Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 0

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Various proposals have been floating around for a while that Wikipedia discuss and present some stylistic conventions for the consideration of Wikipedia participants.

No one should feel obligated to follow such (stylistic) conventions--it's important that we stress this lack of obligation, because one of the things that makes Wikipedia so active is precisely that people feel so free to input information in whatever format they feel comfortable with.

Well, we already enforce/strongly encourage Neutral point of view

I think we can begin by assembling some links here to some of these existing discussions.


  • Wikipedia commentary/Use pinyin not Wade-Giles -- (Warning! Discussion in progress as of 1 October 2001) (I.e,, don't poke your head in unless you're willing to get it shot off.  :-) )

Link to How does one edit a page/Quick reference or not?
It seems to me as if how to put tags into the document, falls under the category of Manual of Style. That's where I looked for this information, rather than at How does one edit a page/Quick reference. In fact I can't even find How does one... when I'm looking for it (How to...). Maybe I'm wrong. Seems like having a link here doesn't hurt tho. --justfred

There probably is a better place for it, but "Manual of Style" most definitely isn't it. Or maybe it should just be linked more prominently from the homepage. "Manual of Style" means something very specific to most writers, namely, a list of editorial decisions made for a particular publication. The technical details of how two write something are, by definition, not editorial choices, they're technical requirements. --LDC

I will concede this, style is style not details. On the other hand I find lots of "HTML Style Guides" that tell you how to write HTML... --justfred

I'm sure you have, and they are mostly worthless. Anything called an "HTML Style Guide" shouldn't tell you what the tags do, it should tell you why to use certain tags for certain purposes. Believe it or not, the art of writing English prose effectively existed long before the web, and even before computers...:-)

All right. I'd like to see Wikipedia standards for:

  • weights and measures
  • Nondiscriminatory language.
There are no such standards, and I encourage our not even trying to adopt any. --LMS

Please, let's not just reproduce the content of other Wikipedia pages here. There's no point in doing that, and it "forks" the content. I'm going to delete this unless someone can explain why I shouldn't (or, if someone else would like to delete it (or the copied parts of it), that would be grand. --LMS

You're right. Removed copied parts. justfred

This page isn't just about style, is it? It looks like it's a summary of links about policy. Doesn't this just duplicate Wikipedia policy? --LMS

It _is_ really close. It seems there should be a distinction made between policy and style. Let's see if I can articulate:

  • Syntax is what you must do. How does one edit a page/Quick reference
  • Policy is what you should do - standards and rules and the like. To keep people from stepping on each others toes and screwing things up really badly. naming conventions and neutral point of view are policy.
  • Style is how you should do it. Much more nuanced than Policy; things like British vs American spelling, what to subpage and what not to, etc. To make the encyclopedia have the right "flavor" (or is that "flavour"?). Rules to consider seems to be more about Style than about Policy.

Articles like those in the Content and Commentary sections are more about style and less about policy. So maybe this should evolve into the pages that are about style, and point back to Policy for the articles strictly about policy?

I know I inherited this idea just by writing about it; I was trying to answer a question to myself about what style to use (well, originally I was also trying to figure out Syntax - which I think of using the Chicago Manual of Style for...)

I do know I strongly believe that whatever it is we're talking about, if anywhere, should be in Wikipedia Manual of Style rather than Wikipedia/Manual of Style where it was originally created. At least I think I believe that !) -justfred

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