Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 48

message: The referencing of birth names is inconsistent.  See Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Judy Garland for example.  I would suggest that birth names should go in the lead paragraph, along with maiden names, e.g.:
:Aliced Foo, née Bar (November 23, 1887 – February 2, 1969), ...
:Boris Karloff (November 23, 1887 – February 2, 1969), born William Henry Pratt, ...
The three listed have one in the style above, one in bold at the start of the Background section, and one where the "childhood" section starts "At the age of 2, Frances Ethel Gumm made her first appearance on stage ..." leaving the reader to infer that Frances Gumm was her birth name.  I would fix that but I won't just yet pending this discussion. Just zis Guy you know? 13:09, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Alternatively I could just read WP:MOSBIO... Just zis Guy you know? 13:45, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Birth names 

message: The MoS suggests using  for longer quotes to indent both sides. However, this cannot be used with the current MediaWiki software where the quotation consists of multiple paragraphs, since the newlines are ignored inside the  element. Is there a more wiki-like alternative that indents both sides (say, an officially recommended template putting an appropriately styled div around it)? Or can MediaWiki be changed to take account of wiki markup inside the element? Hairy Dude 04:20, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotation style 

message: Symbols that are not in the alphabet, but in the Unicode character set, are intended for decoration. These should not be used in article text. Articles like I ♥ NY and I ♥ Huckabees should be moved to I Love New York and I Heart Huckabees. I don't understand why people don't see the difference between a logo and a name. A name is something that can be written using standard language. A logo is a stylized representation of the name. Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, should not be what amounts to inlining logos. Everything in the text should follow standard language rules. In fact I helped with guidelines on this a while back at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (trademarks), and it seems people are ignoring them or not applying them to this situation. Perhaps a new guideline reading, "do not use analphabetic characters in an attempt to recreate logos," would be appropriate. (See also: Talk:I ♥ NY) – flamurai (t) 18:45, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of decorative analphabetic characters in article titles, text 

message: Browsing through articles that are deal with a foreign subject, all names are always translated to the original language. For example: On The Protocols of the Elders of Zion The first sentence is The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion...(Russian: "Протоколы Сионских мудрецов" or "Сионские Протоколы"). Here the article gives a direct translation to Russian which is okay in my opinion. But dealing with an foreign subject many foreign names come up through out the article and are translated every time which in my opinion looks kind of messy.
I suggest that beside all foreign names instead of translating it we place a small box such as 
Ru
and when the user puts his mouse over the box a popup text will display the translation. What do you guys think? Tutmosis 00:33, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't have a mouse. PizzaMargherita 01:07, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Is it possible to operate a computer without a mouse? Or is yours just integrated into the keyboard? Tutmosis 01:33, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Quite possible, so long as everything you want to do is properly tab-stopped.  On the other hand, anything that requires mouse-overs won't work, for obvious reasons. Kirill Lokshin 01:42, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  So I guess my proposal failes? haha Tutmosis 01:46, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Proposal 

message: There was previously a discussion here about Columns in articles
As I mentioned there, I don't think they should be used, but if they are, they should use CSS, not tables, so I've tried to make a new version of the templates to do the visual styling that some people like without modifying the article structure.  (Additionally, with the CSS-based layout, people who really don't like the columns can turn them off in their monobook.css.)  ;-)  The original table-based templates are at , and my new div- and CSS-based ones are at Template talk:Columns.  I need feedback and it needs tweaking.  Bypass your cache if you don't see the example. — Omegatron 20:51, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Columns of content 

message: Is not "Manual of Style" rather a confusing title for this document? Wikipedia:Manual of Style is a style guide for Wikipedia articles, and is also one of Wikipedia guidelines, more specifically a Wikipedia style guideline. However, Wikipedia:Manual of Style is not a comprehensive style guide for Wikipedia articles as there are numerous other documents that specify style for various sorts of Wikipedia articles. For one, Wikipedia:Manual of Style does not cover the layout of document that is covered in any regular style guides such as MLA. In Wikipedia, layout is explained by Wikipedia talk:Guide to layout instead, an independent style guideline document. Nor is Wikipedia:Manual of Style the only style guideline. It's just one of them.
I suppose that in the beginning Wikipedia:Manual of Style was in fact the only document that specified the style of all Wikipedia articles, and only later were those complementary style guideline documents created. If so, should not Wikipedia:Manual of Style be now renamed and rewritten as a kind of meta document that organize various style guideline documents like Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines does? Hermeneus (user/talk) 01:23, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Haven't looked into it extensively, but your points make sense. "Manual of Style" is a guide that technical writers and copyeditors understand; it may sound like a graphic design manual to people not in those specialized fields (I am). I'm generally in favor of breaking things up (to a point) and having a meta navigation document. DavidH 22:01, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The title of the document "Manual of Style" confusing?