Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cue sports/Spelling conventions

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This internal Wikipedia page is part of WikiProject Cue sports, a project to improve Wikipedia's coverage of pool, carom billiards and other cue sports. If you would like to participate, you can edit the content page attached to this talk page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

This guideline is a proposed draft. Feel free to edit it, but please join the WikiProject first if your edits will be substantial.

Contents 1 Consensus and consistency needed on spelling to prevent ambiguity & confusion 2 Process 3 Correcting spelling [@ one-pocket] 4 British/snooker terms

[edit] Consensus and consistency needed on spelling to prevent ambiguity & confusion

Especially for nine-ball but also for eight-ball, one-pocket, etc., I firmly think we need to come to, and as editors enforce in article texts, a consensus on spelling conventions and implement it consistently throughout all of the cue sports Wikepedia articles. I advocate (and herein attempt to justify) a system of standardized spellings, based on 1) general grammar rules; 2) basic logic; and 3) disambiguation.

This article is a draft submission to the active editor community of billiards-related articles on Wikipedia. It is intended to ultimately end up being "[[User:Wikipedia:WikiProject Cue sports/Spelling conventions]]", as its first documentation output.

Anyway, please help me think this through. The point is not for me to become world famous™ for having finally codified billiards terms and united the entire English-speaking world in using them (hurrah). I simply want the articles here on pool and related games to be very consistent in application of some new consensus Wikipedia editing standards about spelling/phrasing of easily confusable billards terms that may be ambiguous to many readers in the absence of that standard.

Compare:

1. "While 9-ball is a 9-ball game, the 9-ball is the real target; pocket it in a 9-ball run if you have to, but earlier is better." (Huh?)
2. "While nine-ball is a nine ball game, the 9 ball is the real target; pocket it in a nine ball run if you have to, but earlier is better." (Oh, right!)

That's the super-simple "use case" I make for this proposed nomenclature. If you think that the differentiation didn't cut it please TELL ME, and say how you would improve it.

— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:50, 20 November 2006 (UTC) [Imported from Talk: Carom billiards because it's more relevant here:]

I realize that was just an example, but how about this:

• "While 9-ball is a game of nine balls, the #9 ball is the real target; pocket it in a nine-ball run if you have to, but earlier is better."

where the name of the game is italicized, and the "#" symbol (which might be too much) is used when referring to the ball itself. Notice also that a hyphen is added to "nine-ball run", which I believe is the correct way to phrase this (not only in billiards, but in general). Just my thoughts. --ChaChaFut 05:58, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Interesting, but I think it poses some problems. Italics is generally a form of emphasis, except when it is used to denote foreign words or used to indicate that something is a book (movie, etc.) title. I'm skeptical that we could get article authors to use the italics consistently, and more to the point that it would have the desired effect; I suspect strongly that readers of the encyclopedia would mistake it for stress/emphasis and become confused. The 9-ball usage as the game name would also still not do anything about the problem of this not being a grammatical way to begin a sentence, since it can't be capitalized. I don't think anyone would use "#9 ball"; we don't say "number nine ball" out loud, so I don't think it will "gel" in people's minds (though I agree it otherwise makes a certain sense.) The hyphenation of "nine-ball" in "a nine-ball run" is grammatically optional (which is why I deprecated it in the draft guideline when one of the words is a number); it's not "required". Not in American English anyway, where hyphenation of compound adjectives is on the decline (cf. "the World Wide Web" vs. "the World-wide Web"). That is to say, the guideline draft as written now isn't violating any grammatical rules. And while "9-ball" is arguably more common in the industry as a name for the game (I surmise this is because in advertising it scans faster) it actually IS ungrammatical (numbers should generally be spelled out when they are not currency, etc.), is difficult to use (the sentence beginning problem), and too ambiguous for WP article space; that's my contention anyway. Is there anything about the draft guideline that you find unbearable, illogical or practicably problelmatic? — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 01:31, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Process

I would like to propose that this standard be adopted as a consensus agreement by the regular editors and "clean-up crew" on the billiards, nine-ball, snooker and related articles, as "official" documentation for WikiProject Cue sports. As it stood when I began writing this, these aritcles were somewhat hard to read and tedious to parse even for someone who is a native English speaker and avid pool player. I felt very sorry for those who do not yet know anything about the game of nine-ball, and/or are ESL learners. Heh.

I would like to see consensus — not just a "you're out-voted!" (coming from fellow editors or me), but a genuine understanding of the reasoning behind whatever standard emerges (the one I've proposed or an alternative), and at least tacit acceptance of its necessity even by those that may disagree on a specific small point. If consensus is reached I would clean this up even more (it's already formatted pretty heavily, but has too many asides and may still have some first-person in it). After launch of WikiProject Cue sports, it could also be derived into something shorter and article/category specific and proposed as an official WP Naming Conventions Guideline and one about article text to become a WP Manual of Style Guideline. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:50, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I concur. You've given this a lot of thought and have done your research, looked at precedent in other published works, and have experience at this, so I respect that. And the usages and your arguments for them all make sense to me. --GregU 07:53, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Correcting spelling [@ one-pocket]

[Copying this over from the one-pocket article's Talk page, since it is as relevant here as there.]

The original article mostly (though not entirely consistently) used the spelling "One Pocket", which is doubly wrong. It is not a proper (i.e. capitalized) noun - cf. "chess", "football", etc., which we do not call "Chess" or "Football". And it is a compound noun, requiring a hyphen. "One pocket" means "a single pocket of some sort, somewhere", while "one-pocket" indicates "something, such as a game, called 'one-pocket'". Moving article and adjusting redirects to comply (esp. since the "One Pocket" article title actually violates WP article case conventions, too. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 13:23, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I submit that given usage, the game is called One Pocket with no hyphen. This is consistent with:

• All the Accustats match videos
• All the Accustats instructional videos (except Bill Incardona and he is a functional illiterate)
• Eddie Robin's books -- which are accepted as THE definte works on the subject

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.131.20.16 (talk • contribs).

Random books and videos about pool are not authoritative sources for how/why to hyphenate in English (though they may or may not be authoritative, on a case-by-case basis, about pool). Speaking of "functionally illiterate", here's a hilarious example: Pocket Billiards Position Play for Hi-Runs, Johnny Holiday, Golden Touch, Florida, 1973". What the fudgecicle is a "Hi-Run"? >;-) Your beloved Eddie Robin couldn't even agree with himself about how to spell billiards game names. His first book on carom games, Position Play in Three Cushion Billiards (1983), spells the number out and doesn't hyphenate. His second does just the opposite of both: 500 Essential Shots of 3-Cushion Billiards (2000). Hardly a consistent source to cite!  :-) And it absolutely should not be capitalized as "One Pocket" as you've done above, regardless of the hyphenation issue. We simply do not do this with game/sport names in English. When was the last time you played Volley Ball or went Water Skiing? All that said, common variants like "one pocket" and "1-pocket" should be mentioned in the article intro sentence as colloquial variants (see nine-ball for an example).

Anyway, please see the draft guideline in detail... The goals of normalizing the spelling on Wikipedia are article consistency, non-ambiguity and parseability (we don't really care at all whether the rest of the world adopts Wikipedia spelling guidelines, because their purpose isn't to influence language evolution, but to make Wikipedia easier to use.) It is really of no consequence at all that a video company and an author prefer "one pocket" over "one-pocket"; "one-pocket" is more grammatically correct, is less confusing and will be consistent with other article titles in this articlespace (eight-ball, three-cushion billiards, etc.) Likewise, it is of no consequence that some events are "Nine Ball Tournament"s while others are a "9-ball Tournament" or "9-Ball Tournament" or "Nine-ball Championship", etc., etc. The industry and sport itself do not consistently use (or not use) hyphenation or spelling-out, and even where they may lean toward "9-ball" this has more to do with advertising (the "9" is parsed by the brain faster than the word "nine" on a 15-sec. TV spot or in an ad in a pool magazine someone is flipping through), and presents significant problems when used as a game name in a Wikipedia article (it is confusable with "the 9 ball", and one cannot grammatically begin a sentence with "9-ball" (or "1-pocket", "3-cushion", etc.) because it can't be capitalized; and so forth.

— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:50, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] British/snooker terms

"Rest" is the term used in snooker for the mechanical bridge and should be included. 218.186.9.5 11:08, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's really relevant here; this is more about disambiguation, capitalization, etc. The term "rest" (in fact every single kind of rest) has been enumerated in the Glossary of cue sports terms, never fear. You might be raising a broader point (and if not, I will raise it for you) that the guideline should probably say something about using proper terms for the games in which they appear (e.g. "pot" not "sink" or "pocket", when referring to snooker), and use British English consistently for British-dominated games like snooker and English billiards, American spelling for quintessentially US-dominated games like nine-ball, and otherwise follow the general Wikipedia MoS rule of sticking with whatever the article was started with, be it British or American. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 12:19, 11 March 2007 (UTC)