Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 65

message: I've recently come accross dashes being used as a kind of quotation marks:
*-MTV Asia Awards- Best Female Artist Award
*A Best 2 -Black-
And even tildes:
*Love ~Destiny~
I think dashes were not meant for this, and I would like to change them:
*MTV Asia Awards: Best Female Artist Award
Or something similar, but first I thought I'd see if people here agreed. What to do with the tildes? Shinobu 22:17, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think I agree with you, but would you be able to provide which pages those are on?  Just make sure that the dashes aren't there for a reason.  Neonumbers 23:38, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with you too.  I think what is going on is ASCII artists getting carried away with creative writing.  Either that or some kids have been reading too many mid-20th century authors who preferred to use a leading dash instead of quotation marks.  That's very cool in a novel but inappropriate for an encyclopedia.  --Coolcaesar 05:25, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dashes used as quotes 

message: === Wording ===
Why does Wikipedia use sentence-style? PatPeter 01:20, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What is sentence-style wording? Are you actually talking about sentence case versus title case (see Capitalization#Headings and publication titles). For further discussion, please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (headings). --Rob Kennedy 03:16, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section Headings 

message: Why does Wikipedia use sentence-style? PatPeter 01:20, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What is sentence-style wording? Are you actually talking about sentence case versus title case (see Capitalization#Headings and publication titles). For further discussion, please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (headings). --Rob Kennedy 03:16, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wording 

message: I asked this question a while back, perhaps in the wrong place, and didn't get any responses. I still need MoS guidance on a basic question regarding infoboxes. Is the infobox supposed to be a redundant summary of the information already present in the main article, or is it ok to have information that is only available in the infobox? My original example was an airplane crash article. I wanted to remove the airplane's registration number from the intro paragraph since it is a detail that is presented more clearly in the infobox. Thanks in advance. --GregU 02:32, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd say that infoboxes are allowed to display information that is not present in the remainder of the article. For example, geographical infoboxes display information such as area and other statistics that would look disjointed if placed within the body text. - 52 Pickup 13:34, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I haven't checked whether the MoS says anything about this, but, please believe me, duplication of information is evil. Note: not "harmless" but "dangerous", as copies are practically guaranteed to get out of sync some day (and even if they were always kept in sync the work would just be a waste of energies on the maintainers part). —Gennaro Prota•Talk 00:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Duplication of information is perfectly normal; that's the whole point of a summary, both within an article (WP:LEAD) and between articles (WP:SUMMARY). Kirill Lokshin 01:25, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

text: The infobox is intended to be a summary of the article (or the topic of the article), similarly to the lead section; but I don't think there's any problem with having some (reasonable amount of) information that appears only in the infobox, particularly when dealing with numerical statistics that don't really fit well in an article otherwise.  Just keep in mind that said information will therefore need associated citations, etc., in its own right. Kirill Lokshin 01:25, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you! --GregU 08:29, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Information that's only in the Infobox? 

message: Many readers/editors have expressed that the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to indicate pronunciations is undesirable. I have proposed an alternate pronunciation scheme based on symbols commonly used in American dictionaries that could be used in addition to the IPA. Currently, the Manual of Style allows for alternate pronunciation guides, but has no standardized alternative scheme in place. Go to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (pronunciation)#Proposal to comment. – ishwar  (speak) 21:55, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Pronunciation style guidelines

message: Whats the rule on adding headers with no information under them, just a stub marker. A stub would be a few sentences. I see a proliferation of dead headers. It reminds me of the "under construction" signs on web pages. Should headers be added when there is info to add? I don't see dead headers at other authoritative reference websites --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 10:50, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I would recommended commenting them out, but not deleting them.  Not sure who would agree.  Neonumbers 00:55, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I would agree.  In fact this is exactly what I have done (& will continue to do unless there appears good reason to do otherwise) to the dead headers I have come across.  Jimp 01:11, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

text: Okay, I'm trying it ... what I expect to find is that the headers will be subsumed into the above section. Jimp 03:20, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead headers 

message: Okay, I have always preferred the serial comma before knowing it as the obnoxiously named "Harvard comma."  And I might be missing something--I'm saying this honestly, not rhetorically--but I don't understand the style guide's example that "I would like to thank my parents, Sinead O'Connor, and George Bush." can "refer to either two or three people."  I have racked my brain but can't think of a single example of where the use of the serial comma actually can lead to more ambiguity than leaving it out.  Please advise.  Cain47 06:10, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Serial comma

message: The manual says:
:"it looks a bit different in some fonts, so it may be better just to type the dots."
This doesn't make sense to me.  We shouldn't define our style around broken fonts.  If some fonts don't render ellipses correctly, they will later be dropped or fixed.  An ellipsis character is specified in Unicode for a reason:  It is not a run of three periods, it is an indication that something is left out.  It should not look like three periods in a row.  
This being said, I haven't changed the manual, as I don't normally work on this project, so I'm not going to "be bold" to that extent. --Slashme 09:15, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm - does that not beg the question of whether we should assume people reading Wikipedia are using a font that is compatible with Unicode? In my experience, not everyone does. Of course it would be a lot easier if they did. Sam Blacketer 23:39, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I've argued in the context of the mathematics project that we should avoid mathematical symbols that are not rendered by IE6. Is it IE's fault, and they should fix it? Maybe, but that doesn't help the large proportion of readers using it. One reason to use three dots is that it's easier to edit for people who don't get HTML entities and Unicode. I think a better solution would be for the software to automatically encode three successive periods as an ellipsis, where supported by the browser. But that's a software change. Deco 23:11, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  ellipsis 

message: When a long article is on a foreign topic which should be italicized, should/can the italics on the name of the subject be dropped at some point? For example, it's been brought up on the talk page for Tengu that that article should do this, according to the precedent set by Kitsune. Kotengu 小天狗 10:47, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it should not, unless the word has been adopted into English, and the first italic merely discuss it as a word rather than a thing. Switching from tengu to tengu will provoke edits to correct this "obvious flaw", and will leave the mere reader wondering whether he has missed some distinction. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:08, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Italics and long articles