Wikipedia:WikiProject Cue sports/Spelling conventions

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Cue sports naming and spelling conventions

This [draft] guideline describes spelling and terminological conventions for the article (and category) names and content of Wikipedia topics related to cue sports. See WikiProject Cue sports for a list of categories and major articles within the scope of this guideline.

The purposes of this guideline are to:

  • Describe conventions for referring to cue sports games and equipment, differentiating them from each other and from other usages, especially numerical, to avoid ambiguity and confusion.
  • Elucidate issues relating the applicability of Wikipedia-wide policies and guidelines, such as the Manual of style, as they apply to the naming and terminology of cue sports topics, including the handling of US vs. UK English, treatment of numbers, and neutral point of view.

Nine-ball, being the most popular professional cue sport, and also a complex case because it can be seen as being named either for its "money ball" and/or its number of object balls, is used frequently as the example game (and namesake ball) for these conventions, but they are generally applicable to all games and balls.

The overall intent is to ensure that cue sports article prose is comprehensible, by avoiding awkward and ambiguous constructions. 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!)

Contents

[edit] Summary

  • nine-ball = the game and only the game — hyphenation mandatory, numeral forbidden, capitalization forbidden (except as "Nine-ball" at sentence beginning, in book title, etc.) The only hyphenation exception for compounded game names is blackball, which is internationally standardized under this name.
  • the 9 ball = the ball and only the ball — hyphenation forbidden (including grammatically optional hyphenation of adjective phrase as in "nice 9 ball shot"), numeral mandatory (exception "Nine (9) ball" at sentence beginning deprecated). The definite article is generally mandatory except where superfluous/ungrammatical.
  • nine ball = adjective phrase referring to number of balls, as in "a nice nine ball run" — grammatically optional hypenation forbidden, numeral forbidden.
  • ninth ball = phrase referring to order of balls — hyphenation generally not relevant, numeral forbidden
  • nine games = phrase referring to something other than balls; hyphenation generally not relevant, numeral forbidden (with very limited exceptions, e.g. "the carom billiards game 18.2 balkline")
  • 9-ball = forbidden, except in article intro sentence as a colloquial alternate spelling (and even then only if applicable as per details below).
  • nineball = forbidden.
  • 9ball = forbidden.
  • cue ball = the ball; just "the cue" is forbidden; compounding forbidden
  • cue stick = the implement; if being more specific, then drop "stick" (e.g. "snooker cue"); just "the cue" deprecated; compounding forbidden
  • bridge stick or mechanical bridge is the reach-extending tool; don't use "rake", "granny stick", etc.; just "bridge" forbidden, disparaging terms forbidden
  • cue sport(s) = the general topic, singular (plural); use "cue game(s)" only for non-tournament variants like bar billiards. Informal use of "game(s)" is fine. Compounding forbidden.
  • carom-billiards = forbidden — do not hyphenate non-compound names.

Key: forbidden means it is not done at all (unless an exception enumerated below applies); mandatory means it is always done (unless an exception enumerated below applies); and deprecated means it is not done unless absolutely necessary; try rewriting to avoid it.

[edit] Cue sports

The sports as a class are "cue sports"; singular is "cue sport". Avoid the contracted "cuesport(s)"; this variant has much less currency, and is ambiguous ("What's a port for cues?") Like "water sports" and "martial arts" it is an overarching industry term, a classifier not generally used in everyday speech. Therefore do not use "cue sport(s)" when something more specific and non-ambiguous can be used instead. Note: "billiard(s)" is often too ambiguous unless qualified). Likewise, don't use "pocket billiards" (another industry-created overall term for a large class of games) for "pool" (a smaller one) when the latter will do, or use "pool" when something more specific such as "nine-ball" is intended. "Cue game(s)" can be used, but should be reserved for activities that are not the subject of regional, national or international competition, e.g. bagatelle and bar billiards. A particular cue sport/game or family thereof can be referred to informally (i.e. anywhere in the article other than the intro sentence) with "game(s)", though be aware that this term has an alternative, specific meaning in the context of tournaments, and ambiguity can result if this is done incautiously.

[edit] Numbers

[edit] The game

  • The canonical name format for the game [in English] for Wikipedia purposes is "nine-ball". Using nine-ball as the canonical example, the correct names of the game, outside the Wikipedia context, are (and grammatically must be) "nine-ball" or "9-ball", but we eschew "9-ball" on Wikipedia as a name of the game to avoid confusion between the game and the numbered ball. It is not "Nine-ball" - games are not proper nouns (cf. football, badminton, chess, etc.) It is certainly not "Nine-Ball" - second and subsequent word parts are not capitalized in hyphenated compounds, even if the compounds are proper nouns, unless also proper names, publication titles or the like (e.g. "Jane Foster-Smythe")[1]. The game also is not named "nine ball" [nor "Nine Ball" for capitalization reasons already given above]. Why? Because: First, sport/game names that end in "ball" are almost universally compounded in English[A] And cf. the more similarly-named bowling games of nine-pins and ten-pins, which are traditionally both spelled out and hyphenated.[B]. Second, the adjective has fused to the noun to form a compound noun - without the adjective being integrated into the noun, it is simply a random noun modified by a random adjective like "hot soup" or "ugly dog", and the results are nonsensical in the context of what nine-ball actually is (a thing named, cohesive, integral and indivisible; not a thing described) - one cannot reasonably say "we were playing a game of ball, the nine kind" in reference to this game [unless related to Yoda one is perhaps, hmm?]; "nine-ball" is a concept an sich, and ergo it is necessarily a compound noun[C]. And third, perhaps most importantly, if it is not compounded and the adjective remains unbound to the noun, it is free to modify entire noun phrases that follow it or to be distanced from the noun by insertions, with confusing and ambiguous results - an example within an earlier version of the nine-ball article itself demonstrated this ambiguity: "nine ball rules", which could just as easily mean "nine rules about balls" or "rules about nine balls". (Other words besides "rules", such as "games", cause similar ambiguities.) If we have just "nine ball rules" instead of the inseparable "nine-ball rules", we can also have "nine confusing ball rules"; note that we cannot have "nine-confusing-ball rules" without there being an identifiable, unified thing called "nine-confusing-ball" [which one supposes might be a future game with balls technologically able to randomly change their color and symbols on the fly...] Compounding the noun to its erstwhile adjective prevents any insertions (or more to the point, signals that such insertion isn't even possible; the phrase is immediately and naturally parsed as a compound noun. (See "Non-numeric game names", below, for compound ("line-up") and non-compound ("bank pool") names without numbers.)
  • The term "9-ball" for the game is not an acceptable short version in any billiards-related context in Wikipedia. Rationale: Indeed, the "9-ball" spelling is conceptually perhaps even more correct than "nine-ball" (with regard to that specific game but not eight-ball, for symbol vs. number-per-se reasons that become clear below), and is commonly used in the industry. But, firstly, it is too difficult and awkward to restructure the large number of sentences that naturally should begin with this phrase just to avoid ungrammatically starting sentences with numerals instead of capital letters; second, and far more seriously, it will be hard to read and understand these articles if the usage is not just logically sound but also visually distinct, and this distinction is consistently maintained. The one time the 9-ball construction can be used in Wikipedia cue sports articles is in the first sentence of the intro of the article about that game, as an alternative colloquial name, e.g.:

Nine-ball (colloquially also "9-ball") is a pocket billiards game [...]

  • The name of the game must not be run-together. Incorrect examples: "nineball", "9ball".
  • Where numeral usage is utterly ingrained and almost invariable (e.g., "18.2 balkline", "14.1 continuous"), use the numeric rather than spelled-out version. This does not apply to game names frequently spelled either way (as noted, we do not use "1-pocket", "3-cushion").
  • Commercial or popular [mis]usage is of no consequence; but respect organization names and publication titles. The fact that some pro tour, company, organization, tournament, etc., may use a spelling such as "9-Ball" or "Nine Ball" or "9 Ball" is of no relevance: the industry as a whole evidences no standardized terminology spelling, and the same event (sometimes even the same organization!) are often spelled multiple ways. See "Organizations and publications", "Tournaments and other events", and "Respecting official organization names" for more details.
  • The convention on naming of the game applies to all games, whether named for the winning ball or the number of balls or objects used. This applies to all games, regardless of whether the eponymous objects are money balls ("eight-ball"), total balls ("three-ball billiards"), both ("nine-ball"), total object balls ("fifteen-ball"), or non-ball objects ("five-pins", "three-cushion, one-pocket"). Usage of such appellations as "3-cushion" for such games is grammatically unsound and simply lazy; in that final case it is also inappropriate in that the objects enumerated are simply counted, and unlike the 8 and 9 balls do not bear numerals on them as symbols; wikipedia should not encourage such usages as valid alternate spellings in article introductions, though redirect pages should silently take people to the correct article if they use these misspellings in seeking out articles. In the case of actually-numbered objects, the one-time usage of the "9-ball" format in the article introduction sentence as an alternative colloquial spelling is indicated.

[edit] The ball and other numbered equipment

  • The ball itself is, and must be, "the 9 ball", in all cases. It cannot logically be "the 9-ball", because it is not a compound noun, but simply a noun modified by an identifying adjective, like "my shoe" or "Dante's Inferno" - unlike the game of nine-ball, the 9 ball really is just a thing with a (symbolic in this case) descriptor that differentiates it from several other similar things (balls) within the same context (the pool table at hand). "The 9 ball" is simply short for "the number-9 ball" — we see clearly that it is an adjectival phrase modifying a simple noun, "ball"; it is not a compound noun — one would not write "the number-9-ball" or "the number 9-ball" so we cannot logically write "the 9-ball" either. Similarly, if we had a custom pool ball set with different symbols we might refer to the "ankh ball" and the "mu ball", and there is no reason to hyphenate such phrases. Indeed, doing so can lead to more confusion that it solves (e.g., "the +-terminal and --terminal on the battery"!) As with the game itself, it is not a proper noun, like the title of a book, so "the 9 Ball" is out of the question. It is also not "the nine ball" - it does not say "nine" on it, and the numeral it bears is not really a number per se, but simply a symbol.[D] This does mean that it would not be grammatical to begin a sentence with a bare reference to the 9 ball, without an article or other preceding word; but, oh well - we have the same problem with the poet e.e. cummings, yet the field of literary criticism has simply dealt with it (almost universally respecting his wishes to remain all-lower-case), and somehow survived unscathed. It is hard to think of such a sentence in the first place. Perhaps something like "9 ball shots are the most often missed in nine-ball due to what is colloquially known as 'choking'." Which sounds kind of funny anyway because it is ambiguous and silly ("9 shots on a specific ball? 9 shots on any balls? Huh?"); Most people would write "The 9 ball shot is the most often missed..." See below for how to handle cases where it is felt that a sentence "must" begin with an unadorned reference to the 9 ball. Finally, of course it can't be "the 9 Ball" or "the 9-Ball" (capitalized) for reasons already discussed.
  • Plurals are formed in the same manner. Examples: "the 1, 2 and 3 balls", "the 1 through 15 balls" (Note: "the 1-15 balls" is deprecated as potentially confusing.)
  • An acceptable informal short version is "the 9", but not at first occurrence. To prevent repetitive wording, later references to the ball may omit the word "ball", provided that the meaning is entirely clear in context. It is not "the nine" (nor "the Nine"; see above about capitalization);[E] again, this ball is not labelled "nine" (except perhaps on some custom-designed balls somewhere), but "9". NB: It would never, except at the beginning of a sentence or book (etc.) title, be "The 9" with a capital "T".
  • The "the" is generally mandatory, except where the indefinite article, a more specfic reference, or a clause providing such, precedes "9". Examples, respectively: "a 9 ball shot", "that 9 ball opportunity", "first shoot the 7 ball, then the 8 and 9" (emphasis added for clarity).
  • If one "'insists'" on begining a sentence with a bare reference to the ball itself, it must, in Wikipedia billiards articles, be rendered as "Nine (9) ball..." to prevent ambiguity, especially for non-native English speakers; few languages are as cavalier and confusing about operator overloading of number usage as is English. About the only reason to do this would be a sentence in which more than one 9 ball were referred to (e.g. "Nine (9) balls keep getting stolen from our tables."), but there are other ways to phrase such sentences, therefore this usage is strongly deprecated, and editors are encourage to rewrite any such usage encountered.
  • The grammatically optional hyphenation of ball names when used as adjective phrase is not used in Wikipedia articles in the context of cue sport. While many would normally prefer to write "a 9-ball shot" it must be written "a 9 ball shot", here, for disambiguation reasons. (NB: If the phrase were intended to mean "a shot in a game of nine-ball", it would be rendered "a nine-ball shot".)
  • The ball and its label/name must not be run-together. Incorrect examples: "nineball", "9ball". (The same goes for non-ball objects, e.g. do not use "fivepea".)
  • Journalistic or popular [mis]usage is of no consequence; but do not change direct quotes. The fact that some journalists and writers, in or out of the cue sports fields, may use variant spellings such as "the 9-ball" or "the nine ball" is of no relevance: the industry as a whole evidences no standardized terminology spelling. However, as per Wikipedia:Manual of style generally and univerally, never change the spelling in a direct quote; if the spelling could be confusing ("pocketed the 9-ball in a game of 9-ball") or the term is widely divergent from the norm ("striking ball"[1] for "cue ball") it can be marked with "[sic]" or explained in a footnote.
  • References to the count of or succession of balls should always be in the form "nine balls", "ninth ball", etc. To avoid confusion, they should be spelled out (no numerals like "9 balls left", "or sank his 9th ball in a row in the straight pool match"); it is generally accepted standard English usage to spell it out — and not hyphenate it, either — anyway.[1]
  • The convention on referring to the count or sequence of balls also applies to non-ball objects, whether numbered or not, but numbered ones should be spelled out. For example, pins/skittles or shake pills/peas. E.g., "I knocked over all five pins" not "...all 5 pins"; "I drew the number-five pill from the shake bottle", not "...the 5 pill". While because it is numbered "the 5 pill" would be correct under the same theory as "the 9 ball", which we prefer, in the Wikipedia context the similarity of the former to the latter will be visually confusing to readers and editors, so it is spelled out as "the five pill" or "the number-five pill". Object-referent numerals in cue sports articles always refer to numbered balls.

[edit] Organizations and publications

Names of organizations and titles of publications, because they are usually officially-registered and often trademarked designations, should be left as-is, but redirected-to from the name that would adhere to this guideline. An organization legally called the Aruba 9Ball Association should have its article appear at Aruba 9Ball Association, and have a redirect page to it at Aruba Nine-ball Association.

See "Respecting official organization names", below, for additional (non-numeric) organization naming guidelines.

[edit] Tournaments and other events

Apply these naming guidelines rigorously to events, but redirect from attested alternate spellings. Because tournaments and the like are generally not officially-registered corporate entity designations, and especially because promoters, organizers, sponsors and sanctioning organizations rarely consistently use one name for them (e.g., using "9-ball", "9-Ball", "Nineball", etc., among other differences), there is no compelling reason to use anything but this guideline's recommended number formatting and spelling when it comes to the actual article name (i.e. "Nine-ball", capitalized because it is part of a proper name/title). Any demonstrable trademark for the event, or other sourceable semi-official name (one used by sponsors, organizers, etc.) should exist as redirects to the main article.

See "Naming of tournaments and other events", below, for additional (non-numeric) event naming guidelines.

[edit] Statistics and winnings

  • References to wins, scores, ratios, winning, placings, etc., by long-standing sports statistics conventions, should be given as numerals, not written-out words, as per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) (WP:MOSNUM); their format and context is generally clear enough as to avoid any ambiguity with ball or game names. Example: "He won 10 to 4 in the race to 10, taking 3rd place and winning ¥20,000,000." Note however that ordinal numbers should otherwise be spelled out ("her third tournament win that year").
  • Give 'versus' statistics in a semantically meaningful order, not always winning-score-first, and use standard formatting. A phrase like "and she lost match, 9 frames to 5", is nonsensical. Even worse is "Jackson was the next player Smith faced, and by a narrow victory of 8-7, Smith took the title" — many readers will be at least momentarily confused, unsure if the 8-7 order was chosen because victory was mentioned first, because the editor personally prefers winning-score-first, or if it was meant to refect (as it often does) the order in which the players were introduced in the sentence. Painstakingly avoid ambiguous constructions of this sort. As per the Wikipedia Manual of Style on dates and numbers, please use "10 to 1", "10-1", or "10 racks to 1" formatting, not "10-to-1" (unless used as a compound adjective, as in "a 10-to-1 sweep"), "10–1" (which means "from 1 through 10, inclusive, and backwards"), "10 - 1" (which equals nine), "10/1" (which is an irregular fraction, equalling 10), "10:1" (which is a ratio or an estimation of odds), etc.
  • Currency should be wikilinked to when possible, and disambiguated when necessary (e.g. "US$" or USD", not just "$"), again as per WP:MOSNUM.

[edit] Dates

  • Dates should be given in long form not abbreviated. According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) (WP:MOSNUM), events in main article prose should have their complete dates linked in customary Wikipedia style, e.g. 4 November 2006, because this enables user date formatting preferences to work; however, this is not true of date ranges, e.g. November 4-12 2006. If only a year is present, and the event isn't significant enough for an "in sports" link (see below), it is the preference of WP:CUE among a growing number of others that the year not be linked at all (except in tables for consistency of appearance; see below). WP:MOSNUM is also neutral on this matter, but the sheer size of such dates articles and excessive number of links to them makes their utility dubious.
  • Dates should be wikilinked to an "in sports" article when appropriate. Where dates refer to an encyclopedically significant event worthy of listing in the "(date/year) in sports" articles, it is the preference of Wikipedia:WikiProject Cue sports among many others (WP:MOSNUM remains neutral on the matter) that they be linked to those instead, e.g. November 4-12 2006 WPA Men's World Nine-ball Championship, but not excessively "superlinked", e.g. November 4-12 2006 WPA Men's World Nine-ball Championship, as this is confusing to the reader and it provides no useful functionality to the reader to link to generic date articles at every occurrence. (Note: That recommendation will be subject to revision in the future if the problem of date ranges not being wikilinkable in a manner that works with user date preferences is ever resolved; see WT:MOSNUM for further information.) Good candidates for "in sports" links are a 1st-place victory in a tournament with or deserving its own article, the founding of an important cue sports organization, induction into a major hall of fame, and death of an highly notable person in the field. Poor candidates are regional or ranking tournaments, 2nd-place rankings, founding of regional organizations, challenge matches, births, deaths of players who were not globally significant, random events in the lives of players, and the like. WP:CUE uses these links for a purpose, namely identifying (by "What links here") what events need to be added to the "in sports" date articles (with {{Cue sports heading}} if needed), so using these links appropriately is important. If this is too much complicated editing for someone, they are welcome to post a date-fix request on the article's talk page.
  • Link dates in tables but do no overuse "in sports" links in them. According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists of works)#Linking years, dates that appear in lists/tables, such as of title and tournament wins, should only be linked once to "in sports" articles (if at all - see above); for later occurrences, use the basic year link, or no link (many Wikipedians prefer the former, as it makes the table's appearance more consistent, and WP:CUE advises the former for the same reason; i.e. link the date again in a table/list even if the link has already appeared in the long-form prose elsewhere.

[edit] Numeric compound adjectives

  • Optional hyphenating of compound adjectives that mention numbers should be studiously avoided in the context of cue sports articles on Wikipedia. For reasons of ambiguity and ensuing confusion, even if one's dialect or preferred register normally calls for it, one should not write, "She pulled off an astounding nine-ball run in bank pool." A previous example could grammatically have read "the 9-ball shot is the most often missed...", but the visually confusing ambiguity of this style is immediately evident. Use "nine ball run" or "run of nine balls" in the former type of case and "the 9 ball shot" or "pocketing the 9 ball", etc., in the latter.

[edit] Non-numeric game names

  • Similarly to "nine-ball", hyphenate non-numeric game names when appropriate, for consistency. The style specified here for nine-ball, etc., is also used for non-numerically named games, except when this will produce a grammatically incorrect result. Game names that are not compound nouns must not be hyphenated. Incorrect examples: "bank-pool", "English-billiards", "skittle-pool", "carom-billiards", "straight-rail"; all of those are simply adjectives modifying nouns - games described and differenced from other games in the same general class. (Straight rail is a deceptive case; it looks like a compound adjective, but here "straight" is a colloquialism for "plain" or "just one", not a description of the rail.) Correct example: Line-up (pool) ("line-up" is a compound adjective).
  • Game names that are fully compounded on an industry-wide basis shall remain that way in Wikipedia articles. As of this writing, the only known example is blackball, an internationally standardized (mostly British Commonwealth) variant of eight-ball. This guideline would otherwise recommend "black-ball", but as the English language preference is to eventually fully compound such phrases into a single word (cf. baseball, football, etc.), Wikipedia will not resist this process. Please note that the term "the black ball" in reference to a ball rather than the game should not be hyphenated or compounded ("9 ball", "cue ball", etc.); see "The ball and other numbered equipment", below for more information.
  • The numeric convention on naming of the ball also applies to non-numbered balls and object in all games, to the extent it is relevant. Hyphenation and direct compounding is not applied to non-numbered balls, e.g., "the cue ball", not "the cue-ball" or worse yet "the cueball"), including generic references ("the red balls", not "the red-balls" or "the redballs"), and references to custom ball sets that use symbols other than a number (e.g. "the star ball", not "the star-ball"). The same goes for non-ball implements; do not use compounded constructions, like "pool-table", "pooltable", "snooker-cue" or "snookercue".

[edit] Respecting official organization names

The article for an organization should use the most official name of the organization (such as that found on privacy or copyright policies or contact information at the organization's web site, sans any legal abbreviations like "Inc. or "GmbH", and expanding any organizational abbreviations in the name itself, e.g. "St. Kitts Pool Assn." to "St. Kitts Pool Association"; note that in this example, "St." is not exanded to "Saint".) While the most authoritative official name should be used as the real article, any additional official or semi-official ones should definitely exist as redirects to the former. A real world example is the World Pool-Billiard Association (their most authoritative name, and thus also their real article), who also appear as the World Pool Association, the World Pool-Billiards Association and the World Pool Billiard Association on several of their own documents; these sourceably attested alternates should certainly be redirects.

  • In the case of non-English-language names, the main article should be the official non-English name of the organization, with redirects from plausible (and especially sourceably in-use) English translations. An exception is when the organization itself supplies a preferred English translation, in which case that English name should be the main article, and the non-English one a redirect. If the name cannot be represented in Western European characters, the English name should be the main article. If it cannot be represented in unaccented English characters (the 26-letter English alphabet without accent marks or other diacritics), the closest English approximation of the properly-accented spelling should also be made a redirect to the main article, as many readers do not know how to generate and search for such characters from their keyboards.
  • If the country/region name is not part of the official name of the organization is should not be added as if it is. If some differentiation must be made for disambiguation reasons, it should be done with a parenthetical at the end of the article name. For example if an organization existed called the Pool Federation (and that were its full legal name) in the Kingdom of Tonga, and a different organization had the same legal name in Jamaica, and both were notable enough for articles, they would be named Pool Federation (Tonga) and Pool Federation (Jamaica), with a Pool Federation disambiguation page at the unadorned name, wikilinking to both of them. They should not be named Pool Federation of Tonga, Jamaican Pool Federation, etc.
For the handling of numbers in names of organizations, see "Numbers: Organizations and publications", above.

[edit] Naming of tournaments and other events

  • Use this guideline's recommended formatting when it comes to the name of events (i.e. "Nine-ball", not "9-ball", etc.), because tournaments and the like are generally not officially-registered corporate entity designations, and especially because promoters, organizers, sponsors and sanctioning organizations rarely consistently use one name for them (e.g. the organizer may call it the Botswana National 9Ball Classic, some promoters might call it the National Botswana 9-Ball Tournament and the Botswana National Nineball Smack-down Challenge, and the main commercial sponsor might call it the Ndele Billiards Club Nine-ball Invitational). Any demonstrable trademark for the event, or other sourceable semi-official name (one used by sponsors, organizers, etc., but not typographical errors that happen to appear in a newspaper or other third-party source) should exist as redirects to the main article.
  • Competitions and other events should:
  • Use the official name to the extent possible without violating the number-related guidelines here.
  • Use the clearest and least excessive official name when there are more than one, generally preferring that of the sanctioning organization (the supplier of the rules) over those of local organizers and especially of commercial sponsors, all other things being equal.
  • Precede the event name with the acronym (or where there is no acronym, the name) of the sanctioning organization, when this can be identified, and it is relevant: i.e. the event is a championship or qualifying match; if something like an exhibition match happens to use WPA (or whatever) rules, this is not a particularly relevant fact and should not be reflected in the article name, though if sourceable should be mentioned in the article.
  • Should not include the name of a commercial sponsor unless disambiguation would be severely hindered by omitting it.
  • If the event is very broadly known by the name of the sponsor rather than by the name of the sanctioning body, also give that name as an alternative, secondarily, in the article introduction, and in bold. Example: the San Miguel Asian Nine-ball Tour (Guinness Asian Nine-ball Tour as of 2007), which is really the WPA Asian Nine-ball Tour. In articles, please use the sanctioner, not sponsor, version of the name.
  • Commercial sponsors: Identifying events by their commercial sponsors is very problematic for a number of reasons. First, it runs afoul of Wikipedia:Spam, by simply providing advertising for commercial entities - the corporate designations appearing in articles is not necessary and effectively acts as a form of banner ad. Second, sponsors often change from one season/year to another (the "San Miguel" Asian Nine-ball Tour is now the "Guinness" Asian Nine-ball Tour, and for all anyone knows may change again next year. Third, events often have multiple sponsors, and without a clear, citable statement from the tournament organizers as to which sponsor is the primary sponsor (if there is one; some events have multiple primary sponsors), this would leave editors between a rock and a hard place, either listing all of the sponsors in the article title (e.g. the "Microsoft Pepsi Budweiser Meucci Simonis Bank Pool Championship"), with ridiculous results, or engaging in forbidden original research and determining for themselves who the primary sponsor "probably" is. Fourth, and worst of all, it can directly mislead readers in a number of ways. For example, San Miguel is a place first and foremost, a beverage company and its product secondarily; readers not familiar with Filipino beers would be most likely to assume that the tournament took place in San Miguel, and perhaps even that it was arranged by the local government of San Miguel, neither of which are correct. Worse yet, sometimes one league sponsors the events of another, and following the deprecated practice of naming event articles for their sponsors would have resulted in the 2007 WPBA World Championship having an article at 2007 APA World Championship! The Women's Professional Billiards Association and the American Poolplayers Association have no rules or player sanctioning connection at all, but such an article title would very strongly imply that competitors in this event were APA league players using APA's handicapping system and ruleset, while nothing could be further from the truth.
  • Illustrative example: Using the Botswana hypothetical event used above, assuming sanctioning by the Botswana Nine-ball Association (BNA), and using these criteria (including the number formatting guidelines), the event article should be BNA National Nine-ball Classic, and a redirect page should exist pointing to this article from each of the other names, and their number spelling-corrected variants: Botswana National 9Ball Classic, Botswana National Nine-ball Classic, National Botswana 9-Ball Tournament, National Botswana Nine-ball Tournament, Botswana National Nineball Smack-down Challenge, Botswana National Nine-ball Smack-down Challenge, and Ndele Billiards Club Nine-ball Invitational. Imaginable but unattested variants (like "National Botswana Nine-ball Smackdown Challenge Invitational Classic") should not be created as redirects.
  • "Championship" is singular, "Masters" is plural. As a matter of convention, events such as the World Snooker Championship and WPA World Nine-ball Championship are given in the singular, even if they have multiple divisions (no division produces two tieing champions), and on the other side of the coin, there is no such event as the World Pool Master Tournament. "Championships" is plural when more than one event is being discussed, e.g. "she has won 3 back-to-back WPBA World Championships". The plural of "Masters" is "Masters" (not "Masters'", which is possessive, and not "Masterses" which is simply poor English.)
For the handling of numbers in names of events, see "Numbers: Tournaments and other events", above.
For the handling of non-English names of events, see "Organization names", above.

[edit] Equipment

[edit] Cue

  • The cue ball is the "cue ball"; the cue stick is the "cue stick" (or a more specific term, e.g. "pool cue"). A bare reference to "the cue" is usually too ambiguous.
  • The terms must not be compounded, e.g. as "cuestick" or (as already addressed above) "cueball".
  • When speaking generically, the hand-held implement is "the cue stick"; when speaking of specific games, the term can be more specific (and mandatorily truncated): "snooker cue", "pool cue", "billiards cue" (or "carom cue" or "carambole cue"). While "cue" is a perfectly valid term for "cue stick" (some would even argue that the latter is redundant), the shorter term is usually too ambiguous for use in Wikipedia articles, which will be read by many people utterly unfamiliar with the topic. "Cue" by itself is acceptable when:
  • the cue stick and cue ball are mentioned in the same sentence (e.g. "strike the cue ball with the cue" is not ambiguous; "using a lot of follow-though with the cue" is not;
  • the context is not about games at all, so no confusion could arise: "George Balabushka did not actually make the 'Balabushka' cue used in the movie The Color of Money".
  • The cue ball must never be referred to as "the cue", even if it would not be ambiguous in context, and despite common spoken shorthand of this fashion, because it is simply factually incorrect and constitutes non-encyclopedic language.

[edit] Mechanical bridge

  • The reach-assisting implement should be referred to as the mechanical bridge or bridge stick (or a more specific term) when being spoken of generically or as a class. It should never be referred to as simply the "bridge", as this is factually incorrect (the forward, stablizing hand is the bridge, and the mechanical bridge is an artificial substitute for it when reaching with the hand is impossible or ineffective). It must not be referred to by colloquial disparaging names like "granny stick", "wussy stick", etc., per Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. It may be referred to by neutral colloquial terms if these are defined in situ or Glossary-linked. For largely American games like eight-ball and nine-ball, the term "rake" can be used, but should be wikilinked with {{Cuegloss|Rake|rake}}. For snooker, English billiards and blackball, the proper term is "rest", and likewise should be given as {{Cuegloss|Rest|rest}}. The casual shorthand of "rest" should not be used to mean the cross-type rest specifically; there are up to four different rests used in those games. If one means the cross-type rest, say so, e.g. "{{Cuegloss|Cross|cross}}-type {{Cuegloss|Rest|rest}}", or "{{Cuegloss|Rest|rest}} ({{Cuegloss|Cross|cross}} type)" (or even simply "{{Cuegloss|Cross|cross}}" after first occurrence). Because "cross", "spider", "swan" and "hook" all have original, non-sporting meanings, using these rest names by themselves is too ambiguous and should be accompanied one way or another by the word "rest" at first occurrence in an article or large section. Likewise, the first occurrence of "rake" should be something like "{{Cuegloss|Rake|rake}} ({{Cuegloss|Mechanical bridge|mechnical bridge}})".

[edit] Chalk

  • "Chalk" should only refer to cue-tip chalk, never hand "chalk". For the latter, use "hand talc" or "talc" (most hand "chalk" cones are in fact made of talcum, not chalk.)

[edit] Language conflicts

  • Summary: Dialect logic and game traditions should be respected, and terms disambiguated; otherwise WP:ENGVAR should be applied as usual.
  • As elsewhere in Wikipedia, it is proper to use British terminology when discussing largely British or Commonwealth English topics (or those highly influenced by their terminology, such as snooker), and North American terms when discussing largely North American topics.
  • US/Canadian example, in an article about an eight-ball player: "Using the rake, she shot with high left english from the foot rail, to pocket the 8 ball with a carom off one of the stripes."
  • British/Australian/etc. version, about a blackball player: "Using the rest, she shot with top left side from the top cushion, to pot the black with a cannon off one of the yellows."
(And jargon terms not previously defined in the article should be wikilinked to their Glossary of cue sports terms entry with {{Cuegloss}}.)
  • For games closely associated with one dialect or another, the more appropriate dialect should be used consistently (thus American English for most pool games such as eight-ball, nine-ball and one-pocket, and entirely American games such as American four-ball billiards, versus British English for snooker, blackball pool, and English billiards. The article for the Western Hemisphere variant American snooker should use American spelling, just as the British eight-ball variant blackball uses British English.
  • Note: British-spelled snooker terminology ("the colours", etc.) are terms of art and should not be changed to American spellings (with the sole exception of the American snooker topic) even if the rest of the article is in American English (compare the legal profession's entirely consistent use of the spelling "judgment", even in areas where the vernacular dialect prefers "judgement"). While some non-authoritative American sources on the topic will use American spellings ("colors", etc.) in discussing snooker, authoritative ones do not (such as The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards and Pool: History Strategies and Legends Michael Shamos, curator of the US-based Billiards Museum and Archive). To date there is no reliable evidence that American spellings for snooker terms have gained currency within the sport/industry, even in the US (miscellaneous websites notwithstanding).
  • Because cue sports terminology can differ widely between the dialects, and even directly conflict, jargon terms should be given with their other-dialect equivalent at first occurrence whenever they differ, especially in a context where the dialect is not immediately intutitively guessable (i.e. one might do this in Billiards techniques but not in English billiards, though no harm could come with doint it there as well). For example: "head rail (bottom cushion", "rest (rake)", "black spot (foot spot)".
  • Spelling/language disputatiousness is strongly discouraged and in excess may be considered incivil and disruptive. Per Wikipedia:Etiquette, divergence from this [draft] consensus standard in an article by an editor should simply be corrected without remonstrance or criticism. Non-standard usage in talk pages should be completely tolerated, with no criticism and especially no edits of others' posts, just as with any other typo or spelling/usage preference or quirk. And it is expressly not expected that the average, occasional editor of these articles will or should memorize this convention, only that clean-up editors who have done so and who apply it will not be attacked for this nor have their clean-up edits reverted.
  • This [draft] consensus standard is for the rendering of article (including caption and heading) text, and names of articles and categories, only, and although ideally it could influence and help clarify usage elsewhere, it is not intended to have any applicability as a standard elsewhere, within or without Wikipedia.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Admittedly most are not hypenated today [which used to be spelled "to-day"], with "stick-ball" being a common optional exception; but in their early days these games were univerally referred to as "foot-ball", "base-ball", etc., and the particularly old ones were originally written as two words, before the "-ball" convention evolved. Cf. also "e-mail" ⇒ "email", etc. — compounding and the eventual dehyphenization of compounds, to form new unified words, are very common processes in English. But contrast these compounded sports names with "ice hockey" and "field hockey", or "long jump" and "high jump", etc.; in references to games and pastimes, this compounding phenomenon is mostly peculiar to "ball" and "skat[e|ing]" sports and games, and a few others, and those inspired by them, e.g. "snowboarding" from "skateboarding". One day, generations from now, we will surely play nineball [though surely not 9ball!], but this is not anywhere close to a standard usage yet (a non-exhaustive scan of a dozen books on pool, and a small stack of Billiards Digest and other pool mags, revealed no occurrences of the "9ball" spelling and only a handful of "nineball" instances). [back]
  2. Note also that for "number-named" games, the names of which refer to the number of balls being used, such as "eight-ball", "three-ball billiards" and "seven-ball", the name is both a compound noun by being a reference to a game as such, and a compound adjective, making the hyphen even more appropriate. Since only someone who already knows perhaps more about a given game than they would learn from reading the article about it here is likely to know whether or not the game in question is named for its money ball (eight-ball), its number of balls (three-ball), or both (nine-ball), the consistent use of game names in the hyphenated format "nine-ball" is doubly indicated; applying a standard of "nine ball" name formatting to some games and "nine-ball" to others, based on this distinction, would be even more confusing than the overall usage before this Wikipedia standard was drafted! [back]
  3. This is a common feature of English; e.g.: "I did a Wikipedia look-up on 'billiards' last night" - it was not an upward glance, even metaphorically, but a "look-up", which despite its etymology has a distinct synergistic meaning as a compound noun that differs greatly from the simple sum of its two parts. Indeed, a game based on the non-synergistic concept "9 ball" (no hyphen) would be pretty boring, what with only one ball to shoot at! [back]
  4. Cf. "X-ray" - though we prounounce it "ecks-ray" we never spell it that way, and it is only very infrequently misspelled "x-ray" in scientific literature, because scientists know that "X" is a symbol not a letter of the alphabet as such, in this context. X-rays are not one type of ray in a series ranging from "a" through "z"; rather, the X is an arbirary, symbolic designation, like "gamma". Just like the numbers (which could just as easily have been letters or Egyptian hieroglyphs) on pool balls, which were added simply to tell the balls apart specifically rather than just by suit/group (as still evidenced even today by the fact that the British, among others, do not regularly call shots, and thus do not typically use numbered object balls, other than the adopted 8 ball). Obviously nine-ball and other more obscure numerical rotation games were invented to take advantage of the already existing numbers (it would be absurd to posit that such games existed before numbered balls but with no one actually playing them until unfulfilled demand resulted in numbering being added to balls!) So, they are symbols. We do not spell out symbols, unless those symbols do not exist in our character set (e.g. the Artist Formerly Known as Prince's symbol) or would not be understood by the target audience (e.g. we write "gamma" if the reader cannot be expected to recognize the actual Greek letter). Neither condition applies to "9" of course. Note that "X-ray", aside from being capitalized as a symbol, and The X-Files (which is further capitalized as a title), are both hyphenated as compound nouns, because these two cases — unlike "the 9 ball", but very much like the game of "nine-ball" — refer to unique things named as discrete entities unto themselves, not near-identical things described and differentiated from their neighbors. That is, if the show had been about actual case names filed alphabetically under "X", like "Xavier, James A.", the show would have been called The X Files, and references to the files themselves would be rendered "the X files" with a lower case "f" (and, further, could have correctly been referred to as "the x files" had the show centered on someone obsessed with keeping files about non-proper-noun dictionary words beginning with that letter.) [back]
  5. And besides, "the Nine" means something else entirely to anyone who's read "The Lord of the Rings"! [back]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b H.W. Fowler & E. Gowers A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford U. Pr., UK, 1926/2003, ISBN 0198605064; and H.W. Fowler & R.W. Burchfield, [The New] Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd [Rev.] Ed., Oxford U. Pr., UK, 1996/1999/2004, ISBN 0198610211; the former is the highly prescriptive original, the latter the remarkably more descriptive and permissive total rewrite; both agree on these points.)