Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 1

message: In many Wikipedia pages there are Automated [Table of Contents]. But I can't see, from an editing view of the page, how this is done. Can we please have some instructions somehwere on how to put an Automated Table of Contents into a page. Thanks. RB-Ex-MrPolo 09:54, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Automated Table of Contents

message: There exist a wide variety of formmating styles within Wikipedia articles for the presentation of "Ses also" lists.   Can we get more detailed guidance in the Manual of Style about appropriate "See also" list formatting?   I'm primarily concerned with the "See also" lists that end up at the end of an article. --  Bevo 11:23, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: ''See also'' lists formatting options?

message: I fail to see why the spelling Anglicization might jar (Wikipedia Manual of Style). My understanding is that the suffix -ize (and thus  -ization and -izing) is normal in American English but in British English one has a choice betweeen -ize and -ise. However, the Oxford English Dictionary and its offshoots strongly recommend -ize, and the OED presents a good argument in its favor. Since this spelling convention is compatible with American English it would make sense to employ it consistently in preference to -ise. To quote the OED: "as the pronunciation is also with z, there is no reason why in English the special French spelling should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic." Shantavira 11:21, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Spelling Style

message: :Re: "an article with only links is actively discouraged"
:I'm sure this has been exhaustively discussed but to me the first step in writing an article is to research information available on the web and make a list of links.
:So I did this and put the links on a page.
:Unfortunately it seems "actively discouraged" means "people are encouraged to blow it away".
:Next time I will keep a copy at home (Duh. Well, there weren't that many, I can find them again).
:But supposing I have done a lot of research and collected a lot of relevant links and then I have difficulties actually writing something. Shouldn't I be able to make my collection of links available to others as a starting point? Perhaps I could make a "stub" page which mentions that links are availabe on the "talk" page?
:: But, you must see that an article with just links is not really an article at all and says near to nothing about what the article should be saying. An article about eggs with just links to eggs sites doesn't say what an egg is, how it is important, and so on.
:: If you like, add perhaps a 1 to 2 sentence description to start with (a stub), then the links. This way the page becomes instantly functional, and you can help it grow by adding information later (Of course not by blind copy and pasting! :) Dysprosia 06:34, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Articles with only links

message: US
#Lirath Q. Pynnor The .s are superfluous and annoying. 
#Angela (I don't like dots)
#Martin
#FearÉIREANN The dots are annoying and re-Mattworld's and Hep's comment, whether the US (opps, U.S.) uses dots or not is irrelevant, as US/U.S. is used in contexts far beyond American topics. If US/U.S was only used in American topics, then it would be OK to use American english. But a universally common form is needed in this specific case (or else we will have endless edit wars between AE and BE), and that international usage is US, so it is the logical choice. Anyway, what happens when articles are written in neither of the above but Hiberno-English, Indian English, Canadian English or (god forbid) MTV-english? :-)
#Stan dots, bleah - I think it's becoming an initialism by analogy to military terms - seems idiosyncratic to write "U.S. Navy" and "U.S. Air Force" one moment, USN and USAF the next, and going by Google, lots of AE writers agree
#I hate the dots, but for titles at least we should use either "United States" (for when it is part of a noun) or "American" (when an adjective is needed). --mav 06:51, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: USA, USN, USAF, etc are acronyms and according to style books, should not have periods. It's a matter of convention - U.S. usually has it, USA doesn't usually have it. --Jiang 01:11, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)

text: Agreed, are there any objections? --Jiang 22:57, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: US or U.S.

message: In the case of albums, especially compilation albums (In this case Echoes, is it considered OK to link out to the same word more than once.
In this case, there are many songs on the album Echoes from identical albums, especially The Wall.
It seems that in this case it would be better because then others won't have to search for another song from that album to get the link, however, another user thinks its better like it currently is (Though notice that on the second disk, for song 9 (Arnold Layne), the album it is from is left as Relics (album)|Relics, and this can be a negatice impact to not linking every song to its appropriate album.
-Fizscy46 18:08, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multiple Linking for albums 

message: Is this where I file a protest about Wikipedia's style of italicizing words referenced within a text. I realize that single quotes are used in marking up Wikipedia, but my keyboard knows as well as my computer does that a double quote is a separate thing entirely. And it is standard in written English to use double quotes around particular words that are being reference in a text. Itals are generally reserved for titles and foreign words and the like. The ital practice is somewhat jarring. Most standard guide to English style prefers the latter of these two:
The word panorama derives from the word panning.<BR>
The word "panorama" derives from the word "panning."
Is there a technical reason for this standard?  jengod 21:13, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Style for words as words 

message: Sometime back there was a discussion on the village pump on these issues :
# whether "See also" can use links already mentioned in the page. There are scenarios where duplicating links are helpful.
# what is the difference between "See also" and "Related pages" ? This page makes no attempt at distinguishing them.
There was no consensus and I'd think they're still open. Should the discussions be copied to over to here ? They're currently at Wikipedia:Village_pump/January_2004_archive_3#Wikipedia_guide_to_the_See_also_lists
Jay 14:13, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: ''See also'' discussion on Village Pump

message: :OK, we've tried to add NPOV description of the various dashes that does the following:
*Briefly describes the standard usage for the various dash types. (For detailed descriptions, there's a reference to Dash (punctuation).)  
*Shows the special markup that's valid for each type of dash and also identifies how to represent each using the hyphen key on the keyboard. (Note that I don't have final info on whether someone implemented an automated tool that changes groups of hyphens to something else.)
*Gives a  nod to the fact that there might be technical issues involved in using the special markup.
Elf 17:17, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Current status

message: This is really minor, but if you're interested, I'm looking for input on "copyediting" vs "copy editing" vs "copy editor"; see Talk:Copy editing. Elf 18:02, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Copyediting article

message: For picture alignment in article, Docu said that for pictures where the person is facing right, they should be left aligned. I totally disagree. To me, regardless of which way the person is facing, the picture should be right aligned. So let me make a proposal - that we horizontally invert pictures where the person is facing the to the right (so that they are now facing left) and we put them on the right side of the article. Does that sound good? →Raul654 09:17, Mar 14, 2004 (UTC)
:I'd prefer if the photos are not edited too much. Next thing, some may want to change the background to match one of the stylesheets. Maybe we should simply drop the part on alignment. -- User:Docu
::I'd prefer dropping the part on alignment. It makes more sense for a picture at the very top of the article to be on the right--has to do with people reading from left to right--but I don't feel that it's something we need to mandate.  Certainly don't want to mandate its position by its content.  I understand that the human eye is drawn subconsiously in the direction of a person or animal's gaze, but I wouldn't want to have to put all the right-facing dog breed tables on the left side of the articles while the others are on the right.  And I really don't like the idea of flipping photos; this distorts reality in some way that we might not even be able to anticipate (e.g., someone doing a study of how often photos are taken of people facing the right rather than the left--I dunno--)  Elf | Talk 16:01, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't agree with a policy of always right-aligning pictures.  The option to use a variety of alignment of images is used effectively in many articles.  Sometimes I've used borders to get a pleasing text wrap. - Bevo 18:22, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think I said that I agree with requiring left-facing photos to be right aligned. I said I understood why that's appealing. I *did* say that I don't think we should mandate the alignment of images based on their content. If a particular project wants to mandate that a certain thing always goes right/left at the top of the article (again, like dog projects have the dog breed table on the right), that's fine, but otherwise I disagree with mandating any alignment.  Elf | Talk 19:09, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Picture Alignment