Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 54

message: I'm trying to find a reference to a style policy on the language-links list, but I can't find the right place. It should be here on the MOS page, but there is no mention of it.
I want to know in what order the list of links to an article in other languages should be kept. Should it be in alphabetical order according to the two-letter ISO code (for example, DE (German) would come before HR (Croatian)), or should it be alphabetical according to the English name of the other languages (Croatian would come before German). Does anyone know what the guideline is? Thanks. EuroSong talk 23:53, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Putting them in alphabetical order according to their English names doesn’t make much sense since they are presented at the side of the page in their own languages. For example, de yields Deutsch (not German) and hr yields Hrvatski (not Croatian). Sorting by ISO code gets you pretty close to being sorted by native term. For example, if you have articles in Spanish, Esperanto, and Estonian, you might order them as eo, es, et. That would give you Esperanto, Español, Eesti, which is actually backward from the desired order. I don’t see that as a big problem, though. They at least all start with E, so anyone seeking a particular language wouldn’t have to work very hard to find it. Perhaps it would be best if the software would sort the list when it generates the page. --Rob Kennedy 20:52, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Though not official, the order used 99% of the time is alphabetical, based on local language, see m:Interwiki sorting order. Which makes sense, as then the order visible to the reader is sorted nicely (using other orders give a semi random look to the order of the links). Martin 09:24, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: anything other than iso code will be much harder to maintain. DGG 08:25, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Foreign language links: order 

message: I have corrected the grossly incorrect statement about possessives. You almost always add an apostrophe and an s to all nouns, even if they end with an s, unless it is a plural noun that ends with s. Here is backup for this correction:
*archive 44 of this talk page
*Apostrophe#Possessive_forms_of_nouns_ending_in_s
In practice, regularly leaving off the s after the apostrophe is as nonstandard and weird as not pronouncing the h in human or humble. In striving to be a publication with mainstream appeal and understandability, Wikipedia must use standard forms.
Nova SS 19:26, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Almost always use 's even if the noun ends with ''s'' 

message: About half the recommendations seem to concern "style" (grammar, expression, naming, etc), and half concern "layout" or "format" (when to link, headings, how to use images, captions etc). Could we consider splitting this into a genuine "Manual of Style" (nothing but questions of "how to say it"), and a "Manual of Layout" or "Manual of Formatting", which concerns presentation? My concern is primarily that there is very little guidance on layout, and the size of this beast is a discouragement against adding any. Stevage 16:55, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, layout and formatting should be elsewhere. Maurreen 06:54, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time for a split? 

message: This is a substantial, contested addition to a guideline. Insofar as its substance is uncontroversial, it is long-winded and repetitive; please explain why it is necessary. Beyond that, it is in some parts a large alteration in the current standard, and should not be added without further discussion. If you could explain here the purpose of why you think this should be added, the proposal can be improved, rather than just adding it and reverting without discussion. —Centrx→talk • 21:33, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. By the way, I considered making an RFC, but the process and the page have become too complicated for my taste. Maurreen 07:12, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Principles" addition