Latinisms like "q.v." and "i.e." and "e.g." and "et al." is to use the dots, and the ones that are well-assimilated into non-specialist English don't take italics, while the more obscure ones like "q.v." and "p.m.v" and "op. cit." (lots of them are legalisms or academicisms) are italicized. "Et al." is actually an edge case with regard to the italics; there is or was recently a discussion open about this, though I forget where. (Frustrating, since I was going to comment in it.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:55, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
Very clear.
Thanks very much. Heath St John (talk) 21:03, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Pushing beans

Hi there! In the future, I hope you can take a beat and consider WP:AGF instead of implying that someone is busy pushing beans up their nose, as you did in this edit summary. There's already too much gatekeeping at the project, and I don't think you want to come off as doing that. -- Mikeblas (talk) 02:04, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

There is no AGF failure or gatekeeping in anything I said, or in reverting something I didn't (at least at the time) consider an improvement. I get the feeling you've not actually read or understood WP:BEANS. In short, it means don't give people ideas about monkeying around with stuff they don't need to be monkeying around with. It has nothing literal to do with noses and beans; its a metaphor. (And wasn't about you.) My point was that from my perspective, Trapper already had answered your query, and my further point was that people generally don't need to know about bot-related code, in detail in documentation of parameters for human editors to use, or a few of them are likely to mess around with it in unhelpful ways. Those who do have a reason to be involved with it (e.g. they operate a bot, or they're working on the cleanup category populated by the bot) are already going to know about that parameter and what it's doing (or will quickly know how/where to find out). That was the reasoning at the time (and doesn't fit in an edit summary). However, given what you said at WT:CS1 later, I already said I saw your viewpoint on it and you should just feel free to undo my revert . I guess you didn't see that, but it's a little weird to get a hostile-ish note about some old revert from a few days ago. It's not like I have some magical power whereby a revert from me is permanent and unquestionable. :-) Anyway, I do see your point about documenting that parameter in a more general-editor-facing way, since there might after all be a reason for any given editor to do something with it. Just don't think it should be redundantly documented, when linking to existing documentation is fine. Even that I don't feel terribly strongly about, though.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:48, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Alternative to rp

Hi. In your archive Page-ception you have two paragraphs that outline ref= use as an alternative to Template:rp. Is that still current? Any chance there is a standalone description I can point out for others?

(I use rp primarily because it is much shorter. ref= has the same problem as sfn, additional points of failure. In <ref name=McNuttsIR2006/>{{rp|131}}</ref> vs <ref>], p. 131.</ref>, the string "McNuts, I. R. (2006)]], p." isn't checked by reference failing.) Johnjbarton (talk) 19:31, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@Johnjbarton: I wasn't able to parse what you meant by "isn't checked by reference failing" and that quoted string. I haven't made the "Page-ception" thread's stuff into a page of its own, and I'm more and more leaning toward {{sfnp}} (which does not need a surrounding <ref>...</ref>), along with rare use of {{harvp}} inside <ref>...</ref> for cases that require additional annotations. The complicated |ref=Whatever 2023 and <ref name="Whatever2023">] ...</ref> stuff I did at Tartan and some other articles can all be replaced by those two templates for a leaner and less error-prone result.

Is there some kind of case you're having an issue with? I might be able to help work it out.

The problem (or a problem) with {{rp}} is that it is a form of inline parenthetical referencing, which was deprecated by community consensus entirely in 2022. It separates part of the citation data from the citation and clogs up the text.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:50, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Context: over at Electromagnetic field, we're dealing with a situation where there are a couple standard textbooks that are cited repeatedly, each citation pointing to a different page range, and then a bunch of one-off citations for specific points. One way would be to use a bunch of {{rp}} tags. Another would be to have a separate list of {{cite book}} templates for the textbooks and then point to the specific page ranges with {{sfn}}s. XOR'easter (talk) 21:21, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
@XOR'easter and Johnjbarton: Oh, that one's easy-peasy: (along with some other cleanup). Did that while carrying on a debate at WP:VPPOL in the other window. :-) This one didn't need any |ref= twiddling. If it doesn't suit your needs, feel free to undo it of course (WP:CITEVAR and all 'at). Some folks prefer to have the multi-cited sources be under their own subheading after ==References==, such as ===Sources=== or ===Bibliography===, instead of between {{refbegin}} and {{refend}} (or even both at once).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:35, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the fix (at least @XOR'easter will be happier ;-)
I can't understand multi-cited in a separate section. Change the number of citations and fiddle with the sections. No thanks. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:05, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
If it comes to it, just go back to the older format or pick a new one; I wasn't trying to "impose my will" by that change; it was basically a demo, and I half-expected it to be reverted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:04, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
PS: Another approach is WP:LDR, in which the multi-cited sources would be put inside a <references>...</references> structure or an extended {{reflist|...}} tag, directly under ==References==, each wrapped in <ref>...</ref>, but this strikes me as unnecessarily complicated.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:37, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
I don't want to relitigate the decision, but for me the exact problem with sfn is that separates the citation data (in References) from the citation (in Sources). Or in the case of Electromagnetic field, "Reference" contains some blue links that point to otherwise-formatted citations and some blue links that point outside the article. Looks sloppy.
Now that I know that sfnp can be mixed with <ref> I'll try it. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:04, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Well, at least all the citation data is in the "References" section; this is clearly an improvement over (less sloppy than) having some of it there and some of it stuck in mid-sentence in the article (where for some readers it's probably not even clear what it is). At any rate, it is not possible to have all citation information on the same line, somewhere on the page, without entirely duplicating every {{cite journal}} or whatever for every page at which it is cited. This really is about as good as it gets. The whole site seems to be moving this direction. PS: I used {{sfnp}} instead of {{sfn}} because it produces the same "(2018)" date output as the main citation templates; {{sfn}} produces "2018" without the consistent parentheses/round-brackets, for no good reason. People only use {{sfn}} because it has a shorter name and they think it's "the default" or what is "normal", but it should really not be used unless the article has a citation style that is consistently using "2018" format, which is only possible if they're all non-templated, manually formatted citations, which is pretty much no longer done in any article on the system except old junk no one's touched since the 2000s.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:12, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Is there any documentation other than Template:Sfnp? I'm sure it is completely obvious to you, but don't understand how to use it.
In
{{sfnp | <last1*> | <last2> | <last3> | <last4> | <year*> | p= <page> | loc= <location> }}
there are an indefinite number of parameters (how many authors last names?) with ambiguous definitions (2002abcde?) ("de Broglie" vs "DeBroglie" etc). As I understand it these have to match a {{cite}} template correct? All of the parameters last1...year are essentially an identifier forced to match a function of the cite template as far as I can tell.
(None of this is an issue with ref because the name only needs to match, the authors and date are only given one place. Seems to me that a solution where the point of citation entry is an arbitrary string and page number like rp but which renders as the consensus desires would be nicer). Johnjbarton (talk) 16:47, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
For others and future reference: the information about how to use {{sfnp}} is in Template:Sfnp, in the "Possible issues" and "Implementation" sections. Johnjbarton (talk) 22:16, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
@Johnjbarton: 'Far as I can tell, all the related templates share the same documentation, and as you've seen it has some troubleshooting info in it. But maybe someone should write up a how-to on their use (another thing for my to-do list?). Some usage points based on what I already knew and some sandboxing I just did; I guess this is the bare beginnings of the how-to:
  • A filled-out "maximal" example would be something like: {{sfnp|Chen|Jones|López-Garcia|Le Fevre|2021|p=99|loc=footnote 7}}.
  • The |loc= parameter is optional and can also be used in place of instead of along with |p= or its plural form |pp= (those two are mutually exclusive with regard to each other): {{sfnp|Chen|Jones|López-Garcia|Le Fevre|2021|loc=errata sheet}}
  • The author surnames must match those (in numeric order) given in the CS1 template, e.g.: {{Cite journal |last1=Chen |first1=Amy B. |last2=Jones |first2=C. D. |last3=López-Garcia |first3=Carlos |last4=Le Fevre |first4=Jean-Paul |last5= ... |date=2021 ...}} to match the above example.
    • Spelling must be the same ("De Broglie" and "DeBroglie" and "de Broglie" are not equivalent).
    • The surname matching also works with the generic CS2 equivalent template {{Citation |last1=Chen |first1=Amy B. |last2=Jones |first2=C. D. |last3=López-Garcia |first3=Carlos |last4=Le Fevre |first4=Jean-Paul |last5= ... |date=2021 ...}}
      If this is encountered in any article dominated by the more specific CS1 templates, it should be replaced with the appropriate one of those, per WP:CITESTYLE (and at this point, the vast majority of uses of CS2 {{Citation}} are inconsistent injections of this sort into CS1 articles; the number of articles consistently templated in CS2 is decreasing all the time).
    • Surprisingly, it also works by extracting individual surnames out of the lossy and "reader-hateful" |vauthors= mess, as long as it's actually coded in the proper format: {{Cite journal |vauthors=Chen AB, Jones CD, López-Garcia C, Le Fevre J-P, ... |date=2021 ...}}
      This format, too, should be replaced on-sight with CS1's standard |last1=, etc., if |vauthors= is encountered in a article that is not consistetly using Vancouver-style citations, which is almost all of the cases at this point. (Few articles remain using Vancouver consistently, but editors who are fans of that style commonly go around wrongly injecting it into articles that do not use it, which is against WP:CITESTYLE).
    • It's also smart enough to treat |editor1-last=, etc. as author names for this purpose if there is no |last1=, etc. If there are one or more specified authors, then any editor names are ignored (they do not concatenate onto the author(s) list).
    • |last=, |author=, and |author1= (and the rare |author-last=, |author1-last=, and |author-last1=) are all aliases of |last1=, and so forth. |editor-last=, |editor=, |editor-last1=, |editor1= are all aliases of |editor1-last=, and so on.
  • For multiple authors, the maximum is 4, not "an indefinite number". If you put in 5 or more, the template will throw a red error message. (This applies to {{sfnp}}, {{harvp}}, and all their variants.)
  • All the authors up to 4 must be included if specified in the full-length citation. For the above example, doing {{sfnp|Chen|Jones|López-Garcia|2021|p=32}} will not work because |Le Fevre is missing.
  • The CS1/CS2 special parmeter |display-authors=etal, to output "et al." after the last specified author name, is not detected or supported. If the citation is {{cite book |last=Adebayo |first=Mohamed |display-authors=etal |date=1997 ...}}, this must be short-cited like {{sfnp|Adebayo|1991|p=23}}.
  • Dealing with two publications the same year by the same author(s) : This is where |ref= comes in. If you have {{cite book |last=Tāwhiri |first=Koa |date=2023 ...}} and {{cite journal |last=Tāwhiri |first=Moana |date=2023 ...}}, the solution is this: {{cite book |last=Tāwhiri |first=Koa |date=2023 ... |ref={{sfnref|Tāwhiri|2023a}} }} and {{cite journal |last=Tāwhiri |first=Moana |date=2023 ... |ref={{sfnref|Tāwhiri|2023b}} }}, each short-cited as {{sfnp|Tāwhiri|2023a}} and {{snfp|Tāwhiri|2023b|p=42}}, respectively.
    • An alternative when there are two authors with the same surname is to be more specific about the author names: {{cite book |last=Tāwhiri |first=Koa |date=2023 ... |ref={{sfnref|Tāwhiri, K.|2023}} }} and {{cite journal |last=Tāwhiri |first=Moana |date=2023 ... |ref={{sfnref|Tāwhiri, M.|2023}} }}, each short-cited as {{sfnp|Tāwhiri, K.|2023}} and {{snfp|Tāwhiri, M.|2023|p=42}}, respectively. Doing both forms of disambiguation at once is not helpful. The name disambiguation is often helpful any time there are two authors by the same surname in the same article, even if the publication years do not collide.
    • The formerly recommended practice was to "operator overload" the long-form citation's |year= parameter: {{cite book |last=Tāwhiri |first=Koa |year=2023a ...}}, which would work with {{sfnref|Tāwhiri|2023a}}, but it pollutes the long-form citation's date ouput with an invalid year string: Tāwhiri, Koa (2022a) The kluge to repair that was to do: {{cite book |last=Tāwhiri |first=Koa |year=2023a |date=2023...}}. But this is all just ridiculous awfulness, a case of the tail wagging the dog, the code forcing human editors to do confusing crap that abuses and juggles around template parameters for side purposes that don't match their citation-information intent. Worse, non-expert editors are apt to think that |year=2023a|date=2023 is a typo and "fix" it to just |date=2023, thereby breaking short cites to that source. The |ref= parameter was introduced to make such easily broken hoop-jumping unnecessary. Instances of |, with or without the compensating |date=2023 should be replaced with |date=2023 and an {{sfnref}} (also often called by the alias {{harvid}}) inside a {{ref}}. NB: Using |date= instead of |year= is universally better, because |date= also handles bare years along with fuller dates, and editors who encounter a |year=2023 but see a full date in the cited work when verifying it are apt to improve the citation by giving the full date; |year= is simply obsolete.
  • Dealing with excessively long author names (usually organizational ones): Another job for |ref={{sfnref|...}} . If you have {{cite report |editor1-last=Yi |editor1-first=Xiu-Yīng |editor2=Committee on Reptile and Amphbian Nomenclature |date=2023 |publisher=World Herptological Society ...}}, you can add |ref={{sfnref|Yi|CRAN|2015}}, and cite it as, e.g., {{sfnp|Yi|CRAN|2015}}.
  • Vancouver-style citation templates ({{Vcite journal}}, {{Vcite journal}}, {{Vcite book}}, etc.), which are rare but still occationally found, cannot be used at all with {{sfnp}}, etc., without adding |ref={{sfnref|...}} to them. Yet another reason to not use that citation style.
  • Author names used by {{sfnp}} and related templates have nothing to do with what is in <ref name="...">, only the surnames specified inside the citation template. If you have <ref name="DeBroglieMacDuff2019">{{cite web |last1=De Broglie |first1=Matt |last2=MacDuff Samuelson |first2=Jennifer B. |date=2019 ...}}, this would be short-cited like {{sfnp|De Broglie|MacDuff Samuelson|2019}}.
    • It's helpful for everyone's sanity to make them consistent and clear, e.g. use <ref name="DeBroglie & MacDuff Samuelson 2019">. Note that the quotation marks are mandatory because of spaces and non-alphanumeric ASCII characters. The lazy practice of doing <ref name=DeBMacDS2019> with very simple ref names that do not contain spaces, punctuation, or other special characters is a terrible idea because someone else is reasonably likely to clean up such messy refs later and may forget the quotation marks and break the citation. Even doing <ref name=DeB-MacDS-2019> is technically invalid markup, though few editors realize it (MW seems to generally handle it okay, but this cannot be guaranteed in future versions because it's against the documented requirements of <ref>. Every time it is encountered, <ref name=foo> should be converted to <ref name="foo"> (though as part of a more substantive edit per WP:COSMETICBOT).

Regarding "a solution where the point of citation entry is an arbitrary string and page number like rp but which renders as the consensus desires would be nicer", I'm not sure that's technically feasible to do within this wiki (but see note below about future features of <ref>). Something I could ponder on. If it were doable, I think we would have simply already replaced {{rp}}'s functionality in situ. There might in theory be some way to do something like Here is some article text.{{magicref|Yamamoto2001|p=27}}, where the {{magicref}} template (actually Lua module – this would certainly have to be done with a complicated Lua program, not with normal template code) matched Yamamoto2001 to a <ref name="Yamamoto2001">{{cite book |last=Yamamoto |first=Sumiko |date=2001 ...}}</ref> probably defined in a WP:LDR block at the bottom of the page, and then extracted the necessary details from the long-form citation in essentially the same way that {{sfnp}} does, and generated a similar short citation. This would be "brittle" in that if anyone renamed the <ref>'s name the {{magicref}} would break. It also has the issue that, as with {{snfp}}/{{harvp}}, it would be generally desirable to put the full-form citation at the bottom of the page. If there were community appetite for this, someone else would have to implement it, because I can't Lua-code may way out of a paper bag.

If this is really just about speed/ease of entry, an interim approach but basically a messy one is to just put the full-length citation into the article body at first citation of the source. The templates really don't care where they "live". It would not technically be invalid to do Here is some article text.<ref>{{cite book |last=Adebayo |first=Mohamed |display-authors=etal |date=1997 |page=123 ...}}</ref> ... This is more article text much later.{{sfnp|Adebayo|1997|pp=289–290}} It's still citing sources, and doing it inline, just not in an ideal way (because the long citation has a page number "fixed" in it, and it will be mixed into the main <references> or {{reflist}} output. If you did this at a new article, no one would likely care, but if you did it at an article with already-established citation style someone might object to it as a change in citation style, or at least change it to put the long cite at the bottom and without an permanently embedded page number.

Two further notes:

  • I'm in the process of slowly writing up a {{rp}} replacement guide, with user script tools for making it easier (the scripting requires a boatload of testing and tweaking because parsing XML mixed in with {{...}} markup using JavaScript and regex is very difficult, even when just parsing for a single <ref> tag and its limited parameters like name= and group=).
  • The ability to directly cite different pages in the same source within the <ref> tag itself is (allegedly and very slowly) coming. The format will look like <ref extends="Miller 2019">Miller (2019), p. 42.</ref>, and such a short cite will have a clickable ↑ that links to the full citation (hopefully they'll pick another character, since in many cases the full cite might be below all the <references>/{{reflist}} output, not higher up inside that section). It's already in beta testing, and the preview documentation is at mw:Help:Cite#Citing different parts of the same source. It could be years before we get this functionality, though. MW development is slow, and deployment to here even slower. That feature was first documented as being in beta on 2 December 2019 ! FFS.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:22, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Wow, that's excellent thanks! It's much better to have the exceptions as indented sub-bullets. You should publish this or edit the template doc; let me know if you want feedback.
I probably use ProveIt for 90% of my references (mostly via DOI and ISBN), which is one force that pushes me towards in-line refs. Seems like tooling to adapt ProveIt to sfnp would include:
  • ProveIt to continue to insert inline
    • it may only see one section in the edit window so it can't insert in Sources/Reference/Notes
  • Inline-inserted cite templates could be bot-moved to Sources/References/Notes.
    • After user edits, as part of one of the citation clean bots.
    • Does this exist?
  • ProveIt could offer sfnp insertion from cite sources parsed out of full article as alternative to cite insertion.
    • This would reduce the matching-4-author-names drudgery.
    • Does something like this exist?
Johnjbarton (talk) 01:47, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
@Johnjbarton: I just now saved an improved version to User:SMcCandlish/How to use the sfnp family of templates; much easier to read and with some additional info. ProveIt isn't something I use; I'm an embarassingly manual dinosaur when it comes to adding citation data. I just copy-paste names and titles and DOIs and such from the source material and massage it into a cite template. Probably very inefficient. I don't know of any bot task to do the kind of shuffling you're talking about. It might be feasible to create one, but possibly a challenge to get it approved, because some "don't you dare touch citations in my FA" clown is likely to claim it somehow violates their perfect and careful "citation style", if they don't happen to be doing the full citations at the bottom of the page. See also Misplaced Pages talk:Citing sources#Fine style point with "Citations" and "Works cited" subsections; how to even do them at page bottom varies. I fear this is and will remain a per-article, editor-judgement cleanup task. As for "ProveIt could offer sfnp insertion from cite sources parsed out of full article as alternative to cite insertion", that sounds practical/doable, but I don't know who develops that and how active they are or responsive to new feature requests. Regarding the matching-4-author-names drudgery: It is a little of a hassle the first time around, but once you've got one it can be copy-pasted for the other-page citations to the same source; just change the page number. Careful use of regex (if you're geeky enough for it) in the advanced search feature built into the default desktop editor or the similar one that is part of wikEd, can be used to speed up a lot of stuff when doing conversion/cleanup (but copy-paste the article into a text editor between regex operations; if you mess one up, ctrl-z (Mac: cmd-z) doesn't work). I also find it exceedingly helpful to use a multi-clipboard utility. Windows 10 onward has this already built in (use Cmd-V to see a list of recent pasteables). For Mac, I can recommend the third-party utility iClip, though there are several good competitors. Anwway, to stop rambling, and get back to the subject, another alternative to the matching-4-author-names drudgery is to do {{cite journal |last=Smith |first=J. |last2=Jones ... |date=2021 ... |ref={{sfnref|Smith et al.|2021}} }} then use {{sfnp|Smith et al.|2021|p=92}}.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:51, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

A request

Howdy. I believe Dicklyon respects you greatly & not just because you support his 'lower case' stance. Maybe, if you were to 'suggest' directly to him, that he stop making such page moves while a related RFC is on going? he'll comply. I know it's not your responsibility to do that. But, it might help prevent Dicklyon from being reported by an editor (not me) to WP:ANI. GoodDay (talk) 21:18, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Didn't realize it was him. Yes, I'll do that; he probably has e-mail enabled, and it might be better to get his attention that way.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:43, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
@GoodDay: Done.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:49, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
OK, no more gridiron-related moves or edits by me until the RfC resolves. Dicklyon (talk) 00:16, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Dicklyon, the RfC has nothing to do with the page moves and will not resolve in moving anything, that's for an RM to decide. You may be surprised that I agree with some of your lowercasings of these topics, and opening RM's on many of them will likely get you the results you want. Quite a few editors think the National Football League Draft and other NFL Draft pages stand separate from other draft pages as proper names, and it will take another RM to resolve that, an RM separate from the others (that's how Amakuru got "civil rights movement" lowercased, by mixing it up in an RM with other civil rights movement pages which had nothing to do with the 1954-1968 Civil Rights Movement so the issue was diluted, and I request that you or others don't try that tactic with the NFL Draft RM, thanks). Randy Kryn (talk) 01:05, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Keep repeating that "nothing to do with the page moves", and maybe someone will be convinced. But thanks for admitting that I'm at least sometimes right. I can't see any evidence for the NFL draft standing out as more "proper" in sources, but I do see a lot people repeating it. Dicklyon (talk) 01:08, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
You are often right, and you know that I think that, so I'm not "admitting" anything. But I do think that you are damaging the purpose of both WP:RM and the Village pump (policy) page by this divisive RfC, purposes which will not get straightened out easily if you happen to get your way in substituting one page for another. I don't know why you can't take the location opposition into account, just close the RfC, move the NFL Draft question to an RM at the NFL Draft page, and then ping everyone who has commented at the RfC to haul their main comments and evidence to that one. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:14, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
The "location opposition" is utterly contrary to WP:CONSENSUS and WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY policies, and the only reason it's happening is the American football wikiproject people know they can't control the outcome at a VPPOL RfC by swamping a process (RM) that nearly no one pays any attention to. VPPOL is huge and is the highest-consensus-level venue on the entire system. That a few people who don't care about football are piling on in a "screw our policies, always side with anything that sticks it to Dicklyon and the MoS" is unfortunate but predicable. Everyone has some nit-pick they don't like in MoS, and the most irritated of them always come out of the woodwork to wedge-drive in a "WP:OWN policy shouldn't exist, at least not for my pet topic" manner any chance they get. It doesn't mean there's a lack of consensus on any of these guideline or policy matters, it just means certain individuals will beat their dead horse straight to the center of the earth. Because it's a style matter and people are tired of tedious style debates, no action will ever be taken to put a stop to their antics, or even do anything about it when they engage in direct personal attacks, as they do against Dicklyon on a very frequent basis. If this were any other subject of any kind, this years-long tendentiousness and organized, programmatic incivility would never be tolerated.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:35, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
I don't know how much of that is meant for me, Dicklyon knows I respect (most) of his work here. The point made is that this adds another layer to a requested move and its appeal process. WP:RM, then to WP:MOVEREVIEW, then to WP:Village pump (policy). This major change makes Village pump (policy) the Supreme WikiCourt for requested moves, and if that's what you and Dicklyon intend to do I think it's fair to voice opposition without being unduly criticized. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:43, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
There is no "change" of any kind here. It is not only perfectly fine to seek additional community input when consensus on a P&G question is uncertain, it is a very good idea. It is why WP:VPPOL exists. It is why WP:CENT exists. It is why we have things like WP:NPOVN, WP:RSN, and other noticeboards (other than the "punish someone" drama factories like ANI and AE), and even a tradition of opening "WP:Requests for comment/subject" stand-alone RfCs when we think they'll run long. If there was any merit to your fantasy that an RfC is invalid any time some other, lower-level process also pertains to that type of dispute, then none of these venues would or could exist. So, quote me the policy that makes RM mandatory. Quote me the policy that forbids broader VPPOL discussion of any particular kind of matter, especially titles in particular. Quote me the policy that says there is a WP:CONLEVEL and WP:NOTBURO exception when it comes to article titles.

VPPOL has always been the "once it is decided here, there is no longer a question to keep asking" venue (unless something changes later and WP:CCC might apply so the question should be asked again). We have no broader-input venue for assessing community consensus. The entire purpose of it is to get as broad as possible a range of input on a question of P&G interpretation, application, or change, especially when it may affect a substantial number of articles and/or the question is mired in a tug-of-war between two opposing viewpoints without sufficent input from middle-ground Wikipedians who are not partisans in the dispute. It is completely routine to use RfC or other processes to arrive at decisions that might otherwise be handled at RM, if RM is not a good process for it in that particular case. (Just one of numerous examples: templates are often renamed via multi-template TfDs in which various templates need to be deleted, some merged, and one or more renamed. See also other examples already posted in the VPPOL discussion. There are many more.) Your notion that the only possible way to arrive at article titling decisions is through an RM is simply patently false.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:41, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Just to be clear, you are fine with any "no consensus" decision endorsed at WP:MOVEREVIEW being brought to Village pump (policy), even many months after the close? Randy Kryn (talk) 14:19, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Any time there is "no consensus" on something (and it is something people are going to continue squabbling about), a consensus does eventually need to be reached on it. There are numerous ways to do this, including waiting a long while and asking the same question again (e.g. repeating the RM in this sort of case); waiting or not waiting a while but asking a different question (e.g. propose a move to a different name than one of the ones about which consensus could not be reached); opening a stand-alone RfC on the matter (generally only it's a broad question, like a swath of articles, and in which there is some kind of fundamental dispute like "the rule does not apply to this topic" or "this is/isn't a proper name", not just a routine "my sources say this" vs. "my other sources say that" routine dispute about some specific article); opening an RfC of that sort on a guideline talk page; opening an RfC of that sort on a noticeboard that is pertinent; or, if it's a P&G matter, opening such an RfC at VPPOL. Using VPPOL would not be appropriate if it were not a P&G question. But in this case it is one.

Doing it "many months after the close" would actually be preferable, for the same reason we strongly discourage re-opening the same RM shortly after it closed with no consenus, or re-opening the same RfC shortly after it came to no consensus. No one wants to continue the same unproductive discussion that recently failed. What we do want to see is either quickly a different, refining discussion that may get past the original roadblock, or much later a re-asking of the same question to see if consensus can be reached among a different pool of presently-active editors. Or, for that matter, asking the variant question but later instead of soon. There is no bureaucracy to follow here.

PS: The reason MRV exists is because it is a (not the only) possible way of questioning a closure result, by asking for review of it by univolved admins (and doing so at WP:AN is still how this is usually done; the RM-related ones were just so frequent that the process was spun off to its own noticeboard like WP:DRV was). Its existence does not mean that the community in an even broader venue is somehow prohibited from examining the question, e.g. at VPPOL. Just think about the implications of that idea for a moment. Name any other decision-making of any kind in which admins get to make up their own "micro-consensus" decision, and the community cannot discuss much less override or move past it. (I'll save you the trouble: it does not exist, not even for hardcore things like indefinite block decisions. Hell, even WP:ARBPOL is subject to community consesus review and revision.) It's also important that MRV exists for one purpose and one only: to determine whether the closer erred in summarizing the RM debate they closed (in this case a decision of "no consensus"). It is expressly not for re-examining any (or adding additional) rationales for whether pages should move and to what names. But the VPPOL discussion is about exactly that (it is a "mega-RM" in a broader venue than RM makes possible), based on what P&G arguments and sourcing apply.

PPS: Yet another example of how other processes than RM are used to arrive at article titles: if an RfC about a rule change or a new rule comes to a clear consensus, then pages are simply manually moved (or RM/TRed if blocked by an edited redirect) to comply with it. That's how the species over-capitalization mess was cleaned up. It required no additional RMs at all (though in theory some could have come up if some particular instance had been disputed). It's especially interesting that: a) the lower-case decision was reached by RM in the first place, b) MRV upheld it as not a faulty close, and c) the community re-examined the question via RfC (based on the claim of upper-casing fans that the RM and MRV had an insufficient consensus level). It's an exactly parallel case, other than it trying to overturn a disliked consensus instead of trying to resolve a failure to come to consensus. You were around for all of that, but did not raise any such bogus "wrong venue" or "wrong process" claims. It's obvious why: because those trying to use the RfC to overturn an RM decision were trying to get an exception from MoS (and AT and NCCAPS), and you consistently support topical "rebellion", ignoring all policy and other considerations to champion the cause of subject- and wikiproject-specific special pleading for exceptions even when they provably cannot be justified by usage in sources independent of the subject.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:06, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

A nice essay/summary (why don't you do more essays, lots of them can just be copy paste with a little editing). You were going good on the personal front until the end there. I didn't know about the species RfC and don't know which way I would have gone. When I agree with a lowercasing (you may or may not have noticed) I probably just won't comment or disagree. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:26, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Here I thought I put out more essays than I should already. I'm not trying to make this be "all about you". But if your last sentence means that because you feel put-upon by me that you are now going refuse to support MoS/NC/AT-complaint moves you agree with and are only going to oppose those you don't, I can't see that being constructive and it would just increase a perception of "always defending MoS defiance". But maybe you meant something completely different. Yes, I have noticed that you sometimes agree with a lower-casing; I don't think anyone's suggested you want to capitalize everything, just that you have a history of supporting capitalization when it is wanted (even in absence of independent source usage) by people focused on a particular topic (and relatedly of making or supporting claims that something "is a proper name" when there's insufficient sourcing to reach that conclusion).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:51, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
No, I don't spite edit. Seems an odd way to go about Misplaced Pages. I meant that if I see a move request for lowercase that I agree with, more often than not others have already chimed in enough to pass that RM so I move on. Only so many hours in an hour. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:00, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
Gotcha. I'm the same way about this. My RM time has been dwindling, especially as I take on bigger stuff. I have too many irons in the fire already.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

"regarded/considered as one of the greatest/best"

Hi, thanks for your contributions on the discussion of "regarded/considered as one of the greatest/best of all-time/his (or her) generation" in WT:MOS#MOS:PUFFERY. How is consensus on that page determined as there doesn't appear to have been any activity for over 10 days now? RevertBob (talk) 20:05, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

@RevertBob: I don't think a clear consensus has emerged from that at all, and it would have a lot to do with the venue, because it's not really an MoS matter except in a very surface way, but primarily a mixture of WP:OR and WP:NPOV concerns, with a little WP:V thrown in. I think this is going to have to be a carefully structured RfC, probably at WP:VPPOL. There were a number of issues raised, and a striking point was that some editors think it is better (when there's sourcing to back to up) to state outright "is/was one of the greatest whatever" than to hedge with "is considered one of the greatest whatever", and that is not what I anticipated. All the arguments presented so far need to be accounted for in drafting an RfC on this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:17, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

School outcomes

Hi, I have a weird request that basically involves asking for further context on a comment you wrote in this 2017 RfC. The reason I'm asking you in particular is because as far as I can tell, you are the only one who mentioned school districts at all in that discussion that is still an active editor here.

So, the the story starts with me coming across a school district article that likely would not meet GNG and looking at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes#Education. There it says: "Populated, legally-recognized places" include school districts, which conveys near-presumptive notability to school districts per Misplaced Pages:Notability (geography). I have no idea what the orgin of this consensus is (or if there ever was one). Anyways, I noticed that this kind of conflicted with what is actually stated at WP:GEOLAND. So I tried to create an RfC a few months ago. You can read it at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (policy)/Archive 188#School districts and GEOLAND. A bunch of people thought my RfC was unclear or weren't sure if there was anything I was trying to change from the status quo... and I'd really just like to not be going in circles trying to understand what happened. As far as I can tell, this is the only RfC that's ever really had anything to do specifically with school districts. So I'd really appreciate it if you could prove me wrong? I'm not trying to change what happened, I just want to understand why this has been such a source of confusion. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:30, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

@Clovermoss: Hmm. Okay, we have:
  • WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES: "Populated, legally-recognized places" include school districts, which conveys near-presumptive notability to school districts per Misplaced Pages:Notability (geographic features). That's WP:NGEO for short.
  • The latter (at WP:GEOLAND specifically): Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable, even if their population is very low. Even abandoned places can be notable, because notability encompasses their entire history. Census tracts, Abadi, and other areas not commonly recognized as a place (such as the area in an irrigation district) are not presumed to be notable. Further down, WP:NGEO states: Geographical features must be notable on their own merits. They cannot inherit the notability of organizations, people, or events. School districts are "legally recognized", being formally established governmental jurisdictions/bodies for a specific purpose. But I'm not personally sure that they really constitute "places" in the sense meant here, especially given the "census tracts" caveat that follows; a school district is much, much more like a census tract than it is like a village or even a named neighborhood. I would think that school districts would actually be approached as organizations (governmental bodies, specifically), and thus subject to WP:NORG (in fact, WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES specifically says The current notability guidelines for schools and other education institutions are . School districts are "educational institutions" (they were legally instituted, and they entirely pertain to education). WP:NORG also explicitly covers schools, and it also covers divisions of municipal governments (as a subset of divisions of organizations), and all organizations generally, though it does not happen to mention school districts in particular. Pertinent material from NORG, by sectional shortcut:
  • WP:ORGSIG: No company or organization is considered inherently notable. No organization is exempt from this requirement, no matter what kind of organization it is, including schools. (But see also WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES, especially for universities.) If the individual organization has received no or very little notice from independent sources, then it is not notable simply because other individual organizations of its type are commonly notable or merely because it exists .... "Notability" is not synonymous with "fame" or "importance." No matter how "important" editors may personally believe an organization to be, it should not have a stand-alone article in Misplaced Pages unless reliable sources independent of the organization have given significant coverage to it.
  • WP:NONPROFIT: Organizations whose activities are local in scope (e.g., a school or club) can be considered notable if there is substantial verifiable evidence of coverage by reliable independent sources outside the organization's local area. Where coverage is only local in scope, consider adding a section on the organization to an article on the organization's local area instead. It is very difficult to interpret this as not also applying to school districts, especially since the recommendation is to merge NN schools into articles on the local area (town, etc.) instead, not to the school district, though I would do the latter if the district were notable, as being a more pertinent and specific target.
  • Same section: Local units of larger organizations: In some cases, a specific local chapter or sub-organization that is not considered notable enough for its own article may be significant enough to mention within the context of an article about the parent organization. If the parent article grows to the point where information needs to be split off to a new article, remember that when you split off an article about a local chapter, the local chapter itself must comply with Misplaced Pages's notability guidelines, without reference to the notability of the parent organization. Take care not to split off a section that would be considered non-notable on its own. This was written clumsily with fraternities in mind, but it is not actually limite dto them, and there is no reason this would not apply also to school districts, which are highly local units of a larger city government organization.
  • Same section: Aim for one good article, not multiple permanent stubs: Individual chapters, divisions, departments, and other sub-units of notable organizations are only rarely notable enough to warrant a separate article. Information on chapters and affiliates should normally be merged into the article about the parent organization. ... Information on sub-chapters of notable organizations might be included in either prose or a brief list in the main article on the organization. This clearly includes "division, departments, and other sub-units", and is not specific to any particular organization type, so would include municipal governments.
  • WP:NSCHOOL: All universities, colleges and schools, including high schools, middle schools, primary (elementary) schools, and schools that only provide a support to mainstream education must either satisfy the notability guidelines for organizations (i.e., this page), the general notability guideline, or both. For-profit educational organizations and institutions are considered commercial organizations and must satisfy those criteria. (See also WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES) This only mentions schools specifically, but the reasoning in it is not a new rule, it is an explication of existing rules and how they already apply, and they do already apply to school districts as well.
I have no idea what the full history is of these pages, but WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES (and all the rest of WP:OUTCOMES) is an essay attempting to summarize result patterns and the reasons for them; it is mostly old and crufty and on this particular point seems to be circular reasoning: it has mad a claim that is not defensible, but people go along with it because that's what it says, the essay being (like WP:BRD and WP:AADD) treated almost as if it is a guideline. It is correct about schools, but is what amounts to a WP:POLICYFORK on districts, because it incorrectly cites WP:GEOLAND as the controlling guideline when it is necessaryily WP:NORG, since school districts are definitely organizations but rarely conceived of as places, and only for administrative purposes serve a jurisdictional function, thus are exactly parallel to the census tracts that are ruled out as "places".

In short, I think this is cause for another RfC, to remove the incorrect presumptive-notability claim from WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES and to have districts treated exactly the same as any other local subdivision of any (in this case governmental) organization. If that were repaired, some other advice would have to be tweaked, to suggest merging non-notable schools to notable school districts or to the city/town article in the absence of one of the former, because a lot of school districts (probably most of them) are non-notable and should themselves merge to cities/towns in a subsection under government.

The previous RfC appears to have flopped because it did not provide enough of the contextual material. What I would recommend is using the material above (neutralizing some of my editorial arguments) in a collapse box like {{collapse top|left=y|Pertinent guideline and other material:}} ... {{collapse bottom}} (each of those templates has to be on it own line). Then lay out an RfC proposition something like the following:

The essay WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES claims that school districts are presumptively notable as "populated places", on the grounds of WP:GEOLAND (in WP:NGEO). However, that guideline specifically excludes things like census tracts that are not typically considered places in the usual sense, and this could also apply to school districts. Meanwhile, school districts are organizations (divisions of larger municipal governments), much more than they are places, and appear to be subject to the guideline WP:NORG, as are schools and municipal governments themselves. (Specifically, WP:ORGSIG and WP:NONPROFIT in several parts appear directly applicable to districts, along with the intent behind WP:NSCHOOL.) The essay's wording appears to be a WP:POLICYFORK, which needs resolution one way or another.

Options for addressing the issue:

  • Option 1: School districts are not presumptively notable, and are subject to WP:NORG. Update that guideline to mention them specifically, and revise WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES to agree.
  • Option 2: School districts are presumptively notable, are subject to WP:GEOLAND, and are not subject to WP:NORG. Update both guidelines to state this.
  • Option 3: Some other approach (please specify).

NB: A previous RfC on this was opened in December 2023, but closed as too unclearly worded to reach a consensus.

As a separate comment (since it's non-neutral), perhaps as part of your own !vote, maybe add: "The closer noted: it is not necessary to have a school district article in order to capture all the schools in a given area: they could be captured under another geographical article, such as the local town or city; and further that: common sense dictates that when a school district that otherwise does not merit an article more or less covers the same area as a town or city, or even a county or township, both the district & its schools should then be captured in that article."

So, I guess that's doing most of the work already, though I don't think I want to "run" this one myself.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

You gave me a lot to think about. :) I don't have much experience with RfCs, so I really appreciate your detailed reasoning here. The only thing that jumps out to me immediately as a possible issue with the options is that I worry #3 would lead to arguing about minituae that would derail a new RfC. For example, there was a decent chunk of people in the previous RfC who opposed the concept of school districts even being required to meet GNG (acting like it was an SNG?) and arguments about the differences (if any) between school boards and school districts. The latter argument could lead to a stronger emphasis on GEOLAND if theoreotically there are school districts that are not under the jurisidiction of school boards (which are organizations). Do you think I should change the options any to reflect these concerns or do you think I'm overthinking it? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:59, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
Would have to sleep on it. School boards are kinda-sorta organizations, but are bodies of officials not entire organizations in the usual sense; they are basically like unto a board of directors, an advisory board, etc. That is, the distinction between a school district and a school board is illusory; some districts are administered by school boards and some are not (e.g. controlled directly by the town council, or by some other means). But I didn't pore over the original RfC, so I would have to read it all to look out for "gotchas" that the above draft did not account for, and that might be one of them. Though it also needs to be concise. PS: an "option 3: name your poison" (often resolving to "do nothing") might as well be included since people will make up their own options anyway and may be antagonistic about it if it wasn't already in there. Ultimately, people who want to try to split weird hairs will try to do it anyway. They'll definitely want to in some cases, because if option 1 prevailed, it would mean a lot of AfDs or at least hurried merges to avoid AfDs. This is an RfC I would expect a lot of FUD about.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
I think the idea of a name your poison option is a good one, my train of thought was more maybe there'd be a strong enough recurring poison that would make a fourth option from the start worthwhile. I'm going to sleep on all this, too. Unfortunately, I work full time overnights, so the actual sleeping part will be a bit delayed. You don't need to worry about rushing to read it all, I'm just glad you're willing to give feedback at all. Get back to me anytime you're willing to. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 02:42, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Subantarctic vs. sub-antarctic

Do you have a view on the hyphenation of "subantarctic" or is there anything I've missed in the MoS? List of Antarctic and subantarctic islands and Subantarctic are internally inconsistent. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:02, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Not a question MoS addresses, since hyphenation is always in flux (leaning over time to less hyphenation the more familiar a term has become, and there seem to be regional/dialectal differences on the habit). This seems to be nearly the same argument as anti-Semitism versus antisemitism, where people in favor of consistency and a particular kind of logic prefer the former, because Semite is a proper name, and this how such words are usually written (anti-American, pan-European, pro-Armenian, etc.), and others in favor of typographic simplicity and concision, which is a logic of another sort, want the latter. On that one, antisemitism seems to be dominating on Misplaced Pages despite that fact that it is down-casing the emedded Semite – which itself appears to be an anti-Semitic gesture of no longer treating their name as a proper one! This seems to be the case simply because the lowercased, run-together version is the most common spelling in the press ; this is the common-style fallacy, and WP WP isn't written in news style, which is obsessively driven by concision and expediency. The spelling anti-Semitism clearly dominates in books . Usage in journals is very mixed (first page of results is mostly the compressed form, but going through subsequent results pages shows about a 50:50 mixture). The sub-Antarctic case is complicated by the fact that various sources are apt to treat this a capitalized (Sub-Antarctic or Subantarctic) proper name of a region of the earth, like Western Hemisphere and Arctic and so on, so there are really four options: sub-Antarctic, Sub-Antarctic, subantarctic, and Subantarctic. There are other geographical disagreements like this, e.g. Transcaucasus (a.k.a. Transcaucasia, now South Caucasus) has also been written by sources as Trans-Caucausus and Trans-Caucasia (capitalized as a place name; I'm not seeing use of trans-Caucasia, transcaucasia, etc.). For your case, it's probably a matter to ask in an RfC about what spelling to use across our articles, or in an RM to just move the article and then impose spelling consistency in text afterward. Some links:  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:33, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

WP:CONVENUE

@Thebiguglyalien, Snow Rise, and Levivich: I'd forgotten about it, but what was discussed at some length at "User talk:Snow Rise/Archive 22#Advice going forward on WikiProject Years" shouldn't be forgotten, and is worth developing further. Though that discussion was most immediately about WP:YEARS and "their" articles, WP:ITN, and a few other specifics, what Snow Rise said there (in part paraphrasing Levivich) resonantes strongly and is broadly applicable: hese are en.Misplaced Pages articles at the end of the day, and whatever their unique format and considerations, they are governed by the same content policies as any other user-facing content .... he entire reason we have an objective, WEIGHT-based standard is to prevent the idiosyncratic perceptions of the "importance" of a topic ... to prevent not just bias in our content, but also the introduction of insurmountable discord into the process of consensus building when such a subjective standard is utilized. ... his is primarily a behavioural issue. ... I am certain that any solution has to be based on our existing RS/WEIGHT standards. It's simply the only approach that can be adopted on this project without the gears constantly locking up beyond our ability to repair. untethering our process from an objective standard and inviting our editors to do what they presently are disallowed from doing: basing content on their own assessments of what is actually "important" .....

All of that is central to the whole problem of "topical rebellions" against our WP:P&G (which rapidly spill into throwing WP:CIV and WP:NPA out the window), and some other walled-garden issues (ITN, DYK, FAC, and several others come to mind). These policy observations apply well beyond the core content policies themselves, including to guidelines on titles, style questions, notabilty, and other considerations, except where a subject has its own guideline-level (not WP:PROJPAGE essay) naming conventions page, MoS page, subject notability guideline or whatever (and some of those need re-examination and revision; much of their text dates to the 2000s, and is often problematic, especially with regard to topics that don't get a lot of editorial attention; but that'll be an issue for another time). The matter recently got raised again at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (proposals)#General Sanctions (Darts), a very typical case where a niche subject with long-term "this is our topic" editors collide with other editors and it turns into a long-term battleground.

As I recall from the original discussion, the first idea was to revise WP:PROJPAGE, but it's not checked all that often, is not a policy, and is aimed only at wikiprojects' output, so it doesn't address topical PoV-pushing and walled-garden behavior by factions or tagteams that are not wikiprojects, nor individuals with this kind of bent. So, the idea after that was to revise WP:CONLEVEL with a WP:CONVENUE add-on (usurping the WP:CONVENUE shortcut from my essay, which may be useful for some points/wording, along with WP:PROJPAGE). Thebiguglyalien drafted something in a sandbox here, and Snow Rise had some quibbles with it (one of which got mentioned at the thread linked up top), but everyone got busy and it fell by the wayside. For my part, I think much of that draft is correct, but it over-states a few things, and glosses over a few others, and is about 10× too long; the whole concept needs to be compressed into a couple of concise sentences, a single paragraph; the community would not be willing to accept a large and complex policy addition, per the WP:CREEP principle.

I'm not certain how to proceed, but think this should proceed, even if takes some time and work.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:31, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Like I said at the darts discussion, this is still something I think should happen. And I agree that it would be ideal if we could get any potential changes down to a single paragraph or shorter. And I'm just spitballing now, but I also remember suggesting a year ago that WikiProject talk pages could have a banner to the effect of "This page serves as a noticeboard for the topic and for discussion about the project itself. If you want to discuss changes to the articles in this topic, do so at their respective talk pages or at the WP:Village Pump." Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:19, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
Something like that might be a good idea, other than suggesting VP for that (it is not for discussion of changes at particular articles). But we'd probably need to get the policy adjusted first, so that such wikiproject-talk-templating was per that policy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:38, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
Hi SMc, thanks for the ping. My 2c: I'd be hesitant about introducing a new major concept (CONVENUE) in addition to the existing concept (CONLEVEL) at the policy level, because the fewer concepts, the conceptually simpler the policy, the better.
I also think the same result could be achieved just by making a change to the existing policy section at WP:CONLEVEL. CONLEVEL is also WP:LOCALCONSENSUS, but the actual policy doesn't contain the phrases "local consensus" or "global consensus." It should.
The second paragraph of CONLEVEL should be moved in its entirety to WP:PGCHANGE, leaving room for a new 2nd para that explained more explicitly the idea of levels of consensus.
The new 2nd para should explain the relationship between "consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time" and participation, venue, advertisement (it should explain the importance of {RFC} and FRS, CENT and VPP/VPR). Levivich (talk) 06:02, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Good feedback. Sounds like a reasonable approach, but I've about run out of energy for the day. Will ponder upon it soon.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:11, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
My concern is that, ultimately, some level of cultural change will have to accompany a policy change. Most editors generally agree that global consensus beats local consensus, but being willing to do something about it is another matter. ANI regularly sees cases where editors are causing disruption but it's overlooked because it's "not that big of a deal" or "this is overblown", and CONLEVEL seems like exactly the sort of issue that would fall into that trap. It's not until we get into a WP:DARTS type situation where several editors without much "social capital" are being incredibly uncivil that it gets any sort of attention. We can get the wording changed, and that's all well and good, but I worry that things would keep on going the way they have been other than having one more all caps link to use. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:14, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
Yes, this bears some thinking on. Getting community culture to shift is always a challenge.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:55, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Château

Moved to Talk:Palace of Versailles § French château

Regarding your edit here, don't you think "château" is a well assimilated loanword? Jean-de-Nivelle (talk) 13:14, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Disney move

Why did you want the Walt Disney Company to move to Disney in the first place? While it is a common name, it is not the only important Disney. You know Walt Disney himself, right? Please read the guidelines, think, and learn from your actions. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 15:06, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

@GabrielPenn4223: Read the RM proposal. The company is by far the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC (that is, the vast majority of reliable-source usages of just "Disney" by itself are in reference to the company, not to any other subjects), and it is the WP:COMMONNAME of the company (that is, the vast majority of RS references to the company are simply as "Disney" not as a longer term). This case is not different in any way from any other routine disambiguation case. The fact that Walt Disney himself might be referred to on second mention as simply "Disney" in a biographical context is completely immaterial. Hatnotes exist for a reason, and {{About|the company|the company founder|Walt Disney}} would resolve any navigational issue. There's a weird fandom-driven "local consensus" happening at that page to defy WP:AT policy and the WP:DAB guideline. It's silly (most especially since Disney still redirects straight to the company despite that recent discussion). This case not any different from Heinz. The company, H. J. Heinz Company, formerly Heinz Noble & Company, now a subsidiary and brand of larger company Kraft Heinz after a 2015 merger, is the PRIMARYTOPIC for that name. The COMMONNAME of the company-cum-brand is simply Heinz, and the founder, Henry J. Heinz is notable and would be referred to on second mention in a biographical context simply as "Heinz". Heinz doesn't even have a disambiguation hatnote pointing to him, though it could have one; it was probably thought unnecessary since he is mentioned and linked in the first line of the article. If you went and proposed moving Heinz to H. J. Heinz Company, Heinz (company), Heinz (brand) or some other name, you'd be WP:SNOW opposed because such a name would not fit WT:AT and WP:DAB requirements (see also Talk:Heinz/Archives/2015#Requested move 26 March 2015). The difference is that Heinz, unlike Disney, doesn't have a walled-garden fanbase who want things a particular way to suit their WP:ILIKEIT preferences instead of following our WP:P&G like every other subject does. Some day the company article will be at Disney where it belongs, though I'll leave it to someone else to get that done.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:38, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
It should not. Disney should be a DAB page in my opinion. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 16:45, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Not according to WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and WP:DAB (and WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT for that matter). We don't just get to make up our own opinions to suit our personal preferences on such matters; they are governed by policies and guidelines (pretty much explicity to prevent particular popular topics being given special treatment by their fans).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:49, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
WP:NATDIS, WP:NATURAL read these as an user said on the RM. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 16:52, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Those both go to the same place, so you seem to be the one not reading the material. In particular, read the entire WP:TITLEDAB section in which this is found: nothing in there is invoked unless disambiguation becomes necessary, and it is by definition not necessary for a page if it is the PRIMARYTOPIC; that's what PRIMARYTOPIC even means.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:55, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Users could also be looking for not limited to: Walt Disney himself as I stated, Disney theme parks, Disney Channel, Disney Studios etc.! This seems to be the primary topic over Disney by usage but not globally. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 17:15, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
That's why we have Disney (disambiguation). It's also why we have Heinz (disambiguation). There is nothing different about these cases, other than some Disney fans personally wanting things a certain way to suit their PoV preferences. Disney theme parks, Disney Channel, Disney Studios, etc., are also services, products, or subsidiaries of the Disney corporation. I fear you simply do not understand how WP article titling and disambiguation operate; your arguments strongly suggest this. And you have zero RS in support of your notion that globally "Disney" by itself has a primary referent different from the primary referent in the US (i.e., the Disney corporation, in both cases). I have no idea why you've come to my talk page to argue in circles about this stuff, but it is not constructive, and Misplaced Pages is not a debate forum.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:28, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
PS: Actually, I now see that you've only been here three weeks; I thought you were a long-term editor already, so that might have come off as unreasonably dismissive, given how long it takes to absorb all of WP's complicated rules and procedures. Article titling on Misplaced Pages is complex, but the nutshell is that we use the most common name for a subject by default, and disambiguate it only when necessary (on a per-page basis, not on an "everything ever called by this name" basis, and only to the extent necessary). We do not use a longer name than necessary. If something is overwhelmingly the primary topic for a name, it is not disambiguated, and takes that short and recognizable name as the article title, with the disambiguation page being at, e.g., Disney (disambiguation), and other topics by that name being disambiguated one way or another. That DAB page would move to the bare Disney name, without "(disambiguation)", if and only if no primary topic could be determined for "Disney"; but of course there is an overwhelmingly primary topic for that name, the corporation. To get up-to-speed on this stuff, start reading WT:AT from top to bottom, then read WP:DAB and then MOS:DAB. There are also some topical naming conventions pages at Category:Misplaced Pages naming conventions; the pertinent one here is WP:NCCORP (though a sentence or two in it is subject to an active dispute right now, as being contradictory to policy and several other guidlines). Anyway, Walt Disney Company (and some would move it to The Walt Disney Company to even better agree with the primary-source preference, not being at Disney is an abberation not a norm, and it will not last indefinitely.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:39, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 60

The Misplaced Pages Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 60, November – December 2023

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Misplaced Pages Library team --13:36, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

January music

story · music · places

Thank you for improving articles in January! I remember Ewa Podleś on the Main page, and have - believe it or not - two musical DYK. Shalom chaverim. On vacation, with something for your sweet tooth --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:41, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Today: the performance of Anna Nekhames --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:56, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Today a friend's birthday, with related music and a few new vacation pics --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:17, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Category:Language preservation organisations has been nominated for deletion

Category:Language preservation organisations has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Mason (talk) 23:40, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Notification: Feedback request service is down

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Must

Well, we don't or shouldn't be using "must" anywhere in MoS or any other guideline unless describing a policy or technical requirement.

@SMcCandlish, this is wrong. Here's a list of five statements in the main MOS page that use the word must. Notice the absence of policy and technical requirements:

  1. Infoboxes, images, and related content in the lead section must be right-aligned.
  2. The heading must be on its own line, with one blank line just before it.
  3. If a sentence includes subsidiary material enclosed in square or round brackets, it must still carry terminal punctuation after those brackets, regardless of any punctuation within the brackets.
  4. Where such a word or phrase occurs mid-sentence, new terminal punctuation (usually a period) must be added at the end.
  5. Names not originally written in one of the Latin-script alphabets (written for example in Greek, Cyrillic, or Chinese scripts) must be given a romanized form for use in English.

Do you see any here that ought to be presented as mere "should" statements – like, you "should" use proper punctuation at the end of a sentence, but it's sometimes okay if you don't? I don't.

Misplaced Pages:Policies and guidelines#­Content says:

  • Be clear. Avoid esoteric or quasi-legal terms or dumbed-down language. Be plain, direct, unambiguous, and specific. Avoid platitudes and generalities. Even in guidelines, help pages, and other non-policy pages, do not be afraid to tell editors directly they must or should do something.

If something is actually required, even if it is "only" required by the rules of proper English grammar, then it should be indicated as a "must", not a "should". It is unfair and needlessly confusing to tell editors that something merely should be done this way when we are actually requiring it. There has never been a rule relegating the use of words like must to pages that say "policy" in a box at the top. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I said "shouldn't" for a reason. All of those things need to be revised. 1. "in the lead section are always right-aligned" (we don't appear to have any exceptions, and if one were found in some single-editor stub, other editors would fix it, so this is true). 2. It is correct that it must be on its own line, as a technical matter, but one blank like just before it is not a technical requirement, just a recommentation (and often ignored when a subheading immediately follows a heading or a hatnote after a heading), so needs to be reworded. 3. Should read "it will still carry terminal punctuation after". Just state it as a fact instead of a demand. 4. Should read "is added at the end." 5. Should read something like "also needs a romanized form for use in English." I would bet good money that all this "must" nonsense was added by a particular editor, now topic-banned from all of MoS, who was on a years-long campaign to make MoS emphatic and excessively prescriptive (in the direction of that person's particular preferences). It has taken many years to clean up after them, and I'm not surprised there are little bits still left to repair. PS: Please do not approach Misplaced Pages as if a bureaucracy. We absolutely do not need a rule that says we "must" avoid using "must" in things that are not policies or technical requirements. It's just sensible writing, and avoiding "must" in our guidelines simply matches 99.99999% of the rest of our guideline material. Consensus exists regardless of whether it has been recorded in a rule we do not need to record, and when so close to zero of our guideline material says "must" that you can only find 5 examples, that is clearly an overwhelming consensus on the matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:58, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
What's your underlying worry with the word must? It seems to be particular to the word itself, because your suggestions have the same level of force, just using other words. I don't think we should tiptoe about in a way that suggests we have people with Pathological demand avoidance in mind. If editors must do something, then they must; there's no benefit to trying to cover that up by saying "always" or "have to" or any of the other synonyms for must.
PS: What I want is for editors to stop saying that guidelines should not use words like must, out of the mistaken and misguided belief that only policies and technical requirements "deserve" to make firm demands on editors. If the community is making firm demands, then those firm demands need to be communicated with clarity and accuracy on every page, not just on pages that have a certain label at the top. (There are a lot more than five examples available, if you want to see them. Here's a list of 108 guidelines using the word must. That's 40% of the guidelines – far too widespread to suggest that it's the work of just one opinionated editor, and far too accepted to pretend that there isn't community backing for this.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
What's your fondness for it? The concerns are that to anyone familiar with the norms of technical documentation, the word "must" indicates an asbsolute, inflexible requirement, and there is no such thing coming from a style guideline (any policy or technical requirement such a page happened to be contextually reminding editors about comes from an authority external to the guideline, either the policy in question or the technical specs of MW). To anyone not familiar with tech-writing norms, the term still indicates a policy-level requirement, which nothing in MoS is, and it produces basically a "micro-WP:POLICYFORK" of MoS material posing as policy and conflicting with the WP:P&G definition of guidelines as always permitting commonsense exceptions. There absolutely is a benefit to using other teminology, even "always" or "never" if the case really calls for it, rather than "must", namely avoiding the technical confusion that something will break if it isn't done as advised, and the non-technical confusion that someone might be sanctioned if they don't do as advised. This stuff matters. I have no idea why you've this simple copy-editing matter as the hill to die on, but I guaratee you if I open an RfC at VPPOL proposing non-"must" changes to all of the above instances that it will be a WP:SNOW in favor of making them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:40, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
I like it because it's clear. Style guidelines do have absolute, inflexible requirements. See, e.g., the placement of the lead image or infobox. It will absolutely, inflexibly, invariably be placed on the right.
I don't think that "must" should be conflated with "enforced in software" ("something will break if it isn't done as advised"), and it's wrong to think of breaking a policy as resulting in sanctions. People get sanctioned for violating essays all the time. There are more block log entries citing the essay Misplaced Pages:Tendentious editing than there are blocks that happened because of violating the policy Misplaced Pages:Verifiability or the Misplaced Pages:Editing policy – and we know that both of those policies are violated every day of the week.
I think you would be surprised by the response to your hypothetical RFC. A clear question would be "Shall we first repeal the long-standing policy statement that says guidelines are permitted to use the word must, and if so, shall we then change the wording of all sentences in the Manual of Style currently using the word must, such as those declaring that punctuation "must" be added at the end of sentences, so that they no longer use that particular word?"
That sounds like a loser of a proposal to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:31, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
If you phrased it that way you would be yelled at for making a non-neutral pseudo-RfC abusing argument to emotion by making fake claims of a "repeal", when nothing at issue about the term "must" would be actually be raised about anything beyond a handful of usese when it does not actually refer to a "must" situation (requirement by policy or technical limitations). I have no idea why you're picking a silly fight about this trivia; we usually seem to get along, but you are coming off as excessively aggressive about this one particular thing, and I'd like that to stop.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:51, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
"Must" situations are not limited to technical limitations and policy requirements. This is not true in the tech doc world; this is not true on Misplaced Pages. It may be your personal preference, but it isn't true. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:53, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
This is just turning circular. Let's stop.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:57, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
As for why I care: When good editors say "Oh, guidelines can't say 'must'" – even though they have policy-level authorization to do so, with none of the limitations you have assumed – then POV pushers and wikilawyers say "When it says 'must', it means 'optional'" when they don't like what the guidelines say, and they say "Well, it says 'should' or 'may', but it really means 'must', because we're just too polite to use hard words like must in a guideline". We lose coming and going when you say that guidelines can't or shouldn't communicate hard requirements, or that certain words are taboo when communicating that requirement.
The placement of the lead image on the right is a hard requirement. There are lots of ways to communicate that, and I don't honestly care which one is chosen. I want you (and anyone else) to stop telling other editors that it's taboo to communicate that hard requirement with the word must. The other options can be better, prettier, nicer, clearer, more alliterative, more concise, more parallel, or any other virtue you can think of; I just don't want you to keep telling people that it's wrong for a guideline to use the word must when communicating a hard requirement that arises from no source higher than the community's views of what that guideline needs to tell people. Editors really must place lead images on the right; we should not be telling them that this is a bad way to express that hard requirement. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:01, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure what part of "This is just turning circular. Let's stop" sounded like an invitation to repeat your viewpoint yet again in two more paragraphs. If "There are lots of ways to communicate that, and I don't honestly care which one is chosen", then you're contradicting yourself in demanding "must"-or-bust, and venting at me for no reason about material your profess to not care about the wording of.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:55, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
(Check the timestamps; you posted while I was writing.)
I'm not demanding "must or bust". I'm demanding that you stop telling editors that "must" is not permitted or appropriate in guidelines. Write whatever you think will be most helpful in the guidelines themselves, but:
  • So long as we have a policy explicitly saying guidelines are permitted to use the word must, don't tell other editors that we can't use "must" in guidelines. It's officially permitted, even if you don't like it.
  • When 40% of guidelines currently use the word must, don't tell other editors that we don't actually use "must" in guidelines. We don't need any more misinformation going around about that fact.
WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:31, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
Well, I don't respond to "demand that you stop telling editors" anything. You don't control what I say. Please just drop this; it's starting to irritate, a lot, and you should have picked up on that some time ago.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:37, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Why I'm opposing the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Charter Ratification

A note for my talk-page stalkers – here's my opposition vote comment:

The "even those which would not normally be in the scope of the U4C" portion of this is not acceptable at all: "Movement government structures may also refer UCoC enforcement cases or appeals, even those which would not normally be in the scope of the U4C, to the U4C." Nope. U4C has to stay within its scope or this will just turn into a "forum-shop my buddies to get a result the community denied me" kangaroo court. This even directly contradicts previous rulemaking in the same document: "The U4C will not take cases that do not primarily involve violations of the UCoC, or its enforcement."

This is also problematic (aside from the grammar error in it): "Provides a final interpretation of the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and the UCoC if the need arises, in collaboration with community members enforcement structures". This "collaboration" is undefined, and too vague to be meaningful.

There may be other issues with it as well, but these two parts alone were enough to trigger my immediate opposition. Policy writing is hard, and the drafters of this are not trying or thinking hard enough yet.

The vote is somehow only open until 2024-02-02. Can anyone say "rush job" and "ramrod"?

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:52, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Improper close of MOS botany

I recommend you undo your Plant Descriptions thread closure at WT:MOS. As you know from your own work on MOS:CS and your recent proposal to add it to the general WP MOS, the thread is indeed absolutely an MOS issue, WP:BOTANY does not have its own MOS under active development. It's also not a sourcing matter -- Meteorquake is describing the order in which content sections should be presented, and why it being unorganized as now causes confusion, which seems like exactly the kind of thing MOS:CS is set up around.

Meteorquake was correctly told to check with WT:BOTANY. But as this can be nothing other than a style issue, and as BOTANY has no MOS project set up yet, the thread is improperly closed, and the description and edit summary are inaccurate. SamuelRiv (talk) 00:26, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

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