User:Tony1/Monthly updates of styleguide and policy changes
| Manual of Style (MoS) |
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Wikipedia has a daunting array of styleguides and policy pages. They come under very little central coordination and are subject to change without wide notice. This makes it hard for users to keep track of changes to rules and policies they need to be aware of, and to attain a sense of how the project is evolving.
This page displays the important changes in a central location, month by month; it enables all Wikipedians to keep abreast of what is happening, quickly and conveniently.
Contributors to styleguide and policy pages are asked to notify us of changes for each upcoming monthly summary by posting a brief note of substantive changes (with a diff) on the talk page.
Summary updates are posted here and at the talk pages of MOS, (main page), FAC and FAR shortly after the start of each calendar month. Copy-editing and relatively trivial changes are generally not included in these summaries.
January 2008
- Non-breaking spaces. Added: "In compound items in which numerical and non-numerical elements are separated by a space, a non-breaking space (or hard space) is recommended to avoid the displacement of those elements at the end of a line." A caveat was inserted concerning disadvantages of using the {{nowrap}} template.
- Captions. Added: If a caption contains a complete sentence, any other sentence fragments in the caption should themselves end with a period.
- Added: "If a nominator feels that an Oppose has been addressed, they should say so after the reviewer's signature rather than striking out or splitting up the reviewer's text.... nominators should not alter, strike, break up, or add graphics to comments from other editors; replies are added below the signature on the reviewer's commentary."
- Criterion 3. Removed: "If your image is greater than 500–600px add {{non-free reduce}} to the Image: namespace and someone from Wikipedia will shrink the image to comply with this guideline."
February 2008
- Numbers as figures or words. In the body of an article, whole numbers from zero to ten (rather than the previous zero to nine) are spelled out in words. [Now inconsistent with MOSNUM] The previous insistence that ordinals for centuries be expressed in figures (the 5th century) has been made optional (the 5th century or the fifth century).
- Avoid first-person pronouns. It is now acceptable to use we in historical articles to mean the modern world as a whole (The text of De re publica has come down to us with substantial sections missing).
- Foreign terms. "Unitalicized" was added to this point: "A rule of thumb is: do not italicize words that appear unitalicized in an English language dictionary."
- Spelling and transliteration. [Additions underlined, removals struck through]
For terms in common usage,use anglicized spellings; native spellings are an optional alternative if they use theLatinEnglish alphabet. The choice between anglicized and native spellings should follow English usage (e.g., Besançon, Edvard Beneš and Göttingen, but Nuremburg, role, and Florence). Article titles follow our naming conventions. Diacritics are optional, except wherethey are required for disambiguationEnglish overwhelmingly uses them, whether for disambiguation or for accurate pronunciation (résumé, café). Where native spellings in non-Latin scripts (such as Greek and Cyrillic) are given, they normally appear in parentheses(except where the sense requires otherwise),and are not italicized, even where this is technically feasible.
- "See also" sections. Slight rewording: Links already included in the body of the text are generally not repeated in "See also"; however whether a link belongs in the "See also" section is ultimately a matter of editorial judgment and common sense.
- End sections. Greater flexibility is now permitted in the order of these sections: although the preferred order [of the sections is "See also", "Notes" (or "Footnotes"), "References" (or a combined Notes and references), "Bibliography" (or Books or Further reading), and "External links", it is permissible to change the sequence of these ending sections if there is good reason to do so. However, if an article has both "Notes" and "References" sections, "Notes" should immediately precede "References".
- Op. cit. was added to Ibid as an abbreviation that should not be used in footnotes.
- Addition (underlined): "Unsourced or poorly sourced material may be removed from any article, and if it is, the burden of proof is on the editor who wishes to restore it."
- Phrase added (underlined): Before nominating an article, nominators may wish to receive feedback by listing it at Wikipedia:Peer review or the League of Copyeditors.
- Phrase added (underlined): Nominators are expected to respond positively to constructive criticism and to make an effort to address objections promptly.
- Minor changes to the mechanics of adding a nomination.
- Addition: "[Stating at the top of the page] a reason for nominating, and a declaration of "Support" are not necessary."
March 2008
- Multiplication symbols. Inserted: Do not use an asterisk to represent multiplication between numbers in non-technical articles. The multiplication sign in exponential notation (2.1 × 108) may now be unspaced, depending on circumstances (2.1×108); previously, spacing was always required in exponential notation.
- Punctuation in quotations. "Punctuation" was added to the requirement that "Wherever reasonable, preserve the original style, spelling and punctuation".
- Em dashes. "Em dashes are normally unspaced" was strengthened to "should not be spaced".
- Instructional and presumptuous language. "Clearly" and "actually" were added to the list of words that are usually avoided in an encyclopedic register.
- '"Pull" and block quotes. Removed: Pull quotes are generally not appropriate in Wikipedia articles. Added: Block quotes can be enclosed using {{quotation}} or {{quote}} (as well as the existing specification, i.e., between a pair of <blockquote>...</blockquote> HTML tags).
- Numbers as figures or words. The lead statement expressing the default was reverted to the wording that pertained until it was changed last month: "In the body of an article, single-digit whole numbers (from zero to nine) are given as words; numbers of more than one digit are generally rendered as figures, and alternatively as words if they are expressed in one or two words."
- "See also" sections. It was clarified that links should be presented in a bulleted list, and that rather than grouping them by subject area, it is helpful to alphabetize them.
- Added: "Nominators must be sufficiently familiar with the subject matter and sources to deal with objections during the FAC process. Nominators who are not significant contributors to the article should consult regular editors of the article prior to nomination."
- As an alternative to striking out their "objection", reviewers may "cap off their resolved comments; the cap should include the reviewer's signature, and editors [not nominators] should cap only their own commentary.
- Criterion 8. The second clause was removed: "Non-free content is used only if its presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the topic
, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding." - Enforcement. Inserted: An image with a valid non-free-use rationale for some (but not all) articles it is used in will not be deleted. Instead, the image will be removed from the articles for which it lacks a non-free-use rationale.
April 2008
Manual of Style (main page)
Titles. Clarification that common nouns denoting deities or religious figures are not capitalized.
Acronyms and abbreviations. The terms "abbreviation", "acronym" and "initialism" were clarified.
Quotation marks. Clarification that (block-quoted) multiparagraph quotations "must be precise and exactly as in the source. The source should be cited clearly and precisely to enable readers to find the text that supports the article content in question." Instead of HTML tags, {{quotation}} or {{quote}} can be used to render block quotes.
SI symbols and unit abbreviations. This was added:
- "A lowercase s is the SI for seconds; thus, kgs means "kilogram-seconds"."
SI symbols and unit abbreviations. This was added:
- "Exponentiation is indicated using a superscript, an; do not use a caret, a^n" and "Do not use E notation".
Disputes over people's proper names. The previous statement:
- "Use terminology that subjects use for themselves (self-identification) whenever this is possible"
was replaced with:
- "Disputes over the proper name of a person or group are addressed by policies such as Verifiability, Neutral point of view, and Naming conventions where the name appears in an article name. When there is no dispute, use terms that a person uses for himself or herself, or terms that a group most commonly uses for itself.
Alignment of images. The last four words were added to the statement:
- "Right-alignment is preferred to left- or center-alignment for the lead image."
An exception was added:
- "Wherever possible, images of faces should be placed so that the face or eyes look toward the text, because the reader's eye will tend to follow their direction."
This was added:
- Where the lead image is a portrait with the face looking to the reader's right, it should be left-aligned, looking into the text of the article. Where this is the lead image, it may be appropriate to move the Table of Contents to the right by using {{TOCright}}."
Pronunciation. The last three words were added:
- "For ease of understanding across dialects, fairly broad IPA transcriptions are usually provided for English pronunciations."
This sentence was added:
- "For English pronunciations, pronunciation respellings may be used in addition to the IPA."
Manual of Style (dates and numbers)
Decade abbreviations. Two-digit abbreviations for decades may have a preceding apostrophe only in reference to a social era or cultural phenomenon as a stock phrase that roughly corresponds to or defines a decade (the Roaring '20s, the Gay '90s), or where there is a notable connection between the period and the immediate topic (a sense of social justice informed by '60s counterculture, but grew up in 1960s Boston, moving to Dallas in 1971). [This is now inconsistent with the main page of the MoS.]
Units of measurement. A new section was inserted:
- "Use terminology and symbols commonly employed in the current literature for that subject and level of technicality. When in doubt, use the units of measure, prefixes, unit symbols, number notation, and methods of disambiguation most often employed in reliable periodicals directed to a similar readership.
This was marked with a dispute tag and has been the subject of an edit war and page protection.
Units of measurement. The recommendation to use "sq" and "cu" with US-unit abbreviations was removed; now superscript exponents may be used in that system.
Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)
The piping of disambiguation pages. Clarification: piping may be used to add italics to the part of an article name inside parenthetical clarifiers (for instance [[Neo (The Matrix)|Neo (''The Matrix'')]]); until now the guideline only allowed italics and quotation marks for the part outside the parentheses.
Featured article candidate instructions
The third bullet was added to the instructions (underlined here):
- "A nomination will be removed from the list and archived if, in the judgment of the director or his delegate:
- actionable objections have not been resolved; or
- consensus for promotion has not been reached; or
- insufficient information has been provided by reviewers to judge whether the criteria have been met."
Featured portal criteria
The following sentence was added to the Featured portal criteria:
- "It should include links to other Wikimedia Foundation projects when applicable. Portals that focus on a specific group of life-forms (other than humans) should contain a link to Wikispecies project."
Non-free content
The phrase that was removed from Non-free content Criterion 8 last month (underlined here) was reinstated and is currently under discussion:
- "Significance.' Non-free content is used only if its presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the topic, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding.
May 2008
Post notifications on the talk page, please, not here.
The notifications in-progress, if any, are at {{/May 2008}}.
Guidelines for preparing the summaries
General principles
- Be as succinct as possible; the primary purpose is to create a useful report for editors at large, not to overwhelm them with detail.
- Do not allow your own POV to intrude. You're merely reporting.
- Consider noting [in square brackets] any inconsistencies with other manuals that you know have been created by a change, and if a guideline or policy has reverted to a previous month's version.
Process
- Start by displaying the whole-month diff; do it from the last edit in the previous month to the last edit in the current month.
- Ignore copy-edits, mere changes of terminology that won't impact on users at large, and reverts, of course.
- Insert a piped link to start each point; diffs would be problematic, though.
- If a change is complicated, consider reproducing the whole point, underlining insertions and striking through deletions. Try to minimise this option.
- If a change is subtle or minor, but you still think it's worth flagging here, write something like "Minor changes to the rule on ..." without specifying the actual wording. Try to minimise this option.
- Insert meta-comments in square brackets, such as [Now inconsistent with MOSNUM].
Location
- Each summary is located at a subpage of this page named by month and year, such as March 2008.
- These are transcluded in the sections above, and may be transcluded elsewhere.