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February 2018

Please comment on Talk:March 14, 1891, lynchings

Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:March 14, 1891, lynchings. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

CanEng

"Canada in particular is undergoing major usage shifts, as can be seen by comparing fairly current Canadian dictionaries and style guides with those from the 1990s and earlier (on the plus side, it's shifting away from chaos and slowly towards standardization) ... we know the shifts are moving from the coastal cities inland)"—can you throw some sources my way? These are surprising things to read—I'm not aware of such "major shifts" that have occurred since I was in high school in the 1990s, and the idea that "shifts are moving from the coastal cities inland" seems counterintuitive—traditionally (and from personal experience) the east coast tends to be linguistically conservative. I'd be surprised if there were trends converging from both coasts, and I'm not aware of any evidence of that. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:01, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: Stuff I was reading like 5 years ago. The most linguistically conservative are the rural (pretty much anywhere). Major cities like Toronto and Vancouver are melting pots of international influence, and change happens faster there. Media production is also concentrated in them (TO ever more so as it turns into "Hollywood of the Northeast"), and effects thus radiate out from them to rural areas. Similarly, Iowa and Ayrshire have near-zero impact, while New York and California, like London and Manchester, have major impact on US and British English, respectively. Colloquialisms also arise faster in and spread farther out of urban centers than into them from the countryside.

The current Canadian dictionaries and style guides go into some of the corpus material, and at least one of them discusses changes that are underway; I think Editing Canadian English has the most of that material. The works that're more specific are journal papers; some might be cited at Canadian English; I don't presently have JSTOR, etc., but it's worth seeing what's come out from 2005 onward. After construction at my place, lots of my books are in boxes; the two to look at first would be latest editions of Editing Canadian English (2000) and The Canadian Style (1997), and compare what they say to old editions. I'm pulling the dates from Amazon listings. Oxford also puts out two Canadian English dictionaries (both 2005, with different editors; I think I have only one of them), and a Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation (2003, which I do have, but it's a pocket book), and a Guide to Canadian English Usage (2005; I don't think I have that one yet). One of the university-oriented style manuals produced in the US by Diana Hacker, et al., also has an adapted Canadian edition, which I have around somewhere, though I'd consider that a tertiary source (someone Canadian just edited it to reflect a few Can. vs. US distinctions). That's A Canadian Writer's Referece; I have 2011, but there's a 2016 version now (too expensive for what it is, if you ask me, though it's on discount sale at Amazon right now). The first two I mentioned, and the Oxford GCEU, are the big ones, and they conflict on many points. Oh! Editing Canadian English is now out in the new 3rd ed. [1] (2015; it was still in production last I'd looked). Should provide an additional reference point on what's shifting, by comparing three successive editions. There's also the Canadian Press Stylebook (2013 seems to be latest edition, and I think mine's from 2008 or so), which will reflect news-style biases from AP Stylebook, etc. – lots of punctuation-dropping, space-dropping, and other compression techniques.

Anyway, the gist is that on any choices between "American" and "British" style, Canadian usage is mixed, the mixture varies regionally, and it's shifting over time in various ways (maybe more since the '80s than the '90s). I didn't live there long enough to entirely absorb the style, or determine sub-styles, and that was over a decade ago anyway. I have not tried to work much on the Canadian English article, or I would have a much better sense of exactly which sources say what.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:00, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Probably addl. sources in Canadian Shift, which seems to still be happening (as of stuff published 2015–2017). Something new-ish: Canadian English: A Sociolinguistic Perspective (James A. Walker, 2015; Routledge); that didn't exist last I looked into this stuff, but would probably cite the same papers I'd encountered back around 2012 or so and didn't retain. One I was aware of but don't have is The English Language in Canada (Charles Boberg, 2010; Cambridge). And of course The Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash & Boberg, 2006; De Gruyter) will have material of interest, but it's dense linguistic stuff, not akin to a style guide. Costs about US$700–1000, so it's something to find at a research library or through inter-library loan. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:12, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

I'll have to look into what I can from that, but an awful lot of it has to do with phonetics and informal-register stuff, doesn't it? How much of a "major shift" does this stuff point to in formal writing? The Canadian newssites I frequent use all the same orthographical conventions I grew up with.
"Major cities like Toronto and Vancouver are melting pots of international influence, and change happens faster there" seems to contradict "shifts are moving from the coastal cities inland"—Toronto's not exactly a coastal city, and one wouldn't expect Halifax to be a hotbed of influential orthographical change. And it's overwhelmingly orthography we're talking about ("punctuation-dropping, space-dropping, and other compression techniques" doesn't really apply, since ENGVAR generally doesn't apply to that stuff anyways). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:54, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

The English Language in Canada doesn't appear to go into orthography. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 07:07, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

I'm counting TO as a coastal city, because it's a major Great Lakes port, is Canada's NYC, and is separated from the Atlantic by New York. Goods flow from the east coast of Canada and the US through TO in staggering quantities. More to the underlying point (about population and its dynamics, not really geography) it serves the societal function of a major coastal city, and is where the largest number of immigrants to Canada go, and is a production center, especially for major national media. Anyway, I was using "coastal cities" as a shorthand; obviously it doesn't mean "every place larger than a town that's near the sea". :-) Halifax isn't coastal anyway, but insular. I'm not sure what argument you're trying to have other than about "majorness", and it's not not a hair I care to split. The few Canadian style guides and similar works I've gone over in any detail indicate a lack of conformity, with wide regional variation, but also that the inconsistency is decreasing over time (especially in major media, the point you seem to be making yourself). I agree that we don't want to see people try to use ENGVAR (as often actually happens, especially from British editors who read a lot of news but few books) to do reader un-helpful things like compress out spaces and punctuation in imitation of news style (e.g. "9pm", "JK Rowling"). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:34, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Uh ... you might want to check your geography—Nova Scotia's no island, and Toronto's 900 km from the sea. Most Canadians would consider it Central Canada, and there are more Canadians east of it than west, which makes calling it "coastal" all the more eye-popping to a Canadian—when you talk about "from the coasts in", it sounds like Toronto is the last to be affected (!!!). I'll have to look at some more of those sources you've pointed out, but I suspect the "major shift" in formal orthography amounts to little more than decreasing prevalence of -ise and increasing tolerance of practice as a verb. The point being that "Canada ... is undergoing major usage shifts" is quite an exaggeration, and I think readers of your comments are going to take it at face value when, really, formal Canadian orthography is probably nearly as stable as BrEng or AmEng (certainly from a MoS perspective). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 09:19, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Geography: My bad; I'd mistaken Halifax for being on PEI, rather than on the peninsula. Just forget "coastal"; it was the wrong word to use. The point is the major urban centers with a strong and continual influx of new people from other parts of the world, also operating as hubs of media production. Halifax is insular in effect; it has a population smaller than that of Albuquerque, is not a media or immigration centre, and not terribly important in the national cultural scheme of things, unlike Toronto, which together with Vancouver is one of Anglo-Canada's modern cultural poles.

How much stability there is or isn't in Canadian orthography will be clear from a comparison of current and generation-old or older Canadian style guides and dictionaries. Whether to characterize the shift as "major" or not seems like not worth arguing about; the important thing is whether the orthography is actual stabilizing or becoming more diverse again. What I was seeing half a decade ago was a nascent trend toward standardization; since at least two of the key works have more recent editions, they're liable to indicate whether the trend continued or foundered. Another set of sources is academic material. I don't have a lot of it on hand, but references to it are easy to find via Google in minutes. From the 1960s to ca. 2000, it's been frequently questioned whether Canadian English (especially in written form) really exists as a consistent, identifiable thing unto itself, generally because of a refusal to standardize, i.e. because of an embracement of conflicting, diverse usage, which varies greatly on a regional basis, over time, and especially in areas of differing cultural history, and this uncertainty is tied closely to a comparative lack of a strong national identity among Canadians (Bednarek 2009, citing lots of previous work [2]). Lilles (2000) [3] and Sutherland (2000) [4] seem to be the most-cited in this regard; the first of these has been subjected to a some criticism [5], but it still referenced a lot.

The key question is whether standardization has reduced or increased in the last generation. And it's really more a question (and research) for the Canadian English article, which appears to ignore this controversy entirely; our article is engaging in begging the question, and what looks like some original research. It really doesn't have much to do with MoS, at which we do appear to have a consensus to treat Canadian English (to the extent it can be identified) as a major national variety for ENGVAR purposes, though perhaps at the cost of setting up potential arguments down the road about exactly what that means in orthographic terms. The lack of active disputes seems to suggest either that that orthography's become rather stable during or maybe even before WP's existence (WP started Jan. 2001), or that Canadians in the aggregate are loath to argue with much insistence about such matters (which is actually a reliably sourceable possibility), or both.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:10, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

I've had the Canadian English article watchlisted for years, and it seems to be an OR magnet, but it's hard for me to clean up when all the good sources are offline in a different hemisphere. The thing is, I totally understand the "urbans centres blah blah blah" thing—but that's not what you wrote at TALK:MOS, even if it's what you intended—as I said, to anyone who is familiar which Canadian geopolitics (say, any Canadian), you've written basically the opposite of what you intended to convey.

I'll be looking into those links and other sources, but more out of personal curiosity (at least where I can access the sources). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:41, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

I've struck "coastal" and put "major" in its place. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:00, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

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Civility in infobox discussions case opened

You were recently listed as a party to or recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility in infobox discussions. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility in infobox discussions/Evidence. Please add your evidence by February 17, 2018, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility in infobox discussions/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:49, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Proposal: Adopt WP:WikiProject Video games/Article guidelines into MoS

You are invited to view the closure at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Proposal: Adopt WP:WikiProject Video games/Article guidelines into MoS, an RFC launched by you. ~ Winged Blades^Godric 05:08, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#RfC:_Capitalisation_of_traditional_game/sports_terminology

Hi SMcCandish. Just a note to let you know I've closed an RFC you initiated, at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#RfC:_Capitalisation_of_traditional_game/sports_terminology. Apologies for the delay, I'm working through the closure backlog as best I can. Kind regards, Fish+Karate 13:12, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Hello SMcCandlish, thank you for your efforts in reviewing new pages!

Backlog update:

The new page backlog is currently at 3819 unreviewed articles, with a further 6660 unreviewed redirects.
We are very close to eliminating the backlog completely; please help by reviewing a few extra articles each day!

New Year Backlog Drive results:

We made massive progress during the recent four weeks of the NPP Backlog Drive, during which the backlog reduced by nearly six thousand articles and the length of the backlog by almost 3 months!

General project update:

ACTRIAL will end it's initial phase on the 14th of March. Our goal is to reduce the backlog significantly below the 90 day index point by the 14th of March. Please consider helping with this goal by reviewing a few additional pages a day.
Reviewing redirects is an important and necessary part of New Page Patrol. Please read the guideline on appropriate redirects for advice on reviewing redirects. Inappropriate redirects can be re-targeted or nominated for deletion at RfD.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. 20:32, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Ayurveda

I saw your comment here. The dispute on this article goes back a few years, and if I can summarise from memory, there is a group of editors who believe that as Ayurveda is sometimes portrayed as being efficacious medicine in the modern age, it should be fully subject to MEDRS. Therefore the article's lead should begin by debunking it. Then there is another group which says that as this is a belief system which predates modern medicine, the lead should be a summary of its history. I can see that there may be merits on both sides, or at least that neither view is automatically disruptive or against our principles. Historically, there were savage back-and-forths in editing and much name-calling on the talk page. I was asked to take a look and (again from memory) initially applied 0RR and a strict civility rule. A couple of editors were blocked, I think there was a central discussion, my actions were upheld, the restriction was changed to a prohibition on edit-warring, and the article settled down for about three years. Fast forward to the present. As far as I can see, the restrictions have worked, and it's hard to argue given the history that a return to open warfare is in anybody's interest. Articles are not improved by name-calling or edit-warring. They are improved by civilised discussion, a strong consensus from a wide range of editors, and a willingness to compromise in the face of nuance. I don't see any tearing hurry to resolve this as the article is protected for a while; I will read up on the story again in the next few days and see if I remember it all correctly, and what, if anything, needs to be changed. I believe I am in quite a good position to judge this, as I am neither involved nor WP:INVOLVED in the situation, and I think the years of peace on the article bear out my admin judgement. On the other hand the article isn't terribly good. Perhaps one of the problems has been the historical focus on what the lead should say, a sign that there are camps of editors who want the article to take very different slants. Perhaps rather than arguing about the first paragraph, there needs to be a discussion about what exactly the article should be about, and how much weight it gives to the subject's history, and how much to its manifestation in the present day. It's a difficult situation and I'd be grateful for your thoughts on it, either here or at article talk. --John (talk) 22:20, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

@John:Yes, I skimmed the archives. The recent stuff appears to be civilized discussion (unless something's been redacted – and especially compared to other MEDRS disputes like the ones about e-cigs, and many of the other FRINGE disputes). The back-and-forth is quite minor, mostly about the lead, as you say. The MEDRS-focused editors appear to feel administratively threatened, and that should probably be assuaged. We really do have a responsibility to get this right from a MEDRS perspective, and that arguably outweighs cultural/historical sensitivity matters. I would think the solution is probably WP:SUMMARY and WP:SPINOFF, with Ayurveda as an overview article, and separate articles on ayurveda as medicine and ayurveda as tradition (for starters). Depending on whether controversy there has died down, the Traditional Chinese medicine article could also be used as a model; it's spun off a large number of detailed articles. I personally think it leans in overall presentation too much toward credibility and too far from MEDRS, but it is pretty comprehensive otherwise, both at the main article level and the total coverage level.

The key encyclopedic challenge with things like this is that none of the central tenets have a scientific basis. No one can find chi or kunalini "energy" in laboratory-controlled conditions. Ergo, it appears to be in the same category as semi-recent Western belief in phlogiston, the four elements, cold as a force unto itself (rather than lack of heat), the idea that disease can be cured with mercury and leeches and is caused by bad air or the Devil, acceptance of Fruedian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypes, and so on. Some of these beliefs (especially in Satan, Freud, and Jung) are still prevalent in certain circles, but we do not treat them as a form of scientifically backed medical diagnosis on Wikipedia.

I've seen people raise this before, so I'll pre-emptively address it here: I think that MEDRS being "only a guideline" is similar to CIVILPOV being "only an essay"; it's the wrong approach to thinking about it at all. Guidelines are best practices we really should be following unless there are very strong reasons to not do so in a particular case. The principal difference between policies and guidelines isn't even level of consensus, but the nature of the rules: policies are the bare minimum for the project to be functional at all, while guidelines are what enable to it run smoothly instead of in fits and starts, and essays (of the site-wide buy-in variety) are what fine-tune it to high performance. They're all consensus. The consensus conflict here is, overall, between V/RS and NOR plus FRINGE and MEDRS on one side, NPOV as the fulcrum, and SYSTEMICBIAS on the other. The consensus weight seems to lean heavily against playing up ayurveda as medicine.

The fact that ayurveda is old has nothing at all to do with how we present its efficaciousness; exorcism of disease demons and application of leeches and such are also ancient. The lead should include a brief summary of ayurveda's history, but also include the skeptical scientific consensus (which includes doctors from India – plenty of scientists come from there and not everyone's a devout Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain, any more than everyone in the West is all about Jesus and the Bible). The medical responsibility angle would suggest front-loading that material, even if the bulk of the lead is the historical background. That's the long version; I could distill the key points to a couple of sentences for the article talk page if it would be helpful, but I tend not to wander onto such pages if I can help it; they seem to be drama magnets.

Please comment on Talk:Bitcoin Cash

Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Bitcoin Cash. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

This may interest you

In case you haven't read it, this might interest you: Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million. Thinker78 (talk) 05:26, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

In all seriousness, this example should go in the appropriate MOS section (to illustrate not only serial comma issues, but semicolons). E Eng 05:32, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Ha ha. Not the first time something like this has happened, though perhaps the most expensive. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:35, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

What is the meaning of a {{GOCEinuse}} template?

I have been editing the article Pieve Vergonte and someone placed said template in the article. I'm a member of the guild, but I don't know what to make of the template. For me, it is saying that all guild members may be working on the article, but it may mean also that a single editor is editing the article and that I shouldn't edit. Also, the template may have been placed because I am working on the article. How should I interpret the template? In the guild, it says "Consider adding {{GOCEinuse}} to articles you are in the process of copy editing", but the template itself says, "This article or section is currently undergoing a major edit by the Guild of Copy Editors. As a courtesy, please do not edit this page while this message is displayed", which seems to be saying that editors who are not guild members should not edit, but guild members are working on it and are welcome to edit. It is kind of confusing the seemingly contradictory information. Maybe the template should say that a member is working on the article, that way other members and editors would understand they shouldn't edit while it is up? Thinker78 (talk) 04:23, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

@Thinker78: I think it's the same as the other in-use templates; it indicates someone from GoCE is currently working on it, and they hope it will be left alone in the interim to avoid edit conflicts. I agree the wording is confusing. The template is also redundant and should just merge to {{In use}}. You could probably just boldly redirect it, and failing that, take it to WP:TFD. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:02, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

I have edited the documentation for {{GOCEinuse}} to explain its use more fully. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:07, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

We should still probably have some rewritten wording in the template, or a merger, but that's an improvement. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:07, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:List of oldest living people

Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:List of oldest living people. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

You just pop up everywhere

[6] E Eng 22:50, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Just couldn't get enough of you ... Curly "blush blush" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:57, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

It's a conspiracy. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:27, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Appeasement

Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Appeasement. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

Evidence length

Hi SMcCandlish The Arbitration Committee has asked that evidence presentations be kept to around 500 words and 50 diffs. Your presentation is over 1400 words. Please edit your section to focus on the most relevant evidence. If you wish to submit over-length evidence, you must first obtain the agreement of the arbitrators by posting a request on the /Evidence talk page. For the Arbitration Committee, Amortias (T)(C) 00:45, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

@Amortias: Should be 1000; I'm clearly a party even if I've been accidentally left off the party list. I'll see about cutting it down to 1000; I didn't have time before 00:01 Feb. 18 UTC to shorten the material. I'm also almost out of time today for WP stuff, so this may have to wait until tomorrow. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:03, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Trimmed to approx. 1100, not counting "[1]", etc., or my sig as words. There are 55 diffs (several are reused to prove different quotes). I can squeeze this to 1000 tomorrow. Being an actual party, I'm not willing to go lower, or it'll simply remove the evidence for why SchroCat is properly a party and why his behavior has to be addressed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:49, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Now it's under 1000. If the party request is denied for some reason and a 500-word limit is imposed, I'll leave it clerks to axe it how they like. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:36, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

I suggested - on the workshop talk, and not only for your evidence - that the arbs focus on recent events (2018, 2017) rather than former ones. I rather like to forget that I had to appear at AE, for example, correct as it is. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:42, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Well, the evidence deadline is over. It's too late for me to re-do it to focus on 2017+; I would have to spend literally several days researching diffs from S&C's edit history, and it wouldn't be worth the time and effort even if the material would be accepted, which it would not be. I have doubt that any action will be taken about S's behavior in this case anyway, only C's. I have, however, established a that there's a behavior pattern going back at least as far as 2016, so S can take his likely escape-with-a-warning as a signal to change his approach, or he'll just end up back there (or AE, or ANI) again, and the evidence of not having changed the behavior since 2016 will not go unnoticed. Presenting that material was worth the effort in the long run, since I'd already done 95% of the work to collect and sort it. I'm now going back to what I'm actually here for (and probably not until tomorrow+; I don't have much time for WP right now, and drama has consumed too much of it already). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:08, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Understand, thank you for explaining. I looked - prompted by the request for diffs about edit-warring - at just the changes to the article Cary Grant from removal of the infobox in 2016 to now, where C appears rarely, and S not at all. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:17, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

I long ago lost track of which FA or FAC was being fought over. I actually avoid going near any of them for any reason, because if the local OWNers don't want to fight about an infobox, they want to fight about something else, even whether you're "allowed" to remove or add a comma from "their" precious masterpiece. FA long ago turned into more trouble than it is worth. I've said for years that the encyclopedic endeavor is better served by spending a day vastly improving 5 or ten stubs than barely perceptibly improving one article that's already a GA or A-class. If your point was just that it's possible to find a case of either C or S getting involved in an infobox dispute with the other not actually showing up, I have no doubt that's true; people do have lives and none of us are on here 24/7. It doesn't mean the overall tagteam pattern isn't obvious and demonstrated. Anyway, I did the Workshop page input I'm willing to (this is already a bunch of tiresome noise to me, that never should have been necessary). I trust it's enough for ArbCom to work with, and if it's not, then either the behavior will stop of it's own accord, or it won't and it'll get dealt with in a later case. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:02, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

FWIW, clicking on either Kubrick or Sellers in my post will take you to many other IB and article problems with many more diffs, in case they're of use. I realize that the IB discussion is apparently over, however. --Light show (talk) 08:18, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Worth a look anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:22, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
I don't see anything really usable there. The consensus in both cases was that you were being disruptive, and you got topic-banned both times. I've already mentioned their incivility toward you in evidence already, and that's probably sufficient (even if you were being being disruptive, it's not license for others to pretend our behavioral policies magically don't apply to them). And the evidence phase is over; all one could do at this point is mention stuff on the Workshop talk page, and it's fairly apt to be ignored as too late. I did add some today, but only in response to unproven accusations by SchroCat. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:36, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

You've been added as a party, and you are welcome to modify your evidence – the evidence phase will remain open for at least 24 hours from now. Best, Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) 04:48, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Somehow didn't see this until just now. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:22, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Herding Internet standards cats re <cite>

As a part of this discussion from a few years ago, you managed to convince the W3C to update their copy of the specification and their cheatsheet for <cite>. However, the WHATWG still uses the old definition (both in the element definition and its suggested rendering, and apparently their FAQ [FAQ spot 2]). Do you know the best way to herd those cats to The Better Way? :) --Izno (talk) 02:42, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

@Izno: Not at present. I've raised the issue on one of their mailing lists, and with one of their people in direct e-mail, and the general feeling I get is that they're resistant because it's more important for them to position themselves as The One True HTML5. I don't think they're going to budge without further pressure to do so, and this is probably best done at their wiki page on this element. https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Cite_element It's a matter of getting the attention of anyone autoconfirmed at #whatwg on irc.freenode.net to set up a wiki.whatwg.org account; you can't just go register for one. I'm on the IRC channel right now and no one is responding. Our own Andy Mabbtt/Pigsonthewing, has already chimed in at that wiki page. Any chance you can help people create an account there, Andy? You're not on their short list of permanent autoconfirmed, but I'm not sure those are the only account creators. I requested one via e-mail before, twice, but never heard back. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:58, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

@Izno: Update: One MikeSmith is on right now, and is dealing with it for me. He says they ignore the e-mail requests, and that some of them are trying to discourage use of that wiki entirely because they want to move the material to Github, but others disagree; He'll create accounts via IRC request. Just needs desired login ID, and e-mail address. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:07, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

The One True HTML5 struck me as a correct analysis after reading this bit in their FAQ. --Izno (talk) 04:32, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

I'm on the site now, but want to pore over the material before I chime in there. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:01, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Gosh, that was almost a decade ago. I've no recollection of how I got an account. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:07, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

It's all good. Well, getting into the site is. Getting anything to change, tougher nut to crack. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:20, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Proper names & {{lang}}

Hi. Should proper names be enclosed in {{lang}}? I've just been to Anatole France and someone has templated every single french word and name. This strikes me as extreme, but I'd leave well enough alone if there were no harm. But {{lang}} automatically italicizes everything, so in many of these cases, either the template has to be removed, or it has to be supplemented with |italic=unset. The closest direction I find is MOS:LANG which gives Assemblée nationale as an appropriately-templated term, but I couldn't find explicit direction on personal names, and figured you'd have some insight. Thanks. Phil wink (talk) 20:32, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

@Phil wink: Consensus seems to be "don't bother", unless an alternative name is being presented to an English one, e.g. Munich ({{lang-de|italic=no|München}}). It's not wrong to do something like {{lang|fr|italic=no|Guillaume Apollinaire}}, but it probably serves no encyclopedic purpose except in the person's own lead (all it's going to do for a proper name by itself is offer a pronunciation clue to higher-end screen readers with multilingual support). It's arguably important that our articles indicate correct pronunciation at the subject's own article – though we also have templates that do this – but not such much in a running sentence that happens to mention that person, especially given that in running English the average speaker is very unlikely to drop into a French-correct pronunciation of a name like Guillaume Apollinaire, and doing so can be distracting.

E.g., I watched a lot of stuff about Montserrat after the volcano went off there, and about 90% of the time, English-speaking newscasters used the English pronunciation, /mɒntsəˈræt/ (mont-suh-RAT) or something close to this (often without the first t), about 9% of the time a bastardized "Franglais" pronunciation along the lines of /mɒnseˈra/ (mon-say-RAH), which came across as pretentious, and in one case the correct French (which our own article doesn't even use; it's something like /mõse'ʁa/ (with a nasalized first vowel, and a guttural r), which was so distracting I tended to lose track of the sentence. The same effect is sometimes heard in the Southwestern US when certain Hispanic newscasters insist on full-Spanish pronunciation of Spanish names even for subjects (like various actors and sports figures with English as their first or only language) who don't use them (think "Gonzales" approximately as "gohn-SAH-lace"). It's a form of hypercorrection, similar to insisting on sticking in a č in names that shouldn't have one like Stana Katic (the fact that her grandfather would have used Katič is irrelevant).

Anyway, some argue not to use lang templates for proper names at all, only for words, because Guillaume Apollinaire is the guy's name in English, and Spanish, and whathaveyou, not just in French. This view would make an exception for Munich ({{lang-de|italic=no|München}}), since the names differ. Another way of looking at it is that my first name "Stanton" tends to get converted into /^əstän'ton/ (uhStahn-TONE) or /^ə'stänton/ (uhSTAHN-tone) by Spanish speakers, instead of /'Stæntən/ (the "STAN-tuhn" you'd probably expect), or in some English dialects, /`Stæʔ^ən/ with a glottal stop and almost no final vowel before the n – "STA'-nn"). But Spanish Wikipedia should not use /^əstän'ton/ (much less the more Castillian /^əsθän'ton/ with a 'th' sound) to render my name if they had an article on me; that would be eye dialect, bending orthography to try to match colloquial speaking accent.

The short version: There's not a clear consensus on when to use language templates with proper names, but it's generally minimized, and only used when it seems particularly helpful at a first occurrence, usually to contrast English and something else. When we need to indicate pronunciation of a proper name (including English versus something else) we usually do it with pronunciation templates, as at Tycho Brahe (though the audio file once provided for that one in Danish was terrible; the speaker ran it together sloppily as something like /ˈtɪg^əˈbrɑ/ when it should have been enunciated clearly and as two names, as /ˈtyːə ˈbʁɑ/; I see that someone's finally removed it from the article). Given the recent re-tooling of the lang templates (and the auto-italicization that is non-trivial to turn off), we now have an additional reason to not use lang templates around person and place names; it will vastly clutter up the markup if we don't we reserve the use of the template around proper names for cases where it's especially pertinent. Sorry this is a long answer, but the point is to provide several points of argument articulation. We probably need to revisit this at MoS, especially since the template changes have serious consequences of code bloat, a problem that didn't exist only a couple of months ago.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:53, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your long-ass answer. I feel I should now at least be able to make edits that are not plainly wrong. Also, I will now fondly think of you as Esthantone — perhaps the designer of an especially esthetic line of Pantone colors. It was my sense (and you confirm it above) that the auto-italic feature/bug is a fairly recent addition to the {{lang}} template. There must be thousands of cases of it being used (as it frequently is in Anatole France) to designate text that should not be italicized, and indeed was not italicized when the template was placed, but is now magically being manhandled into italicization by this update. Even more insidious, I wonder what previously correct formatting advice may now be contrary to the intention of anyone who originally worked on it. A case in point: MOS:LANG which I referenced above does not state but pretty strongly implies that Assemblée nationale should be italicized. However, all that is actually being recommended is the template ({{lang|fr|Assemblée nationale}}), and the italics appear to be merely an artifact of the template update — it seems likely that this update has changed, even contradicted, the intended style advice in the Manual of Style itself. Finally (in case you have to give this advice again), you've suggested using |italic=no above, but on balance it seems to me more sound to use |italic=unset. The first forces no italic regardless of circumstance, whereas the second just goes with whatever the wikicode around it demands. This second option seems much more intuitive from a user perspective, and would continue yielding non-surprising results if, say, the code were copied for use in a different context. Cheers. Phil wink (talk) 00:41, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

@Phil wink: In the long run, the auto-italics are a boon (and it's only applied to Latin-based scripts), since about 95% of usage is in cases we actually want italics. Before, each template was utterly randomly either italicizing or not by default, and it was maddening; often even the {{lang|xx}} and {{lang-xx}} versions of the templates for a given language were inconsistent. Some peeps are working on tracking down all the italicized cases that shouldn't be in italics; see Template talk:Lang for more info; I think they'd appreciate more eyes and hands on the job. I would like to see a shorthand syntax like |i=n (or |i=u, |i=y) also be available. You're correct about MOS:LANG and {{lang|fr|Assemblée nationale}}; last I looked at MOS:LANG and was working on it, it was not yet certain whether the templates would auto-italicize, and since they now do, that needs an update to show |italics=unset; the rule is to not italicize proper names of any kind (unless they would be italicized for some other reason, e.g. being a book title). I agree on |italics=unset versus |italics=no; I hadn't thought about it until this second, because I'm generally working in plain article text where the non-italics is the desired result for such thing. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:19, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Robin Hood

Done

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Water ski

Will "water ski" still be separate words under your proposal? If so I can fully support it. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:46, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

@Randy Kryn: Depends on what the sourcing tells us. They might remain separate, for the base noun ("I have good water skis"). English fully-compounds regular noun phrases considerably less readily than multi-part verbs/verbals/gerunds and adjectives (doing it with nouns is primarily a tech geek habit, and even then is most often done with verb phrases that have been "nouned", e.g. "my backups", "an overload", a habit the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel has been excoriating for two generations to little avail). For the verb "to waterski" it would necessarily be a single word if we have "waterskiing", otherwise the latter could not linguistically arise ("to dog groom" does not become "she dooggrooms", "I doggroomed","he's doggrooming", though most people would probably hyphenate that particular one in all cases).

I hate to sound like a broken "Mr. Critical" record, but I think you're taking an unhelpful approach to this. It's not a tit-for-tat negotiation; we do not support or oppose based on whether we'll get what we want later on some side topic. Whether it should be "water ski[s]", "water-ski[s]" or "waterski[s]" as a noun is completely irrelevant to the question of what to do with the verb and the verbal/gerund forms for the activity (and directly derived regular nouns like "waterskier"). More to the point, what you (or I, or whoever) prefer is irrelevant; we do what needs to be done, with an eye to consistency when the sources support it, and tolerant of inconsistency between different grammatical forms when they don't. I've not done the "water[-]ski" noun research because it's not the RM before us, and the answer to the question would have no bearing on this RM. It's basically the same as the "comma-Jr." thing; what you or I love [in my off-WP writing, I habitually use that comma, though I realize it dates me] and what was firmly traditional (at all or in a particular dialect) in 1977 is out the window if usage in reputable sources has provably changed. (I have no idea whether "water ski" [n] has been changing). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:21, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

You had me at "I've not done the "water[-]ski" noun research because it's not the RM before us, and the answer to the question would have no bearing on this RM", which is all that was needed but I appreciate and have read your comment. If I ever meet you on the street and ask for the time-of-day I would expect to hear an interesting history of time, what exactly "day" means in the sense of the present culture, and then somehow "street" and my approach to time would be woven into it. Will adjust my comment on the page accordingly, thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 15:29, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I would just answer you, because you wouldn't be fishing for a concession on some lost traditionalism cause. >;-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:32, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Just a question I needed answered for my Support or Oppose comment. Not clear on the time question though, as the 12-hour vs 24-hour descriptors of time, not to mention UTC, Greenwich, or the long-time no-time concepts of some cultures, could factor in (and let's not get into quantum mechanics or off-world time, unless you take my "Excuse me sir, can you give me the time of day?" enquiry as referring to local time, which it probably wouldn't). Randy Kryn (talk) 15:41, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

And metric time could become involved, at which point I would jump off a bridge. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:46, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017

Done

– Also closed the RfC above it.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Question on university naming

Hey SMcCandlish, I have a question on university naming… specifically University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. It was recently moved to remove the endash because "that's what the university wants." However, I disagree, because most of the time we use the endash for universities like this not the dash. Not sure if the others at WT:MOS would agree with you or not, but since you've been helpful in the past, I figured I'd ask you first… what do we use? Thanks, Corky 02:58, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

@Corky: I think you mean "not the hyphen". In this construction it would definitely be an en dash, or a space, or a comma, or "at". A hyphen is just wrong. The fact that some people who designed that university's letterhead allegedy don't know the difference between an en dash and a hyphen is no concern of ours. (I say "allegedly" because without access to the exact specific font files they use, we have no proof what character they typed when designing their logo – the two glyphs are not visually distinct in all fonts, so there's a WP:NOR problem with claims that "they use a hyphen". They may use it in things like typed memos, but business English and encyclopedic English are not the same register, so again we don't care. WP follows the WP MoS, not some third-party business English MoS, and not the UW house style. @Dicklyon: Haven't we been over "university hyphens" before somewhere? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:17, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

@Corkythehornetfan: correct ping. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:18, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the response! That definitely helps. Yes, I meant hyphen... 😁 Corky 13:13, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

I do have one more question... could you respond to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Titles#Ampersands discouraged? Thanks, Corky 17:15, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Done, though I have no idea which "side" you were on. I didn't pore over the conversation, just did the "standard operating procedure" bit. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:03, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Discussion about MOS:JOBTITLES

Done

There is a discussion about whether to add clarifying text (shown in boldface) to MOS:JOBTITLES at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Clarification of "Titles of people" that you may be interested in. Sincerely, HopsonRoad (talk) 14:26, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

I don't need pings to MoS threads; I watchlist those pages and check them as my first login action (even ahead of my own talk page many times). If I haven't showed up yet it's because I'm busy off-WP. :-)

Please comment on Talk:Joseph Stalin

Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Joseph Stalin. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Editing News #1—2018

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The 2017 wikitext editor is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. It has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. The team have been comparing the performance of different editing environments. They have studied how long it takes to open the page and start typing. The study uses data for more than one million edits during December and January. Some changes have been made to improve the speed of the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual editor. Recently, the 2017 wikitext editor opened fastest for most edits, and the 2010 WikiEditor was fastest for some edits. More information will be posted at mw:Contributors/Projects/Editing performance.
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—User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:14, 28 February 2018 (UTC)