Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides

Wikipedia essays on style

The style guides in English that have the strongest effect on general public writing (in the kinds of secondary sources Wikipedia cares about) – and which most directly inform the consensus behind our own Wikipedia:Manual of Style (MoS) – are those for mainstream book publishing. Those of journalism also influence less formal usage (e.g. news reporting, marketing, and business style), but very little from them directly affects Wikipedia style, because it's a markedly different kind of writing. Most discipline-specific academic style manuals are focused on citation formats and the preparation of papers for publication in journals; we draw on them only for technical material. Government and legal manuals have little impact outside their fields; like academic manuals, they provide little to Wikipedia aside from some terminology and citation formattig.

The "big four", plus one

The off-site style guides that are the main bases of our own MoS are The Chicago Manual of Style (often called Chicago or CMoS) and Garner's Modern English Usage, for American and to some extent Canadian English; and New Hart's Rules and Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage for British English, and Commonwealth English more broadly.

These are the style guides with the most direct impact on formal written English. Chicago and New Hart's are the primary style guides of non-fiction book publishers in North American and the Commonwealth, respectively, and also have a significant impact on journals. Well-educated peopled who write much often have a copy of one or the other (though not always a current edition). Garner's and Fowler's are both usage dictionaries (like New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, often packaged with New Hart's in a single volume, New Oxford Style Manual), and are popular with well-read everyday people as well as professional writers/editors. Cambridge University Press puts one out too, but The Cambridge Guide to English Usage dates to 2004, is rarely cited, and was primarily for ESL learners.

Wikipedia's manual of style also relies heavily on Scientific Style and Format for medical, science, and other technical topics; e.g. it is where most of our advice on units of measure comes from. This is put together by a multi-disciplinary body of science writers from all over the anglosphere. It was formerly published in the UK, and leaned British for basic typographical matter, but the last few editions have been published in the US by Chicago University Press, and been normalized to an extent to Chicago style on such matters, without affecting the technical advice.

Government manuals

Style guides issued by government agencies/ministries are usually specific to that particular legal entity. There are exceptions, intended to normalize style across the entire government, with highly variable success rates; examples including the US Government Printing Office Style Manual (GPO Manual for short, on which most American government department manuals are actually closely based); the UK Guidance for Governmental Digital Publishing and Services (for British government websites; too new to assess); and the Australian government's Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers (last updated in 2002 and widely ignored). There are also some international or world English manuals for specific organizational purposes, e.g. UN directorates.

Governmental style guides determine (or attempt to determine) bureacratese/governmentese/militarese – regulatory language. They also exert some effects on national legal style (a field with its own manuals), and business writing to an extent (which also draws heavily on journalism/marketing style, of course). And that's about it. No English class is going to recommend the GPO Style Manual to its students, for example; nor are these works relied upon by book, news, or academic publishers, except for limited, specialized purposes. Governmentese is a quirky style, full of excessive capitalization and a hatred of hyphens, commas, and much other punctuation.

English has no global or national language authority; there is no equivalent of the French language's Académie française. Government manuals have no authority to dictate style to non-governmental writers, including Wikipedia. We do borrow from national legal style manuals their citation formats for legal cases, but very little else.

News style

Wikipedia is not written in news style, as a matter of policy. Journalistic writing uses many conventions not appropriate for scholarly books (which is what an encyclopedia is, even if you move it online). Our MoS does derive a handful of things from journalism manuals, simply because they are not covered in academic ones; some examples include how to write about the transgendered, and which US cities are well-known enough to not need to be identified by state unless ambiguous. MoS does not follow journalistic punctuation, capitalization, or extreme brevity practices, and eschews bombastic and unusual wording. Our encyclopedia articles' lead sections have little in common with journalistic "ledes". Even the inverted pyramid article structure of journalism is typically only found at Wikipedia in simple articles; for more complex topics, our pages are arranged more like an academic paper, with a number of subtopical sections, especially if summary style is employed.

In newswriting, the most influential manual, by both number of compliant publishers and number of news readers, is the Associated Press Stylebook (AP), used by the majority of the US press (though several papers, including The New York Times, put out their own widely divergent style guides). The UK/Commonwealth press have no equivalent "monolithic" stylebook; each publisher makes up its own, or choses to follow one of the major papers' (The Guardian, The Times, The Economist, etc.; they're all pretty inconsistent with each other on many points; like NYT they make a point of it, as a branding mechanism). The UPI Stylebook and the house-style one for Reuters (both international newswires) diverge very little from AP.

Englishes around the anglosphere

Canada's style is in flux, even aside from being a commingling of British and American influences plus Canadian innovations. There are several competing style guides, like The Canadian Style (which is old) and Editing Canadian English, but they're not published very frequently, and they contradict each other a lot. One "Canadian" style guide, A Canadian Writer's Reference (2016), intended as classroom manual, is just a tweaked American one put out with a new cover. The Canadian Press Stylebook pretty closely follows AP, except on various Briticisms used commonly in Canada (-our, -re, etc.). The Gregg Reference Manual, for business writing, also exists in a Canadian edition (2014).

The Australian government style guide, while intended for public not just governmental use, is generally excoriated; some of its recommendations have caused minor political disputes, and even "most public servants ignore it". A new edition has been in the planning stages for years, but even if it came out tomorrow, it would be too soon for it to have any effect on Australian usage any time soon, much less on Wikipedia. The Cambridge book has an Australian edition, The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage; it is already over a decade old, and is almost word-for-word identical to the UK edition, aside from a few .au colloquialism tweaks.

Aside from single-entity house style manuals (internal documents for university departments, companies, particular newspapers, specific ministries/agencies), or self-published one-author websites, real style guides do not appear to exists for the Englishes of Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and so forth. People in those places just buy the British ones (often not printed in the UK; they're reprinted in India, etc., under contract, to avoid the shipping expense). In formal writing, there is no difference between Barbadian, Hong Kong, Singaporean, or Ghanan English; they're all British English, aside from some loanwords borrowed from local languages (just as in Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, and Northern Irish English within the UK itself). Some English varieties, like those of Liberia, the Philippines, and Okinawa, are based on (and in formal writing follow the norms of) American English, not British.

We have editors from all those parts of the world, and I would love to hear from them if they know of "native English" style guides produced in their countries. I'm running out of style guides to collect.

Topical academic style guides

Beyond the above, there are few style guides of note, other than for specific fields. Some major examples include the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Modern Language Association Style Manual and its MLA Handbook abridged student edition (collectively called MLA style), American Medical Association Manual of Style (AMA), American Chemical Society Style Guide (ACS), American Sociological Association Style Guide, etc. Most of these are American, and are primarily used for citation styles and the preparation and publishing of academic papers in journals. Students and other casual users (like Wikipedians) of their styles tend to buy citation style summary guides like A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (often called Turabian, after the original author, and containing also a summary of Chicago style), rather than the full, expensive manuals. When they offer general writing advice, aside from citations and field-specific stuff, the topical academic guides are mostly in line with Chicago and Scientific Style and Format (which is also a Chicago U. Pr. publication, and mostly normalized to Chicago orthography). There's also the Modern Humanities Research Association Style Guide (MHRA), which is British, but tiny, being mostly concerned with citations. Virtually nothing in the Wikipedia Manual of Style on general writing principle comes from these works, though they inform several discipline-specific line items in some of MoS's sub-guidelines. When working on articles, it is important to remember that Wikipedia is not a journal and must not be written like one, but for a general audience.

There are specialized style guides for law, marketing, business, etc., but they don't have any real impact on general writing. Some of these have field-specific details drawn from them (especially in law) for MoS, but otherwise have no detectable influence on Wikipedia style. In particular, many of them are "punctuation-hostile", and like to drop hyphens, commas and other marks that don't seem absolutely necessary when professionals are communicating with other professionals in the same field, in compressed and highly jargon-laden academic journal material.

Aside from these, there are innumerable style monographs (some notable examples include those of Gowers, Strunk & White, Fogarty, Pinker, and Truss). They range from overall writing advice to usage dictionaries, or some combination of these, and are of debated authority, often in conflict. The two best-accepted that take the form of usage dictionaries were already mentioned above: Fowler's (UK) and Garner's (US, though recently internationalized to an extent and actually published at Oxford).

There's also a never-ending stream of over-priced undergraduate textbooks that are just regurgitative tertiary sources, though a handful are fairly well-regarded, like The Bedford Handbook and The Penguin Handbook. These do not set style, but collect and average it from other sources (generally on a national basis, and sort of splitting the difference between academic, news, and business writing). Such works must be used with care for several reasons. They're typically not very current, and may insist on traditionalisms that have already slipped out of conventional usage. They are derivative, not authoritative, and may simply pick an arbitrary recommendation when more authoritative sources conflict. Thus, they are rarely of use in informing internal MoS discussions other than when surveyed in the aggregate (i.e. "because Bedford says so" isn't a valid rationale). They are also weak sources for use as citations in our actual articles; while our WP:No original research policy considers them reliable as a general class (at the university level and higher), they are not high-quality sources, and they cannot be used for any claims that involve anaysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis – these require secondary sources.

Finally, there are grammars of English, which sometimes cover a few style matters, but they're descriptive works – about everyday usage for learners or in serious linguistics terminology (depending on the publication in question) – not prescriptive style manuals. Our MoS generally does not deal with grammatical matters, strictly speaking. Wikipedia trusts that our editors already have that under their belt. High-quality grammars of English are, however, very good sources for use in articles on the English language, and should take precedence over individual monographs and other prescriptive matter. For example, no amount of punditry against split infinitives and sentence-terminating prepositions can evade the well-studied linguistic fact that there are features of the language; their use or condemnation is primarily a matter of register of use, not of "correctness".

Tone about tone – dictating what's "right" is wrong

Our articles should steer well clear of subjective pronouncements about what is "proper", "incorrect", "standard", etc. – even when some of our sources wander into that territory. Similarly, MoS is written to provide advice on what to do when writing articles here (and sometimes why), without editorializing on propriety or legitimacy. Please keep this in mind if you work on improving the Wikipedia Manual of Style.

In a few cases, editors with a bee in their bonnet about the "legitimacy" or "wrongness" of some particular style nit-pick (especially along nationalistic lines) have been topic-banned from editing about that peccadillo, or even banned from MoS-related discussion as a whole. Avoid disruptive editing about style, especially personalization of style or article-titles disputes; discretionary sanctions have been authorized to deal with MoS-related disruption: admins have leeway to unilaterally issue bans and blocks.