Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 49

message: Most articles link to the city and its state or region separately, e.g. Chicago, Illinois. Is this an official Wikipedia style specification? Should articles where the city and state are a single link be fixed? --Jonathan Kovaciny 17:24, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I would say that it is less than once in ten times when this is done that it is really appropriate.  I really dislike that practice.  Most of the time the U.S. state or whatever secondary administrative subdivision elsewhere has no particular relevance to the article in which that link appears—and the city itself should have links to the state or whatever, if after getting there someone wants to go on.  It is also not usually of any utility in the other direction, either.  People will use "what links here" to find information relevant to a city; because this is so often done with things so trivially related to a state, that option is next to useless in that case. Gene Nygaard 22:13, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I concur.  --Coolcaesar 23:52, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree as well. If the state is relevant then it should probably be mentioned separately. If there is ony a single link then it is more obvious that we are only referring to one place. I even once saw something like, "The mission culture was important in Santa Barbara, California, and San Jose", where it wasn't clear if the reference was to two places or three. A local placename, in the U.S. taxonomy, generally has two parts. Linking the two separately is a bit like linking the first and last names or a person separately. "Henry Jones". -Will Beback 07:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  City, State/Region linking 

message: I've been cleaning up some articles about certain real-time strategy games, especially Starcraft. Often, articles refer to "spell-casters" or "spell-casting units" when they actually mean units with special abilities with an associated pool of energy/mana/whatever that needs time to regenerate. This seems to also happen in other cases such as articles on Warcraft III. This terminology is standard in the gaming world but could lead to confusion if a reader is not familiar with the term (and doesn't know for example that the spy unti Ghost (Starcraft) or a Science Ship are classified as spell casters. So should the term spell casters be used?
:Why not stub out an article at spell-caster and then link to it when the term is used?  If it's used as widely as you say, it's as encyclopedic as any other article in the video game genre. --TreyHarris 06:24, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks for the suggestion. Will do. JoshuaZ 19:37, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nerdy style question 

message: I've just added the folowing text to the Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Quotation marks section:
:Similarly, when the title of an article requires quotation marks in the text (for example, the titles of songs, poems, etc.), the quotation marks should not be bolded in the summary, as they are not part of the title:
::"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.
I've often noticed that there's no consistency with regard to this (admittedly minor) matter, and today an editor asked me for advice on the issue, as he'd been unable to find anything in the MoS.
I don't think that this will be controversial, but if it is, please remove the text and we can discuss it here. --Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 08:28, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotation marks and bolding in summaries 

message: When writing an article, should the dialect be geared towards North American, Brittish/Australian/New Zealand/Other, or should it depend on the audience of the article (or should it not matter at all)?
*For example: I translated Jose Cardona from Spanish to English, and I used my US dialect in regard to the word "soccer." When a user edited to add some information and change the grammar, he changed "soccer" to "football" because he is from the UK. I feel that because American "football" is not the same as the Brittish/Australian... "football," "soccer" should be used.
--Kmp589 01:08, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Generally, the only guidance is that you should consider what the subject of the article is. However, I would say that it's more important for you to write whatever is comfortable for you, and for everybody to accept that different folks will use English differently (if you're editing an established article, though, you should make some effort to conform to the existing style). In the specific case of football/soccer, I think it's definitely better to use soccer in most situations, because football is ambiguous, but soccer is not. There are many styles of football. - Nat Krause(Talk!) 01:44, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: On the other hand, only in North America is the word soccer used, so using it in a non-North American article is arguably POV. Consider that everywhere else in the world, football is not ambiguous because the term American football is commonly used to denote the NA sport. — Saxifrage ✎ 18:59, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What about Australia? I was talking to a guy just the other day who used to be a professional footballer, and he didn't mean soccer. The U.S. + Canada + Australia is a large chunk of the English-speaking world. - Nat Krause(Talk!) 07:06, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Since the article is about someone from Spain and since you'll never heard the word soccer used in Europe, I suspect applying the Canadian-American-Australian usage would be Canadian-American-Australian-centric (if there is such a thing :-). — Saxifrage ✎ 07:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

text: What was the orginal spanish text?Markb 06:44, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lexins (different words, same meanings) 

message: I'm not going to make a fight out of it, but I personally think foreign is a bad choice, as the word unnecessarily implies nationality (the dic. def says "Of, characteristic of, or from a place or country other than the one being considered"). While English is used by many, many native speakers, it is also the current lingua franca of the world and loan words aren't necessarily "foreign" to a non-native english editor. That said, I won't revert Gene Nygaard's change back to foreign, but I hope he and others can be persuaded to see my reasoning :-) Henrik 08:49, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with your reasoning. WLD 09:16, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I'd tend to disagree. What's your definition of the widely used expression "foreign language"? I wouldn't say Canadians speak a foreign language from an American point of view, and yet they are different countries. PizzaMargherita 09:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Frankly, I'm not sure what I would say instead, I think that's a phrase to avoid as much as possible in Wikipedia (even though it is widely used) but I can't think of a good alternative right now. The problem is that Wikipedia is a global project, and term 'foreign' always implies a viewpoint. Henrik 11:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I like your attempt at circumventing the issue, Barberio. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it does the trick, as there are a huge number of words not in common use that are indeed recognised as English, e.g. sesquipedalian, quincunx, uxorious, fletch and also non-English words used more commonly, such as latte, gestalt, entrepreneur, junta - I don't think any of the latter have made the transition from 'foreign loan-word' to English yet, unlike say, 'hinterland', 'cafe', 'pork', 'beef', 'mutton'. I would suggest that where a word is generally recognised as being 'non-English', it be italicized. I've not made an edit to the article itself, as I think the debate should reach a conclusion first. WLD 11:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Nice job. I rephrased one last foreign in that paragraph. (85.235.1.20 is me, apparently my cookie just expired) Henrik 11:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  It wasn't a "nice job", not if the intent here was to keep the same meaning while avoiding the objectionable word "foreign".  See the diff.  By the new text prior to my reversion, technical articles would have to italicize unusual specialized words, neologisms would have to be italicized, and see also WLD's examples.  Italics are used for loan words, not all words not in common usage. --TreyHarris 15:14, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  You are glossing over the presence of 'In other languages', which made it clear the section applied only to words and phrases from other languages. The section was functionaly identical to that it replaced. Unless you can think of any other objection, I feel the changes should be restored. --Barberio 16:31, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Sorry, look at the diff again.  "In other languages" was used only for the first sentence of the paragraph.  "Foreign" was simply deleted in the second case, which was fine, since a word with "common use in the English language" will not be a foreign word.  It's the third case I was referring to, which substituted "that are not in common English use" for "foreign".  "Psychoacoustics" is not at all common in English use, but it shouldn't be italicized. --TreyHarris 19:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

text:  Note also that the word "foreign" encapsulates the idea of "strange and unfamiliar" along with the meaning "of a language other than one's own".  Any restating without "foreign" needs to encapsulate both those factors; recall that 80% or more of English's words are loanwords, so if you try to restate the idea of foreign words, you may unintentionally end up requiring that an enormous proportion of words be italicized due to non-English origins. --TreyHarris 15:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Frankly, this is an absurd objection. "Common English use" is pretty clear, and would not be subject to the problem you state. In this case 'Foreign' was not only redundant, but in its self needed to be explained. Since we have to give a clearer term than 'foreign', there is no need to actualy use 'foreign' anyway. Using a word that gives a 'sence' of that, is not as good as explicitly stating it; and if we explicitly state it, there is no need to use 'foreign'. --Barberio 16:31, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Back to my earlier example, there's no way you're going to convince me that "psychoacoustic" is in "common English use".  I'll happily go find a corpus and see exactly how common it is, if you want to argue with me here.  Foreign-language words borrowed, but not yet incorporated, into English get italics; native words, no matter how rare, don't. --TreyHarris 19:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

text:  Ok, fair point. It seems that this is not a page to be bold on. What does the panel think of my original suggestion: "non-English"? Henrik 16:14, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

text: This sounds appropriate, and avoids calling words like latte or gestalt non-English words (which I would disagree with heartily were it written into the policy). — Saxifrage ✎ 19:03, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's just fine.  As I said, my objection was to replacing "foreign words" with "words that are not in common English use"; those are two very different matters. I would suggest inserting "unitalicized" before "in an English-language dictionary".  Many dictionaries list words one might come across that are still not considered incorporated into the language. --TreyHarris 19:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I suspect that such italicised-in-dictionary words would be eventually removed from any prose in Wikipedia just because they're obscure and editorial standards would warrant their replacement, so the policy doesn't need to mention them. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:27, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd be careful with that kind of talk if I were you. You don't want people to accuse you of trying to "dumb down" Wikipedia. (For reference, I completely agree with the sentiment that obscure words should be replaced with well-understood synonyms. Using fancy words in articles for their own sake does not advance the purpose of building an encyclopedia that can be used by everyone.) Nohat 20:36, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Loan words, foreign or non-english?