Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 41

message: ... was there consensus on the large, recent excisions from this document? - Jmabel | Talk 05:32, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The edit summery says they were moved, and cites a talk page discussion but I don't see any such discussiuon and i am not convinced that this move is a good idea. DES (talk) 22:31, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maybe I'm missing something but... 

message: Do bulleted items have to have periods to end them? Some bulleted items are sentence fragments and don't look proper with a period to end them such as:
*1997.
*Academy Award.
Should the rule be that if it is more than one sentence then it should get a period?
Such as:
* Academy Award and Golden Globe (fragment with no period)
* He won the Academy Award that year. He also won the Golden Globe. (full sentence with period)
What do you think? How do other style guides handle them?
--Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 05:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No periods always seems to work best, since they are not sentences.  It's also probably best not to mix bulleted points with and without periods; so rewrite the last one, or just use a period in the middle but not at the end.  Bulleted points are best if they're brief; if you need too much punctuation, consider rewriting the list as a paragraph or removing some information to the text or footnotes.  —Michael Z. 2006-01-20 18:39 Z
*In some cases, including discussion on talk pages, a bulleted list where each entry is a paragraph works well. When most items in a list are naturaly short, making some into sentances is probably a poor idea. DES (talk) 18:45, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

text: In some cases bulleted lists have all but the last ending in a comma or semicolon, and the last ending in a period. But more conventionally I either see all periods or no periods, based on whether or not the items are complete sentences. Deco 22:52, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

text: PS: (Another posting on this page reminds me to ask: where does that old proscription of "no sentence fragments" fit in here? -Onceler 10:20, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I just saw the new W:MOS bullets section.  I guess it clears up my concerns in in as much as degree of fragmentation is not the right question.  It's more important to be consistent one way or the other, whether by bits or bytes.  -thanks, Onceler 12:02, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bulleted items 

message: I just removed the following paragraph "In a biography, for example, Wikipedia only requires that the birth date and year and death date and year be wikified in biographies. Ask yourself: will clicking on the year bring any useful information to the reader?" The first sentace is not correct -- there is no current guideline (mich less a policy) which requires such links -- it is in fact much disputed whether they should even be standard, and until recently the MOS dates & numbers page pretty celarly reccomended agaisnt them. I myself tend to remove them whenever I find them. DES (talk) 22:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Odd, though I didn't write that text.  I would have thought that most biographies would include day, month, and year, in which case the MoS is pretty clear that you wikilink.  Otherwise user preferences for date formats do not work.  So you're referring only to cases where the day of birth or death are not known, only the year? --TreyHarris 22:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes i am refering to cases where the only date given in the lead is the year, which is not at all uncommon for birthdates, particualarly for people born a long time ago. (Prefs also do not work if the month and year, but no day, is given, which is less common but does happen.) There is an ongoing debate about this on the talk page of the relevant MoS page -- see that for more details. DES (talk) 23:07, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

text:  I am confused. Here is the entry: []
I was saying that biographies require the birth and death dates wikified. I was trying to convey that there is no need to wikify every year you see in an article. Such as: 
He moved to Jersey City in 1928, then in 1930 his parents moved to Hoboken. By 1935 he was working as a lawyer, and he married in June of 1941. In 1942 he enlisted in the Navy, where he won the Navy Cross.
I ask: will clicking on the link be useful, or is part of the wiki-clutter?
--Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 23:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a poll now ongoing on the talk page about whether those examples should remain linked, since the paragraph above says that years not part of full dates generally should not be linked. The examples show biography lead dates as being linked, but nothing in the text says that such links are required (asming that no full date is present) DES (talk) 23:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

text: See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Usage of links for date preferences. See also Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Year links in examples (year of birth/death) and subsequent discussion. DES (talk) 23:31, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed paragaph on date linking