Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting/Archive 9

Archive 5

←

Archive 7

Archive 8

Archive 9

Bold face after redirects

One fairly often sees apparently random bold face text in the middle of articles. I just came across an example here. When editing that section, hidden text indicates that the bold was added due to WP:R#PLA.

The talk page at WP:R is protected, hence my post here instead. But the guideline says:

Wikipedia follows the "principle of least astonishment"; after following a redirect, the reader's first question is likely to be: "Hang on... I wanted to read about this. Why has the link taken me to that?" Make it clear to the reader that they have arrived in the right place.

The linked article contains this:

When the principle of least astonishment is successfully employed, information is understood by the reader without struggle. The average reader should not be shocked, surprised, or confused by what they read.

It's always seemed to me that the use of bold face for text in this way is misguided. Certainly, a reader who has been redirected to the middle of an article will wonder if they are in the right place, and bold face like this may help them to realise why. But a far greater number of readers will not have followed any redirect. They will just be reading an article in which arbitrary text suddenly appears in bold face. Following the principle of least astonishment, if one of two groups of readers are unavoidably going to be astonished, it is better if it is the smaller group, is it not? 83.3.91.154 (talk) 15:50, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

A term being boldfaced isn't particularly "astonishing", especially given the frequency with which WP employs bold for redirects. But I'm not going to opine on the matter much more strongly than that. Anyway, I requested unprotection of Wikipedia talk:Redirect at WP:RFPP since it seems to have been protected accidentally when the guideline page was protected.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:39, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree, (apparently) random boldface is not particularly astonishing. If you want to improve things, consider adding a boldfaced mention of the redirect term to the lead and remove the section link from the redirect. Also, if there are no articles linking through the redirect and few page views, it is arguably appropriate to remove the boldface. ~Kvng (talk) 03:54, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I think you're missing the point. The word "astonishing" is only relevant because the guideline mentions the "principle of least astonishment". What you have here is a choice: bold face a term, to avoid "astonishing" people who arrive via a redirect, or don't bold face it, to avoid "astonishing" the people who did not follow a redirect but arrived by reading the article in the normal way. Which group is bigger? Without any doubt, the latter. So a guideline that seeks to follow the "principle of least astonishment" is failing to do so. 185.106.155.193 (talk) 11:38, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Do we have data proving that most people read articles from top-to-bottom? Some redirects are quite popular. But this is, in turn, missing a bigger point: arriving at an article that isn't what you were looking for, and not easily finding in it what you were looking for, it a high astonishment level, while seeing something boldfaced, which most regular readers by now probably understands indicates a redirect term, is hardly any astonishment at all. The comparison you are making is uneven at best.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:49, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

"Do we have data proving that most people read articles from top-to-bottom?" - How many articles do you arrive at by way of redirects to sections, as compared to all the articles you look at?

"...which most regular readers by now probably understands indicates a redirect term..." - that's total guesswork, and I doubt it is in any way realistic. Most readers of Wikipedia articles are not familiar with any of the policies and guidelines, and do not want to have to guess what they are.

Perhaps the real point is that redirecting people to sections of articles is generally a pretty bad idea and should be avoided. 185.106.155.193 (talk) 12:25, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

"How many ..." - Lots and lots and lots. The reason I asked is because in the discussion leading up to the changing of MOS:DUPLINKS, evidence was presenting proving that our readers (especially mobile ones) do not read our articles top to bottom but jump around all over the place, both within the same article and across articles. So what research do you have counter to this? That regular readers of WP understand our most common markup conventions is common sense; you can call it "guesswork" if you like, but it's educated guesswork at worst, and you're not one to be talking about guesswork when you are presenting guesses that directly contradict the research that changed DUPLINKS. "Perhaps the real point is that redirecting people to sections of articles is generally a pretty bad idea and should be avoided." This is a baldfaced assertion with which virtually no editors agree, and is contrary to the entire nature of WP as a heavily-link hypertext work (cf. WP:NOT#PAPER, MOS:LINK, etc.).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:01, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

"Lots and lots and lots" - you're claiming that the majority of the time, when you follow a link to an article, that link takes you not to the top of the article, but to a section of it? There is very strong evidence that that is not the case: just look at the links in any article. How many take the reader to subsections, and how many take them to the top of the article? I just checked for Paris. It links to 1067 different articles. 1065 of those links - 99.8% - take the reader to the top of the article rather than a subsection. So how would you be managing to follow 0.2% of the links "lots and lots and lots" of the time? And you think that seeking to avoid those 0.2% of links is "contrary to the entire nature of WP"? I think you've lost track of what's being discussed here. The vast majority of links that you or anyone else follow take you to the top of the article. Links that take you to somewhere in the middle are the issue. Bold face within an article to help the small number of people who arrived via a redirect to a section is unhelpful to the far larger number of people who arrived by scrolling down the page from the top. 213.86.69.236 (talk) 05:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I think I just read more complex material than you do or something. Many of the articles I read (and work on) are very long and have numerous redirects that go directly to sections in them. At any rate, I'm no longer interested in arguing in circles with you. Good day.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:30, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

That's very funny. I really cannot imagine why you've chosen to behave in this confrontational way about a formatting issue. Care to provide an example of one of these articles with "numerous" redirects to sections? I do hope we don't have to conclude that you were making anything up. 86.187.160.119 (talk) 15:31, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

You have to consider both frequency and degree. If encountering random bold is more frequent, it is certainly less astonishing. Even if we had the numbers, we would probably still have difficulty agreeing on which situation is worse overall. I did suggest above a way to avoid section links in redirects. Where applicable, I agree this is the best solution. ~Kvng (talk) 15:01, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

So, you're in agreement with yourself? I'm not sure what solution you're proposing, to what alleged problem.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:53, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

clearer language re:foreign italics

Please tell me if this is overly legalistic or guideline creep, but I think loan-phrases (as opposed to foreignisms) being italicized should be textually proscribed, as opposed to its present light, somewhat ambiguous discouragement. I think it's safe to draw a hard line here, since italicization simply doesn't contribute that much extra information in potential borderline cases. Remsense聊 18:42, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

@Remsense: If I understand it right, you are saying you want to change this guideline to specifically discourage loan-phrases from being italicized? What kind of loan-phrases are you referring to? –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 03:00, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Yup! Here's a list that I hope provides a representative sample:

• de facto (but probably not ad eundem)
• chargé d'affaires (but probably not accolé)
• qi (but probably not taijitu)
• rōnin (but probably not bokken)
• status quo ante bellum (but probably not magistra vitae)
• Deus ex machina (but probably not eidos)
• Landsknecht (but probably not Gedankenexperiment)

My line's probably fairly wonky, mood-dependant and arbitrary, but I'm fairly convinced it should go a considerable way in the deitalicizing direction. Remsense聊 03:32, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

There is no bright line between these categories. Any particular phrase will show up in one dictionary (a more inclusive one) and not another, and different works will categorize it differently. There is already a thread above about this. To recap: We have no reason to try to impose a bright-line rule about this, as the purpose of MoS is not prescriptively legislating every aspect of writing style here, but presenting text that is consistent (within an article) and comprehensible for readers, and resolving/preventing recurrent disruptive "style fights" between editors. There is no long-term problem of editors battlegrounding over whether to write "de facto" or "de facto", so we have no cause to try to rule-make about it. The rationale for guidelines like this is to encapsulate clear consensus-accepted best practices, not try to force a change in practice, or force one practice over another where multiple approaches are broadly accepted (as appropriate for encyclopedic-register writing). See also MOS:STYLEVAR. Put another way: we have nothing to gain (and much editorial goodwill to lose) by forcing "de facto" or "de facto" style across a wide swath of terms that some people would like to classify as fully-assimilated loan words and other would consider not-full-assimilated foreignisms (and really, people would tend to disagree on a term-by-term basis; meanwhile, exactly where anyone falls on such a discussion is likely going to be significantly affected by personal familiarity with a particular term, e.g. because of more common use of it within their profession or even just the genre of reading material they spend more time with).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:06, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

I think there is a meaningful distinction made when certain classes of words are treated as foreign, e.g. in law, philosophy, religion, and so on, in a way that creates a small, but real sense of, well, foreign-ness. That's my main impulse here. Remsense聊 03:34, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, I have to strenuously disagree with the majority of your examples above. Many of them have very limited use in English, and even where they have a fair amount they are most often encountered under a differently anglicized spelling, like chi, and ronin and charge d'affaires with no diacritics. Gendankenexperiment and Landsknecht are not of a comparable type; the first is a generic term while the second is a proper name for a group of mercenaries (directly comparable to the Gallowglass, which is also a proper name). Several of these like Gedankenexperiment and Deus ex machina and status quo ante bellum are field-specific jargon with only limited use outside science and theatre/media crit and international law, respectively. If I were to suggest any general principle it would be that if the borrowing from a non-English language is multi-word or contains a diacritic, it should be italicized; if it is one-word and contains no diacritics, it should be given without italics if the preponderance of modern dictionaries and other sources on English usage treat it as English and not as a foreignism that has gained some currency in English (thus "arguendo" and "lapsus", but "alias" and "video"; "brunoise" and "mirepoix" but "aioli" and "fondue"). But I am not proposing any such rule, for reasons I've already given: in short, it would just be subject to endless wikilawyering by people with way too much time on their hands to wear out the competition in attempts to subjectively "prove" enough assimilation to WP:WIN in their style-war WP:BATTLEGROUNDing. No thanks. Just continue to leave all this to editorial discretion at particular articles. Especially since a particular term's assimilation level actually varies by context. In many cases, an English adoption of a foreignism has a specific, divergent meaning in the jargon of a particular field in English, and is pretty well-assimilated with that novel meaning within that subset of English, and may not need italicization in an article on that subject; but it remains a non-assimilated foreignism that should probably be italicized when used (perhaps metaphorically) even with the new meaning outside of its jargon home in our language; and it remains an italicized foreign word entirely when it's used with the original meaning it had in the origin language. (This is especially the case with a lot of Latin as well as a few French terms in English legal usage, but there are many other cases, e.g. German Gymnasium has nothing to do with the meaning of English gymnasium, and Spanish arroyo means 'stream' but is used in Southwest American English to mean 'usually dry streambed; small canyon, ravine'.) No evidence has been presented of long-term, intractable, repetitive dispute about such matters, so MoS needs no new rule about it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:13, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Italics or not?

Should the terms "trigon" (game), "Episkyros", "caid" (sport), "harpastum", "Pasuckuakohowog" and "Calcio Storico Fiorentino" be put in italics? JackkBrown (talk) 16:40, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, since they are foreign terms that are not widely assimilated into English. And none of these should be capitalized, per MOS:SPORTCAPS, including even fiorentino since Italian does not capitalize adjectives derived from proper nouns. Where feasible (i.e. not in headings, where we don't inject templates) these should be wrapped in {{lang|grc-Latn}}, {{lang|ga}}, {{lang|la}}, {{lang|pim}}, {{lang|it}}, as appropriate.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:27, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

"Thyrsus"

Hi, "Thyrsus" and "Kylix" goes in italics? JackkBrown (talk) 17:00, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

You already asked this in user talk; yes, they are italic for a reason, as non-English (ancient Greek) words.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:47, 15 November 2023 (UTC)