User:Mrg3105/sandbox for style issues

Stylistic hates (aka "Wikipedia shoot-on-sight")

• The proliferation of flag icons on pages where they add nothing, like biographies or band articles; see this MoS page for the arguments about good and bad use of flags.
• 'Botswanan': in two years living there, I never heard this variant. The preferred adjective is 'Botswana'. See this discussion.
• Chemical elements wrongly capitalised; it's "iron", "oxygen" and "boron", not "Iron", "Oxygen" and "Boron". Simple. Also Over-Capitalisation Of Section And Article Titles.
• "It should be noted that" and even the word "notable". If it isn't notable, it doesn't belong here. 'Ironically'; who found it ironic? 'Actually'; 'in fact'; these are the equivalent of saying 'honestly' and may make a statement less believable, not more. 'Used' is usually better than 'utilised' or 'utilized'.
• Humourous. Honourary. Hypercorrection at its most extreme. See here for details.
• Seminal. Legendary. Iconic. Epochal. Unless it's sourced, no. See weasel words.
• 'Would' wrongly used instead of the past tense, as in "1995 would be a difficult year for Yeltsin". 'Was' is fine.
• 'However' and other linking words deployed without thought as to their meaning.
• Overlinking in general. Incomplete dates wrongly linked (there's hardly ever any point in linking years, months or days of the week). Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) has changed to allow some ambiguity here, but I still generally go with Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context. See also the date linking debate. 'Easter-egg' links like [[1996 in stamp-collecting|1996]]. Disambig pages with extra and/or piped links.