Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

message: A user argued that use of quote box within the article does not constitute a "pull quote" within the context of MOS:PQ, because it is not repeating something in the article. Although, the editorial intent is obviously Wikipedia editor's desire to accentuate and bring more attention to that part than rest of the article, so I believe it is considered pull quote for the intent of the guideline. Please help with the interpretation of the meaning of "pull quote" as used on Wikipedia as used in Boy_Scouts_of_America#Program Graywalls (talk) 16:47, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, repeating something  displaying it prominently obviously needs to consider additional NPOV concerns. Remsense诉 14:47, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

text: A pull quote is an extract pulled from the material within which it's embedded to highlight it. A quotation from an outside source is not a pull quote, it's just a quote, even if it's given special emphasis. However, making arbitrary quotes in articles pretty is not advisable. See, for example, the documentation at .  Largoplazo (talk) 15:25, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: People have been repeating this stuff about POV for years and it's thoughtless nonsense. Judgment must be exercised, and the use cases are limited, but a highlighted quote need be POV no more than does a block quote in the article proper, or a photo caption. EEng 20:57, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I thought the point was that choosing to highlight a particular quote is itself POV, not just providing it for verification or illustration purposes but giving it undue emphasis. It's perhaps the same as MOS:NOTETHAT; beginning a sentence in an article with "Note that" implies that what immediately follows should is merits noteas though the rest of the article doesn't so much. In both cases, we should let the reader assess the significance of each piece of information given in the article without cuing them as to what we think deserves special attention by them. Largoplazo (talk) 21:23, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: It's POV if it's POV, and its undue if its undue. We make editorial decisions about what to include or not include, what to put in the lead or not put in the lead, what to emphasize or not emphasize, all the time. Quote boxes are just one more such decision. EEng 14:16, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

text: It matters a bit more than those elements because highlighted quotes are a bit more distinctive than them, is what I think the common sense idea is. Remsense诉 21:00, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  Despite your indentation I think you're addressing me. Yes, a highlighted quote is more distinctive than the other situations I mentioned, and that's wh, as I said earlier, use cases for highlighted quotes are limited. But they're not nonexistent as some people claim. EEng 14:15, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

text: No. Its not a pull quote, unless its repeating part of the article.  Such "non-pulled" quote boxes are used in WP:FA and there is a current discussion at WP:VPP approving their good use in WP articles. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:42, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is the use of quote box in article to highlight certain contents considered pull quote? 

message: Just a heads up for now: at some point most likely in the next month to few months a Wikipedia in the Mossi language, with the ISO code mos, and thus a "mos:" interwiki which would overwrite the "MOS:" pseudo-namespace, is likely to get created. I've been jotting down various ideas to avoid this problem at m:Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Mooré#Comments. * Pppery * it has begun... 00:39, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting case. Congratulations to the creators of that new Wikipedia! I wonder whether it might be possible to special-case all-caps "MOS:", since interlanguage links are by convention nearly always lower-case ("mos:")? Gawaon (talk) 05:31, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Great suggestion @Gawaon. I totally agree with you. The Moore language is a big language In Africa, spoken across multiple countries with more than 11 million speakers. Having the wikipedia created with mos.wikipedia.org would be very useful.  Shahadusadik (talk) 09:52, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  Interwiki prefixes are currently case-insentive, and that's (probably) not very practical to change. * Pppery * it has begun... 15:07, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I know, I suppose it could be a special "hack" for just this one special case – of course, the software (MediaWiki) would have to be modified to support it. But what's the alternative? And especially, is there a practical alternative? (I would accept it as a given that mos.wikipedia.org is going to come.) Gawaon (talk) 15:24, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Pppery's suggestion "English Wikipedia to convert its pseudo-namespace for MOS into a full namespace" looks practical. Existing links in policy pages, edit summaries and discussions should all work, though interwiki linking from en: to mos: would have to be done in some unusual way. enwiki's range of search selections would have to be expanded - is the code so good that would happen automatically? - and we'd be lucky if that was all, but it's a more elegant evolution than the deep-cludge alternatives. NebY (talk) 16:04, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with this; at this point it would cause too much disruption for us to switch over, and I suspect that we aren't going to be linking to the Moore language very often, considering it has taken over twenty years for it to get a Wikipedia. BilledMammal (talk) 10:04, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

text: Ok. I understand this now@Pppery.  Shahadusadik (talk) 17:17, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

text: With relief I've verified that there are no languages with code "wp" or "wt". Largoplazo (talk) 10:37, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

text: Though this wouldn't fix past edit summaries, could we rename it "Style" and mass-replace /(\[\[)MOS(:.*?[\]\])/i with $1Style$2 throughout the content? Largoplazo (talk) 18:36, 25 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I fear that would re-date all the talk-page and project archives, again, and be a long annoyance to editors who accidentally use the old shortcuts – but any solution's going to be somewhat annoying. NebY (talk) 12:34, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

text: Filed phab:T363538, since Phabricator is probably a better venue for this then here. * Pppery * it has begun... 23:05, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

text: On a related matter, see the notification below. The actual RfD section is Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 April 25#Mos:DAB and etc. where several are listed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:05, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

text: Seems like we should change all our shortcuts. We need (a) a new shortcut prefix that is not an ISO language code and (b) should ask the Mossi language editors nicely whether we can create a few soft redirects at mos:DAB and mos:DASH and so on that point back to enwiki, to be deleted after a reasonable adjustment period. Hacks that continue to make MOS:DASH work as a redirect while mos:DASH is an interwiki are too confusing in the long run, I prefer a clean solution to one that allows us to lazily mostly continue doing what we used to do. (The whole issue comes from the fact that : has too many functions, it is the interwiki separator, the namespace separator and a legal character in page titles). —Kusma (talk) 08:28, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Five years ago I said that  . At the time I was kidding. But I'm not kidding anymore. EEng 09:48, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  MOS: Name clash 

message: What's the meaning of "left" and "right" in images if removing them leaves the images completely unchanged? JacktheBrown (talk) 19:02, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Where is this? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:21, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  I mean in general. JacktheBrown (talk) 11:32, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: "left" places an image to the left, "right" (which is the default) to the right. But I suppose you know that already. So what's the question? Gawaon (talk) 13:16, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: One of the most important things to know about Jack is they use Wikipedia on their phone. They are seemingly unaware of what Wikipedia is like outside the mobile app, which is interesting and thought-provoking. Remsense诉 13:41, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm aware of this, but using Wikipedia only on a mobile device seems much better to me, because I can zoom in and then, like an eagle, immediately notice all the errors and things that need to be improved. Note: I use both the website and the app. JacktheBrown (talk) 13:43, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: My bad, that wasn't meant as a dig at you to be clear. I genuinely do think it's interesting to try to fully consider an editor with that kind of relationship with the site. Remsense诉 13:45, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  it's important to consider that young readers, and not only, use almost exclusively their mobile devices to read Wikipedia pages (I think). JacktheBrown (talk) 13:53, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: totally agreed! Remsense诉 14:11, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

text: Oh, so you mean  and  as in . If you had said that at the start of this thread, we wouldn't have been wasting time (I had thought that you meant in image captions like "From left to right: Smith, Jones, Brown and Foobar"). Anyway, as shown at WP:EIS#Location, these options control which margin the image is placed against; and when  is specified (see WP:EIS#Type),  is the default. So altering |thumb|right to  makes absolutely no difference; but altering |thumb|left to  will move the image from being against the left margin to being against the right margin. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:59, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: One example of why this might be desirable is to avoid WP:STACKING (see especially Help:Pictures#Alternating left and right). If, however, you are using a mobile device, then the L/R image placement may not be visible. -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 16:13, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Left" and "right" 

message: Please join the work on the content of Wikipedia:Stress marks in East Slavic words. - Altenmann >talk 12:59, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stress marks in East Slavic words 

message: It seems that the particular constructions referred to as "parenthetical plurals" by style guides—e.g. —have never been discussed here before, which is a bit shocking. Here's a quick pitch for why we should consider explicitly deprecating their use in article(s):
* They are almost entirely useless, and usually do not clarify any ambiguity. This is the case for WP:AND/OR but stronger. Use of a plural form to indicate "any number of" is usually completely fine, and when it's not there's usually a broader problem with the structure of your sentence.
* Something something, brackets can create problems for wikitext, somehow.
* While neither AMA nor Chicago explicitly disallow parenthetical plurals, they both firmly suggest that you should never have to use them.
* They are ugly.
Remsense诉 09:46, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Parenthetical plural(s)? 

message: Hi. I have been seeing editors removing former from short descriptions on corporate articles, using the essay WP:SDAVOID as the reasoning. I wonder if other editors believe the same as me as this madness, as leaving defunct companies with short descriptions without it is inaccurate. For example Cavenham Foods or Tudor Crisps who have been defunct for quite some time. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 05:31, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with you. --Cyfal (talk) 05:56, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

text: Short descriptions are supposed to give extremely brief descriptions for the purpose of disambiguation. I don't see time-specific descriptors as critical for that, so I'm in favor of keeping them out. It's not misleading to omit the information. Popcornfud (talk) 06:16, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, leaving it out seems fine (and indeed preferable) to me too. That there is an article about a company doesn't imply it still exists, so there is no need for such qualifiers. Gawaon (talk) 06:42, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

text: The short description for Canaan reads "Region in the ancient Near East". It isn't implying that Canaan exists now, it's just identifying it as what it was when it was. The same goes for products and corporations. Just understand the SD to be explaining not what the topic is but what it is-or-was. Largoplazo (talk) 09:39, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[WP:SDAVOID]]