User talk:Ahecht/sandbox

Italics for named weapons

Reading this Italics/Major works#Paintings, sculptures and other works of visual art with a title rather than a name, are swords with a name included in this section? For example Excalibur and Thuận Thiên (sword)? --Gonnym (talk) 10:34, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Based on a visual inspection of the hits at at Google Books, Excalibur is not italicized in running text. Doremo (talk) 11:55, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

One way to look at the distinction is that a sword or building has a practical use, whereas works of art exist for their own sake. Also, works of art are often named after common objects, e.g. The Swing, so italicization alerts us to the fact that we're talking about the work and not the common subject. Likewise, most people's names are distinguished by convention from common objects with a capital letter, e.g. "Daisy" vs. daisy. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 15:48, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

And other non-art objects are not italicized (with very few exceptions, like ships and spacecraft). E.g., many manor houses have names, as do various individual racecars, famous fossils, famous gems, even pieces of famous furniture in the White House and Buckingham Palace, etc., etc., etc. The exceptions, like for ships, are highly conventionalized and unmistakable, not iffy maybes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:31, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Revert, or clarify at least, MOS:FOREIGNTITLE

See above RM mentioned by User:Facu-el Millo . This section of MOS:T is needless instruction creep as it stands and is at variance with other parts of the MOS. Even if there's consensus to keep it, it should be clarified as to its scope; however, I would be inclined to just roll it back to an earlier version at first preference. Looking at the history, most of the relevant history is at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) since this section was merged over here in 2017. It seems that:

• There wasn't any direct guidance in MOS:T itself until 2017's merge of the Naming conventions (capitalization) section over here in this diff.
• The 2013 page doesn't say anything about titles, and notes for phrases that if there's an accepted English language capitalization, use that, otherwise use the language of origin's rules. Simple. Perfect.
• The February 2016 version does include a bit for works of art, but basically restates the above advice: "usually the capitalization found in English-language reliable sources is recommended, but when such sources use different capitalizations there is some leaning towards the capitalization rules valid for the language of the creator." Sure.
• The November 2017 version after SMcCandlish makes a series of edits is what creates the modern guideline, which I think has gone at least somewhat unnoticed? But came up in the above RM. Now, rather than "follow the sources", we have the "retain the style of the original for modern works. For historical works, follow the dominant usage in modern, English-language, reliable sources."

First off, what does this even mean? What counts as a "modern" work? Is this just for things not localized into English yet, i.e. extremely recent, or are we talking about modernism as in art, so the 1960s and forward? If the latter, why exactly should the style of the original be retained, anyway, if there's a clear English-language style in reliable sources? This is especially important for when capitalization essentially makes a different word. If we're willing to translate titles to English words (Instructions Not Included rather than No se aceptan devoluciones), there's really no difference when the "translation" is sometimes just adjusting the capitalization. (Ping for @SMcCandlish:, since you added this section, for your view on what this modern / historical distinction means exactly.)

Second of all, how does this work with MOS:TM, which encourages ignoring "official" stylization and using what's in reliable sources? If we throw reliable sources out the window, it sure seems like this guideline should cause an avalanche of moves back to original / official titles. The largest offender here is surely Category:J-pop songs and the like, so Speed Star (song) should be moved to its original Japanese capitalization of SPEED STAR★ since it's a modern work by MOS:FOREIGNTITLE. Move Die Tageszeitung back to die tageszeitung, and so on. I briefly brought this up in the RM, and Facu's take was that the guideline referred to the "general grammatical rules of the language" which I don't think is what the guideline says, which is "retain the original (capitalization)." I'm not sure that would be a useful standard anyway - titles routinely aren't doing grammar at all, they're just names or sound cool.

Titles of works are not Wikipedia editor's creation or Wikipedia running descriptive text. They're made by people external to Wikipedia. It's fine for Wikipedia to set style rules for internal text, but Wikipedia MOS should not be in the business of "fixing" somebody else's work title, in the same way that Wikipedia shouldn't invent names for people either. If a foreign title has a known translation agreed upon in reliable sources, that translation should be used, style & all. It's fine to mention, as in the 2016 version, that consensus usually errs on keeping the original capitalization when sources are split, but if sources are not split, it is not a matter for the style guide then, it is rather a matter of avoiding original research and respecting what sources say. SnowFire (talk) 09:40, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

@SnowFire: Is there a potential case that you would be especially against apart from one where stylization would be something like SPEED STAR★? I mean, I would be against a title like that too. But having a foreign-language title use the grammatical rules of that language? I find it quite reasonable. Perhaps there should be a small change to clarify that it is grammatical rules only, if that's what concerns you the most. Then, we can properly discuss the rest of your concerns. El Millo (talk) 12:36, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

"If a foreign title has a known translation agreed upon in reliable sources, that translation should be used, style & all" Of course, and that's what we do. But and what I argued on the RM is that that title is not a translation, but the title in its original language. In case the original title is used, I think the grammar rules of that language should apply, the same way that English rules apply to English-language titles. "there's really no difference when the "translation" is sometimes just adjusting the capitalization" I think that is somewhat disingenuous. To me, it's clear that it's just custom for English-language reliable sources to use title case, and they don't take into account that it is a title in a different language. The translations we use are official, and they're actual translations that the studio chooses to use to market the film to an English-language audience. If the studio had decided to use And Your Mom Too or something like that and reliable sources had used it, then that would be the correct title to use. But that wasn't the case, and I think it makes sense to follow English-language reliable sources up until the moment in which they use the original name, and then we apply that language's grammar. El Millo (talk) 12:49, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

I think the guidance is useful, and a plain-language reading of it is fairly straightforward. How exactly to reconcile with MOS:TM is an issue that may or may not ever come up. My two cents on the examples you raised is that "Speed Star" is not a foreign-language title, so MOS:FOREIGNTITLE wouldn't apply, and that Die Tageszeitung is the appropriate title. Where something has an unusual stylization in the foreign language, MOS:TM would apply to use something more standard. But those or similar situations can be worked out when and if they organically arise. Not every possible situation should be addressed in the MOS; that would be instruction creep.

As for why to retain the original capitalization, I would argue it is because it is more accurate to reflect the original language's capitalization. As was pointed out in the Y tu mamá también move discussion, arguably the best English sources (scholarly articles and the Criterion release) used the original Spanish capitalization. WP:COMMONNAME says we can avoid an inaccurate name, even if it is more frequently used. The advantage of using an English translation (e.g., Pan's Labyrinth rather than El laberinto del fauno) is improved recognizability for English-language readers. But there is very little difference in recognizability when capitalization is the only difference, so the increased accuracy of retaining the original capitalization outweighs it.--Trystan (talk) 13:42, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

I would be in favor of simplifying this to following the style of the origin language. Trystan hints at this but I'll say it outright: most sources on recent works are not high-quality sources, like film and literature journals are; they're low-end entertainment journalism that explicitly follows house-style rules that are nothing like our own; WP is not written in news style as a matter of policy.

As for the present wording: I did my best to merge not-crystal-clear material in multiple guidelines, which was collectively trying to advise about the same thing but in conflicting ways. In doing so, I followed what the dominant patterns of extant article titles were doing (in particular, there are fairly strong conventions in literary criticism, historiography, music history, etc., favoring following the conventions of the origin language, while these tend less often to be applied to modern pop songs and movie titles. This is "following the sources" in a clumsy and WP:UNDUE manner: when most of the materials about a 16th century work are found in academic works, they will follow capitalization-unfriendly journal habits, which are also persnickety about non-English rendering; this precise and down-casing style is also what is recommended in major style guides (including all of those that MoS is heavily based on: Chicago Manual of Style, New Hart's Rules, Fowler's Modern English, Garner's Modern English, etc.). Meanwhile, when most of the materials about a 2020 TV series or video game are found in the entertainment press (and mostly in online sources), the titles are apt to be rendered in "just capitalize everything" style following the habits of news websites, which tend to be both lazy and jingoistic (e.g., most of them drop diacritics from most names, impose Western name order on Asian and Hungarian people who don't use it, etc.). They not only follow in-house style guides of their own devising that conflict between publications, to the extent they exhibit consistent trends they are markedly different from encyclopedic writing.

This is WP, and we write our own style manual, so we can come to whatever consensus we like to do whatever works best here. I've long said that having a single style for any particular kind of thing is generally the best idea, the most practical approach. However, what we have here is an intersection of work titles and foreign-language strings, so there isn't one "kind of thing" at issue. We can either have a rule to follow the style of the origin language, which creates a non-English exception in our normal title-case rendering; or we can have a rule to always apply title-case rendering, creating a work-titles exception in our treatment of non-English strings. I favor the former, because we already have a large contingent of people insistent on other title-case exceptions (e.g. titles of articles in journals; they are in most journals rendered in sentence case, and many editors impose this in citations and in mid-paragraph mentions of titles of such works). So, "always use title case" is going to get push-back from multiple directions.

What we definitely don't need, however, is a difference depending on source age. We should just ignore entertainment journalism's over-capitalization bad habits, and always render non-English titles in the style of the origin language, even for stuff that was released this week, and even if Entertainment Tonight or The New York Times Book Review over-capitalizes it. We need to not care. They don't dictate our style manual to us, and it exists to produce consistent output in our material (and to reduce recurrent editorial strife over style trivia), not to align with particular off-site publishers of news, marketing, or other non-encyclopedic writing. And yes, of course, if a work has a common name in English, like Pan's Labyrinth, then prefer that over El laberinto del fauno, though do render the latter in that Spanish capitalization pattern when mentioning the Spanish title. "El Laberinto del Fauno" is simply an error, even if you can dig up a Spanish website somewhere doing that. You can also find an English-language news site that writes "Do It Like A Dude". That is, "I found some sources that capitalize every single word, even 'a'" is meaningless (well, it means one thing: there are some sites with bad editors).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:26, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Replying here.

• Facu-el Millo: What do you think the title of L'Auberge Espagnole should be? The English title is capitalized as it stands. The French title is l'auberge espagnole. The standard French grammar for "the Spanish apartment" would probably be L'auberge espagnole. To me, following French grammar rules makes no sense - that's describing something qualitatively different, about some Spanish apartment, not about the movie that was released. The movie would either be all capitalized (English sources) or not capitalized at all (retain original). Going by "what if it was French running text" essentially invents a new capitalization, which (IMO) is against fundamental Wikipedia ethos.
• Trystan: If "Speed Star" is too close to English for you (which... I disagree with... it'd be more clear when it's mangled / weird spellings of English, something like Brain Powerd), then there's plenty of other titles that mix English snippets with native language snippets, and then the problem comes back. If hypothetically Jama Shinaide Here We Go! was spelled Jama Shinaide HERE WE GO! in the original, but without caps in most sources, then I'd think the sources should win (to be clear the real song is just Here We Go!, I just grabbed a random exmaple). I guess I just disagree it's possible or useful to make this distinction at all. Either there's the original title, or there's the title in reliable sources. There is no middle ground with custom Wikipedia MOS styling, and attempting to create one results in novel titles that don't show up anywhere else, which is very bad. I also disagree that titling is solely a matter of "recognizability" for readers. It's also a matter of being accurate. If somebody picks up a book that says "Don Quixote" on it and reads a journal article about "Don Quixote" and then writes a paper about "Don Quixote", then that is Actually The Title for English readers, not merely the "recognizable" title.
• SMcCandlish, part 1: You brought up a lot of points but let me focus on the important one. Thanks for clarifying why this distinction exists at all - because you don't like modern sources? Okay, whatever, I disagree, but that's still useful to clarify - that means "modern" is "1 year old or less" because we'll certainly have more than just the entertainment press you dislike in that amount of time. Would you have objections to editing the guideline to say this more explicitly, that "modern" is more like "in the news right now", and "historical" is more like "has established, published dead tree sources"?
• SMcCandlish, part 2: I'll try to handle the other stuff you brought up here. I've disagreed with you before about sources (NOTNEWS has nothing to do with anything in MOS matters) but I don't think that's actually relevant to this discussion, any more than your comments about "what if we could impose One Awesome style everywhere". You also seem to be misreading my point: I am certainly not saying "always use Title Case", and doubly not suggesting that original language titles be modified (so sure, El laberinto del fauno for the Spanish title obviously). I am saying "use either the English form whether it be title case or not, or use the original capitalization, based on what the sources say." Sometimes the English form won't be vanilla title case, sometimes it will. This is what worries me when you constantly bring up "over-capitalization" here and elsewhere - that's starting with a result. The guideline should describe a procedure to get the answer, and let the chips fall where they may on capitalization. Anyway, going back to the Requested Move, to the extent that the argument was "real" sources used lowercase for YTMT - sure, whatever, where every Wikipedian draws the line of what counts as a real source will differ, although I would point out that it's equally likely the journal article was simply acknowledging the film's Spanish name which wouldn't mean much. That said, I'm not opposed to this style currently described for "historical" works of "check the sources, but maybe only use high quality ones." What throws me is that this is not what you seem to be advocating. If you think we should just go with a rule to follow the style of the origin language, great, but this is gonna cause all sorts of ALL CAPS or wEiRD caps cases which you seem to also think won't happen. If you think we should go with a rule of "impose my favorite capitalization, we set the rules around here" then I don't think there's consensus for that nor is it the Wikipedia way to handle this, per above comments: is is inaccurate at some level. Again, to some extent titles are like people's names - even if a person's name is "weird", it's a name, you can't just "fix" it yourself. SnowFire (talk) 01:22, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

  @SnowFire: The English language has certain rules when it comes to titles of works, the Spanish language has different rules, the French language has different rules. What I'm saying isn't to stick to the specific style the guys that designed the poster used. That would be, no ALL CAPS, no wEirD caps, nothing of that sort. For titles in English, title caps. For titles in Spanish, sentence case. For French titles, whichever rule applies (I'm not familiar with French grammar). El Millo (talk) 01:59, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

  Taking SnowFire's points in the same order presented (and this will be long, because each of those bullet points has several actual points embedded within them):

  • The proper French title by most conventions would be L'Auberge espagnole (both among French publishers – Académie française, Imprimerie nationale, Le Petit Robert, Le Quid, l'Dictionnaire de citations françaises, etc. – and in major English-language style guides' advice on treatment of French work titles in English). The convention is to capitalize the initial letter, and if the first word is L'<nowiki>, Le or La, then capitalize the noun phrase that follows it. Basically, capitalize up to and including the first noun then use lowercase afterwards (other than for any embedded proper names). French does not capitalize adjectival forms of proper names, thus espagnole ('Spanish'). A few camps on en.WP are strangely resistant to this (see, e.g., Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/France and French-related articles#Proposed simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS, which is more than a decade outdated, and Talk:L'ange de Nisida#Requested move 8 December 2020). This appears to be entirely tied to the preference of a handful of specific, topically-focused English-language works, especially Grove Book of Operas / The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. I.e., it is a WP:Specialized-style fallacy of topical editors cleaving to the preferences of a specific off-site publisher.
  • Your points to Trystan are largely reasonable, except MOS:TM applies. We would not write "HERE WE GO!" unless virtually all reliable sources did so (including in media beyond entertainment journalism). Second, your final point in this section is fallacious. The fact that a particular person has an edition of an originally non-English work with Title A, and chose to write about it as Title A, and found a reliable source who also called it Title A, is meaningless (other than the last of these points being evidence that at least a redirect should exist for Title A). What matters is what the WP:COMMONNAME in English is, across all reliable sources. Has nothing to do with some random person's writing or reading habits, or one edition publisher's title choice. A much more useful example that Don Quixote is probably Tao Te Ching, which remains most commonly known in English by that title than by the modern pinyin spelling Dàodé Jīng, or approximations of it like Daode Jing or Dao De Jing. The fact that this causes various people some consternation is unfortunate but is not going to result in a page move. The fact that modernized spellings have become accepted for some other things, like Beijing instead of Peking, is immaterial. It'll remain Tao Te Ching until that is provably no longer the most common name in English RS.
  • Straw man. It has nothing to do with the publication date, but whether a particular group of publishers produce output consistent with our titling practices. I even explicitly stated "What we definitely don't need, however, is a difference depending on source age." That it's mostly very recent online publishers, in the "entertainment news" sector, who are over-capitalizing things like song and movie titles (often against the norms of their own language), is incidental. What matters is that they're using a non-encyclopedic "news style". We not only have no reason to imitate it, we have an explicit policy (WP:NOT#NEWS) that we don't.

    Also, if you know anything about blog software and other CMS systems, you'll know that a lot of this is caused by default text-processing scripts in such systems, that people simply have not bothered to override. E.g., you start an article on a movie titled A Boom with a Thrill (or in the 4-letter-propositions capitalization system, A Boom With a Thrill) and your text gets rendered "A Boom With A Thrill" to capitalize every single word, then you copy-paste that and work from there (and may even have macros running that "suggest" that over-capitalized spelling because it's already been used), ending up with over-capitalization throughout. This is also why so many minor non-American news sites, blogs, forums, etc., strangely use US MDY date format despite it being foreign to the norms of their own country's mainstream publishing. Most of the software is American and comes with MDY as a default; lots people without IT departments never get around to changing it). You can see similar scripted effects do other dumb things; e.g., one or another editing system has an option to downcase all words of two letters or less (intended to stop capitalizing "a", "an", "of") other than the first letter, and it regularly results in things like "it" and "is" being lowercased, despite no style guide in English ever recommending doing that in titles (other than as part of downcasing all words, in sentence case). But this "style" (despite being codified nowhere) is rampantly common online. Its commonness doesn't matter in any way for how WP should write.

    The problem with a few that "WP should write A Boom With A Thrill because lots of the sources do" (to summarize a common argument of this sort) is that all those sources about this new movie are all entertainment journalism sources all following essentially the same over-capitalizing style (either by intent or by not giving a damn), and an soon as the film attracts coverage in better sources like books and film journals, that apparent "source preference" will vanish, which necessitates a move to A Boom with a Thrill, which is where it should have been on this site the entire time.

  • "NOTNEWS has nothing to do with anything in MOS matters" is just completely incorrect. "Wikipedia is not written in news style" was added explicitly to stop people trying to write WP like journalism (including topic-specific journalism). That goes for wording style, orthography, and article structure. It has stood the test of many years, and has served us very well. "[W]hat if we could impose One Awesome style everywhere" = more straw-man nonsense. "[U]se either the English form whether it be title case or not, or use the original capitalization, based on what the sources say." Yes, we can agree on that, in principle (and if you felt I was straw-manning you, I apologize; I may have misapprehended your intended meaning). But my perception is that you think this means "ape the style of one genre of sources, no matter what" any time something like, say, entertainment sites are the only sources we presently have, or are nearly all of them. That's not going to fly. When all the sources are following a particular non-encyclopedic way of writing, we are not tied into some suicide pact that forces us to use that style, when the style question is simply arbitrary. (There are cases when it is not; e.g. a particular text string might be capitalized in a song title because it is an acronym, and it may take research to determine that it is one.) You don't have to believe or agree with my reasoning on any of this; our individual interaction won't matter much. I'm just telling you how WP does observably actually work when it comes to such matters, based on thousands of RM discussions. When exceptions get made on a supposed "local consensus" basis (usually a WP:FALSECONSENSUS of vote-stacking by topical fanbois), they generally do not last, because as sourcing becomes broader and extends beyond entertainment journalism, the "style hegemony" that seemed to support something awful like A Boom With A Thrill just disappears. Exactly this happened with "Do It like a Dude". The early sources wrote "Do It Like A Dude" out of copyediting system dumbness and out of mimicry of the cover art; later sources (especially real news organizations with actual style guides of their own) knew that looked stupid to everyone, and started mostly doing "Do It Like a Dude" (as most of them were four-letter-rule publishers – capitalize any preposition of four or more letters), then over time as writing about it exceeded blogs and news sites, we ended up predictably with "Do It like a Dude" showing up with increasingly frequency (5-letter rule, the dominant pattern in book and academic publishing, and the one WP uses).

    "The guideline should describe a procedure to get the answer" – it already does, but all of MoS (in concert with AT and naming conventions) is the procedure; something in, say, MOS:TM or MOS:CAPS isn't magically inapplicable because it wasn't redundant copy-pasted into MOS:TITLES. "[C]heck the sources, but maybe only use high quality ones" – Sure, but that's already what WP does about everything. You seem (I don't want to misinterpret) to be wanting to draw a distinction here between very recent subjects and "historical" works, but there is not a policy basis on which to apply different sourcing standards. The fact is that most entertainment writing is poor-quality sourcing (the vast majority of it is primary-source reviewer opinion and interview material, and even when not it is subject to very little editorial control, by publishers that are marginally reputable). Regardless, it is not a reliable source of any kind for how to write an encyclopedia. This is the WP:CSF and WP:SSF central point that some people just ever don't seem to absorb. It just doesn't matter if a particular article is a very reliable source on when production wrapped on a TV show, and why a particular casting choice was made. That has no impact on WP orthography matters. How to write even the finest pop-culture journalism for Rolling Stone or E! has no implications of any kind for how to write an encyclopedia.

    Finally, back to non-English work titles: "If you think we should just go with a rule to follow the style of the origin language, great, but this is gonna cause all sorts of ALL CAPS or wEiRD caps cases which you seem to also think won't happen." That doesn't track. I think you are confusing "follow the style of the origin language" with "follow the style used by the publisher's marketing department on the original-language cover". They're not related. That is, if some French comic comes out and the title looks like la renoncule AGONISÉE de malheuR, most French publications of any quality are going to render this La Renoncule agonisée de malheur, and that is also the style most often recommended by English-language works for rendering French titles. It just does not matter that some low-grade publications (in English and in French) may give it literally as la renoncule AGONISÉE de malheuR; we would not, per MOS:ALLCAPS and MOS:TITLES and MOS:TM at all once. Our hands are not tied into doing the weird version unless virtually all sources ever, across all genres, do this with nearly no exceptions. And this nearly never happens. Even major TV shows and films with all-caps marketing titles, that fans like to render all-caps, are not rendered that way on Wikipedia, because we can always find reliable sources that, like us, do not feel a gun to their head forcing them to slavishly mimic marketing bullshit. For every instance of something odd like "Deadau5" and "iPhone" in WP titling, there are a thousand cases of "Kesha" instead of "Ke$ha" and "Macy's" instead of "macy's" and "Sony" instead of "SONY". It is extremely difficult to get WP to accept a marketing-gimmick stylization of any sort; the independent RS usage of the unusual style has to be near-unanimous. And that applies to titles of works, like everything else. Cf. Gangsta (manga), which is not (any longer) at GANGSTA., and never should have been. It only ever was because very early on there was little coverage except in anime/manga fandom outlets that mimic goofy title orthography without question. Your analogy to personal names is both faulty and on-point in different ways. There is much greater buy-in on the part of independent RS to go along with unusual personal name stylizations (and even some kinds of corporate trademarks, like "runtogethernames"), and for that stylization to become so ubiquitous in sources that we would end up with a WP:RECOGNIZABLE problem if we did not go along with it. You're right in that this standard applies to personal (and corporate/product) names as well as to work titles. Unfortunately for your stance on this stuff, the frequency of sources going along with weird styles in titles is markedly lower than for going along with things like "danah boyd" and "CCH Pounder" and "DaimlerChrysler".

   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:33, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Minor works mentioned within quotations

I think § Quotation marks should be amended to mention that the double quotation marks should change to single when nested in a quotation. (For instance: Flansburgh said, "So I think 'Dr. Love' was kind of the springboard for the idea behind 'Dr. Worm'.") This is the usage prescribed by MOS:QUOTEMARKS, and that page mentions that its guidelines apply to "titles of songs, chapters, episodes, and so on" as well as quotations. Here there's no mention of that, and an editor reading this page might wrongly assume that minor work titles should always use double quotes. — Ardub23 (talk) 05:59, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Request for comments

Greetings to all,

A Request for comment has been initiated regarding RfC about whether to allow use of honorofic 'Allama' with the names or not?

Requesting your comments to formalize the relevant policy @ Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles

Thanks

Bookku (talk) 17:54, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Better Than Working

Should the "than" in this stub be capitalized, or not? My gut says "not", but wanted to ask before requesting a technical move. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 15:43, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

The word than is a preposition when preceding a noun phrase (as apparently here); this is clear because it assigns object case, like other prepositions (than me, for me, to me, etc.). (Before a clause it functions as a conjunction: than I am, etc., which also applies to elided clauses: than I am.) In either interpretation, preposition or conjunction, it ought to be lower case. Doremo (talk) 03:31, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Italics for holy books

Even though our guidelines say you should use italics for "books, multi-volume works (e.g. encyclopedias), and booklets", it seems that holy books are rarely italicized on Wikipedia: Torah, Pentateuch, Quran, Book of Genesis, Gospel of Matthew, all the other books of the bible, Old Testament, New Testament, Bhagavad Gita, Lotus Sutra, Charge of the Goddess, etc. Anyone know why that is? Should they be changed to italics or should the guidelines here be modified? Kaldari (talk) 03:17, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., § 8.102) states: "Names of scriptures and other highly revered works are capitalized but not usually italicized (except when used in the title of a published work). the Bhagavad Gita ... Koran ... Talmud ..." § 8.104: "The names of books of the Bible are capitalized but never italicized. The word book is usually lowercased ... Genesis; the book of Genesis ... Job; the book of Job ..." Doremo (talk) 03:26, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Yes, it's just a convention. I'm not so sure it's common for the Buddhist & Hindu ones. Johnbod (talk) 18:12, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

See RfC on changing DEADNAME on crediting individuals for previously released works

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#RfC: updating MOS:DEADNAME for how to credit individuals on previously released works
This potentially would affect a significant number of articles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:21, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Italics in citations (again)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 74#Italics 2 – another round of recurrent dispute over what to italicize in citations, and whether to cite just the publisher if the work title and the publisher are essentially the same. This was addressed in a previous RfC fairly recently, and many prior discussions, but there still seems to be some doubt among some editors what the answers are.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:22, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Update and simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS proposed

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/France and French-related articles § Proposed simplification of MOS:FRENCHCAPS, which is more than a decade outdated

Also has some implications for MOS:FOREIGNTITLE. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:06, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Translations of titles and capitalization

In English, titles tend to capitalize the first letter of proper nouns and adjectives, but this is not true for all other languages, for example Polis. I.e. this newspaper article in Polish has the title "Koniec mitu Westerplatte" which translates as "The End of Westerplatte's Myth". So the word myth is capitalized in English but not in Polish. In a recent A-class review a reviewer, User:Sturmvogel 66], said that "MOS:CONFORMTITLE says that the translated title should conform to the usage in the rest of the title, and MOS:CAPTITLE all translated titles should be in title case.", which I take it to mean that they want to see the Polish word capitalized in the reference. I think this would not be correct, as I don't think MoS demands that, and further, it would be plainly wrong, as it would change the Polish title from what it is to a Wikipedia-only version that is not grammatically correct (in Polish). Comments? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:48, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Jeez, MOS:CONFORMTITLE refers you for foreign titles to MOS:FOREIGNTITLE just below. This starts "Capitalization in foreign-language titles varies, even over time within the same language. Retain the style of the original for modern works. For historical works, follow the dominant usage in modern, English-language, reliable sources. Examples: Les Liaisons dangereuses (French; the English title is Dangerous Liaisons) ....." Johnbod (talk) 03:23, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

No, that's not what I meant at all. The translated title, and only the translated title, needs to use English title case. I have enough of a problem keeping track of the capitalization rules in languages that I sort of understand, much less ones in which I haven't a clue.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 03:27, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Ah yes, that's right. Johnbod (talk) 03:32, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

A translation of a title that doesn't exist in English is not a title. Titles of newspaper articles even in English often (mostly?) use sentence case. There is no reason to cap a translation from a Polish newspaper article. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:30, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Following the not-a-title logic, one would write: "Koniec mitu Westerplatte" (the end of Westerplatte's myth); that is, with an uncapitalized the. Doremo (talk) 07:16, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

If it's not a title, it uses sentence case, not all lower case. A separate question for the translator in this case is whether to include "The" at all.

Non-titles use all lower case, like this: "Koniec mitu Westerplatte" (an article published in 2005). In the example above, using sentence case to mark the parenthetical means considering it a title rather than a common noun phrase, and it simply expresses a personal preference for sentence case over title case for titles. Doremo (talk) 03:30, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

MOS:ITALICWEBSITE update for WP:CITALICSRFC

This MOS:ITALICWEBSITE section's blanket statements, which had not been updated since WP:CITALICSRFC and other discussions, have been causing repeated conflict and rehash of the same stuff over and over again. Three recent examples:

• Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 74#Italics 2
• User talk:Citation bot/Archive 24#BBC News et al (again)
• User talk:AManWithNoPlan#Please stop using Citation bot to flip news corporations from publisher to work

And I've seen many others.

That RfC result and the related citation template documentation needs to be summarized here in a footnote, so I have done this [1]. It was ironic that this section has long had a shortcut of MOS:ITALICWEBCITE without actually addressing cite italics of websites at all. No wonder disputation about this has been recurrent despite being RfC-resolved.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:37, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Religious Texts

I have retitled the Scriptures section Religious texts, which is more appropriate. The section already uses examples of religious texts that are not scriptures (e.g. Talmud), the page already links to Religious Text, etc. Gershonmk (talk) 02:28, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

"MOS:Naming convention" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect MOS:Naming convention. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 April 3#MOS:Naming convention until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 21:03, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Titling of "Reception of ..." articles about works of authors, composers, etc.

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Talk:Reception history of Jane Austen#Requested move 8 May 2021, on whether to use "Reception of [name]", "Reception of the works of [name]", "Reception of [name]'s [type of works]", etc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:24, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Forms of to be

Concerning the requested move of Reasons to Be Pretty, at Special:Diff/1026091325 RMTR, Rreagan007 and Ahecht objected, interpreting the current wording of MOS:TITLECAPS Every verb, including forms of to be as requiring "To Be" to be fully capitalized under the interpretation that "to" is not a preposition, it is part of the phrasal verbs "to be". I do not think this was the intent, as the MOS sentence is followed by clarification (Be, Am, Is, Are, Being, Was, Were, Been). Further, I haven't seen anywhere that "to" is capitalized when part of the infinitive. https://capitalizemytitle.com/ provides a summary of several style guides, according to which only the AP recommends capitalizing to in infinitives. However, under MOS:5LETTER we explicitly have Not capitalized: [...] The word to in infinitives. No such user (talk) 09:49, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Nomination of NominationName for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article NominationName is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/NominationName until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:03, 6 July 2022 (UTC)